Reflections on launching airahome.com
How to build a web and acquisition flow from scratch for a secret startup that didn’t really know what they were about to sell or how. But the ultimate goal was (and still is) clear: to lower the carbon footprint of Europe one home at a time.
August 2022 to November 2023 (1 year, 3 months)
Do you want to work for a secret startup?
I got a call from someone trying to gather a group of people to build some kind of platform for selling heat pumps. My profile was interesting due to my current assignment at the energy provider Fortum. The person couldn’t tell me many details, the company didn’t even have a name yet. I said yes, sounds like a fun ride.
How to save Europe by heat pumps
When I stepped into the office on my first day, we were a team of five crammed up in a small room on the third floor of a co-working space close to the central station in Stockholm.
Tasked with the mission to lower the carbon footprint of Europe we got started. The strategy was to replace the gas boilers heating the majority of European homes with electricity-powered air-to-water heat pumps.
This would be achieved in a way that hadn’t been done before. We set out to own the entire process, from the customer purchasing a heat pump to having it installed and operating in their home for the next 15 to 20 years.
Fat challenge #1Guessing what the customers need
In our tiny office space we started asking ourselves the important questions.
How do you create a customer journey without a baseline?
Honestly this was a completely new situation for me. With no existing users to interview and really no competitors doing the same thing we had to do what you sometimes need in order to get going: just guess.
So, what we did was to outline a journey to identify areas of high uncertainty (=high risk) and simply start from there.
How do you validate a completely made up customer journey?
Through market research, lurking on heat pump forums, interviewing friends and family and studying companies in similar spaces we could update and add more details to the journey as we learned more.
Most times this is not enough but without a brand, a product and any users to learn from we agreed that this was a special occasion.