Aaron Nichols talks with Hervé Billiet, co-founder of SunVoy and former CEO of Ipsun Solar, about how frustration with off-the-shelf tools led him to build a white-labeled software platform just for solar installers.
Hervé explains how SunVoy helps established solar installers centralize data, keep customers informed, and tap into their “gold mine” of legacy customers to lower acquisition costs and grow through referrals.
You can connect with Hervé on LinkedIn here.
Listen to this episode on:
* YouTube
* Spotify
Expect to Learn:
* What “brand” really means for a solar company (it’s more than just a logo or truck wrap).
* Practical first steps for small and growing solar installers.
* Why most installers are sitting on a hidden gold mine of legacy customers they don’t cash in on.
Quotes from the Episode:
“You order a twenty dollar pizza and you can track every step. You order a twenty thousand dollar solar system and you can’t. That made no sense to me.”– Hervé Billiet
“Most installers hear from the three angry customers and forget about the hundreds of happy ones. Your legacy customers are a gold mine if you bring them back into your ecosystem.”– Hervé Billiet
Transcript:
Aaron Nichols:Hello, everyone, and welcome back to This Week in Solar. I’m your host, Aaron Nichols, the Research and Policy Specialist here at Exact Solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania.And today we have a very special guest. It’s Hervé Billiet, one of the co-founders of SunVoy. Hervé, I’ll let you introduce yourself.
Hervé Billiet:Hey, thank you. I’m Hervé Billiet. I’m the co-founder of SunVoy — a software to run and grow your solar business, where we really invest in marketing.
Aaron Nichols:Great. And I know that you built a version of this software back when you were working for Ipsun Solar.Well, I know you co-founded Ipsun Solar, and you owned it, and then you sold it. But you must have gone through a period of frustration with software to manage a solar business.So what was the moment when you and your co-founder said, “There’s nothing out there that works. We need to do this ourselves”?
Hervé Billiet:Yeah. So I co-founded a solar installation business. It started simple — in your basement you want to do something else with your life and fight climate change — and installing solar panels is one way to do that, very actively.You plug it in, it produces power — it’s phenomenal, the closest you get to magic.
The company grew. Once you have a few customers, maybe 10, you know them all by name — even their pets’ names. But then you grow the company, keep hiring people, you’re doing 100 installs, and you start forgetting who’s who. And once you have 1,000 customers, you don’t remember anymore.
Plus, you’re not in the trenches anymore. You have salespeople doing the work for you. As CEO of Ipsun Solar, I cared so much about branding.Branding is what differentiates you between every other installer you compete with. It doesn’t just magically happen — you need to do something about it.
One way is having your own customer portal — making sure you have that app in the App Store so when you sell solar, the homeowner can track the project.You order a $20 pizza and can track every step, but you order a $20,000 solar system and can’t track anything. That was one of the first problems I wanted to solve.
As you grow, you go from doing the work yourself to hiring people who do it better and more focused — you’re building a process.Going solar is a one-time thing for a homeowner, but for a solar company you have hundreds of projects at once. It’s very process-oriented — like a conveyor belt of solar projects moving through your business.
And in that conveyor belt, there were missing pieces. People get impatient, drop off, or cancel because they feel out of the loop.
You need a way to keep homeowners informed without adding too much work. You could hire more people, but automation helps.Automation is tricky — you shouldn’t automate everything, because people don’t want to talk to robots. I still prefer talking to a real person.So you automate what makes sense and let your team handle what’s specialized and human.
We got started because we couldn’t find software that could do this white-labeled. That’s key.I wanted the Ipsun Solar app, emails from our own domain, consistent colors — 100% white-labeled. That didn’t exist, so we built it ourselves.
And since I knew other solar CEOs, I realized if I built it for me, they’d want it too. So I designed it white-labeled from day one, knowing I’d resell it.
Aaron Nichols:Well, obviously it’s a powerful tool and white-labeling is very important.For anyone listening who doesn’t know what white-labeling is, it means the software runs in the background, but your company’s brand is what the customer sees.
You mentioned branding — and we’ve seen a lot of benefits from investing in it. Before we talk about the benefits, what do you believe a “brand” even is for a solar company?
Hervé Billiet:A brand is the perception of your company — and it’s often a reflection of the CEO or leadership team.
When someone sees your brand — online, on a vehicle, on a letter, or even just the name — that gives them an impression.If I say Nike, Toyota, Tesla — you instantly feel something. It might be positive or negative, but it’s something.
Ideally, when someone recognizes your logo or colors, it should immediately trigger: “That’s a good company. I want to work with them.”Branding isn’t just for businesses — individuals have personal brands too. You, Aaron, have one on LinkedIn. It’s everywhere.
Aaron Nichols:Yeah, I would say brand is how someone feels when they haven’t talked to you yet.But I’m interested in what benefits you saw from investing in brand at Ipsun — what kind of returns did it bring?
Hervé Billiet:I can go back to the early days of running Ipsun. I asked myself, “How do I sell something anyone with a hammer could also do?”
You realize not everyone can — and not everyone wants to.In the early days, I even helped some people do DIY installs, shipping materials and walking them through it over the phone. That didn’t work out well.
So I had to figure out how to differentiate myself. There were already plenty of solar companies in my area.Branding was the key — but how do you create a brand people actually associate with quality?
Becoming a B-Corp made a big difference. Joining the Amicus Solar Cooperative did too.That network of premium, independently owned solar companies helped us run differently.
In solar, you can be residential, commercial, or utility-scale. You can also be vertically integrated — meaning you handle everything from sales to installation to service — or not.Other companies just sell, or only do labor. You need to know which you are, who you compete with, and what you value.
For me, I valued giving my employees full benefits — 401(k), healthcare, real jobs, not gig work.That’s part of your brand too: how you treat people internally. Customers can feel that difference.
Aaron Nichols:Absolutely. And as you and I both know, the bar for investing in brand in the solar industry is still low.
At Exact Solar we’ve seen it snowball — the more you invest in it, the bigger it gets.But it’s hard for small business owners in survival mode to put time and money into something they might not see returns on for a year or more.So where can someone start — and how does SunVoy help with that?
Hervé Billiet:At SunVoy, we build customer portals and fleet management systems, but we cater to established solar companies.Not two-guys-and-a-truck operations — we stopped selling to them. We’ll still give them advice, but SunVoy makes sense once you have enough customers that you don’t remember everyone by name.
If you’re just getting started, focus on basics.First: your website. Don’t overpay — you can get far with WordPress or Squarespace. Make sure your email works, you have a clean signature, and you set up your Google My Business page.
Marketing’s goal is to make the phone ring. The moment someone calls you — that’s when it clicks.
And it does compound over time. You start showing up more, people find you, and soon you can’t believe it — “They’re calling me!”But it takes consistency. Just having a website isn’t enough — update your Google listing regularly. Post something every day if you can.
And if you’re blogging, here’s a tip: every time you answer the same customer question three times, write a blog post about it.Then next time, send them that link instead of retyping the answer. You look more professional, you save time, and you build your website traffic.
That’s how branding and automation meet — you build assets that keep paying back.
Also — take good pictures. Clean up the yard before you shoot, position your van nicely, make sure your logo’s visible.Little things matter. Even custom license plates helped us. “IPSUN” fit perfectly, so we numbered our vehicles — Ipsun 1, 2, 3, up to 11.People constantly told me they’d seen the plates. Small touches add up to a strong brand.
Aaron Nichols:And I know that SunVoy also helps solar companies lower their cost to acquire customers.That’s a huge deal. The bigger a company gets, the harder it is to make sure every customer has a great experience.How does SunVoy help solve that and bring acquisition costs down?
Hervé Billiet:SunVoy builds white-labeled customer portals and fleet management systems. That’s the short version.
The long version: most established solar companies already have a CRM — Salesforce, HubSpot, NetSuite — full of data. They don’t want to switch.So we integrate with 20+ CRMs, pull data from them, and show it to homeowners in a clean, branded interface.
That keeps customers informed automatically as their project moves along.
And the real key to lowering acquisition costs is leveraging your legacy customers.Most installers are sitting on a gold mine — hundreds of happy customers who’ve just forgotten about you.
Installers remember the few angry calls, but forget the hundreds who are thrilled. SunVoy brings them back into your ecosystem.We connect their inverter data, show them lifetime savings in dollars, not just kilowatt-hours, and give them a place to engage again.
Once they’re back in, they see your referral tools, your online store, your add-ons — batteries, EV chargers, smart panels — and you get more referrals and repeat business.
It’s about consistency. You can’t just blast one email and call it done. You need to meet people where they are — in-app, by email, through updates.
Our best clients have customer acquisition costs under $1,000. It’s repeatable, process-driven, and proven.
Aaron Nichols:That makes total sense. Solar’s biggest challenge is that it works too well — people forget it exists.
Most customers don’t even remember who installed their system years later because it just runs silently.Like your partner said, when he asked people who installed their solar, most couldn’t recall — they’ve had so many contractors since then.
That’s why brand matters.
Hervé Billiet:Exactly. I remember asking my own brother-in-law, whose solar I’d helped arrange in San Diego, “Who installed your system?”He couldn’t remember. And this was someone I personally referred to an Amicus member!
He loved the system, used the app, even referred neighbors — but couldn’t name the installer.That’s when I knew we needed to fix this.
Because solar installers work hard. Things go wrong sometimes — it’s construction — but good companies own their mistakes and make it right.So after all that effort, it’s a shame when customers forget your name. That’s what SunVoy solves.
Aaron Nichols:Well, to bring it home, I ask everyone the same question.
A few months ago I was at my grandma’s 80th birthday party, and it hit me — she was born just ten years after the Rural Electrification Act.At that time, all we knew was how to burn things to create electricity.
Within her lifetime she saw the invention of PV cells, Jimmy Carter’s solar panels on the White House, and the drop in cost from hundreds of dollars per watt to just cents today.
So — if you’re just spitballing — what do you think clean energy looks like 80 years from now?
Hervé Billiet:Before I answer that, when I was 15, I read an article in a science magazine about electric cars.It said EVs would one day have so much stored power that when you plug them in at home, your car would charge your house — not the other way around.
The image showed a futuristic car powering lights in the wilderness. And now it’s happening — people have literally powered concerts off Ford F-150 Lightnings.
So that’s one.
Looking forward, I think we’re heading to a world where the grid becomes decentralized.It was built for centralized power plants that needed huge investment and monopolies to distribute energy.
But now we can harness the sun directly — solar panels are like wireless receivers of fusion energy.The only fusion reactor we’ve got that works is the sun — and we already capture it.
I think nations are now racing to be the first fully renewable, battery-powered economies.Whoever gets there first gains a huge competitive edge — near-free energy powering every industry.
For homeowners, it means total independence — complete energy sovereignty.
Aaron Nichols:Yeah, and you end up completely sovereign — you don’t owe anyone for power, you’re not beholden to anyone.
So thank you for coming on today, Hervé. And where can people find you?
Hervé Billiet:Go to SunVoy.com.
And if you’re watching the video, you’ll see the logo behind me — that’s how you spell it.Also, for anyone starting out with marketing, we offer a free website analysis tool. It reviews your site and gives tips on how to improve it.We don’t build websites — it’s just a free resource we share from our experience helping solar companies grow.
Aaron Nichols:Well, thank you so much. And for everyone listening, that’s been This Week in Solar. I’ll talk to you next week.
