Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How To Become a Millionaire In Three Years

jasonlbaptiste.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 79 posts

Re: How To Become a Millionaire In Three Years

#61

Post by Sukotto »

runT1ME wrote: post #50
ErrantX wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats exactly what I mean. Jason may or may not have a million - but he understands how to make wealth. This is possible to scale to meet the timeline as required.

what? It means everything. Selling lemonade from a stand can be profitable, but the skills required for that to be successful in no way transfer to running a company that sells to every grocery store in america.

Interesting you should mention that. In this talk[1], Gary Vaynerchuk describes how he started a Lemonade business, hired all his friends to run the stands, and used the skills he developed doing that (and selling trading cards at the mall) to build his family's little liquor store into "WineLibrary.com" a 60M/yr business.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1447500

Re: How To Become a Millionaire In Three Years

#62

Post by brlewis »

paul wrote: post #54
jasonlotito wrote: post #5

Thanks for editing your comment and posting it. It's much nicer to read. And... > Raise Revenue, Not Funding Thank you, thank you, thank you. > Look For Something That Is Required Or Subsidized By Law I'd like to add that you should be careful about something that requires you to need constant permission from a third party. The iPhone market is a good example. While I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't develop for t…

>> Raise Revenue, Not Funding > Thank you, thank you, thank you. Why "thank you"? Are you looking for the truth, or just something that repeats what you wish were true?

The parent post is currently at -1. I'll bet the downvoters have not made millions from their startups.

The parent poster sold FriendFeed to Facebook last year in an estimated $50MM transaction. I would take his question seriously.

Re: How To Become a Millionaire In Three Years

#63

Post by jasonlbaptiste »

Sukotto wrote: post #60
patio11 wrote: post #47

Just a quick semi-meta comment: if you have a comment which you put a lot of time into and which resonated with people, strongly consider blowing it up into a blog post. It may be irrational, but the perceived authority of 500 words wrapped in an attractive Wordpress template murders the perceived authority of 500 words appearing at the third level of indentation on this page. I like to think that I've written some f…

Another meta comment: Let me start by saying I do not think you have deliberately abused the HN point system. You already have a high score and presumably don't care about the number growing. That being said... this is an interesting way to game one's HN score. Comment on stories. Once it became obvious that a particular comment is popular/well-received (200+ points) clarify it a bit and post it to your blog. Then su…

I don't care about Karma at this point in the same way people with lots of money don't care about money (that right there is a potential post). I'd rather not lose it because that means I've done something bad/not smart. Otherwise gaining karma isn't something I keep track of. My logic was:

a) I wrote the comment randomly on a Sunday night. I literally wrote what was on my mind. I kept updating it frequently as I thought of more things.

b) All of a sudden there were 200+ upvotes the next day. To me that indicated that people found the comment really useful.

c) I had more to say, wanted to polish it up, and put it on my blog in a more permanent place.

d) Submitted it since it was previously proven to be useful.

Re: How To Become a Millionaire In Three Years

#64

Post by jasonlbaptiste »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #51

Please don't take this wrong way, but: GAAAH my eyes! The text is way too big, the margins way too wide, and the letters way too run-together. (Readability ftw!)

No no, I won't. I tried optimizing the blog for the iPad a few weeks back. It works great there, but it's not the best for the actual computer. I'm going to scrap the current design and go with something fresher now that I'm writing more often. The iPad formatting? More on that later...

Re: How To Become a Millionaire In Three Years

#67

Post by ComputerGuru »

jasonlbaptiste wrote: post #64
ComputerGuru wrote: post #51

Please don't take this wrong way, but: GAAAH my eyes! The text is way too big, the margins way too wide, and the letters way too run-together. (Readability ftw!)

No no, I won't. I tried optimizing the blog for the iPad a few weeks back. It works great there, but it's not the best for the actual computer. I'm going to scrap the current design and go with something fresher now that I'm writing more often. The iPad formatting? More on that later...

Thanks for your reply. Can't you detect if it's an iPad and use a different stylesheet or is that not possible? (don't know - I'm a mac user, but I'm not sold on the iPad).

Re: How To Become a Millionaire In Three Years

#68

Post by jasonlbaptiste »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #67
jasonlbaptiste wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No no, I won't. I tried optimizing the blog for the iPad a few weeks back. It works great there, but it's not the best for the actual computer. I'm going to scrap the current design and go with something fresher now that I'm writing more often. The iPad formatting? More on that later...

Thanks for your reply. Can't you detect if it's an iPad and use a different stylesheet or is that not possible? (don't know - I'm a mac user, but I'm not sold on the iPad).

You can certainly detect the user agent. Working on something a bit more in-depth than that though :).

I'd say go for it, but it really depends person to person. It's not perfect for everyone.

Re: How To Become a Millionaire In Three Years

#69

Post by ComputerGuru »

getonit wrote: post #55
ComputerGuru wrote: post #51

Please don't take this wrong way, but: GAAAH my eyes! The text is way too big, the margins way too wide, and the letters way too run-together. (Readability ftw!)

> letters way too run-together Keming!

For those downvoting: it's a joke :D kerning == the way characters are drawn/rendered with their ligatures, etc, if badly kerned ------> keming.

Re: How To Become a Millionaire In Three Years

#70

Post by dabent »

jseliger wrote: post #42
edw519 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent point. On the other hand, I know plenty of millionaires who never could have made a post like Jason's. Why? Because of how they became millionaires. Either they inherited, joined a family business, climbed the corporate ladder, held onto or flipped real estate, grew a conventional business in the perfect climate, or just got plain lucky. Better: Have you earned a million dollars through your own start-up >…

Most people don't become millionaires through inheritance, extreme income, and so forth; they become millionaires because they save more than they spend, usually by a substantial amount, invest widely, buy a house and keep it, and marry and don't get divorced. Stanley and Danko's book The Millionaire Next Door describes this phenomenon: http://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Thomas-Stanley/d... and what wealth i…

As good as that book was, I liked Stanley's "The Millionaire Mind" even more: http://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Mind-Thomas-J-Stanley/dp/0...

There were two groups that stood out in the book:

1. Professionals who did well and invested wisely. He noted that most professionals who do well, spend all of their income and often even more.

2. Business owners.

Both groups became millionaires through one means: business ownership - through stocks in case 1 and directly through case two.

I know several people who've done very well and it's because of their businesses. A junkyard owner, an owner of an electrician company, an owner of a used tire business are among those who have little or no post-high-school education. They all have far more in the bank than I do.

Note that all of these are all what the blog post calls "unsexy" businesses. They provide a product or service and charge for it.

The first million didn't happen for them in 3 years. But it did happen and for at least two of them (I lost touch with the junk yard owner) the money just keeps coming in.

Post reply on HN