Ask HN: How would you make $100k fast?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31498142

by zeuch • 4 years ago

25 46 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Imagine you're in a challenge and need to make $100k, from scratch (zero initial financial investment) in an ethical and legal way, as fast as possible.

What would you do to achieve that? Why? How long do you estimate you'd make it?

colesantiago• 4 years ago

Join a FAANG, investment banking / finance or a company with a high TC. [0]

[0] https://www.levels.fyi/leaderboard/

greenpizza13• 4 years ago

Well this is one useless link.

neximo64• 4 years ago

Get a job at an investment bank and wait for the bonus

jschveibinz2• 4 years ago

With zero financial investment, I assume that also means no capital assets of any kind. That excludes land, commodities, resources, labor contracts, securities, etc.

I will assume subsistence is available.

With that said, you only have labor and ingenuity. The ingenuity is required to identify something valuable (scarce, in high demand, etc.) from an economic standpoint.

The labor is initially focused on earning enough capital to acquire the necessary tools. Then, that will enable the labor required to make something of value that can be sold for more capital.

The question of time is unanswerable, because it depends on too many factors.

zeuch2• 4 years ago

Interesting. Would you use the same approach for $1M instead of $100k?

jschveibinz2• 4 years ago

Yes. I have seen it work many times over.

hdlothia• 4 years ago

Marry well

muzani3• 4 years ago

That might take a few years.

simonblack• 4 years ago

The best ROI would be to rob a bank.

Whether or not you could keep that $100K is another matter entirely.

Robbing banks with a gun is not much different from people (aka 'banks') robbing you with a fountain pen, ethically and legally speaking. Read up on the Cyprus Banks and the Bail-In. https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanlewis/2013/05/03/the-cypr...

muzani3• 4 years ago

Looking up the stats, there were 1,788 bank robberies in 2020. There's probably an SOP to robbing banks by now, and a SOP to dealing with them.

Tellers are trained to be very polite to bank robbers, which throws them off. Most bank robberies don't even involve a gun right away. They're written notes asking for smaller amounts of money. The clearance rate is 60% which means about 40% don't get caught.

However, before anyone sets down this path, you should probably consider that it might be easier to make $100k just working at a bank.

jrandm• 4 years ago

might be easier [...] just working at a bank

Reminded me of this Key & Peele sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgYYOUC10aM

    Robber 2: So how do we get the money?
    Robber 1: That's the beauty of it, bro. They deposit the money into our bank accounts, week after week, month after month. They're not even gonna know they're being robbed! And then 20-30 years later, we walk out the front door like nothin' even happened.

rootusrootus• 4 years ago

You'd have to rob a lot of banks to get to $100K, however. And the FBI is very effective at catching bank robbers. It would be pretty low on my personal list of illegal ways to get money.

E2EEd• 4 years ago

Go into the biz of robbing banks for profit. Like in Sneakers intro but adjusted for 2022, more automated, robotic, human-decoupled.

It'll make DHS salivate when you prove that the need for high speed, AI drone defense is greater than currently is deployed.

You'd probably sell a full stack solution with a "Jolly Bank Robber Cookbook Manual 2022" to prove the risks going fwd along with successful live field tests.

mattbrewsbytes2• 4 years ago

I went into my local BigBank branch to close out accounts since we moved to a credit union, they said they were a "cashless bank". I was in a hurry and didn't ask snarky follow-up questions like how long that branch would be there. Felt bad for the employee.

It would make for a funny movie scene that a bank robber tries to rob a bank and finds out its "cashless". Maybe they steal the pens? Or try to get them to write out a cashiers check? Then they have a problem with the printer and the triplicate forms they need to fill out.

zeuch2• 4 years ago

Are you the Sovereign Man?

Thespian2• 4 years ago

Be lucky.

I don't mean to be flippant, but given the constraints, your speed will be almost entirely proportional to luck/risk.

To start, all you have is labor to bootstrap with. So let's say for round numbers $10 / hour, at 40 hours per week is $400. or $1600 for one month. That puts you six "doublings" away from $100K after one month.

Go to Vegas, bet it all on black (or red, your choice) and win 6 times in a row, and done. 1 month of labor + a few minutes of very lucky gambling. Or, a single bet that pays off 62.5 to 1. While the odds are the same it probably seems more "practical" to win "just" two 8:1 bets back to back.

Investments, options tradings, sports betting, etc will all be some variation of this. Get really lucky, and it can be done in a short time, but with a high risk that you have to start over, and it ends up taking a longer time overall.

More realistically, if OP can put all that labor money into investment/savings (assume subsistence is supported otherwise) The standard advice to buy and hold low/no- fee index funds could do it in about 5 years (on average).

https://www.investor.gov/financial-tools-calculators/calcula...

400 initial, $1600 / month, 5 years, assume 7% yearly growth +/- 2% variance.

Finally, OP says "zero financial investment" - but what other resources do they have? Perhaps the sunk cost of education or training or other skills. Then, their labor might be worth $100 / hour, instead of $10. Get a high-paying job.

Then you could make it in 6 months of straight labor income without risk of investment or gambling losses.

All the above is wildly speculative, and not investment advice, and somewhat US-centric, and contains completely implausible numbers and assumptions, but is an honest attempt to quantify an answer to the question.

yuppie_scum• 4 years ago

Blackjack and sports betting. But maybe that’s why you need 100k to begin with

giantg2• 4 years ago

If you're female - OnlyFans.

muzani3• 4 years ago

I ran the numbers for fun once, including porn and "sugar baby" and honestly I think it pays terribly. It's probably in the "high waitress tip" range but way below tech. If your only skills are being pretty, your best bet might be ASMR on YouTube.

There's also a lot of marketing needed. It's hard enough to sell SaaS or whatever, how do you sell something that's free in large quantities? If you have marketing skills and are willing to show skin, you could probably make money faster selling submarines.

It's a bit like acting, sports, drug dealing, novels, where a tiny minority make extreme incomes and most lose money on it. Even then, the top extreme of hard and smart workers like Sasha Grey make less money than say, Notch made from Minecraft.

altdataseller2• 4 years ago

Yeah it’s a lot easier to just be an escort, and charge $500/hr

altdataseller2• 4 years ago

If you're pretty, you probably can make more money doing videos for tech companies, like Stephanie Wong for Google Cloud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og94u8CEsag

synicalx• 4 years ago

AFAIK the overwhelming majority of creators on OF make way way less than minimum wage.

thagerty• 4 years ago

$10 will get you one share of AMC right now, and if the hedge funds ever close their short positions, the result could be $100,000 per share.

TowerTall• 4 years ago

What is AMC?

smcn• 4 years ago

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMC/

The cinema company.

culopatin• 4 years ago

Is that what happened with GameStop?

mr-pink• 4 years ago

marijuana arbitrage

kleer001• 4 years ago

Easy: small, incremental, face-to-face, ratcheted, barter-trading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_red_paperclip

adrianwaj• 4 years ago

I read a story about a guy that made around that amount with Google ads and producing really generic articles - top 10 lists and such. So for people that don't run adblockers I suppose.

I also read about Wolfgang Gartner writing music based on top 10 music charts and just emulating those tracks - not sure how much money he made but he has 166k followers on SC.

GauntletWizard2• 4 years ago

I'm a consultant, a site reliability engineer, and that's about my yearly "fun budget". It took a lot of hard work and training and learning to get to this point, though, so my advice is to work hard 10 years ago.

mr_o47• 4 years ago

That sounds impressive how were you able to get in a position like

What advice would you give

GauntletWizard2• 4 years ago

Study. Learn. Do personal projects and work projects, work hard and smart.

The other option is to have a life.

enduser• 4 years ago

It's important to make a favorable impression on people over time. Do good work, be trustworthy.

High-paid independent consulting gigs are based on a lot of mutual trust. You never know where the best referrals are going to come from, so do right by everyone.

michepriest• 4 years ago

I'm working on this now. Officially started January 1 of this year but giving myself a few months of grace because I hit a few bumps in the road with some family stuff.

I'd spend the first 3-6 months creating info products (e-books on gumroad, amazon; e-courses on Udemy/Coursera). Once those are up and running spend the 4th month on t-shirts and merch with print-on-demand and sell via shopify/etsy.

Take free cohort-based courses and do paid ones with the proceeds from the sales of the info products and merch. Set up affiliate links once I have a bit of an audience. Set up systems to automate all along the way.

Mix in some freelance work to start and build websites and apps with no-code. Share my journey on Twitter and YouTube.

Because I have money I'm adding podcasting and will buy Google and Instagram ads once I see some traction.

I started by doing 100DaysOfNoCode. This is free and taught me how to build stuff on the web. It was a great way to generate business ideas. I've made a bit of money from a few of them. The one that's getting the most traction is micro-coaching with UnstuckIn15

The fastest way to a lot of money is offering cohort-based courses but you need a solid reputation to make it work. With these courses if you charge $199 and have 100 students for a 3 week course that's $19,900. Do one a month and you're basically there in 5 months. Caveat is being able to get 100 signups per month. It's the internet, and you have access to people all over the world.

The best thing about this strategy is not having any obligations (no investors, employers, or employees).

I'm thinking I'll make around $50K this year. My goal is to eventually make $1 million a year mostly in recurring revenue. I'm thinking that'll take 10+ years, but it's the internet so who knows?

The key is try a bunch of stuff. Like how VCs diversify, don't put all your eggs in one basket. Be consistent on your daily output. No matter what happens in your day, do something to advance your work.

ynac• 4 years ago

Having done this experiment with a few variations over the years, maybe a dozen times, I've found that the first $100 is the roughest.

I'm currently in one now with a buddy and we're going for a grand sum. Exciting. But, we started with $20 each in the pot.

When I was in college, I had two concurrent experiments running. Player one was only allowed ethical & legal investments. Player two, well, basically did whatever. Player two crushed player one. It was the 80s. Each player started the contest with one penny. Player one ended up with about $80 in 60 days. Player two was something like $1200+.

I promise to plug it here when its done, but we're documenting this game and also publishing a pamphlet / ebook on the basics of playing. Like I said, there are some real challenges getting past the first few dollars. Depending on your rules of course.

It's all good fun, if it is for fun. But it's also good to remember while playing a money race, the times when you were flat broke. And if you never had that challenge, try to imagine people who deal with the struggle to eat and shelter every night. Of course, this is another version of the game - Walking Out. Take only what your seed for the game is (one cent, $100) and walk out of the house. Good luck!

nullbytesmatter3• 4 years ago

1. Pick an industry you know well.

2. Look at the most popular monthly paid tools in that industry.

3. Pick a tool that seems interesting and not too difficult to duplicate.

4. Build a competitive product.

5. Sell it.

aristofun• 4 years ago

Any examples of 1 and 3 combinations that come to mind?

nullbytesmatter3• 4 years ago

Alternative strategy, buy a few dozen bags of uncle bens instant rice and a dozen Psilocybin spore syringes for like ~$100. Grow a few tubs full of mushrooms and sell them online and get paid in Monero.

Cash out a small portion of the profits (~$200) and double up your production. Do that a few dozen times. When you got around $50,000 in profit exchange the Monero to ADA/DOGE/SHIB and hold for 2-3x.

str3wer• 4 years ago

last part is how to get to 0

Gravyness• 4 years ago

How else are you supposed to restart the game?

pengaru• 4 years ago

Find and sell 0-days for lucrative targets like openssh, linux, iOS, etc. to the highest bidder

pyuser583• 4 years ago

Im too tired to think of the specifics, but it would definitely involve real estate.

Shatnerz• 4 years ago

Would it be ethical to land several tech jobs at the same time and then do the bare minimum at each to keep the paychecks until you hit $100k? You'll likely be fired and burn some bridges for potential employment, but I think you could hit $100k within a few months including interviewing.

desaiguddu• 4 years ago

Staffing or Hiring Consulting is easy to start. Find a startup or enterprise who is looking for Technical Developers, and they are willing to pay for the referral or hiring fees.

Scrap HN freelancer or HN looking for job portal & match them with the companies.

You will require a computer & some persuasion skills.

mattbrewsbytes2• 4 years ago

The answers in this thread indicate no really good ideas for fast and legal/ethical so your best bet is to land a tech job and work 6-9 months to get to 100k if you're senior and if you're more junior then probably 1 year.

All other 6 figure professions require massive schooling or certifications/apprenticeships/internships of some kind. Or years to get to 6 figure territory. For tech, you can learn web development online and then work at any SaaS that has CRUD apps as a junior-mid level engineer and start around there. If/once you have experience you should be starting above that.

One viable option is some consultancy that pays for deliverables, not hours and meeting attendance. Let me know if you find a consultancy like this. I think that would be ideal semi-retirement mode, work one 6 month contract each year or something like that.

Ask HN: How would you make $100k fast?

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