Where it started
Solar has always been close to home: it is part of my family's business. VivoGreen was my attempt to rethink one piece of that market digitally — making residential photovoltaic quotes easier to discover and request online.
I built it before software creation became as accessible as it is today. Getting a real product online meant finding people, coordinating design and development, managing a remote Upwork team and paying for an actual MVP. That was part of why the project mattered to me: it was not a prototype on a weekend. I had to commit to building it.
The test
Once the platform was live, I spent the following months trying to acquire customers. After a few thousand euros in paid acquisition, the strongest signal I had was one meaningful call. The product worked; the demand did not validate the model strongly enough.
So I stopped. It was a good attempt, but it did not go to plan — and forcing it further would have been defending the work already done rather than listening to the market.
From VivoGreen to Domus Green
The family business has since become Domus Green. My involvement is different now: rather than trying to force a standalone startup model, I use what I learned to improve the digital side of a real operating business.
A lot of that work is organic acquisition: continuously improving technical and on-page SEO, building content around the questions potential customers are actually searching for, strengthening local relevance and using search-performance data to decide which pages deserve more attention.
What I built
- Product concept, brand and go-to-market for VivoGreen.
- A working residential solar-quote MVP with a remote team.
- Paid-acquisition tests to validate demand.
- The decision to close the original startup after weak market signals.
- Ongoing digital and SEO improvements for the family business now operating as Domus Green.
VivoGreen was one of the first times I put real money, time and coordination behind something of my own. It failed as a startup, but it gave me a much clearer distinction between building a product and building something the market actually wants.