Watsco Ventures

Watsco Ventures is known as the startup/incubator arm of Watsco Inc., the largest HVAC distributor in North America. In October of 2017, I joined the team and worked remotely for 4 years on a number of products including Sentree, Credit for Comfort, and Easy Link. This team is one of the best I have ever had the pleasure of working with.

Sentree

My first project with Watsco was Sentree, a proprietary device they invented which attaches to air conditioners and transmits telemetry data to the cloud. The data is then processed by AI to provide proactive diagnostics of issues before they arise.

My role was to build the dashboard which displayed realtime system data and graphs of system performance over time. The dashboard also handled notifying users of incoming alerts, which came from the aforementioned AI diagnostic solution.

The first dashboard app we built using Vue.js and Chart.js. Then later, after partnering with AlertLabs, the framework was switched to Angular, NgRX, and Redux. Shortly thereafter I was asked to turn my attention full-time to another mission-critical app in the Watsco ecosystem, Credit for Comfort.

Credit for Comfort

Credit for Comfort is Watsco's contractor portal for applying for financing for HVAC equipment sold to customers. We worked with several lending partners including Greensky, Fortiva, and Wells Fargo, implementing their APIs behind the scenes in our streamlined multi-lender application flow. Using Credit for Comfort (C4C) customers are able to submit one financing application to multiple lenders simultaneously. Customers get the best offer available for the cost of a single credit check.

We built C4C using Vue and Vuetify, as well of course Vuex and Vue Router. C4C was made as a Progressive Web App, and on the backend used AWS services including Lambda, DynamoDB, and S3.

Easy Link

Easy Link was in fact a sub-product of Credit for Comfort. In 2018, Watsco Ventures CTO, Mario Cruz, had the insightful foresight that we should help clients, who were the HVAC contractors, by making their process of financing for their customers remote. One day he called me into his office and asked, "Do you think we can do something like Slack's Magic Link, but for financing applications?" Excited by the challenge, I immediately went to work on the idea.

It took us 8 days from the initial commit to the first working prototype, and then just two more months to complete version 1. I worked mostly by myself during the initial phase of development until the concept was proven. I used Node, Express, AWS SNS, DynamoDB, Lambda, and S3, and then we scaffolded the project using Terraform and Jenkins. By January 2019 we completed the project, and onboarded most of our users over 2019. Just in time before the 2020 COVID lockdown.

We made minor upgrades to Easy Link over the following couple of years, such as a native web component implementation allowing contractors to easily insert Easy Link onto their webpages, as well as ids for tracking usage. Easy Link went on to generate more than half of C4C's revenue, making it the single-most successful feature we added in our entire time working on the product.