I’m now a co-founder at Xebit Ltd, trading as Migrating Dragons. We make software for companies that install solar panels on new build houses.
That’s the boring version. Here’s the more interesting one.
The problem nobody talks about
New build solar is a mess. Not the technology – the technology is fine. The operations behind it.
Every solar installer I’ve spoken to is running their business on spreadsheets and WhatsApp. Scheduling? Coloured cells in Excel. Photos from installation sites? Sent via group chat, then someone has to manually sort them into the right folders for the right plots. Compliance paperwork? A combination of prayer and post-it notes.
This works when you’ve got two teams out per day. It falls apart completely when you’ve got twenty.
Why this actually matters
New build solar is high volume, low margin. If you have to send someone back to fix a job, you’ve lost your profit on that job. One company I talked to was spending £100,000 a month on remedial work before they got proper quality control in place. A hundred grand. Every month. Just fixing mistakes that shouldn’t have happened.
And then there’s the legal side. One installer told me about a panel that came off a roof during a storm and landed in someone’s garden. A two-metre square panel weighing 30 kilos. Nobody was hurt, but it could have killed someone. When they pulled up the installation records, there was a missing clamp clearly visible in the photos. The system worked – they could prove what happened. But here’s the thing: the CEO had decided they only needed to audit half their jobs. The rest of that estate? Nothing had been checked. Someone had to go up to that site with a cherry picker for two weeks and inspect every single roof manually.
There’s also a story about a competitor who literally sabotaged an installation to try and steal the contract back. Moved clamps, ripped up flashing, walked across panels. The only reason the installer didn’t lose their job and the company didn’t lose the contract was because they had timestamped photos proving the installation was perfect when their team left site. Ten minutes before the sabotage.
This stuff isn’t theoretical. It’s happening right now, across the UK, every day.
What we’re building
Migrating Dragons is project management software specifically for solar installers. Scheduling, dispatch, forms, compliance tracking, audit trails, report generation. The goal is simple: capture everything, track everything, and never let anyone fuck it up.
We already have customers using the product. I’ve been building version 2 for a while now, and my focus is getting that to a point where it’s ready to take on more customers and handle the edge cases that always appear when real people use real software.
Why I’m doing this
I’ve spent most of my career building systems for problems that weren’t really problems. Clever solutions looking for someone to care about them.
This is different. The people buying this software are phoning us up desperate to get on board. They’re paying for a prototype because their current situation is that bad. They know more about their specific operational chaos than I ever will, and they’re actively helping us build something that actually solves it.
That’s the kind of problem I want to work on.
What’s next
I’ll write more about what we’re actually building, how we’re approaching it, and what we’re learning along the way. For now, I just wanted to say: I’m in. Let’s see where this goes.
