Willie Jiang: Wholesale Solar Equipment Marketplace To Help Solar Contractors Save Time and Compare Prices

SolarFeeds is a wholesale solar equipment marketplace to help solar contractors save time and compare prices. Our mission is to fight climate change by making solar equipment procurement easier.

Tell us about yourself?

Before SolarFeeds, I’ve been in the digital marketing space for a long time. In 2019, a Ramez Namm Youtube video inspired me look into the solar industry.

I was shocked to find out how bad climate change was getting. I was also fascinated by rapidly falling costs of solar power.

Then purely out of luck, I connected with the formal owner of SolarFeeds.com, John Basile on LinkedIn in early 2019. SolarFeeds.com used to be a solar industry news site. One conversation led to another, then I bought SolarFeeds.com.

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

I’d advice myself to start earlier finding one or two solar veterans as my co-founders.

What problem does your business solve?

Solar equipment procurement is still a laborious process. Most solar contractors today are still going to the suppliers’ website, filling contact forms, phoning sales support, and using email to request for quotes.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

As a two-sided markplace, we’re solving the problem for both buyers (solar installers and EPCs) and sellers (manufacturers and wholesalers).

What is your magic sauce?

We’re incorporating solar financing partners into the platform so that it solve another major problem of solar EPCs.

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

In 5 years, we want to become the “Amazon for solar industry” that offers SaaS workflow tool digitizes procurement process; to embed financial products to both sides; to build distribution centers to fix solar supply chain’s domestic and cross-border logistics pain points.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

Upon launching our platform in April last year, SolarFeeds.com already had around 50,000 pageviews per month and a significant amount of product inquiries from buyers. However, we quickly realized the supply side was our bottleneck. But the majority of solar manufacturers are based in China.

All my life, I have been always looking for an impactful and meaningful career. Building this startup makes me feel that I am doing my part to fight climate change. So, I made a tough decision to move to China so that it would be easier to build up our supply chain network.

How do people get involved/buy into your vision?

After more than a year of grinding, SolarFeeds.com now has around 100,000 pageviews per month, a steady flow of revenue and the CEO of ETE Solar as my co-founder. We’re currently preparing to raise our Seed round of capital. Now we’re ready to talk to VCs in the climate tech space.