Ask HN: What would you do with $25,000? | Hacker News Reader

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

10 pointsCenfath16 comments

Here'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'd like your own business. What business idea would you pursue?

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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.

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.

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.

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.

2) Translate "How to Solve it by Computer" from Pascal to Python. 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.

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.

This strikes me as by far the best answer. If OP doesn't know what s/he wants to do, a good place to start is to fix something that already exists but is broken.

Agreed on this being a good idea. Most of the sites listed are unappealing, but there are some good ideas there from time to time.

THis is much harder than most realize. Much harder.

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.

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

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

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.

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/ project, but for bees.

I would work on my new startup 24/7!

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

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