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🧠 3 Idea Thursday

🧠 3 Idea Thursday

Tax Harvesting, Podcast Summarizer, Solar Panel Cleaning

Andrew Haag
February 29, 2024

In partnership with

Every week, I spend hours searching for the best business ideas.

Here are my favorites this week!

🧠 1: Tax Harvesting 🤝 Profits

If someone made an app that analyzed all your stock positions and then created a new basket of stocks and ETFs that represented >99% of your portfolio—but with optimized tax-loss harvesting—they would be able to capture a massive part of the retail brokerage market, because you… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
— Nikita Bier (@nikitabier)
6:37 PM • Dec 6, 2023

This is actually genius. But the stock market is confusing…

Imagine you have a collection of stamps (stocks in an EFT). Every year, some stamps might become less popular (lose value) while others become more popular (gain value).

When you sell a stamp for a gain, you pay taxes on it.

When you sell a stamp for a loss, you can ‘tax harvest’. This offsets the taxes on stamps you sell for a gain, or your total taxable income.

Here’s how this idea works:

Stamp A = currently unpopular (but you bought it when it was popular)

Now, imagine there's a robot that tells you the perfect time to sell Stamp A so that the sale price + tax harvesting is greater than the current market price of Stamp A.

This allows you to swap Stamp A for an identical Stamp A, and have the transaction be a financial gain.

😮‍💨 My head hurts… on to the next idea, yeah?

Investor-ready Startup Financials

Last year, we helped companies raise $300M in venture capital. Next week, we are running a 1-week LIVE workshop that covers:

Financial modeling basics
How to forecast startup growth
Budgeting rounds of funding

Book a Slot for $199

🧠 2: AI Podcast Summarizer

Here's a killer AI product:
1. Let me pick a few podcasts to follow
2. Take the latest episodes
3. Use LLM to summarize each of them
4. Send me a weekly email with the summary
5. Link to the episodes if I want to dive deeper
Would save me hours.
— Peter Yang (@petergyang)
3:15 PM • Feb 24, 2024

Too many good podcasts, too little time. A few of my favorites:

🧠 3: Solar Panel Cleaning

Business idea:
The other day I noticed that my solar-powered security cameras were low on battery.
Turns out my solar panels were just super dusty and were not charging so I cleaned them with a wet paper towel.
Within a few days the batteries are back to normal.
This got me… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
— Jon Stenstrom (@JonStenstrom)
12:37 AM • Feb 19, 2024

Simple ideas are beautiful ideas. Here’s the gist:

Dust, debris, and bird shit reduce solar panel efficiency by 25 to 50% (this figure is debated online)
It’s recommended to clean solar panels 2-4 times per year

How to test this:

Use Google Earth to find neighborhoods with a lot of solar panels (Or buy/find a leads list of homes with solar panels)
Send out flyers, cold call, run targeted ads, etc…
Charge $199 for one-time clean, $599 for all-year cleaning (4x per year)

That’s all for this week.

— Keevin ✌️

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