Ask HN: How do I get $2.2M dollars?

I havn't reached that amount but in terms of income... You don't need to build a 10M+ business, just one with a 80k a year income rate, which is fairly achievable.

I only just launched it, i have negligible traffic and we are already getting about 1 customer every week, each customer pays .03 Bitcoin for 3 months ~300 usd perhaps the lifetime value may be 1000 usd if they continue, i'm sure there will be some churn but its fairly achievable that in a few years we will have atleast 80 paying customers.

I'm currently reinvesting the money that comes in into marketing/improving the business and into trading the cryptocurrency markets with the product to validate that its got value for our customers, its not too hard to double your money every few weeks using a high leverage trading platform like bitmex, or something like poloniex if you pick the right coins with our forecasts :)

I built the product in between my day job at Weta Digital.

You can do the same!

Also checkout our referral program where you can earn .003btc every paying user :)

The Sooner you get your business/secondary income stream off the ground the sooner you'll hit your financial freedom goals, with running a business you build trust/authority and traffic over time through many sources and the sooner you start the easier it will be, i started bitbank.nz as just a ghost blog about cryptocurrency trading about a year ago to get something out and eventually snowballed into doing things in a more advanced way, now the company is benefiting from the odd blog post i writ a year ago,

Keep doing things that don't scale and hitting 80k year on year is very reasonable, you don't need to have hockey stick growth or be unicorn level, you should be happy to run a business that would never get funded because your aiming for 80k and not the moon.

+ The scenario is based on applying the wrong capital allocation strategy at the wrong time. When you have 2200k dollars and you want to make it last, the important thing is capital preservation, not growth. Because growth can be negative and even positive average growth can be locally negative.

+ Once you have 2200k dollars keeping it in your mattress rather than investing it will for growth provide 80k dollars/year for more than twenty-five years. Twenty-five years is a long time even if you're old.

+ Assume the plan is to get to 2200k dollars in five years. This requires an after tax income of 484k dollars/year. And the discipline of living on 80k dollars/year while earning 6x that amount. In ten years it is 282k dollars/year with a 3x discipline. In twenty years it is 181k dollars per year with 2x discipline. That's still tough.

+ The proposed plan does not reflect a discipline of spending only a small fraction of available yearly income. The proposed plan is 80k dollars/year in and 80k dollars/year out.

+ More broadly the proposed plan's 80k per year does not strongly imply holding frugality as a principle virtue. It's about the top 1/8th of US incomes (before not after taxes). This suggests that status is playing a role alongside financial independence.

+ 2200k dollars is an abstract X in an X -> Y problem if the goal is 80k dollars/year of passive income. There are more concrete X's in the X -> Y problem. For example twenty years US military service as an officer could come close to providing 80k dollars/year in retirement. It would still require discipline but not the 2x spending discipline.

+ Not that I am suggesting a military career, only that it is a concrete plan with a reasonable chance of producing 80k dollars/year in twenty years. The downside of concrete plans is that they are less intoxicating.

+ There's an old joke that the easiest way to make a small fortune is to start with a large fortune. That's why most people don't have a small fortune.

Good luck.

I have a lot of experience in this area. (Obsessed about retirement from about age 22, and set a goal for 30. Did it.) This is a very important question to ponder at the beginning. :)

I should probably add why I'm asking this question. I thought all those years I was working my ass off, missing out on so many things in life, and destroying my marriage over this goal that I needed to have the money first THEN realize my dreams. If your dreams are "freedom" and "doing my own thing" you probably don't need $2.2 million to do them today. But I don't know what they are, so that's why I asked. Sure, if your dream is to buy Ferraris and pop expensive champagne every night, you really do need that money.

Mine or more simple: traveling practically full time, getting a farm and building crazy inventions on it, etc. I really didn't need a lot of money to do either of these things. For example there are sites like workaway.info where you can go live and work on a farm, or on a beautiful vineyard in France, or in a cool hotel in the tropics, etc. TODAY.

There are similar resources for travelers.

For anything I could imagine wanting back then, I could've easily achieved by being a little resourceful, creative, and reaching out to those who could help me in exchange for my skills/talents.

Bottom line is, you would be amazed at the life you can live outside the mainstream economy. I think it's one of the best kept secrets in the world.

I don't regret how I did things entirely, but thinking about this very carefully in the beginning would've saved me a whole lot of heartache and distress.

I'm excited for you and wish you the very best.

In fact, it might be easier to build one product that millions of users pay $1/year for a few years than it would to get $1/year from 80,000 till one's death.

Also checkout our affiliate program where you can earn .003btc per paying user referred :)

We also provide a live API and bulk data to the technical HackerNews types.

There is a lot of money flying around in the Crypto space right now and with some good forecasts/data you can go a long way even manually trading :)