How Enelyst powers a global energy intelligence community with Mattermost

In energy trading, information moves markets. Yet too often, crucial data is scattered across tons of apps and buried in noise. Journalist and publisher John Sodergreen, along with natural gas market analyst Het Shah, saw an opportunity to solve this fragmentation. In 2018, they launched Enelyst, a market intelligence hub that combines streaming intel, live trade briefings, and public chat into a single collaboration space. Powered by Mattermost, the platform quickly grew to serve over 1,000 daily users.

Searching for a sustainable business model

As Enelyst’s community grew, Sodergreen and Shah began exploring monetization strategies. Initially funded through ad sales and offered free to users, Enelyst soon faced the need for a sustainable revenue model. When Shah left to pursue new endeavors, Sodergreen realized that the platform would need to shift to a paid subscription model to continue its growth.

To make that work, Sodergreen needed to upgrade the Enelyst platform, originally built on open source code, to something enterprise-grade.

Choosing Mattermost Professional for security and compliance

After evaluating several platforms, including Slack, Sodergreen chose to deepen his relationship with Mattermost by upgrading to self-hosted Mattermost Professional, enabling Enelyst to maintain complete control over its data infrastructure. “We are publishers after all,” Sodergreen says. “Ownership is everything.” 

In addition to data sovereignty, the decision was also driven by Mattermost’s stability, flexibility, and competitive pricing.

“We determined that Mattermost had the best possible platform to support our growing needs,” Sodergreen says. “Scale has not been an issue with Mattermost.” 

To support an industry that runs on real-time data, Sodergreen was drawn to Mattermost’s ability to easily stream content and integrate diverse data sources. “We have managed to deploy content from dozens of intel, data, and analytics providers directly to our various sector channels. Enelyst provides traders and analysts with original content covering natural gas, crude, power, LNG, weather, policy and risk, and economics.” He was particularly interested in Mattermost guest accounts, which allow view-only members to read content and observe live briefs while meeting compliance requirements. 

“Our customers include many regulated commodity traders from some of the biggest funds and energy companies in the world,” he continues. “They have very specific compliance criteria.” 

Enelyst also offers all-access memberships, which enable users to post content, comment, and otherwise contribute to the conversation.

Creating a global community for the energy sector

For Sodergreen, the biggest benefit of choosing Mattermost has been building a truly unique global community for the energy sector.

“It’s a one-of-a-kind community hub for folks from diverse companies and locations to share ideas, news, and intel,” he says. “Our community members are big fans of Mattermost.”  

Enelyst has customized the Mattermost UI to reflect its branding and has created custom icons for channels to improve organization and visual identification. The company is also using incoming webhooks to post messages and alerts directly in specific channels and outgoing webhooks to forward specific channel messages, enabling real-time automated processing and workflow execution, Sodergreen says.

“We also use Zapier to manage several RSS feeds that continuously post updates into different channels within the Enelyst platform,” he continues.

Looking ahead, Sodergreen plans to explore using AI inside Mattermost for tasks like automating end-of-day reports, polling, and other content creation. He also hopes to expand Enelyst into other competitive markets beyond energy — such as equities, metals, agriculture, and foreign exchange — and is confident Mattermost will support that mission at scale.

“I would absolutely recommend Mattermost to anyone in the energy sector and beyond,” he adds.