From LEED Consultant to Solo Founder: I Built an AI to Automate My Own Job (12 Months, 0 Funding, Still Figuring It Out)

I spent 5 years doing energy modeling, LEED consulting, and commissioning. Every project, I was spending 200+ hours doing repetitive credit calculations, document prep, and simulation runs. So I started building a tool. Not to launch a startup, just to save myself time.

12 months later, it's become a full platform. I rewrote it 3 times, from a local PySide6 app to a full web-based system (Next.js + FastAPI + GCP). The hardest part wasn't the coding. It was turning my consulting logic into something others could understand and trust. The best moment was seeing the first LEED report auto-generate with no human input.

I'm now running a small pilot with professionals in the US. People seem interested. But I'm still not charging anything, mostly because I want to make sure it works before I ask anyone to pay.

If you've built B2B tools before: When did you feel ready to charge for it? How do you know when trust is "good enough"?