NYC Taxi medallions used to cost about $1M before ridesharing companies arrived.
People would take out loans to afford them, or rent them from the real "franchise owner".
Not everybody aspires to a unicorn exit. Predictable returns are worth a lot too, even small ones. The drivers who took out loans for their medallions really got screwed when Uber came in, but if the demand for electricity drops catastrophically, we'll probably have bigger problems than a bit of debt.
Why not just make a startup for that money. You can train a GPT-3 clone for that money. You can hire a few ML grad students to make some dangerous AI the big companies think is unethical.
Or you can do a deep tech startup like mini Varda. $1MM can get you far enough that you attract VC money and that’s all you need.
Solar panels are much lower risk. Electricity is a well known product. It's a straightforward process from building it to getting cash in your account.
It might look more like a micro financing idea than a franchise. Most of the commercial-scale solar installations today are built by a developer and then either a) held in their portfolio or b) sold to a utility
