Let’s Build a Company to Fight Climate Change

Residential heating and cooling accounts for a whopping 10% of all ghg emissions in the United States. With insulation alone, that number can be reduced by >20%. For emphasis, something as simple as air sealing (i.e. putting foam in cracks) and insulation (spraying cellulose into the attic) can avoid gigatons of emitted CO2.

Currently, there are 28,000 insulation and weatherization contractors working in the US. Intriguingly, there isn’t a “go-to” software stack to help these hardworking small business owners run their companies. Enter Get Weatherized.

Our product is a SaaS tool for insulation & weatherization companies. We believe that by helping companies operate more efficiently, we’ll increase the number of well-insulated homes, thereby reducing the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere for the sake of heating and cooling.

Additionally, there are some pretty substantial headwinds in this space. Most notably, the Inflation Recovery Act (IRA) has created billions of dollars of credits and rebates. Now is the ideal time for founding a company in this space.

A little bit more about the role

The ideal candidate is a mid- or senior-level coder with strong intrinsic motivation to fight climate change. Defining ‘senior’ can be a bit fuzzy. Rather than years of experience, we instead consider senior to refer to an engineer who uses best practices by default because of hard-learned knowledge of what can go wrong, and why.

In this role, you’ll have an enormous amount of ownership, and therefore you should care deeply about the product you’re building. Likely, you’re motivated by delivering new features to your customers and then watching them smile.

Moreover, we’re going to create a culture together. We’re looking for someone who finds that exciting, and who also recognizes that it takes thoughtful effort.

This is a full-stack role. If you lean more frontend (read: Tailwind), that's fine too, so long as you can hack out backend when necessary.

Presently, the stack is vanilla Ruby on Rails, and therefore Rails experience is required. We’re strong proponents of using proven technology in order to iterate quickly - let’s save our “three innovation tokens” for when we really need them.

Get Weatherized is a distributed-first company (we write things down, we should all write things down), which is to say this role can be done US remote. However, if you happen to be based in Chicago, and if the idea appeals to you, perhaps we could rent a co-working space (we also love whiteboards).

A little about the team & funding

Right now, “we” have a team of one.

Now you may be wondering, “Why should I take this joker seriously?” And in response, I’ll flatter myself by saying I know a thing or two about early phase startups. I have experience co-founding a climate tech company, and I was the CTO & 1st hire at Snapdocs (currently #61 on YCombinator's top private companies), where I build out the software, product, data, and (unexpectedly) marketing teams.

I’ve secured a pre-seed that should last for approximate 24 months. That’s plenty of time for us to experiment, iterate, laugh, cry, code, code again, and hopefully find product-market fit.

I’ve heard enough! My relentless curiosity demands I apply for this role.

To apply, please fill out this form. Pro tip: there isn’t a field that asks for your name. It’d be great if you included your name in one of your answers.