Ask HN: How would you make $100k fast? 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? |
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
What advice would you give
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.
The other option is to have a life.
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...
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.
Scrap HN freelancer or HN looking for job portal & match them with the companies.
You will require a computer & some persuasion skills.
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.
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.
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.
The cinema company.
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.
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.
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.
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.