Sustainable Innovation for Residential Homes with Low-Code

With sustainable initiatives gaining popularity, creating an eco-friendly household has grown increasingly complex for consumers seeking solutions.

Homeowners often struggle with researching viable options such as solar panel or heat pump installations, feeling a lack of control and transparency throughout the process.

In an industry traditionally dominated by large corporations, Mike Out and his team at HomeZero are revolutionizing how financial institutions, collectives, insurers, and manufacturers navigate the installation market.

HomeZero pioneers a marketplace model that connects installation companies with homeowners to meet the growing demand for sustainable solutions.

With over two decades of experience in platform development and a deep understanding of installation processes, Out recognized the challenges faced by installers and homeowners alike when implementing sustainability plans, including conducting energy audits.

Today, HomeZero is transforming how installation services are delivered with an emphasis on speed, simplicity, and scalability. By leveraging the Mendix low-code development platform, they are equipping small installation companies with digital tools that enhance both user experience and technical capabilities, accelerating the energy transition.

“Complexity is Simple, Simplicity is Complex”

The installation sector has long struggled with adopting digital technologies and processes, but online selling has emerged as a pivotal strategy to transform its operations. HomeZero strives to provide solutions for installation companies of all sizes, from small and family-run businesses to larger organizations.

“Smaller installation companies work locally and use third party platforms for additional work. In the future, we want to help them grow and scale sustainably using our accessible solutions,” said Out.

To offer a white-label service that fosters better collaboration and benefits all parties, HomeZero needed a strong foundation for its innovative platform.

Having observed the inefficiencies of traditional coding in large ERP implementations, Out realized that fast, digital workflows were essential for HomeZero’s success.

“A lot of development problems are just waiting for a workflow logic or database to make the perfect digital process, but you’ll never deliver rapidly enough with traditional development,” he said. “Those results aren’t enough. With larger platforms, you don’t have that flexibility, and we needed that agility.”

Out was exposed to low-code in a previous role and observed three key advantages over traditional programming:

• Development speed and time to market
• Ability to simplify scalability
• Resource efficiency

Out knew that integrating Mendix into HomeZero’s human-centric business would be transformative. “With Mendix, I saw a path to long-term success for our business without compromise to scalability, customer experience, or unhealthy lock-in,” he emphasized.

To build their platform, Out and Hunter Koppen, Mendix MVP and also co-founder of Kobeon, who has over seven years of experience with the platform. Now acting as HomeZero’s CTO, Koppen confirms that the ability to experiment easily with Mendix was a game changer for the startup.

“People think low-code compromises customer experience, design, or scalability, but that’s far from the truth,” Out said. “You can build anything you want in Mendix and pivot easily. I always say, ‘Complexity is simple, simplicity is complex.’ The platform has made everything much easier for us.”

With a team of Mendix experts, a strong development platform, and a vision to transform the installation industry, HomeZero began development in 2023.

Powering Up a One-Stop Shop

In 6 months, HomeZero created Pico (Platform Installation Capacity Optimization). This flexible platform provides a one-stop-shop for commercial organizations and installation companies to connect with homeowners and manage their interactions.

Pico allows business owners to customize everything from emails to quote generation. Installers now have a thorough management tool that can:

• Provide detailed information about their business and sell their propositions online using the lead configurator
• Manage quote requests
• Offer direct support to their customers
• Retain their brand identity and differentiate themselves.

“You can use Pico to launch sustainability propositions as a marketplace or shop,” Out explained. “It manages your installation capacity, all the jobs, and operates like a CRM. It’s an ERP, but it’s also a place where you design and configure yourself, all these white label propositions.”

From the homeowner’s perspective, the journey begins with a landing page guiding them to HomeZero’s intuitive lead configurator for all measures like heat pumps, home batteries, and insulation. While homeowners don’t directly interact with Pico, the smart form enhances the process by offering:

• House scanning that provides a sustainability assessment to determine the most appropriate measures for their home.
• Searching for businesses from a network of companies that meet specific needs, either independently or with an advice module.
• Requesting quotes from companies to make more informed decisions.
• Accessing customer reviews of contractors.

Koppen and Out place a large emphasis on the platform’s user experience and design to ensure that the customer journey is consistent and uninterrupted when switching between applications.

“Architecture is extremely important here,” Out said. “We spent a lot of time making sure that there was a healthy foundation from the start. We have this multi-app set up we use. So, it’s one interface, but switching between applications within milliseconds from the user’s side.”

To ensure HomeZero’s platform is robust, versatile, and caters to various business and industry-specific needs, it uses several integrations that enhance the user journey, including:

• Mendix Connect to link Mendix applications together for cohesive functionality.
• Widgets that provide tools like registration links, photo recordings, and link sharing for customer engagement.
• Google Maps to offer a 3D view of areas suitable for measures such as solar panel placement.
• APIs to facilitate connectivity with roof scanners and estimation tools.
• Government onboarding connectors to extract installer-specific company data from government sources related to sustainability.
• A Zapier API Connector that allows installers to integrate Pico with their own systems easily.

By achieving this level of customization, HomeZero maximizes its customers’ business opportunities, promotes efficiency, and enables self-sufficiency. Contractors experience approximately five times more cost savings compared to manual methods like Excel sheets.

By reallocating resources, HomeZero’s customers convert more website visitors into accepted quotes, driving additional business growth. Additionally, small businesses save significant time during the sales phase with homeowners thanks to the streamlined structure in Mendix.

Though Pico is integration heavy, HomeZero has simplified a complex process, easily connecting with other systems, and making the homeowners’ experience that much easier. Most importantly, HomeZero’s unique solutions are mobilizing individuals who previously wouldn’t have taken steps towards sustainability.

Generative AI Enhances Sustainable Initiatives

Artificial intelligence is providing new opportunities for Out and the team to further enhance the HomeZero platform and user experience.

A virtual sustainability advisor will offer live guidance to homeowners based on their preferences while selecting a contractor or identifying best measures.

The team is already using five data partners that are also AI suppliers and give data insights that are already integrated into the workflow.

While HomeZero operates primarily in the Netherlands, the platform runs on AWS S3, ensuring a scalable set up for international expansion. Mendix’s complimentary collaboration with AWS also allows HomeZero to leverage more intelligent automation.

“The beauty is that we have a managed solution via Mendix. We don’t see all the complexities of AWS, but we gain all the benefits. When we go towards these very specific AI use cases, we’re aware that there’s so many options available,” Out highlighted.

“We have all these niche ideas, products, and prototypes that we’re building out now for our users,” Out said. “There’s so many possibilities to transform this industry even more.”

A Brighter Future

Today, HomeZero is simplifying the consumer journey to sustainability with a digital blueprint that can scale easily and accelerate the transition to renewable energy. With a Mendix-built architecture, their business can stand the test of time and adapt easily to an ever-changing market.

When reflecting on their journey as a startup, Koppen shared:

The Mendix Marketplace also played a key role in HomeZero’s development, with Koppen actively contributing to and utilizing its resources to further advance the platform. “You can always find so many good components on there. You don’t have to build everything from scratch. It saves a lot of time,” Koppen said.

“This all helps as we start growing our development team,” Out added. “We’ll use the Academy and certification courses, but we have an MVP which is a unique advantage of ours. We’ll be able to shape how we scale.”

Out is now striving to make sustainable solutions even more affordable and accessible through frictionless finance. The team also hopes to transform Pico into a full-fledged ERP that can be rented to installation companies.

“At the end of the day, we’re not only trying to make the sector more healthy, standardized, and digital. We want to celebrate small installers’ identities so they can operate alongside these larger brands,” Out emphasized. “Mendix is the platform where you can have it all. Our goal was to provide homeowners and businesses a seamless, digital collaboration experience in the sustainable building industry.”