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The team
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Engineering & design
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Marketing & education
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Brand and artwork
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Sales
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Deal flow
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Venture fundraising
Legends Solar was an online solar investing startup
With Legends, anyone could buy operating solar panels on commercial solar facilities. 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 Solar 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.
Solar investing was to be the first product offered by parent company Legends Incorporated. After launching ‘online solar investing’ and proving the value of a user experience driven approach to consumer financial products, Legends aspired to expand into other asset classes like wind, carbon capture, and more. Legends’ made otherwise complex and inaccessible infrastructure equity investments appealing to retail investors.

Legends stopped operating in early 2023 after a year of research and development.
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The team
Legends’ founding team included experts in design, sales, engineering, and finance.CEO Lassor Feasley had a past in product design, working with startups on UI/UX, qualitative research, and brand strategy. Director of Sales and Marketing, Nera Lerner, had been director of a fine art gallery for many years and worked to educate former art collector clients as Legends’ first ‘online solar investors’. Technical cofounder John Compas had both front end and embedded systems engineering experience. Finance Director Antonella Wells had an impressive career in derivatives trading before she refocused her career on sustainability and the energy transition.

The team was supported by industry experts and stakeholders, including two solar finance organizations and a variety of advisors active in the entrepreneurship, renewable finance, and climate tech industries.
The surprising parallels between art collecting and online solar investing
Legends Appoints Antonella Wells ‘Director of Finance and Originations’
Why I chose an MFA over an MBA before founding a startup
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Engineering & design
Legends Solar’s aspiration was to redesign the financial security to match everyday investor’s expectations of them. Popular stock brokerage and crypto related financial products invite users to perform research and analysis they are ill equipped for. On Legends, understanding what you own, its effect on the world, and its financial profile would be simple and intuitive.

Legends met clients as consumers, rather than as investors. Instead of buying a share of an abstract security, on Legends you would buy a solar panel, and gain access to an interactive dashboard that put your impact in context with your earnings.

As Legends matured, it hoped to offer client’s opportunities to invest in other asset classes. The throughline between all Legends products would be the use of design and engineering to create a powerful experience that affirmed investment impact.
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Marketing & education
Legends Solar found early success attracting customers by targeting millennials locked out of residential rooftop solar. The insight was that millions of people were marketed home solar and had it recommended by friends and family – but were unable to install it for a variety of reasons (i.e. 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. On average, users indicated interest in purchasing thousands of dollars worth of panels.Where similar products tended to highlight impact and environmental benefits, Legends Solar’s prioritized product features like its intuitive user interface, which allowed it to attract a wider audience.

Over 2,300 investors signed up to use Legends Solar.
Legends 101 newsletter
Referral rewards campaign
Meditation Instagram Stories Campaign
Frequently asked questions and documentation
The Ballad of Mary
Legends Rooftop press release
Go-to-market strategy
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Brand and artwork
Legends Solar’s aspiration was to redesign the financial security using the principles of human centered design. Investors on Legends would know exactly what they owned through their holding because Legends’ interface would make it simple and intuitive to understand.

Legends created a brand identity and visual language that illustrated how financial products could be designed to be as intuitive as other digital products.  The identity was used across multiple touchpoints like marketing, written material, web design, print, artifacts, and documents.
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Sales
Legends Solar intended to one day serve millions of individual retail investors. However, in  Legends' early phase, it could not sell investments to everyday investors due to regulatory constraints.

Instead, Legends completed a small number of private placements with well-off accredited investors. Co founder Nera Lerner spent her previous career managing an important fine art gallery. She cultivated past art clients into the first ‘online solar investors’.

This required Legends Solar to produce high quality investment marketing materials like pro formas, investment overviews, and consultation decks to educate clients on the unique benefits of solar investing.
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Deal flow
Legends attracted two leading solar finance firms to source and diligence solar infrastructure acquisitions for its platform. This allowed Legends’ to focus on product execution in its early operations, rather than finance diligence and origination.
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SDC Energy, a private placement consultant  run by an industry veteran with deep industry ties and a masterful knowledge of structured solar finance was a powerful resource to navigate the industry. Captona, a $500 million AUM renewable investment fund lent powerful credibility to Legends’ operations and provided visibility within the solar M&A landscape.

In addition, Legends had an internal ability to source, analyze, and diligence deals. Director of Finance and Origionations, Antonella Wells, had a long history building energy trading platforms and dedicated her substantial experience to sourcing deal flow.

Legends facilitated a small number of  private placements with accredited investors before ending operations.
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Venture fundraising
Legends Solar raised over $500 thousand from solar finance organizations and angel investors to fund its first year of preseed operations. Leading solar finance and deployment organizations, as well as climate tech venture capital groups agreed to commit additional capital before Legends decided to end operations.

Legends lost faith in its ability to acquire solar facilities and abandoned its seed fundraising efforts. However, it produced a number of pitch documents and other analysis that articulated its long term plan and venture-scaled vision.
Monthly investor newsletter
Preseed pitch deck
Preseed executive summary
Comparables analysis
Seed pitch deck
Seed executive summary
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The end
After a year of operations, Legends Solar closed in early 2023. Legends completed a small number of private placement investments with accredited investors in its preseed phase, but the team lost confidence in its ability to acquire additional infrastructure at scale.

As interest rates and energy prices increased, institutional capital poured into the solar infrastructure market. Meanwhile, years of development constraints like labor shortages, supply chain issues, and tax policy insecurity had slowed deployment. This made for a powerful sellers market that made it difficult to acquire solar projects.

Legends Solar had signed up over 2,500 investors who indicated interest in investing on its platform. It built a marketing apparatus that validated scalable consumer demand for ‘online solar investing’. Despite a clear path to traction and a vibrant and growing community of stakeholders and vendors, Legends ended operations due to unfavorable conditions in the solar finance industry.
Designed by Legends
in Brooklyn, New York
Contact Lassor Feasley
feasley@lassor.com