Legends Solar

Online solar investing with powerful impact and monthly dividends

The idea

Legends Solar allows anyone to purchase equity ownership in real, operating commercial solar panels. You could buy one panel for just a few hundred dollars, or a “rooftop’s worth’, and earn cash in real-time as you generated and sold electricity to the grid. Legends gave clients access to a monitoring system, where they could check in on their panels and see real-time and trailing metrics on their earnings, carbon impact, and generation productivity. Long term, Legends aspired to expand into other asset classes like wind, carbon capture, and more. The goal was to make complex and inaccessible infrastructure equity investments appealing to retail investors.

4,000+ investors pre-committed to buy 50,000 panels worth $10,000,000+. While Legends was never able to offer “by the panel” purchases for retail investors, we did launch a product for accredited investors (generally, these were new commercial development projects worth $100K+).

Our differentiation angle(s)

User acquisition / marketing

Legends Solar found early success attracting millennials locked out of getting residential rooftop solar. Millions of people were marketed home solar and had it recommended to them by friends and family - but were unable to install it for a variety of reasons (e.g., they were renters, lived in the city, or faced finance or logistical barriers). These leads were already eager to purchase solar panels, and so needed little persuasion to sign up. Legends operated a sophisticated paid marketing campaign that tracked users across its website, social media platforms, and email engagement. This attracted conversions for less than $10 per sign up, and on average, users indicated interest in purchasing thousands of dollars worth of panels.

We also got unpaid marketing by leading the ranks of Hacker News and Product Hunt, the two most prominent message boards for novel product launches. Our launch garnered significant earned media attention within industry trade publications and newsletters and helped us grow the list of users.

In addition, Legends commissioned the smash hit product launch video “The Ballad of Mary”, a unique “musical explainer” video with 150K views and counting. The video uses a novel format to express Legends Solar’s value proposition in a fun and engaging way.

User experience-driven design

With Legends, understanding what you own, its effect on the world, and its financial profile would be simple and intuitive. Our design and engineering team launched the Legends Solar web app, which had interactive dashboards to show users the amount of electricity generated and profits earned in real-time, and also tracked user engagement through a CRM. Our product design was informed by hundreds of user tests.

Amount raised

Legends Solar secured over $500k from leading solar finance companies (such as Captona Renewables and SDC Energy) and angel investors to fund its first year of pre-seed operations. We received additional commitments for capital before Legends stopped seed fundraise efforts and ended operations as we lost faith in our ability to acquire solar facilities.

Duration from Start to End

1 year

Team size

4

Challenges and what you'd do differently

Regulatory

Legends Solar intended to one day serve individual retail investors and offer a “by the panel” investment product. During our operations, we were unable to sell investments to everyday investors due to regulatory constraints. Instead, Legends completed a small number of private placements with well-off accredited investors. For example, one of our co-founders cultivated our first accredited investors from past art clients she had in her previous work managing a fine art gallery.

Business Model

We were unable to secure a scalable path to acquire solar project investments for our customers because we found that institutional investors were increasingly involved in acquiring projects - so there was no need for money from retail investors. During operations, our model for acquiring projects was two-fold: 1) Two leading solar finance firms were sourcing and diligencing solar infrastructure acquisitions for our platform - SDC Energy, a private placement consultant run by a solar finance industry veteran, and Captona, a $500M AUM renewable investment fund which lent us credibility and provided visibility within the solar M&A landscape. 2) We had the experience to source, analyze and diligence deal flow internally. However, we did not source as many high-quality projects as we anticipated due to the growing interest from institutions to investing in commercial solar.

Notes above shared by Lassor Feasley, CEO / co-founder of Solar Legends. Find additional information about Solar Legends here. Lassor now runs Renewables.org, an online solar investing non-profit that allows anyone to help build solar in the Global South.