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If you had 5 dollars and 2 hours, how would you make as much money as possible?

entrepreneur.venturebeat.com

1–10 of 196 posts

Re: If you had 5 dollars and 2 hours, how would you make as much money as possible?

#3
Get as far as you can on $5 of gas and drive to friends and family's houses running msconfig and cleaning up crapware to make their computer run faster. Easily $20 - $40 a pop. Protip: reinvest a little profit into more gas, make even more money!

Re: If you had 5 dollars and 2 hours, how would you make as much money as possible?

#7
If the question is what I would actually do, I'd probably offer "computer tune-ups" as someone else suggested. That, or set up and secure wifi routers. A lot of people are afraid of wifi routers because they've heard the person next door can get them in trouble; solving this problem is of definite value to them. Once I did this for someone whose house was big and radio-interfering enough to require repeaters; I made $100 in an hour.

If the question is what would make the most money, I'd print up a bunch of official-looking flyers and an official-looking record sheet, go to some high-traffic spot, and collect "donations". This is very unethical, but it probably earns money the fastest of anything that can be set up so quickly.

Re: If you had 5 dollars and 2 hours, how would you make as much money as possible?

#9
post #5

Since it's a video, I will risk ruining the 'surprise' for you since it's hard to scan a video. She says the most successful teams didn't really use the $5 because it was a limitation, they broke out of the standard "framing" of the problem.

So, the 2 hours is more important than the 5 dollars? I did get caught by the framing, but in retrospect I should have been tipped off by the fact that most wages are > 2.50/hr.

Re: If you had 5 dollars and 2 hours, how would you make as much money as possible?

#10
post #7

If the question is what I would actually do, I'd probably offer "computer tune-ups" as someone else suggested. That, or set up and secure wifi routers. A lot of people are afraid of wifi routers because they've heard the person next door can get them in trouble; solving this problem is of definite value to them. Once I did this for someone whose house was big and radio-interfering enough to require repeaters; I made…

Actually in the video, one of the teams did something similar. They went to a highly trafficked area on campus and offered to test bike tire pressures for free, then fill the tire up for a dollar if necessary.

They had a great response from this, but soon learned that they could make even more money by asking for a "donation", instead of a dollar.

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