Overview
Rainplan is a multi-sided platform connecting property owners, government incentive programs, and vetted contractors to make it easier and more affordable to adopt green infrastructure.
Problem
Rainplan needed to win the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWDSC) as a B2B customer. As SoCal's largest water wholesaler, MWDSC was sitting on tens of millions of dollars in unspent turf rebates through its SoCalWater$mart program: money earmarked to pay homeowners to replace lawns with water-wise landscaping, but stuck in a process that wasn't moving it.
The rebate is appealing, but the process isn't. Owners need pre-approval before starting, designs have to meet program rules, and finding a contractor who responds and quotes a fair price is its own challenge. Many give up before they begin.
Rainplan's concierge service removes those hurdles, but only for owners who sign up. To prove it could move MWDSC's money, Rainplan needed to show demand, so the priority was growing the number of owners who placed an order. After ordering, owners entered a post-order dashboard shared across all of Rainplan's incentive programs, so this project focused on the part of the journey unique to SoCalWater$mart: getting owners to that first step.
Orders alone weren't enough, though. An owner who ordered without understanding the program's requirements was likely to drop off later, so the experience had to set clear expectations as well as convert.
How might we help property owners quickly understand the value of Rainplan's concierge service and feel confident enough to order it, knowing what comes next?
Roles & Responsibilities
I partnered with a product manager on prioritization and engineers on implementation, as well as programs and marketing teams. Research, flow design, and the final UI decisions were mine.
Scope & Constraints
We had three months to ship this project, and leadership wanted to improve upon our existing consumer flow, rather than design from scratch. The key difference between this experience compared to our “universal” consumer flow was that we were showcasing a specific incentive for a specific landscape upgrade, rather than showing all eligible incentives and projects.
Process
Outcomes
1. Understanding the program's blind spot
Our program manager interviewed MWDSC and uncovered the core constraint: the district had money for rebates but couldn't spend it on marketing. Demand generation would fall to Rainplan.
An audit of the existing rebate websites showed why owners weren't finding their way in on their own:
Dense, legal-heavy copy that buried the value of the rebate
Complicated eligibility requirements that were hard to parse without expert help
Rules and rebate amounts that varied by zip code, so owners couldn't easily tell what applied to them
2. Testing demand before designing
We started with the assumption that California residents already understand water conservation and may know rebates exist, but underestimate how generous this one is. What they don't want is to manage design, program requirements, and coordination themselves. To test that, we launched ads with a simple lead form so sales could start talking to real homeowners immediately. Those calls reshaped the brief:
Our language was filtering for the wrong users. A meaningful share of inbound leads wanted to replace lawns with artificial turf, which the rebate explicitly disallows. Shifting messaging from "turf removal" to "turf replacement" both filtered out unqualified leads upfront and reframed the project as an upgrade rather than a teardown — a better story for the homeowners we did want.
The water bill was a better hook than the rebate. We'd built the value prop around the one-time rebate payout. But homeowners on calls kept returning to ongoing utility costs — a recurring monthly win mattered more to them than a lump sum.
Homeowners couldn't answer "is it worth it?" They couldn't visualize what their yard would become, couldn't price the replacement, and therefore couldn't tell whether the rebate covered enough of the cost to commit. The decision was paralyzed at the imagination layer, not the paperwork layer.
The real bottleneck was supply, not demand. SoCal had a severe shortage of landscape contractors willing to navigate municipal rebate paperwork. Even motivated, fully qualified homeowners stalled out waiting for a quote.
3. Exploring three approaches
4. Committed to the standard flow
I initially pushed for the guided quiz because it solved problems the other approaches handed off to sales:
It collected everything upfront, removing the need for a post-order sales call
It felt personal, responding to the owner's property and priorities rather than a generic offer
It ended in a project blueprint that built momentum, showed owners Rainplan had it handled, and laid out clear next steps
However, because each project was custom, it couldn't offer pricing estimates or show the rebate as a percentage of cost, both answers to owners' uncertainty about whether the project was worth it. Moreover, leadership wanted to prioritize speed and consistency with the rest of the platform. We chose to build on the existing property owner flow.
Standard Property Card
What I’d Do Next
Custom Property Card
5. Solving the Pricing Problem
I reframed the question: what if homeowners didn't have to specify their design at all?
We replaced bespoke project configuration with three packages (Budget Friendly, Mid-Range, Luxury Option) each mapped to standardized plant and material kits.
This was the highest-leverage decision of the project because it solved three problems in one move:
Homeowners didn't have to know what they wanted, which research had shown they couldn't articulate anyway. We could generate ballpark cost estimates without bespoke design work. We could take packaged orders to contractors in bulk, directly attacking the supply shortage that was killing conversion, by creating predictable jobs and repeatable installs.
150+ orders
10x projects
Largest B2B contract
In the first month after launch, we received more than 150 orders through the platform and 50 of those signed contracts to complete a project using the rebate. The consumer experience became the proof point that closed Rainplan's largest B2B contract to date and validated that a private-sector product layer could move public conservation dollars that municipal programs alone couldn't.
Our sales calls surfaced a second motivator we didn't design for: homeowners cared more about lowering their monthly water bill than about the one-time rebate. Turning that into something we could show, like an estimated monthly savings for a given property, would have required a major research and data effort. That was out of scope for a three-month launch focused on proving demand. With demand proven, it's the next lever I'd pull. I'd start small, testing savings messaging on the landing page to see whether it lifts conversion before investing in property-specific estimates.