Ask HN: Shortest path to $1 million?

My answer, as always:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247615

Another answer:

Get a $120k/yr job. Live like you make $50k/yr. Wait.

Note that both these approaches also mesh well with investment in real estate or whatnot.

Also note that both these approaches leverage technology.

Unless my little spreadsheet here is wrong, if we assume you can invest at 3% above inflation, saving 50k per year will get you a million dollars in 16 years.

The second million only takes ten more years. Nine years after that, at year 35, you get your third million, at which point you might consider retiring and living indefinitely on your $85k annual investment income.

How conservative is 3% above inflation?

Also, who, even in the high salary brackets, can save $50k/year?

3% is fairly conservative: According to the calculator here:

http://www.moneychimp.com/features/market_cagr.htm

...over the last 40 years an S&P 500 index fund had annualized returns of 10% before inflation adjustment, 5.5% adjusted for inflation. That's, like, twice as good as my guess! And no need to invest in real estate for that: That's a Vanguard index fund.

Of course, over the last ten years the equivalent annualized return is only 1.5%, which goes to show you that (a) depressed global economies are no fun and (b) there is some rationale behind my choosing to use a more conservative number.

As for "how does one manage to save 50k per year?", the sad answer is that I don't, and most of us probably don't. But many tech workers could, in theory. The median income in San Francisco is "only" $42k:

http://blog.sfgate.com/ontheblock/2011/03/07/bay-area-tops-s...

More than half the people in SF are staying alive somehow on less than $50k per year. Figure out how to live like them and it might not be hard to save $50k per year... if you have a Bay Area developer's salary. Which, obviously, is not the case for everyone.

Also, making an additional $50k per year is a reachable goal, relative to most get-rich-quick schemes. It's $4200 per month. The OP is halfway there, with one $2k/mo product.

I've been running the numbers for myself, while looking into moving to SF. With current tax rates (state and federal) considered, for me as an individual being able to save/invest $50k/year would be around $100-110k salary mark.

Housing expenses (especially in SF area) make that really tough. But if you're married with both of you working, only have one (used) car, and both of you live frugally, it can be done.

i've done it consistently for the past 10 years. if you have some discipline, set up automatic investments, it's easier than it sounds.

I already have a 401(k) and a normal brokerage account through Vanguard, invested in a few good index ETFs. I set it up a few months ago and I remember there's some paperwork I still have to find and handle, but mostly I haven't looked at it.

When I'm actually making money I can transfer into American dollars again, I'll be dumping some fixed amount of it straight into those accounts for investment.

However, I currently make far less than $50k/year due to being a grad-student, so it's not like I can save nearly that much.

1. I don't have a CS degree or any high-education degree.

2. I don't live in the US or a developed country.

3. Middle/Lower Class family with no superior connections.

Edit: 4. I have a WP product selling @ $2,000/month. I'm looking for some dramatic change, though.

1. Neither do I.

2. You've got me there.

3. Neither do I.

Congrats on $2k/mo from Wordpress. You can't do another one and make it $4k/mo? Maybe if you picked a specific industry vertical to target, like lawyers or accountants, you'd be able to charge higher prices. Maybe if you rethink the packaging of your offering --- instead of "a product for Wordpress", you sell an entire offering that happens to be "Wordpress Compatible" --- you can escape the price points people have for Wordpress offerings.

4. I learned the trick and I'm building another $1-2k product. $4k is much harder because these markets are highly competitive. But I can't build 25 products and support them (or manage their support). Maybe a couple products that sell for $25k/month.

I sent you an email.

Having a $2k/month semi-passive income stream is pretty relevant to this discussion!

Given that you have the savvy to get that much, you would do much better to develop and build upon that success than to start trying anything else. A lot of people struggle and it takes them years to get to $1-2k a month in product sales. If you can do that now, you could be at the pre-takeoff point of a hockey-stick curve without realizing it.

I would take tptacek's advice, and develop your WP product. Make a Pro or Enterprise version, make a version with a monthly support cost, offer a premium support plan, offer annual billing, make a family of related products, etc. Or do all of the above.

The thing about that plan is, you get taxed and you pay land rent like someone who makes $120k.

Sure; on the other hand, you're accepting much less risk.

This is purely on your suggestion of "what you know to be the shortest thing". This may, or may not, seem a bit outlandish but there is a reason it is so lucrative. So my answer would be porn.

I read a figure that said something like 70%+ of ALL Internet searches are related to porn, sex, or nudity. Not that I have really given it much thought, but I am positive there are dozens of ways you could get to $1million in porn. I have a couple off the top of my head:

1. Tube site: I'm sure you could get video crawlers that take videos from other porn sites. You could go on eBay and buy views for all of those videos to inflate the perception of the traffic you are producing to other users. Then you could use an ad network for popups, banner ads, or whatever.

2. Cam site: These are supposed to be super popular, as pirating (although still an issue I'm sure) is much harder. There are numerous examples of popular cam sites, but because it is "porn" all of them are shady. There have been numerous complaints filed against the owners of myfreecams for example. I guess for this after you develop the site, you could use Craigslist to find models. Drive traffic to the site (again, it's porn, so marketing naked girls would seem to be easier to market than some eBook), leverage social media, or whatever else. You could also promote traffic for some other site, but affiliate marketing is overrated in my opinion. No offense to anyone doing it, but it just seems like an awful amount of work for a measly scrap of the revenue you could be seeing if you owned the site/content or whatever.

3. Produce your own content: Now this does need some overhead. Cameras, a somewhat trained crew, models, lawyers, location etc. This one would be what I would stay away from. Too much headache for me personally.

I am not saying turn into a "smut peddler" or some porn kingpin, but if your sole goal is to get to $1million as quickly as possible, porn seems like a great solution. Porn is recession proof, there will always be a demand, and you can't argue with the numbers. Best of luck.

Just to critique this idea:

> I'm sure you could get video crawlers that take videos from other porn sites.

Then you get videos which are labelled with other sites watermark. This gives you a poor reputation in the busines world so very few people will cut deals with you, and you're essentially providing free advertising for your competitors.

> 2. Cam site:

There are already dozens of extablished cam sites, so it'd seem a better option to just affiliate with one of them under a whitelabel program while you learn the ropes.

To make that sort of money, you always go for a B2B market, pref targeting small business. Forget social sites, consumer apps, etc. When your product makes more money for the customer that what s/he is investing, your conversions are faster.

Unfortunately, even with a shortcut you have to take at least a 2 to 3 year perspective. So think about what a small business can use. Like a software for eBayer sellers, or some really useful site insight tool that increases website conversions, or maybe some cost cutting tool for traders, etc. Something which actually makes or saves money for the customer.

In my experience i have seen the more specific niche you go after the better. Like if you are making a tool (or even say a theme template as in your example) for eBay sellers, it is better to go after sellers in eBay motors than targeting everyone in the market.

Also if you are in to make money, then instead of honing your programming skills you will have to teach yourself marketing, specially the part of getting traffic to your site and networking with people in your niche (they are the ones that make your launch day a million dollar payday).

You will have to write tonnes of content and create a lot of buzz about it everyday. You will have to create an email list of interested prospects right from the get go and mail them regularly with good quality practical stuff for which they have subscribed. Creating the product is always the simple part; marketing it successfully over and over is what creates the difference between $1 mil in sales or $1000 in sales.

You can probably spend one day / week adding features, but the rest of the week you will hang around forums (dedicated to your niche) to help people while building your reputation as an expert in that field, write blog posts, make guest posts on sites related to your niche, follow the market leaders on twitter and hopefully make them your affiliates.

As you do this you will start getting more and more traffic to your site every day (it happens slowly and steadily). The blog posts and guess post also help you in Google. It may be sounding very simplistic (or maybe even confusing) but this is definitely one of the ways to making a million dollars.

The fastest way is to use leverage.

Leverage technology to sell digital copies of something you only have to make once (which you seem to have already been doing and look to be doing more of.)

Leverage time by hiring other people.

Leverage money, which allows you to scale the other inputs more quickly than you would by bootstrapping. Preferably you would be able to use other people's money.

In another comment, you mentioned that you aren't living in a developed country. It's difficult for anyone to get investment money and it may be more difficult where you live. On the other hand, you have access to relatively cheap labor. If you are able find decently skilled developers in your area, then perhaps you could apply what you are making on your WP product which is selling well and hire a couple of developers.

You could also try setting those developers on jobs from Elance and Odesk. Maybe start out with a niche and build a brand for that niche. For example, build a WP team and focus on WP jobs. Too many developers on these platforms are too general. If your add-on is well known then that would give you a leg up on the competition. Actually, every add-on you create would add to your brand.

Another crucial point is to find someone who can sell! Too many job proposals on Odesk and Elance are the types which start out as Dear sir, broken English and no demonstrable understanding of the item they are writing the proposal on. Get this right and you could crush it. Maybe even get someone from the U.S. to work on commission and pair that person up with your best developer (or yourself) to work on each proposal. Essentially the salesperson would dress up the proposal from the tech guy and add some spice.

I'm currently living in the Philippines. I have been pondering going this route myself.

I thought about going the WordPress theme route about a year ago and stumbled upon these same statistics. At first it seemed like a great idea. I mean, I already knew how to build them since I use WordPress for almost all my client projects.

But then I realized that part of why I was bored freelancing is that building a WordPress theme is essentially doing the same thing over and over and over again. It's just like an assembly line, factory job.

These days I'm much happier working a salary job for a company on a large scale project that is constantly getting new features and presenting fresh engineering challenges. The salary is good. I'm not a millionaire, but at least I enjoy what I spend 8-10 hours of my day doing.

That's the good part of selling themes: do the work once, get paid repeatedly.

The themes selling well are constantly updated though.

Frankly quickest way to be 'rich' is to be content with the riches you already have.

Which is probably why he used "$1 million" instead of "rich". :)

yes, I'm not looking for getting rich. I'm looking for a particular amount.

Do you have a specific debt with a certain criminal organization? Just so we know who to call if you disappear off HN... ;)

Nope, no debt and no expenses. Just have a delusional lifestyle that I want to get by the next few years.

Deal making and the stock market are probably the fastest.

Stocks. The stock market isn't much of a good one without a knowledgeable mentor that can show you how to create and verify an edge. Without this, you will not know if you are consistently making money over time irrespective of short-term results.

Deals. Larger deals work best, so that generally means business or real estate. Once you have an idea, you can use cross directories to solicit your targeted group. If you can make arrangements for people that make them good safe money, funding the arrangements won't be a problem.

I was skeptical about the $100k/month by selling themes claim so I did some research. This guy (http://themeforest.net/user/Kriesi) on ThemeForest has 61,313 sales (which seem to be ~40$ on average). That's 2,452,520$ so I guess $100k/month is believable. I was quite surprised there was that much money to be made by selling themes.

It's a "hits" business though, right? For every person doing $100k/mo, there are how many doing $10/mo?

Indeed. With some experience, however, you can better hit it. I have a friend who never missed it and continues to generate more sales for every new theme he produces.

I'm still skeptical. Kriesi is one of only 2 author's on the site who've earned more than $2MM and <$5MM[0]. He's been consistently adding and updating products for 5 years, so maybe he's breaking $100k/month now, but it's probably closer to $50-80k/month(amortized). Though he'll probably continue to grow and get closer to that.

There are only 11 (of 2492) authors who've earned more than $1MM.

There is only one author (http://themeforest.net/user/ThemeFusion) that really looks like it's near the mark of $100k/month, with between $1-2MM, in just 15 months.

[0]Those numbers are before the network takes their cut of 30% (at that volume). So it appears that nobody on the network is making much more than $60k/month at the top. Of course, that's nothing to scoff at though. But it's certainly not short in time or effort, to achieve that.

ThemeFusion has only one theme. This is a lot different than having a bunch of themes (support and marketing wise)

And that's fair, and is probably what's allowed them to actually come close to that $100k/month figure, before the network takes it's cut. But they're the only one I see anywhere near that figure, regardless of the network. And they look pretty seasoned and focused on that one product.

To even think about that figure you have to be in the top 0.4% of just ThemeForest, disregarding the whole network, because then it becomes much worse.

If you want an achievable goal in any reasonable period aim for $20-40k/month, before the network takes their cut, which goes as high as 50% when you're starting out.

My recommendation would be to follow along with tptacek, and the plan he linked to above.

Don't forget the 50% share that ThemeForest takes, and also the first of sales dates back to 2008.

Time, Probability, Soul.

Pick two.

Just ask 1,000,000 people for a single dollar - job done.

You might need a good story...

A bit like http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ ...