Maythem

we help companies evaluate, design and estimate EV charging sites.

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@shaneparrish Another thing I learned is that anxiety is experiencing failure in advance.

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@parchmentmaps @maplibre The night style looks great!

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interaction inspired by @aydahnizzy

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Working on a new release pop-up

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Perfection is the enemy of progress. None of the stuff we use every day were perfect when they were first released.

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"back in the day, many charging companies just chased rebates, didn't give a damn about user experience and figured if they build they'll come. But they didn't. It wasn't pretty. I don't miss those days"

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@a16z Success is rarely a straight line.

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@jsngr Hard agree on this one. How you do one thing is how you do everything

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This is the story of how we got the idea to build https://t.co/RIAtua1vZL Ironically, the CPO that inspired us to build it hasn't used the product to this day.

Before EVpin was founded, we were working with several big CPOs on producing 3D renderings. And one of their execs set up a call and asked if we’d be open to doing a site selection contract.

The scope was they would hand us a portfolio of ~500 locations that they get from real estate partners and our job was to vet them and give them the top 50 based on several factors that they deemed important.

Sounds pretty straightforward, or so we thought.

So naturally we asked, what tool are you using to accomplish this?

The answer was, we use these 10-14 tools (some paid software products, some free data from a government website, etc).

Within one week we determined there’s got to be a better way, the amount of tab switching was ridiculous.

I kid you not, we had to use a tool to figure out the electric utility company for each address. Then a tool for parcels, then EV adoption, then traffic, flood maps, POIs, etc..

Then, on top of all that, they asked us to create a charging layout using…(drum roll)

Good ol’ PowerPoint.

We had to draw colored boxes, each one showing where chargers and support equipment would go. No concept of how many can actually charging stalls can fit, because that would require another tool they didn’t have.

So they just punted it to an engineering company to build site drawings for projects they had yet to win. They spent ungodly amounts of money on drawings for sites that never ended up getting built.

Our idea for EVpin was simple:

What if all these data points lived under one roof? And the same tool would let anyone who knows how to use PowerPoint to create a scaled layout on top of a live map.

Just search an address and start drawing. No need to worry about scaling the map/layout. That move alone saved companies hundreds of thousands of dollars. Because now sales teams can create layouts in the prospecting phase without needing an engineering company till after the contract is signed.

A few months later, EVpin was born and the rest is history.

And that operator I mentioned at the top? Still not a client. But that’s a story for another day

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Really pumped for the launch of our new site! EVpin has always been a self-serve tool, but this time we went all in. You don’t even need to sign up to see the value.

Just head over to the site and start exploring.

Toggle map layers, click around, hover over the data, and watch a full charging layout come together right in front of you.

There’s still a ton more coming soon. This is only phase one.

Go check it out and tell me what you think. https://t.co/RIAtua1vZL

[Maythem @maythem]

@KMkota0 Look great! Would love to try it.

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Every time technology starts demanding a lot of power, people say the grid can’t handle it. Right now it’s EVs and AI data centers.

Before that it was air conditioning. And before that it was refrigerators and all kinds of electric appliances people now barely even think about.

In 1930, only 8% of American homes had a refrigerator. By 1950, 80% did. That is a massive jump in demand from machines that ran all the time, on a grid that was way smaller than the one we have now.

Same thing with washing machines. Same thing with electric irons. Same thing later with AC. In the late 1950s, hardly anyone had air conditioning at home. By 2020, 88% of households did.

And every time, people asked some version of the same question: how is the grid supposed to handle all this?

The answer was simple. The grid grew to meet the new demand.

Between 1902 and 1930, US electricity generation grew 20x. Between 1945 and 1965, generation capacity grew 4x. Household electricity use kept climbing too. The system expanded because demand was rising and the country built around it.

So when people say the grid can’t handle what’s coming, they’re talking like the grid is some finished product. It’s not. It never was. The grid has always changed to match demand.

What is different now is not that the challenge is bigger than anything we have seen before. What is different is that we have made it a lot harder to build. Transmission lines can take 7 to 10 years to permit. Around 2,600 GW of proposed generation is stuck in interconnection queues, and only a small share ever gets built. Transformer lead times have gone from months to years.

So yes, the constraint is real. But it is not that the grid cannot grow. It is that we have slowed down the process of growing it. That is a big difference.

The grid has handled wave after wave of new demand for more than a hundred years. It can do it again. The real question is whether we are going to make it easier to build what is needed. That is the part I wish more people talked about

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@_adishj @garrytan @motion_so Motion

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what if I told you that you can filter by a specific utilization rate, power rating, port count, and charging network, and the map actually shows you the stations that meet your exact criteria

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Right-clicking is so underused in modern software today. It's the perfect interaction for tiny tasks because it meets users where they are.

Right-click to measure an area.
Right-click to copy a lat/long or an address.

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You can build a polished app in hours, but it still takes days to shoot and edit a polished video for the same app

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There’s so much progress happening it’s difficult not to get excited about the future. Here a few things that excite me:

1. Rocket science is becoming aviation
2. Cars driving themselves are becoming the norm
3. Computers keep getting tinier and more powerful
4. Robots are entering the workforce in mass
5. Green Energy is becoming the default (cheaper + faster)
6. Artificial intelligence is accelerating everything it touches

Progress of this magnitude is disruptive. We can sit here and be pessimistic about where we’re heading the same way people did when electricity was first invented. I choose to be on the other side of the coin simply because we were created to create.

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@bnj @variantui Yes please 🙏🏻

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@irushishah Very cool! How long did this take from start to finish?

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@benspringwater Huge fan of matter. Would love an invite.

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@hnshah Well said! Reminds me of this tweet.