
Ask HN: How do I add $100k to my 2014 income? - randomnumber314
I&#x27;m a serial wantrepreneur. I build things that no one wants. That&#x27;s my problem and I know it. I respect the candid feedback HN&#x27;ers offer. So if I were your son, or best friend, where would you steer me?
======
Alexx
Having read through all the answers here, I really think that HN is possibly
not the best place to ask such a question.

    
    
       Solve a problem
    

Seems to be the largest response. Solving problems is hard. If you want to
earn $100k _this_ year, don't solve a problem, don't do a startup[1].

Startups deal with problems, are capital intensive, risky, and high reward. If
you want to potentially make a lot more than $100k in the next _few_ years
then, sure, go find a problem.

If you simply want to make $100k _this_ year, then my choice would be to start
a simple service business. No need to build anything new or solve a complex
problem. The majority of SME businesses fit this mould really, everything from
software agencies to recruitment companies.

Pick an area you have some knowledge in, start on your own, and execute to the
best of your abilities. The main challenges are usually managing cash flow and
the day to day realities of running a small business. But if you end up with
4-5 employees and stable cash flow, you now have your own earning power plus
around 20% of the people below you typically.

That or review your CV, and plan the most aggressive route towards a position
in a financial / high yield company, adding $100k to your salary as an
employee could be feasible depending on your background.

Either way, the people who just stumble upon money are outliers. So the really
short answer is just work harder and accept more risk in you decisions.

[1][http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html)

~~~
pdevr
If he is already working as a PHP/mySQL developer, it will be hard to build a
service based business on the side. YMMV.

Edit: Those who downvoted, please provide the reason also. Happy to have a
discussion. I wrote the above based on my personal experiences.

~~~
Alexx
I didn't down vote you - but the way I always see it is a sliding scale:

 _[Lowest payout] Totally guaranteed money - [Highest payout] Risky very
unlikely money_

On the left you have a salaried job. On the right a shoot for the moon VC
startup. In between you have the entire range from trying to build products
for 'passive income' on the side, to going alone starting a small cash-
positive business, or freelancing. Your level of risk is entirely up to you,
and the reward will usually be fairly linear, within your own earning capacity
and skill set (money is fairly efficient in that sense!).

Working more hours or quitting your job fits into that scale along with all
the other factors. If your appetite for risk is on the lower end such you
won't quit, then you will have a harder time competing with people who've
positioned themselves with more risk.

There will always be the outliers who just break the model though.

~~~
pdevr
Thank you for the response. I agree, more or less. In this case, of course, I
made the assumption that OP didn't want to quit his job. His skill sets are
fairly common, based on what he posted. Considering that, I thought he will
have a better chance of building something on the side, since getting high
enough consulting rates for PHP work is hard, especially when you are trying
to do it part-time. (As you said, there are outliers for this also. I assumed
OP falls close to the _mean /median_ when I wrote that.)

------
chegra
So, I think about the only way you are going to make that $100k is if you are
going into business for yourself. In that light, you need to solve a problem.
Here are a bunch of problems that I would pay money for(hopefully others too):

1\. I need a cheap gpu powered pc, something like 300 cuda cores but with the
ability to expand to 3072. I'm will to pay $1k for this plus the price of
shipping.(Don't care if the parts are old)

2\. I need to dress better. A service to pick out the clothes that I wear and
should buy. Willing to pay $120 per year for this.

3\. A book about how to make great conversation. The book needs to have tons
of examples. Willing to pay $10 for this.

4\. A book about 1000 ways to make people laugh. Willing to pay $10 for this.

5\. A programmable human size android. That cost under $1k.

6\. Designs to said programmable android. Willing to pay $100 for that. Should
be able to hook it up to a 3d printer.

~~~
raphaelj
1\. Really ? Build a such computer is really trivial and cheap (the 100$ GTX
650 has 300 CUDA cores whereas the 700$ GTX 780ti has 3000 cores).

I don't understand the motivation will be for someone to use a such service
instead of building it by himself ...

~~~
thatthatis
Let's say, conservatively, that doing the research to know how to build this,
having never built a pc before, takes 20 hours. I bill at 100-160 an hour, so
let's take the low end and cut it in half, and say my opportunity cost is
$50/hour.

The cost of building one of these is (20 * 50) + 700 = 1700. If someone can
build one for me at $1000 I'm money ahead.

It's easy to forget that knowledge acquisition isnt free when you already
poses the knowledge.

~~~
nawitus
Couldn't you Google for a PC which has a graphics card with 300 or more cuda
cores?

~~~
e12e
If you're not following hardware, that google result isn't going to help much
(other than _maybe_ giving you an idea of basic cost of such a system).
There's lots of ready-made vendors, generally they're all crap (for a certain
value of crap).

There's a big difference between building a one-off rig, and buying one,
working with it for a year or so -- getting your code right -- and the knowing
you can get 20 more (updated and/or cheaper) -- that won't have driver issues,
heating issues or flaky psus. Sure, a contract can help, but whatever you get
"back" in cases of failures are _always_ going to be much less than whatever
value you wanted in the first place (eg: the hardware ended up being free, but
you weren't able to sequence the genome because of glitches).

In short, don't underestimate the cost to acquire the required domain
knowledge to do such a task well.

One can always hope that the new Mac Pro will be successful enough that
there'll be a decent Cuda story there -- but I'm not holding my breath. And
after seeing what Apple did vs Final Cut pro and OS X server (esp: hardware)
-- I'd be wary of trusting them with any production platform.

~~~
nawitus
I've read from
[http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc](http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc) that low-
cost computers are cheaper from ready-made vendors. Not sure if you can buy a
cheap ready-made PC with 300 cuda cores, though.

------
wellboy
I know every HN reader will hate this, but my advice, try to add $100M to your
2016 income.

Why so?

If you aim for $100M, after 3-4 years it is possible that you land somewhere
between $5M-10M.

However, if you aim for $100k, you will land at around $0. If you aim for $1M,
you will land at $50k. If you aim for $10M, you will land at $1M.

You need to aim for the stars if you want to land on the moon, because
everybody and everything will try to prevent you from doing it. Aim for the
stars.

~~~
randomnumber314
I like your thought process. I guess the $100k mark was just to get ideas
flowing. I would like to aim for $100M, but I can't think of a product or
service people demand that would achieve that revenue (at least not within my
skillset)

~~~
jonwinstanley
I think you're playing yourself down here. You can build websites, so you have
the perfect skill set to solve (almost) any problems.

Just get out there and find out what problems people have. Ask a bunch of
people which websites/apps drive them crazy.

With a bit of luck they will mention ones that they use regularly or pay money
for. Once you find a niche product idea, come up with a way you can test your
hypothesis, Lean Startup style.

~~~
robinhoode
> I think you're playing yourself down here. You can build websites, so you
> have the perfect skill set to solve (almost) any problems.

The unsolved problem space that is solved by building a website is shrinking
year over year. It would seem obvious that you need a larger skill set to
solve problems no one has attempted yet.

~~~
wellboy
No, for each new startup, there are two more startups that can be built on top
of it. The funny thing is that rhere are not fewer ideas down the road, idea
generation is exponential.

------
pdevr
Solve a problem. Examples:

1\. Find an area with a lot of questions and not many answers. Create a
content site. Attract 834,000 visitors per month. Advertising should net you
$100K per year (this is an approximation and can vary a LOT).

2\. Find a problem large enough for which a solution can be built with PHP and
mySQL (since you mentioned that's your main skill set). Build a solution which
costs around $25/month. You need only 334 customers to reach your goal.

How do you identify problems? Do some market research (using Google Trends,
Amazon Top Sellers, niche forums, etc).

Good luck.

------
sanswork
Towards a steady job with a successful company with room to move up.

~~~
ronaldx
Agree. Entrepreneurialism is a slow and risky way to make money: if you want
money in 2014, get a job.

~~~
tlongren
I took it as though he had a job already.

------
ChuckMcM
I always hear this form of the request with a bit of bemusement. The simplest
way to add $100K to your income is to rob a bank. You didn't constrain the
problem to "legally" :-)

But setting that aside for a moment, why $100K? What does $100K get you? And
why is money your goal? Do the thought experiment where "Poof!" the magic
genie drops $100K on your bed. Sit there and look at it, now what?

You need money to pay the bills and survive, okay. But having it is rather
fleeting, and when you die you cannot take it with you. Get past "money" and
into "accomplishing something." When you have something you want to accomplish
come back and we can opine on that :-)

~~~
rquantz
$100k lands on my bed. _Poof_ go my student loans and credit card debt. With
enough left over that I could take a nice vacation and take a 6 month break
from work if I live very frugally. Sounds like a worthy goal.

Edit: this is why claims of finishing returns with the ratio of
earnings/happiness are unconvincing to me, or at least setting them as low as
$70-80k (which some people do) seems wrong. Additional capital produces
happiness because it provides security -- I can afford not just to service
debt, but to eliminate it, making me free to take a lower paying job in the
future. I can afford to buy a house outright instead of just a down payment. I
can fund my own business ventures. I can provide for the people I love. I can
bend the law and government to my personal interests. I don't see a real cap
where more money stops providing more happiness and peace of mind, at least
not before reaching sums that make you truly wealthy. Any middle class person
in America is still incredibly subject to the vagaries of fortune, and the
more money you have the more you alleviate your risk.

N.B., I personally can't afford any of these things.

~~~
ChuckMcM
FWIW I get/understand the goal directed version (exemplar: I'm looking to pay
off credit debts (student loans, CC) and save for down payment on a house.)

The fastest way to make money "now" is to sell something you already own.

The second fastest is to create a service business which pays for your labor.

The third fastest is to sell things for someone else, where they let you keep
a commission on everything you sell.

The fourth fastest is to take a professional job (Doctor, Lawyer, Engineer) at
a large firm, and work your way up to a senior position.

The slowest is start a company, build a product, make it successful, and then
sell the company.

The tricky bit is navigating the path in a way that you enjoy or are fulfilled
by. My observation is that not doing so puts you in a less useful place at the
end of your life. But I by no means have a statistically valid sampling of
that.

------
netman21
Move to Bay Area if you have not already. Get a job with a funded startup led
my someone who has done it before. Should be 12-50 employees. Must offer
options. Work hard.

~~~
midas007
Moving to the BA is a win for anything tech because cash flows freely, but the
cost of living is murder. If possible, buy some land somewhere cheaper like
Oregon and work remotely as much as possible.

Options after about 10 employees are worthless paper. The real cash is being
an early founder and owning meaningful equity.

------
ninh
Multiple income streams is the best starting point imo if you don't know what
you want to double down on. Getting $100k itself is not an easy task, let
alone trying to get $100k off of a single thing. It's easier (and more
pragmatic) to get to $100k by getting $5k on product A in YRR, $20k on product
B etc... These things will eventually add up and need to be easily
maintainable projects (as opposed to timesink projects). I wouldn't recommend
writing a super complex app consisting of millions of lines of code for
example that requires a lot of support towards your customers; instead,
consider writing an e-book and selling it for $10-30 a pop. Or a SaaS that
nets you $10 MRR per customer.

Another upside imo of this approach is that you can discern at a later stage
which one of your projects is most successful and has the most chance of
getting you to $100k YRR, on its own. This will allow you to decide if you
want to double down on it or not.

Also, consider building things someone wants: I know, I know, easier said than
done, but it's often a good place to start at what you'd like yourself. In a
worst case scenario, you'll at least have 1 customer (yourself) ;-)

------
ergoproxy
My best friend built a neural network based trading system in 1994. He risked
his $100,000 inheritance on it. His parents were killed by terrorists in the
First Intifada and left him this money.

Central banking intervention into the US bond market to lower bond yields
(10-yr bond yields fell from 8% in 1994 to 4% in 1998) for the benefit of
bondholders bankrupted him. His neural net didn't predict outside
intervention. After he lost it all, he became despondent. He shot himself in
the chest with a shotgun.

So, if you were my best friend, I'd tell you this:

We are all Noah. We are all at risk of drowning in a flood of desires.
Drowning in a flood of worthless, central-bank-printed, fiat currency. Build
an ark, a refuge, to protect yourself from the flood of desires and self-
centeredness that are drowning us.

In the Dammapada, the Buddha said, "Desires are never satisfied, not even by a
shower of gold. He who knows that the enjoyment of passion is short-lived and
that it is also the womb of pain is a wise man."

So forget about making an extra $100,000. We could go into hyperinflation
tomorrow, and your extra $100,000 savings would become worthless overnight.

Stop chasing paper and do something worthwhile instead.

------
AznHisoka
Build an API that can convert a twitter username OR Google+ username OR
Linkedin ID to an email address. It won't be 100% accurate, but if you can
have 20% accuracy, there are lots of people who would pay for such a service.

If you don't want to go that route, then go buy an establish website from
Flippa, use your coding skills to auto-generate unique pages to rank in Google
(content farm), then flip it months later for a profit. Keep doing this. How
to auto-generate unique pages? One idea is to deep crawl old forums, and get
an unique sentence and do an exact match search in Google to see if it's in
the index, if not - assume that content is unique. Or go ping random blogs
that aren't popular in Wordpress every second, scrape their content and put it
up so Google sees it first. Black-hat, totally lame, but you just want make
money, and I'm your son :)

------
goofygrin
Short term cash = consulting... But it's like heroin and hard to quit. It also
has no long term value.

~~~
guiomie
How does someone start software/technology consulting ? I'd like to make some
extra dineros also, and I thought this could be a good way...

~~~
thatthatis
Go to startup and tech meetups and Let people know you're looking for clients
doing x. If anyone follows up, tell them your minimum project size of $y
upfront.

~~~
guiomie
I'll give this a shot. Thanks.

------
simonebrunozzi
Hi there, here's my humble suggestions:

1\. It is not easy to add 100,000$ in a year; it is relatively easier to have
a long-term strategy to reach that goal over 3-5 years. It's not a sprint,
it's a marathon. I say this because if you try and fail after the first year,
you should keep doing it until you succeed. To be clear: it's easier if your
goals become: +20k in 2014, +50k in 2015, +100k in 2016.

2\. It really depends on where you live, how much access to capital you have,
and what your skills are. 2.1: where you live influences how much you can earn
as a freelancer (of course, you can always freelance online, no barriers), how
much you pay in taxes, how much business you can find around you. If we assume
that you can work online as a software developer and similar, than this
doesn't apply. Taxation does, though. 2.2: If you have access to capital, you
can try to start a company, and make it profitable; then, sell it. Hard, but
if you succeed, you probably can add 100k or more to your income. 2.3: if you
can easily "sell" your skills, consider freelancing or consulting, even though
100k more in a year means a TON of extra work.

3\. You might want to build something that you can sell; if that's successful,
the sales can eventually surpass 100k. Examples? An ebook (scales better than
a physical book), a software.

Problems I'd like to see solved:

1\. I'd like to keep my photos and videos backed up, remotely, automatically;
and have a much smaller (disk size) version of them on my computer; this way I
can always consult my photo archive, but if I need the original photo, I can
still get it from my online backup, from within the app/software.

2\. I, too (like chegra), would pay to have someone help me buy clothes and
dress better, but trust me this is a very hard problem to solve.

3\. If I have a free weekend, I'd like a service that, based on my location,
budget, and preferences, can suggest me 2-3 things to do with all details (fly
to X and do Y, or drive to W and do Z, or drive to X, hike to Y, eat at Z,
etc).

Hope it helps.

------
jwblackwell
Approaching it with the attitude of "how do I add 100k" is the first mistake.
You need to find a genuine problem that you can solve. The rest will work
itself out.

~~~
randomnumber314
Agreed, and I haven't found a need/problem that is solvable for around $100k a
year. I've asked this question in several evolutions in several places and
come-up flat. Other than "we need more customers" I haven't found idea
extraction to be effective for me. Maybe I need to refine my listening skills.

~~~
kristiandupont
It sounds like you and I suffer from a similar problem. I've done many "idea
extraction" calls inspired by Dane Maxwell and I always somehow end up with a
few vague ideas that would mostly be competition to what already is used in
the industry. Not that this couldn't work of course, it just seems to me that
those calls should result in knowledge about unsolved problems. Maybe we
should form a support group of sorts :-)

------
pessimism
A while ago, someone compiled a list of _Web and Mobile Revenue Models_ :
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4924647](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4924647).

I put the list on GitHub and updated it with new concepts I found interesting
every now and then:
[https://gist.github.com/ndarville/4295324](https://gist.github.com/ndarville/4295324).

There should be something there to pique your interest.

------
midas007
Eat oatmeal and live in a van. That'll cut expenses and give you more runway
to keep failing fast (the character building kind).

Also, sell your apps (make shopping carts, ads, website) before you build
product. That'll save you tons of blood, sweat, tears, time and cash of
building shit no one wants.

Finally, what people like is funny. It can takes time for things to hit so let
them simmer. Don't give up or close down an app right away.

------
gremlinsinc
Build an Altcoin mining rig and rinse and repeat. 1 rig(2.2 MH) = $28/day.

To make $100,000 -- you need to earn $273 per day. To earn this much you will
need 10 rigs.

Cost to get started is < 2k. Buy 1 rig, use earnings to buy more. Try to get 3
rigs as soon as possible, using all available funds, then 1 per month for a
year.

On top of that ALSO work a day job - your machines will earn you money in the
spare time.

------
byoung2
In theory if you found 1000 people who would pay you a little over $8/month
for a service, you would have about $100k. The hard part is finding out what
that service would be, and how to build it while keeping costs low.
Alternatively, you could create a product and sell it, like an ebook, or
WordPress theme, but these have a limited shelf life.

~~~
e12e
A service without any costs to operate, I take it? I'd say you'd need to find
1000 people willing to pay around 30/month (minimum) to _end up with_ 100k
(and that would probably be more realistic than coming up with a service 3k
people would pay 10/month for, I'm guessing).

------
Tycho
What skills do you have?

~~~
randomnumber314
PHP, MySQL dev is my main job. I have a lot of experience coming into small
businesses and refining their processes to increase efficiency and increase
(double in one case) revenue.

~~~
msrpotus
So why not do consulting? If you can show those results and replicate them for
enough clients, you'll make money.

------
farber
Don't build something so that you can make $100k. Build something that you
want to make and that you will enjoy the process of doing. If you are involved
fully in each moment of making whatever it is and not focused on the end
result then you will probably be happy, fulfilled and also profitable.

~~~
Vivtek
Sounds like OP has already tried that approach and it's not working.

------
codex
If you are not a superstar, making outlier money is not in the cards for you.
Focus on becoming a superstar before focusing on the money. This might require
an apprenticeship, either at a big company or a _successful_ startup. Not even
most YC companies are successful, so choose carefully.

------
kmfrk
Cheeky answer:

    
    
        100,000 = price × customers (× months)
    

Sell at high price or to a large customer base - or both. Base it on market
analysis.

See which of the two foci suits your skills the best. Definitely don't start
out with a free product.

~~~
e12e

        100 000 = profit * customers (* months)

------
tomek_zemla
The $100 Startup book addresses this kind of questions quite well. It's
essentially a list of study cases of people that built side businesses (some
of them becoming their main sources of income or even small very profitable
companies) using their skills and interests. Might not give you silver bullet
answer, but it's certainly inspirational and it does point out to certain
patterns of how to do that... [http://www.amazon.com/100-Startup-Reinvent-
Living-Create/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/100-Startup-Reinvent-Living-
Create/dp/0307951529/ref=sr_1_1)

------
Giorgio
Take everything you've learned and become a consultant in an area you're
familiar with. Consulting jobs pay well, you're usually your own boss, you can
deduct a lot of expenses and you can basically charge what you want regardless
of your experience. Experience will come.

Shoot for large corporations with a new contract. They'll have a big budget
handled by some managers who don't know how to handle such a sum of money.
They'll hire consultants to do work that's been done within the company many
times. It's just easier to hire a person than to spend time trying to find
something or someone within the enterprise. The trick is not to charge too low
but to charge as high as experienced consultants. You just need to look really
professional and speak well during the interview (Duh!).

After a while, consultants repeat the same things over and over with different
clients. They look like they work but they're actually laughing! I work at a
major telecom company in Canada and what I've described above is not only
common, it's the norm. I've seen processes on Word documents that took months
to complete and when you look at the document's properties, you see it was
addressed to another person/company! It was just an existing document
repurposed for a new client with minor changes.

I'm not saying you should be bad like that, I'm saying that once you get your
first contract, it's then easy to find other work that's not too hard and pays
well. You can work full time for one client or part time for several and
contracts usually go from 3 months to one year at a time.

Like others are saying below, you've got to solve problem. But that doesn't
mean you've got to find a solution to problems that have no solution yet. I'm
sure that's what you've been trying to do so far. You don't need to invent new
things to be an innovator, you can be an innovator every day by solving
someone's problem, one step at the time. Taking my example above, if a company
hires a consultant, it's because they have a problem to solve. Once you're
there, you can help them solve their problem and innovate on what they're
already doing.

No, I'm not a consultant but I'm thinking of becoming one. I just need a
little bit more guts :)

~~~
pcharles
Before you dive in & do consulting full time, make sure you have a few PAYING
customers. The biggest issue with consulting is the recurring revenue issue.
You want to have paying customers already then get referrals from them to keep
business coming in.

------
Alex3917
On average one new currency becomes wildly popular every year or so. The
returns for investing in a new currency early that later succeeds are around
100,000%. The returns for investing in a new currency that fails are -100%.
However, there are maybe only three or four credible new currencies launched
each year. So I think the rewards for investing in, say, Dogecoin, vastly
outweigh the risks, even though the risks are extremely high.

~~~
k-mcgrady
I agree with you on Dogecoin but I'm interested on where you're drawing this
conclusion: "On average one new currency becomes wildly popular every year or
so." I'd say BitCoin became popular last year - what new currency became
wildly popular in the preceding few years? Maybe I'm just not that
knowledgable about the currency space but it seems like a new thing to me.

~~~
Alex3917
LiteCoin and Iraqi Dinar are two notable examples.

~~~
simantel
Iraqi Dinar? Am I missing something? This looks pretty flat since the war
started:
[http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=IQD&view=10Y](http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=IQD&view=10Y)

------
miyaneha
A serial "wantrepreneur". The first Google search result for that term will
solve your problem. Find a "very good problem" and solve it in the best
possible way. Solution should be a simple one rather than an intelligent one,
so that people shouldn't feel the weight of the problem but the easiness of
the solution. We all possess the ability to solve problems in a peculiar way,
just choose the right problem.

------
snorkel
The question was "how do I _add_ to ..." rather than "how do I earn (in total)
..."

... so in that case, are you ready to work 80 hour weeks? If you're thinking
of adding a side-business on top of your day job than you really need to treat
the side business as the second full-time job to hit the $100k mark, which is
possible if you completely jettison all leisure and recreational activity from
your schedule. Good luck.

------
torbjorn
Build a business in the bitcoin economy.

~~~
kstop
...last year.

------
anthonymonori
Get into cryptocurencies

------
nirnira
Think of an economic niche that no one else has thought of before. Capitalise
upon it silently. Don't tell strangers on the internet how to make $100,000 a
year with it.

~~~
midas007
Very bad advice. Pioneers get slaughtered. Also, some niches are unfilled for
a reason. Let someone else figure that out (eg waste lots of time and money
going nowhere) and instead copy what works (SaaS apps that have recurrent
monthly charges, ad-supported mobile games).

