Spend $2000 on all the FAANG interview prep courses/mock interviews you can, interview at 10 places, get 2 offers, take the offer that pays the most. Move to SF, live with 10 people in a 5 bedroom place (with bunk beds) for $800ish/month to save money. Eat free food at your new FAANG job and rice/beans on the weekend. Work freelance on nights and weekends on the highest paying, most boring bank/adtech software projects you can find. Save more than half your income. In 3 years the market should be back to normal so your stocks should 2x or so bringing you to close-ish to $1m, realistically it’ll take 7-10 though if you live like you’re broke.
Ask HN: What would you do to turn $100K into $1M in 3 years?
31–40 of 43 posts
Re: Ask HN: What would you do to turn $100K into $1M in 3 years?
#32hire a cheap developer from a 3rd-world country to build a lensa ai clone in react native so you get both android/ios version.
since ai art is popular right now, make it better than lensa.
hire influencers with a 20% cut if they refer your app.
invest in pr & aggressive marketing in addition to that.
if you do it right, this should turn your $100k into $1m in if you don't get it done fast, then you can try instagram photoshoots or try to automate onlyfans with an ai.
this will take some work but its a sureshot way to make >$1m with the ai hype.
Re: Ask HN: What would you do to turn $100K into $1M in 3 years?
#33Spend $2000 on all the FAANG interview prep courses/mock interviews you can, interview at 10 places, get 2 offers, take the offer that pays the most. Move to SF, live with 10 people in a 5 bedroom place (with bunk beds) for $800ish/month to save money. Eat free food at your new FAANG job and rice/beans on the weekend. Work freelance on nights and weekends on the highest paying, most boring bank/adtech software projec…
Or live a in low COL country with low taxes, spend nothing on stupid leet code courses (the time is much more valuable than 2000$) and just freelance. You can make 300K easy if you would be able to get into FAANG, and take home 270K after taxes.
Spend 800$ to live in a fancy, big apartment or a nice small house, eat out as much as you want, do vacations live a good life on 20K per year.
After 3 years you will have 750K saved + 100K was never touched and only need 15% growth in 3 years (instead of the illusional 100% growth of stocks hoped for in the above comment) to be at a million. Even if stocks go down you are easy FIRE with a SWR that gives you 30 to 40K a year so close to double of what is needed.
This should work much much more likely than the crazy thing OP suggest, not even sure if meant with sarcasm or not.
Source: Did exactly that in the last 3 years
Re: Ask HN: What would you do to turn $100K into $1M in 3 years?
#34Assuming you are a DINK or SINK. 1. Move to cheap COL. 2. $100k = 3 years run way, and some modest expenditure (ads, servers, etc) 3. Build a bootstrapped business. 4. You might have $1m or be on your way to it. DINK = Dual Income, No Kids SINK = Single "" COL = Cost of living Or downpayment on home in upcoming area while working at FAANGs leetcoding and playing offers off each other. Renting all your rooms out, slee…
I like how you used 3 acronyms exactly once, then explained all of them.
Re: Ask HN: What would you do to turn $100K into $1M in 3 years?
#35Spend $2000 on all the FAANG interview prep courses/mock interviews you can, interview at 10 places, get 2 offers, take the offer that pays the most. Move to SF, live with 10 people in a 5 bedroom place (with bunk beds) for $800ish/month to save money. Eat free food at your new FAANG job and rice/beans on the weekend. Work freelance on nights and weekends on the highest paying, most boring bank/adtech software projec…
Or live a in low COL country with low taxes, spend nothing on stupid leet code courses (the time is much more valuable than 2000$) and just freelance. You can make 300K easy if you would be able to get into FAANG, and take home 270K after taxes. Spend 800$ to live in a fancy, big apartment or a nice small house, eat out as much as you want, do vacations live a good life on 20K per year. After 3 years you will have 75…
Any tips for someone just starting out, with 0 professional work experience attempting the same? I'm not aiming for 300K a year (more like 24K+), I just want a remote job while living in a low COL country.
Re: Ask HN: What would you do to turn $100K into $1M in 3 years?
#36Find a product you can promote using paid traffic, which yields you enough margins. Assuming that you get paid monthly, that there are no caps on the product, and that you get the same margins consistently: A product with 100% margin will have you grossing $1 million in four months. A product with 50% margin will have you grossing $1 million in six months. A product with 25% margin will have you grossing $1 million i…
Assuming you can sell the whole of your inventory in 1 month, re-invest all income and do the same for the next month?
Also assuming the margins are after all expenses? Isn't Amazon FBA taking like 30% cut?
Re: Ask HN: What would you do to turn $100K into $1M in 3 years?
#37If there were any reliable way to do this, people who knew the trick would be doing it, not talking about it. As soon as the opportunity became common knowledge, it would be flooded, and the margin would disappear.
Re: Ask HN: What would you do to turn $100K into $1M in 3 years?
#38Casino. All on Black. Repeat 3 more times (hoping your luck holds out for each). 16x in under an hour. (or zero most likely... but definitely lowest effort) I don't recommend this approach however But yeah, if you're talking USD, then one could easily live comfortably for five years in Vietnam/Thailand for $20k/year. (Although you could easily live in a ton of countries if you pick your town/city/area correctly) Then…
For $20k/year, you can choose so many countries. I would recommend Vienna, Austria. I live in the Netherlands and my expenses are 27k/year living alone and I can imagine you can have amazing lifestyle in Austria for 20k/year.
Re: Ask HN: What would you do to turn $100K into $1M in 3 years?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or live a in low COL country with low taxes, spend nothing on stupid leet code courses (the time is much more valuable than 2000$) and just freelance. You can make 300K easy if you would be able to get into FAANG, and take home 270K after taxes. Spend 800$ to live in a fancy, big apartment or a nice small house, eat out as much as you want, do vacations live a good life on 20K per year. After 3 years you will have 75…
Any tips for someone just starting out, with 0 professional work experience attempting the same? I'm not aiming for 300K a year (more like 24K+), I just want a remote job while living in a low COL country.
You need a start. That's pretty much it. Everyone starts somewhere the important thing is to keep learning and growing. This means different things for different people, but it usually boils down to spending a long time learning and a bit of luck.
Going back to getting a start, unless you know people or get lucky first this will probably be something that doesn't pay well and is hard, but don't get stuck, keep learning and growing.
Re: Ask HN: What would you do to turn $100K into $1M in 3 years?
#40If there were any reliable way to do this, people who knew the trick would be doing it, not talking about it. As soon as the opportunity became common knowledge, it would be flooded, and the margin would disappear.
It's not just that. It's an annualized return of roughly 116%, when for comparison, the US stock market has a long term return of roughly 7%.
In the investment world, anything close to 10% return is usually highly risky, speculative.
So it's downright unattainable, since the vast majority of the population which invests money gets returns that are 20x lower in a good year.