Making Home Decarbonization As Straightforward As Possible.
Balto EnergY
After policy changes, California rooftop solar installations dropped 70%. Contractors who had built businesses around a clear homeowner value proposition suddenly didn't have one.
I was brought in at the earliest stage, before the company had a name, before the founding team was complete. What I built became the foundation Balto Energy launched from. They've since raised a $1M seed round.
Timeline
Jul 2023 - Sep 2024
Team
Founder
Data Analyst
Founding Designer
ROLE
Product Designer
Product Strategy
Interaction Design
The 2023 Policy That Crippled Solar
In 2023, California's NEM 3.0 policy cut the value of rooftop solar almost overnight. Contractors who had spent years building around a clear homeowner value proposition suddenly didn't have one. I was brought in to help figure out what came next.
A Room Full of Experts I'd Never Met
I walked into a room of people who had spent decades in an industry I'd learned about that morning. Solar sales directors, energy data modelers, a CEO. I was the only designer.
The friction was expected. I asked a lot of questions, held the answers loosely, and triangulated across what different people told me before trusting any single account. That's how I figured out what product and experience could actually do here.
The Moonshot Lands in the Room
The Solar CEO introduced me to James, who had founded one of Google's moonshots and exited. He was circling the solar industry deciding whether he wanted to build again. He wasn't committed. He was curious.
His bet: a 20-year home energy prediction accurate enough to change how contractors and homeowners make decisions together. Radiant had the present-state. Nobody had built the future-state yet.
I took their existing work and his whiteboard drawings and started translating. Enough to start the conversation.
Slowly he started taking it more seriously. Then he started hiring.
Getting the Founding Designer Up to Speed
The founding designer James brought in came from an adjacent industry. He was sharp but he hadn't been in the room. I walked him through the prototypes, the research, the blueprint work, the reasoning behind decisions that looked arbitrary without that context. He got up to speed fast and immediately wanted to push deeper.
He wanted the assumptions grounded in data we could actually point to. I flagged that we already had it: 130 survey responses and 11 interviews in the archive. We went back through them with a data analyst, pulling out what homeowners actually prioritized.
Five distinct goals emerged. Zero out the bill. Go negative. Match current costs. Cover system investment. Maximize backup power. Each one a different conversation a contractor needed to be ready for.
He came in with the user stories. My job was matching each one to what the research supported and sketching what it might look like for a homeowner to interact with. The screens were rough, but that was the point.
What the Foundation Made Possible
The founder came into this project unsure whether he wanted to build a third company. What we built together gave him enough confidence to decide.
Balto went on to raise a seed round for nearly $1M. The product has evolved significantly since my involvement, but the foundation it was built on came from that early period of absorbing, translating, and holding the context long enough for the right people to take over.
Honest Reflection
When everything is possible, nothing is actionable. The earliest stage of this project had no guardrails, no defined user, no fixed scope. The only way to move was to bound the problem yourself. Constraints clarify. The hard part is knowing you have to create them when nobody hands them to you.
Experts know their lane deeply. My lane was the space between theirs. I wasn't the solar expert, the data modeler, or the founding designer. I was the person who had been there long enough to understand how all of it connected, and who could hand that understanding to whoever needed it next. That turned out to be the most valuable thing I brought to this project.
©2026
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Designer designing designs.
Filipino-made.
Based wherever the work is good.