Building a Sustainable Home and Business
Tyler Lyman is an entrepreneur at heart with an impressive portfolio of companies under his belt. After years of building profit-focused companies, Tyler decided to try a different route — building a company based on the triple bottom line: people, profit and planet. Today, Tyler is the founder and CEO of HALEE, a smart energy management and home automation system.
While HALEE is one of Arizona’s newer startups, the idea has been percolating for the better part of two decades. But, as they say, timing is everything. The idea first came to 20 years ago when he wanted to install solar on his roof but was off-put by the aesthetics of the massive solar panels. So, he set out to change it. He milled out some roofing tiles, essentially converting them into mini solar panels. But at the time, the technology wasn’t right and production was expensive so Tyler set it aside.
This worked in Tyler’s favor as the market today has allowed him to develop his product more efficiently and inexpensively and also incorporate an AI component that gives him a competitive edge. He continues to shake up the industry as he deviates from traditional distribution models and seeks to incentivize builders to adopt clean energy at the point of installation.
In this Collective Conversation, Tyler shares what it has taken to build HALEE, lessons learned along the way, and what other founders should consider in building their businesses.
What is HALEE?
HALEE is an acronym that stands for Home Automation, Lighting, Environmental, and Electrical. We’re a clean energy technology company and our mission is to reduce the use of carbon energy in residential homes. The first product we’re introducing this year is a building-integrated solar tile. We integrate with a traditional roof but we also use an AI component that looks at consumption. Our long-term vision, however, is to create a marketplace for clean energy. At our core, we’re a clean energy technology looking to solve a big social problem around clean energy and climate.
How did HALEE come to be?
The original idea for HALEE came almost 20 years ago. I wanted to put solar on my house, but I thought solar was ugly so I engineered a product by milling out some roofing tiles. I wanted solar to just be seamless on the roof. Unfortunately, I’m not a great engineer, I’m more of a garage engineer and it didn’t work very well and it was very expensive at the time. So, it became one of those ideas that sat on the back burner the last 15 years as I built other companies.
In 2012, I shifted my focus from building companies that were purely profit-motivated to building companies that have a dual bottom line — a social mission along with some type of a profit mission. I came back to Arizona and was considering what I was going to do next and this idea for HALEE was still resonating. I began to realize that I could make a better product now and it would be cheaper. I put those pieces together and started HALEE.
What’s been one of the biggest challenges you’ve had to overcome in growing HALEE?
The hardest part with building-integrated products is figuring out how to handle the heat. A traditional solar panel sits on top of the roof and has a fairly large air gap underneath it. It allows free air movement underneath to help cool and regulate temperatures. A building-integrated product sits right on top of the roof and it’s enclosed so it’s really hard to get the hot air that’s trapped out from underneath the roof — and heat is the enemy of efficiency in the solar process. The majority of our early engineering was around creating enough of an air gap underneath the tile. It took us about two and a half years to design and engineer the product.
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From there it’s taken another year and a half to engineer the manufacturing process, design the business structure around it, and create incentives for builders to adopt clean energy. We’re changing the paradigm. Solar today is predominantly sold to low-income or fixed-income because that’s where you can make the economics work.
One of the big challenges for us was creating a distribution model that’s different than the industry standard today. We’re typically between 30–40% less expensive than traditional rack-mounted solar. Because of the nature and the structure of how we develop the product, our tax incentives are a little bit richer. The biggest challenge outside of the engineering has been to change the paradigm around how we sell and getting builders and roofers excited about it.
What’s been one of the biggest contributing factors to HALEE’s growth?
From an innovation perspective, we tried to de-risk the product so that the technical risk was taken out of it. We’ve used a lot of existing materials and technology. Obviously, we’ve had to change the form and function of our product to marry the design that we put forward.
From a product innovation perspective, outside of the way we install, it’s very similar to a traditional solar panel in terms of materials, manufacturing process, and design.
The biggest thing that we’ve done is the way that we approach the marketplace and drive an incentive for the builders so that it becomes an easy question for builders to adopt clean energy at the point of installation.
What brought you to the StartupAZ Collective?
I think being a founder is a pretty lonely place. You can never be truly authentic with anybody. It’s really good to have a collection of other founders that you can talk to about the challenges that you face or the issues that you’re dealing with whether that’s on a personal, professional, or industry level. It’s great to have a collective resource that you can go to and really be open and authentic. With your board, you’re trying to shape an image or a message. The same applies for employees, investors, and customers.
It’s great to have an organization that you can go to and really be open and honest about the challenges that you’re working through and to have a like-minded group of individuals that inspire and motivate you to move forward. I found that through StartupAZ Collective. That was one of my personal goals as I came back from China. I wanted to work on growing the entrepreneur ecosystem in Arizona so to be involved in it has been great.
What’s next for HALEE?
The next big thing is our product launch this year. We hope to be on about 500–1,000 roofs by the end of the year. We have the first few roofs being installed in the next few weeks and then we’ll begin production and installation towards the end of the second quarter.
What advice would you give to other startup founders in Arizona?
As you begin to plan out how your company is going to grow, be really intentional about the type of capital that you bring in how you raise money, whether you’re going to bootstrap or take VC. There isn’t enough of that in Arizona from a startup perspective, because we’re a fairly new ecosystem. It’s important to be intentional around the capital process of structuring companies so that each of your raises follows a linear path so that you have some predictability around dilution and how much you’ll need for each threshold.
My other piece of advice is to seek out advice from as many different sources as you can but be really selective with how much of that you adopt. Not everybody is going to give great counsel. Trust yourself, knowing that nobody knows your vision as well as you do.
