Traditional solar lead prospecting involves either buying broker leads (HomeAdvisor, Modernize, EnergySage) at $50–$300 per lead with 3–5x contention, or buying a CSV address list and running it through demographic filters. For a 200-home campaign, that's 2–3 hours of work before a single postcard leaves the building — and the resulting list has zero information about whether the actual roof can host a system.
For residential solar, the bottleneck is worse than for other home services because viability is a property question, not a demographic question. South-facing roof, low shading, adequate roof age — these aren't visible in a CSV. Solar Launch collapses the entire prospecting workflow into a single screen.
The Solar Launch prospecting workflow
- Type a street name. No CSV purchase, no list scrub.
- Solar Launch pulls every house from Google Street View. You see the actual home before mailing.
- AI renders panels on the appropriate roof plane. 200 homes rendered in about 8–12 minutes.
- Google Solar API attaches per-roof economics. Estimated kW, kWh/year, 25-year savings, federal ITC.
- Lead enrichment runs automatically. Property data, year built, owner name where available.
- You decide which renders to mail. Skip homes with bad orientation, dense shading, or roofs too old — no penalty for un-mailed renders.
- Press send. $1 per mailed home, all-in.
Why street-level prospecting beats list-based for solar
List-based prospecting filters by demographics — household income, home value, ZIP. The data is good but the filter doesn't answer the question that actually matters for solar: can this roof host a system that pays back?
Street-level prospecting filters by what you can see:
- Roof orientation (south-facing vs east-west).
- Canopy shading across the day.
- Roof age and condition.
- Existing panels on the block (social proof signal).
- Whether the rendered system actually looks good on the home.
This visual + geometric filter is impossible with CSV-based prospecting. It's the difference between mailing a list you bought and mailing a neighborhood you chose with a system you already sized.
Broker leads vs mailed quotes — the unit economics
Most established installers run a mix of acquisition channels. Here's where each fits:
- Broker leads (HomeAdvisor, Modernize, EnergySage): $1,500–$3,000 CAC. Sold to 3–5 installers simultaneously. Good for filling capacity when you have spare crew hours, bad for scaling.
- Cold door-to-door: $1,200–$2,500 CAC. Capped by rep count and rep churn. Most installers run this as a primary channel and find the loaded math doesn't pencil.
- Cold Facebook: $1,500–$3,500 CAC. The audience is structurally pre-intent; Meta optimizes for clicks not closes.
- Mailed solar quotes (Solar Launch): $250–$500 CAC. Exclusive, deposit-paid, doesn't depend on broker contention or rep retention.
The fastest path to a self-sustaining solar pipeline is mailed solar quotes as the primary acquisition channel + warm-follow-up D2D walking the same neighborhoods 7–14 days after mailing.
Bulk prospecting for multi-region operations
For installers running multiple markets and mailing thousands of quotes per quarter, Solar Launch scales by neighborhood, not by import:
- Render 5 candidate streets in 40–60 minutes (free).
- Compare rendered system sizes + savings to pick the strongest neighborhoods.
- Schedule mailings in sequence so your survey calendar fills evenly across markets.
- The CRM auto-populates as scans + deposits come in — no manual lead entry from any market.
Stop buying lists. Start picking streets.
Free to render. $1 per mailed solar quote. Money-back guarantee on your first $1,000 campaign.
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