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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

It's an interesting thought experiment. An interesting variant, though, might be to divide all his numbers by 10: what can you do to make $100k/year? Now that's not "rich" kind of money, but it is "making a good living independently" kind of money. And the numbers actually don't look daunting at all: bill at $52/hour, make 8 to 9 sales per month of something at $1000/pop, or make 111 sales per month of something at $75/pop.

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The number for $520 an hour that was listed is actually very doable. My friend is a consultant at the moment and his price per hour is $500. Granted he doesn't get to take all of that home at the end of the day, the company he works for takes 25% of that, which still $375 an hour. Since he doesn't have to find his own clients (the company does that, hence the reason they take 25%) he has 40 hours of work a week. Since he is a consultant he can take anytime off he wants, but it is unpaid, lets assume that he works for 11 months out of the year, 40 hours a week.

$375 * 40 hours * 4 weeks * 11 months = $660,000 per "year"

That is still a substantial amount of money, yes it is not close to the illusive 900,000 the original thread was asking for, but it still shows a good example of what is currently doable if you have the skills.

What field is he in?

Medical.

bill at $52/hour

If you have year-round, full-time contract work with no downtime due to acquiring new clients or negotiating new jobs with existing ones, then you probably don't have enough clients to be truly independent.

Well, yes, but you can change the numbers to account for that. Say, bill at $100/hr? Or take the route of selling software. My main point was that the bar is much lower than the targets he gives, if your goal is "make a good living" rather than "become rich".

I like your general point.

I'm sure there are unforeseen expenses in all of those scenarios that would require some padding to insure against, but the contracting scenario is the one I'm most experienced with, and the assumptions behind your numbers have bitten me in the past.

If you work as a consultant in the US in tech, juniors tend to make 50 to 75$. If your anywhere good/experienced/wanted, 125$/150$/hour.

You'll probably also find it's easier to get work if you bill at triple that. Generally people don't hire super-cheap consultants.

Try rebilling $20 / month at 10 sales per day, it really adds up.

subscriptions > one time sales

Don't forget the churn factor.

The figure to measure is 'retention'.

When cancellations equal signups (in this case 10 per day) you will stop growing. With the 10 signups per day as a base and a retention of 6 months on average that would mean that you stop growing after about a year and you'll end up with 1800 active accounts at that point for $36K per month in income.

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