The Story of EVnSteven

A car that catches fire, a strata council that made a catastrophic bylaw mistake, a talented developer on the other side of the world, and a Google spreadsheet that started it all.

In 2018, I moved into a new condo building in a small city just outside Victoria on Vancouver Island. I was driving a 2014 Kia Soul, a car I had a complicated relationship with. The model had a known history of catching fire, and I kept a fire extinguisher in the back seat as a matter of routine. The car was also a gift from my mother, given to me from her deathbed. So I wasn’t eager to part with it.

When the warranty was nearing its end, I brought it in for one final check. While I sat in the waiting room, I noticed something on the showroom floor: a car that looked almost identical to mine — same body, same roofline — but silver instead of red, and with a small badge on the back that read EV. I hadn’t known Kia made an electric version of the Soul. I asked the salesman if we could take it for a drive.

I was immediately impressed. The acceleration was effortless and quiet. The handling felt sharp. And the fact that it was the same model as my mother’s gift mattered more than I expected. I told the salesman I couldn’t sell my Soul. He laughed. Then he told me the price was $42,000. I said thank you and started to mentally move on.

Then he mentioned the trade-in. And the $9,000 in combined federal and provincial EV incentives. And that they’d give me $15,000 for my fire-prone red Soul. Net cost: $22,000 for a brand new 2019 Kia Soul EV with a sunroof and a clean conscience.

I bought it on the spot.

What made the timing feel almost too perfect was something I’d noticed when I first moved into the building a few months earlier: there was an EV charging station in the parkade, and nobody was using it. No electric vehicles in the building yet. It sat there like a small prophecy.

I’d always been drawn to electric vehicles. I remembered reading about the first Tesla and feeling a very specific kind of jealousy — the jealousy of someone who wants something badly and can’t afford it. I’d rented EVs, test-driven them, loved them. So when I moved in and saw that station, I filed it away: if I ever get an EV, I have a place to charge. A few months later, I had both.

For nearly two years, everything worked perfectly. I’d plug in at night, and the car would be fully charged by morning. Most sessions took two hours or less, since I rarely depleted more than a third of the battery on any given day. The 200 km range was more than enough for how I actually lived.

Then other residents started getting electric vehicles.

By 2022, we had four or five EVs in the building, all sharing one charging station, coordinating by text message: I’m plugged in, done by 10pm, it’s yours after that. It worked, barely, through goodwill and patience. But I had a growing sense that the strata was watching.

The building skewed senior/grumpy, and the post-pandemic spike in the cost of living had put everyone in a budget-cutting mood. I could feel it coming. So I started collecting data, in anticipation of a dispute.

I set up a Google Sheet and asked my neighbours to log their sessions: date, name, battery size, starting charge percentage, ending charge percentage. With those numbers, the math was simple. Electricity cost $0.125 per kilowatt-hour. Battery size times percentage charged equals kilowatt-hours consumed. Kilowatt-hours times cost equals the bill. No guesswork. No dispute. Just arithmetic.

25 sessions logged across three neighbours over the first month. October total came to $52.09 in electricity shared between us — calculated to the cent, fairly split.

We tracked for another month with similar results and that spreadsheet became the seed. I didn’t know it yet, but I was already building the product. Shawn went on vacation and stopped logging sessions. Ivan continued to drive skip the dishes, and David just drove a little less in November. This showed that the spreadsheet was a good tool for tracking, but it wasn’t a good tool for billing. It was too much work for the residents, and it was too much work for me to manage. I needed something better.

Around the same time, I’d been exploring a new mobile app framework called Flutter. It looked powerful — clean, cross-platform, capable of building beautiful things quickly. I kept thinking: someone should build an app for this. An app that lets EV residents check in and check out of a charging session, optionally log their battery levels, and automatically calculate what they owe. No special hardware. No metered stations. Just the physics of electricity and a little trust between neighbours.

I played with the idea for about a year. I overcomplicated it at first — thought maybe I’d need to interface with the vehicle somehow, use machine vision to photograph the dashboard and read the battery level. But the longer I thought about it, the simpler it became. The problem wasn’t technical. It was social. People needed a fair, transparent way to share something. The app just needed to make that easy.

Then I met Mekonnen.

He appeared in a Flutter subreddit where I was answering questions about state management. His questions were precise, his thinking was clear, and when I looked at the code he’d shared, I was genuinely impressed by its organization and quality. We started talking. I learned he was just 24, had recently graduated from university in Bahir Dar — a city in northern Ethiopia, nearly 17,000 kilometres from Vancouver Island — and had taught himself English so he could teach it and earn extra money in the summer.

I also learned things about Ethiopia I hadn’t expected. That it has one of the oldest Christian societies on earth. That it is rapidly industrializing, with fiber optic internet and 5G networks, and universities that produce genuinely excellent engineers. That the portrait I’d grown up with — shaped largely by decades of news coverage focused on hardship — was a profoundly incomplete picture of a country in the middle of a remarkable transformation.

Mekonnen was struggling to find work abroad despite his abilities. Companies would see his address and pass, falling back on assumptions that had nothing to do with what he was capable of. I was a little bored. I had some extra time and some extra money at the end of the month. I thought: let’s just build something together and see what happens.

I wasn’t looking for an employee. I was looking for something interesting to do — and I found something much better than that.

Mekonnen showed up to our first call exactly on time. He was visibly nervous. I told him to relax — there were no mistakes possible here, nothing serious at stake, just two people making something. He did his best to believe me.

One week became two. Two became three. Each time I extended things, I could see the relief move across him — the weight lifting. He never once tried to take advantage of the situation. He showed up every day, on time, professional, and genuinely grateful in a way that made me reflect on how much I take for granted. His skills were growing at a rate that surprised even me. His code was clean, his architecture was sound, and his work ethic was quietly extraordinary.

We built three experimental apps over three months — all of them technically impressive, none of them destined to become businesses (yet). But by the end of those three months, I knew what Mekonnen was capable of. And I had a fourth idea.

An EV charging tracker. I wasn’t exactly sure what it would look like. I told him: let’s just start building and see where it goes.

That was when EVnSteven began.

We worked carefully — a few hours a day, five days a week, sometimes skipping a day when I needed to think. I had to think a lot. Mekonnen could build things so quickly that if I wasn’t clear about what I wanted, he’d build the wrong thing with great precision. The complexity crept in the way it always does: one sensible decision at a time, until suddenly you’re managing a system with dozens of moving parts. We went through many iterations. Somewhere between six and nine months passed before we had something genuinely clean and production-ready.

We were obsessive about security. Our backend runs on a database we pay for by usage, which means malicious actors or bots repeatedly hammering the API could drain our resources fast. We hardened everything. We complied with every requirement from the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. We built something that could scale, that couldn’t easily be abused, that would hold up under real-world conditions. It took longer than we expected. It was worth it.

While we were building our prototype, more EV’s were being added to the building.

A new neighbour had moved in with a Tesla Model 3, and the parkade charging station was now genuinely congested — five electric vehicles, one station, everyone coordinating by text, everyone occasionally inconvenienced at odd hours when it was their turn to move the car. Then I noticed something I’d walked past a hundred times: a standard electrical outlet on the column next to my parking stall.

On a whim, I plugged in. In the morning, the car was surprisingly fully charged. I ran a few more tests over the next few days. The outlet could add 100 kilometres of range to my car in 12 hours, and charge the car fully in about 23 hours. For someone who drives 30 or 40 kilometres a day and doesn’t drive every day, it was 2-3 times more than necessary. I stopped using the dedicated charging station entirely and started using my outlet. Occasionlly I would use a public fast charger if I needed a quick top-up if I had to drive more than normal, but for the most part, the outlet was more than sufficient for my needs.

The strata took notice. There were conversations. I was asked to justify myself, so I did: the outlet draws less current than the Level 2 station, the cost is the same electricity regardless of which plug it comes from, and there was nothing in the bylaws that prohibited it. The strata looked at the bylaws. I was right.

So they decided to fix that at the next Annual General Meeting (AGM).

What followed was one of the more remarkable own-goals I have witnessed in a residential governance context. The new bylaw, voted on and approved by the full building, stated that Level 2 charging was not permitted, and that Level 1 charging from wall outlets was the approved method going forward.

They had mixed up the terms. Level 1 is a standard wall outlet. Level 2 is the dedicated charging station. They had accidentally banned the dedicated station and legally enshrined the right to do exactly what I had been doing.

They were stuck with the new erroneous bylaw. Changing a bylaw requires a Special General Meeting, and they weren’t willing to spend the month to call one.

I contacted the property manager to confirm my understanding of the bylaw language and get written clarity before proceeding. She replied dismissively and told me to just do what the bylaw said. So I did.

For the next twelve months, the dedicated charging station sat unused — locked out by the building’s own legislation — while I charged happily from my outlet. The Tesla owner who’d moved in next to me asked if he could share it on weekends. I said sure. He’d plug in Friday night, unplug Tuesday morning. I’d charge the remaining evenings. Between the two of us, we covered our needs almost entirely from one standard wall outlet.

Some months later, the strata issued a fine for what they described as a bylaw contravention — citing the very outlet use their own bylaw had just approved. I disputed it formally. Their position was not sustainable.

The following year’s AGM corrected the language and introduced a monthly fee for the Level 2 station. But by then, the other EV residents — thoroughly alienated and understandably reluctant to pay for something they’d gone without for a year — had found that a business on the ground floor had installed two Level 2 stations for their employees, and that those stations were unsecured. Anyone in the building could access them. They did.

The newly re-opened dedicated station sat mostly empty. The building had spent two years of meetings, fines, letters, and bylaw revisions to arrive at a solution that almost nobody used.

My building wasn’t the only one making a mess of this. Around the same time, a strata elsewhere in British Columbia imposed a flat monthly fee for EV charging. A resident challenged it. The case went to tribunal. The tribunal ruled in the resident’s favour: without an actual measurement of electricity consumed, a flat fee lacks justification and is unenforceable. Buildings need either metered hardware — which costs thousands of dollars to install — or a software solution that tracks actual usage.

That ruling didn’t just resolve one dispute. It clarified the legal landscape for every multi-unit building in the province. Fair billing requires measurement. Measurement requires either hardware or software. EVnSteven is the software.

We launched EVnSteven in 2023. The first wave of sign-ups came mostly from Facebook EV groups, and most of those people weren’t quite ready — curious, but not at the moment of need. We got pushback from group administrators. We got signups that never became sessions.

But a few people understood immediately.

There’s a retired teacher in San Diego who has been using the app for two years without interruption. He got it the moment he saw it — no selling required, no lengthy explanation, just instant recognition that this solved a real problem he had. There’s a building in Washington, DC that set up 19 stations and has residents actively logging sessions. They were organized from day one and never needed convincing. There’s a resident in the Metro Vancouver area running EVnSteven in parallel with an expensive metered system her strata installed, quietly collecting data to demonstrate that the simpler solution works just as well at a fraction of the cost.

We have, at the time of writing, a small but growing number of active users. That number is honest — finding the people who need this has been the hardest part of the whole journey. The problem is real. The solution works. The market is large and getting larger every year. Getting those three facts in front of the right people, at the right moment, in the right words — that’s the work we’re doing now.

I eventually left that building. The weight of the conflict had become too heavy — the sense that my own community had been handed an opportunity to do something good and had chosen obstruction instead. As of April 2026, the residents who found alternative charging arrangements are still using them. The dedicated station remains mostly unused. The building never implemented EVnSteven.

I tried. I arranged in-person demonstrations, answered every objection, offered to walk the strata council through the app. I was met with skepticism and the particular stubbornness of people who have made a mistake and would rather live with it than admit it. It stung. But it also clarified something important: the people who need EVnSteven most are not always the people closest to you. Sometimes you have to travel farther to find the ones who are ready.

Mekonnen is still here. We are still building. The problem hasn’t gone away — it’s getting bigger every year.

Mekonnen is now a skilled, seasoned developer. What started as a casual experiment has become years of collaboration across 17,000 kilometres — a Canadian entrepreneur and an Ethiopian engineer, connected by a programming forum and a shared belief that a fair, simple, software-only solution to EV charging in apartment buildings is not just possible but necessary.

EVnSteven exists because of a dangerous car, a deathbed gift, a strata council that missed the point, a Google spreadsheet, and a gifted young developer in Bahir Dar who had the talent and the drive to build something worthy of the problem.

We think that’s a pretty good origin story for a company that believes great things can come from unexpected places — and that the simplest solution is usually the right one.

EVnSteven is a software-only EV charging billing platform for multi-unit residential buildings. No special hardware required. Works with any existing outlet or standard Level 2 station. Available on iOS and Android. Built in Vancouver, BC and Bahir Dar, Ethiopia.