

Ask HN: What would you do with $25,000? - Cenfath

Here&#x27;s the scenario: You have $25,000 cash plus enough money to cover your living expenses for 2 months.  You have coding skills along with business savvy.  You&#x27;d like your own business.  What business idea would you pursue?
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staunch
Two months is nothing. Create a business that doesn't require much upfront
capital and put that $25k into your living expenses until your business can
support you.

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Casseres
Don't stop what you're doing now to code full time if you don't know what you
want to code. Hold on to that $25,000 or invest it until you've already
started your business in your spare time, and it's growing so much you have to
quit whatever you're doing to work on your new business.

If you don't have a business idea that you believed in 100%, I would suggest
investing that $25,000 into a stock that you believed in 100% and keep living
like you are now.

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thelogos
I would move to SE asia. That much money will last you 2yrs there, holed up in
a hotel room with your own room service. 2 years is plenty of time to code.

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BorisMelnik
Right now if I had $25,000 I would invest it in our business in the following
ways:

1\. marketing material - we don't have stuff like envelopes / letterhead and
we are in desperate need of it. when we do need it we need to make it
ourselves and print it out which takes up so much time.

2\. setup a mini hosting company - we have so many clients right now but are
giving them all free hosting. would like to setup a very small shared hosting
service under our umbrella to bring in more revenue to hire a network admin.
right now we spend so much time on doing transfers / db stuff / apache stuff
and none of us are that good at it.

3\. buy some new chairs - most of us are sitting on waiting room chairs that
don't have wheels or arms.

4\. ppc marketing for our blog (Twitter, Facebook) - we get a ton of leads as
a result of our blog posts. if we could get some better reach with our blog
this would help our phone ring more and even help with backlinks and SEO stuff
if people end up linking to it.

5\. spend $5000 on some bonuses divided up amongst our employees for working
so hard.

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DanBC
2) Translate "How to Solve it by Computer" from Pascal to Python.
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_it_by_Computer](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_it_by_Computer)

3) Fork Wikipedia. I'd have inclusion criteria for what I wanted to include
(STEM; other academic stuff) and I would exclude a bunch of other stuff
(pokemon, recentist fluff, etc.) I'd then create a style manual. I'd then hire
people to fact check, cite and source, correct, spell check, etc the pages I
had. Each page would have a similar page layout. The lead paragraph would aim
to tell someone with no previous exposure to the subject what it was. Each
article would have a simple intro, with moderate or advanced sections if
needed. The aim is to produce something trustworthy and stable that can be
released on a 6 month schedule that could be useful to students.

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jordhy
I would buy a site on flippa, something with revenue and work intensely in
increasing its revenue by 10X. Maybe to gain a monthly income of 7K or 10K,
something that could sustain you for a couple of years in order to build your
next big project.

You could even do this a couple of times before embarking into larger things.

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mapster
THis is much harder than most realize. Much harder.

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thematt
Yep, agreed, speaking from experience. Most sites on Flippa have had their
traffic artificially inflated for the past 6 months using shady SEO practices
just so the seller can get a good price. Within a few months Google inevitably
slams the hammer on you.

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driverdan
$15k of computer hardware for cryptocurrency mining, $10k for build out
(racks, network, AC, etc).

~~~
driverdan
If you're going to downvote for an honest answer leave a reason why.
Downvoting is not for disagreement.

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DanBC
Here's the last one. (Sorry for splitting over 3 posts but mobile really
sucks.)

Unscented washing detergent, with scents that can be added at wash time. This
would allow members of the same household to chose floral scents, or whisky
and woodsmoke scents. (Perhaps not actually whisky and woodsmoke, but
something not floral.)

The bottles of scent would be sized to not fit the bottle of detergent
completely. This would act as some kind of lock in - people would have a bit
of etergent and no scent or a bit of scent but no detergent. That would (I
think) make them buy more product.

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DanBC
Not sure about businesses but:

1) Some photography projects. I'd like nice, standard, photos of all the
buildings in Pevsner. And other nice buildings. These would be released under
permissive licences in web and print resolutions. So the money would be used
to set up web hosting and some torrents. The photographs would I hope be
provided by students and amateurs and etc etc. The other project would be
something like the [http://www.antweb.org/](http://www.antweb.org/) project,
but for bees.

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fedor91
I would work on my new startup 24/7!

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wellboy
Hm, probably almost everyone wouldn't be able to spend it since they have to
build the app for the first 2 months, no?

