Ask HN: How do I add $100k to my 2014 income?

Having read through all the answers here, I really think that HN is possibly not the best place to ask such a question.<p><pre><code> Solve a problem </code></pre> Seems to be the largest response. Solving problems is hard. If you want to earn $100k <i>this</i> year, don&#x27;t solve a problem, don&#x27;t do a startup[1].<p>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 <i>few</i> years then, sure, go find a problem.<p>If you simply want to make $100k <i>this</i> 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.<p>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.<p>That or review your CV, and plan the most aggressive route towards a position in a financial &#x2F; high yield company, adding $100k to your salary as an employee could be feasible depending on your background.<p>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.<p>[1]<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;growth.html</a>

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):<p>1. I need a cheap gpu powered pc, something like 300 cuda cores but with the ability to expand to 3072. I&#x27;m will to pay $1k for this plus the price of shipping.(Don&#x27;t care if the parts are old)<p>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.<p>3. A book about how to make great conversation. The book needs to have tons of examples. Willing to pay $10 for this.<p>4. A book about 1000 ways to make people laugh. Willing to pay $10 for this.<p>5. A programmable human size android. That cost under $1k.<p>6. Designs to said programmable android. Willing to pay $100 for that. Should be able to hook it up to a 3d printer.

I know every HN reader will hate this, but my advice, try to add $100M to your 2016 income.<p>Why so?<p>If you aim for $100M, after 3-4 years it is possible that you land somewhere between $5M-10M.<p>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.<p>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.

Solve a problem. Examples:<p>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).<p>2. Find a problem large enough for which a solution can be built with PHP and mySQL (since you mentioned that&#x27;s your main skill set). Build a solution which costs around $25&#x2F;month. You need only 334 customers to reach your goal.<p>How do you identify problems? Do some market research (using Google Trends, Amazon Top Sellers, niche forums, etc).<p>Good luck.

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

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&#x27;t constrain the problem to &quot;legally&quot; :-)<p>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 &quot;Poof!&quot; the magic genie drops $100K on your bed. Sit there and look at it, now what?<p>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 &quot;money&quot; and into &quot;accomplishing something.&quot; When you have something you want to accomplish come back and we can opine on that :-)

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.

Multiple income streams is the best starting point imo if you don&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>Also, consider building things someone wants: I know, I know, easier said than done, but it&#x27;s often a good place to start at what you&#x27;d like yourself. In a worst case scenario, you&#x27;ll at least have 1 customer (yourself) ;-)

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.<p>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&#x27;t predict outside intervention. After he lost it all, he became despondent. He shot himself in the chest with a shotgun.<p>So, if you were my best friend, I&#x27;d tell you this:<p>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.<p>In the Dammapada, the Buddha said, &quot;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.&quot;<p>So forget about making an extra $100,000. We could go into hyperinflation tomorrow, and your extra $100,000 savings would become worthless overnight.<p>Stop chasing paper and do something worthwhile instead.

Build an API that can convert a twitter username OR Google+ username OR Linkedin ID to an email address. It won&#x27;t be 100% accurate, but if you can have 20% accuracy, there are lots of people who would pay for such a service.<p>If you don&#x27;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&#x27;s in the index, if not - assume that content is unique. Or go ping random blogs that aren&#x27;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&#x27;m your son :)

Short term cash = consulting... But it&#x27;s like heroin and hard to quit. It also has no long term value.

Hi there, here&#x27;s my humble suggestions:<p>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&#x27;s not a sprint, it&#x27;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&#x27;s easier if your goals become: +20k in 2014, +50k in 2015, +100k in 2016.<p>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&#x27;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 &quot;sell&quot; your skills, consider freelancing or consulting, even though 100k more in a year means a TON of extra work.<p>3. You might want to build something that you can sell; if that&#x27;s successful, the sales can eventually surpass 100k. Examples? An ebook (scales better than a physical book), a software.<p>Problems I&#x27;d like to see solved:<p>1. I&#x27;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&#x2F;software.<p>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.<p>3. If I have a free weekend, I&#x27;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).<p>Hope it helps.

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

A while ago, someone compiled a list of <i>Web and Mobile Revenue Models</i>: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4924647" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4924647</a>.<p>I put the list on GitHub and updated it with new concepts I found interesting every now and then: <a href="https://gist.github.com/ndarville/4295324" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;ndarville&#x2F;4295324</a>.<p>There should be something there to pique your interest.

Eat oatmeal and live in a van. That&#x27;ll cut expenses and give you more runway to keep failing fast (the character building kind).<p>Also, sell your apps (make shopping carts, ads, website) before you build product. That&#x27;ll save you tons of blood, sweat, tears, time and cash of building shit no one wants.<p>Finally, what people like is funny. It can takes time for things to hit so let them simmer. Don&#x27;t give up or close down an app right away.

Build an Altcoin mining rig and rinse and repeat. 1 rig(2.2 MH) = $28&#x2F;day.<p>To make $100,000 -- you need to earn $273 per day. To earn this much you will need 10 rigs.<p>Cost to get started is &lt; 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.<p>On top of that ALSO work a day job - your machines will earn you money in the spare time.

In theory if you found 1000 people who would pay you a little over $8&#x2F;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.

What skills do you have?

Don&#x27;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.

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 <i>successful</i> startup. Not even most YC companies are successful, so choose carefully.

Cheeky answer:<p><pre><code> 100,000 = price × customers (× months) </code></pre> Sell at high price or to a large customer base - or both. Base it on market analysis.<p>See which of the two foci suits your skills the best. Definitely don&#x27;t start out with a free product.

The $100 Startup book addresses this kind of questions quite well. It&#x27;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&#x27;s certainly inspirational and it does point out to certain patterns of how to do that... <a href="http://www.amazon.com/100-Startup-Reinvent-Living-Create/dp/0307951529/ref=sr_1_1" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;100-Startup-Reinvent-Living-Create&#x2F;dp&#x2F;...</a>

Take everything you&#x27;ve learned and become a consultant in an area you&#x27;re familiar with. Consulting jobs pay well, you&#x27;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.<p>Shoot for large corporations with a new contract. They&#x27;ll have a big budget handled by some managers who don&#x27;t know how to handle such a sum of money. They&#x27;ll hire consultants to do work that&#x27;s been done within the company many times. It&#x27;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!).<p>After a while, consultants repeat the same things over and over with different clients. They look like they work but they&#x27;re actually laughing! I work at a major telecom company in Canada and what I&#x27;ve described above is not only common, it&#x27;s the norm. I&#x27;ve seen processes on Word documents that took months to complete and when you look at the document&#x27;s properties, you see it was addressed to another person&#x2F;company! It was just an existing document repurposed for a new client with minor changes.<p>I&#x27;m not saying you should be bad like that, I&#x27;m saying that once you get your first contract, it&#x27;s then easy to find other work that&#x27;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.<p>Like others are saying below, you&#x27;ve got to solve problem. But that doesn&#x27;t mean you&#x27;ve got to find a solution to problems that have no solution yet. I&#x27;m sure that&#x27;s what you&#x27;ve been trying to do so far. You don&#x27;t need to invent new things to be an innovator, you can be an innovator every day by solving someone&#x27;s problem, one step at the time. Taking my example above, if a company hires a consultant, it&#x27;s because they have a problem to solve. Once you&#x27;re there, you can help them solve their problem and innovate on what they&#x27;re already doing.<p>No, I&#x27;m not a consultant but I&#x27;m thinking of becoming one. I just need a little bit more guts :)

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.

A serial &quot;wantrepreneur&quot;. The first Google search result for that term will solve your problem. Find a &quot;very good problem&quot; and solve it in the best possible way. Solution should be a simple one rather than an intelligent one, so that people shouldn&#x27;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.

The question was &quot;how do I <i>add</i> to ...&quot; rather than &quot;how do I earn (in total) ...&quot;<p>... so in that case, are you ready to work 80 hour weeks? If you&#x27;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.

Build a business in the bitcoin economy.

Get into cryptocurencies

Think of an economic niche that no one else has thought of before. Capitalise upon it silently. Don&#x27;t tell strangers on the internet how to make $100,000 a year with it.