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Ask HN: How to become a millionaire in 3 years?

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Re: Ask HN: How to become a millionaire in 3 years?

#121

Post by nobutyestoo »

ErrantX wrote: post #91

> How to become a millionaire in 3 years? I've said this before: statistically speaking you are highly unlikely to achieve this. In fact in my experience those who set out to earn discrete amounts in a discrete time with no idea how to do it are those most unlikely to achieve it. The truth hurts. Others have said that setting a deadline is a good idea; which it usually is. Here is just limits your scope - very few th…

Asking is a strong way of pursuing things. If you are able to ask yourself and others like you then you are doing it right. Don't be afraid of those who think that this is impossible. Ask yourself how to avoid thinking that it is impossible as a first step to make it possible.

Re: Ask HN: How to become a millionaire in 3 years?

#122

Post by ErrantX »

nobutyestoo wrote: post #121
ErrantX wrote: post #91

> How to become a millionaire in 3 years? I've said this before: statistically speaking you are highly unlikely to achieve this. In fact in my experience those who set out to earn discrete amounts in a discrete time with no idea how to do it are those most unlikely to achieve it. The truth hurts. Others have said that setting a deadline is a good idea; which it usually is. Here is just limits your scope - very few th…

Asking is a strong way of pursuing things. If you are able to ask yourself and others like you then you are doing it right. Don't be afraid of those who think that this is impossible. Ask yourself how to avoid thinking that it is impossible as a first step to make it possible.

> If you are able to ask yourself and others like you then you are doing it right.

Maybe. In a very small number of cases. Most of the time it is people either a) struggling to come up with ideas or b) trying to figure out a way to solve their dream with minimum effort.

> Don't be afraid of those who think that this is impossible.

It's not technically impossible. But setting out to make $1Million in 3 years is generally a non-optimal approach.

I'm a realist in the sense that I figured out a long time ago that truly impossible goals are worthless and, generally, counter productive. Here's an example of how to fix that; one of my long term goals is to go into Space. This is technically feasible now, but to do it I'd need a few million $'s - so that's a good hack, I can work to achieve my goal through some means and the money should be incidental to that. But it is not limiting because I may find another way to achieve this goal without the cost.

Re: Ask HN: How to become a millionaire in 3 years?

#123

Post by nobutyestoo »

You could make a web game that guarantees someone to be millionaire in 3 years. You have to make the game in such a way that you will be the one to get the price. That is you must be able to plan de game and how to take control of it.

Some hidden seed can be the initial advantage to win.

Re: Ask HN: How to become a millionaire in 3 years?

#124

Post by elai »

petercooper wrote: post #52
Terry_B wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem so far has very much been that all of my ideas and efforts have been towards big, pie in the sky, breaking new ground type things. And of course, they usually don't get finished. I've been trying to get far more disciplined in looking for the more practical, boring problem/solutions that follow market trends etc. I just find it so hard to do because it doesn't excite me as much, even though I know there is…

Perhaps an example of how "small" a trend can be could excite you enough to look out for things that are "bite sized" enough to try. I'm pretty deep in the Ruby world. A trend that has emerged (and is almost becoming a cliché) over the past 18 months or so is selling Ruby related screencasts. Peepcode started selling screencasts about 3 years ago but no-one followed on in a serious fashion for quite a while (until Pe…

You can also try other programming languages screencasts. Choose the top stack overflow questions and make screencasts for them :)

Re: Ask HN: How to become a millionaire in 3 years?

#125

Post by bosment »

cellis wrote: post #56

Looking for incredibly boring, yet painful problems in industries like healthcare, oil/gas, real estate, and ecommerce. Build a solid product using .NET or Java. Charge massive consulting fees and hire some slick salesmen. I know several people who got rich doing this, but they were straight up businessmen, and thrived on solving boring, yet lucrative problems.

Any pointers on how to find these incredibly boring, yet painful problems in industries?

Re: Ask HN: How to become a millionaire in 3 years?

#126

Post by hyperbovine »

petercooper wrote: post #22
jasonlbaptiste wrote: post #5

I'm going to go and replace 3 years with a "short time frame". Some things to focus on: - Market opportunity- a million dollars isn't a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it certainly is a lot if the market opportunity is not large enough. Even if you put Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as founders in a new venture with a total market size of 10 million, there is no way they could become too wealthy without completely…

Love this post, but I'm going to argue against one of your points: If it's a "trend", it's too late I disagree. In fact, if something is a trend, it's a guarantee that a market (of some kind) exists and it can save you a lot of time and research. Most big markets have large numbers of high value competitors and they're not all pioneers. Indeed, most companies with significant turnover were not pioneers in their field…

Totally agree. A surprising number of today's most popular sites were in fact not first to market. Just off the top of my head:

Kayak Reddit Huffington Post Bit.ly Hulu Vimeo Google (!) Facebook (!!)

Re: Ask HN: How to become a millionaire in 3 years?

#127

Post by hyperbovine »

adbge wrote: post #21
ZombieCoaster wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how do you not get arrested after publicly admitting you did something illegal?

You move to a country that doesn't extradite to the USA. I hear Myanmar is nice this time of year.

Whoah, no need to delve quite so far into fascism. The list of countries which do not have an extradition treaty with the USA is longer than most people think (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_extraditi...) UAE is probably your best bet if it's a developed nation you are after.

Re: Ask HN: How to become a millionaire in 3 years?

#129

Post by Confusion »

ojbyrne wrote: post #48
waivej wrote: post #45

Don't make something people want. Instead take away a problem that people don't want to deal with. The uglier and stinkier the problem, the better. Then price very high and look for markets where people have more money.

Can you name some ugly, stinky problem that we haven't already farmed out to the third world?

Then there's your market.

Re: Ask HN: How to become a millionaire in 3 years?

#130

Post by BrandonM »

charlesju wrote: post #89
pfedor wrote: post #60

Get a job as a software engineer at a large company. Rent a small room, don't own a car, don't eat out, don't go to Hawaii for vacation, whatever it takes to save $250k in three years. Then go to Vegas and put everything on red twice. (Metaphorically speaking -- I don't know if they'd allow a $500k bet in Vegas. But in the wonderful world of contemporary financial markets, there are instruments to make any kind of be…

I like this method but just increasing the time span to 12 years. 100% success rate.

I hope this post and the upvotes were sarcastic. Trying this method 4 times means that you have a 68%* success rate. You'd have to try it 8 times to even get to a 90% success rate.

* To calculate this, chance of success after 4 tries = (1 - chance of failing 4 times in a row) = 1 - 0.75^4 = .68

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