HACKER Q&A
📣 guinness74

What would you do to turn $100K into $1M in 3 years?


How would level up $100k an order of magnitude?


  👤 davewasthere Accepted Answer ✓
Casino. All on Black. Repeat 3 more times (hoping your luck holds out for each). 16x in under an hour. (or zero most likely... but definitely lowest effort) I don't recommend this approach however

But yeah, if you're talking USD, then one could easily live comfortably for five years in Vietnam/Thailand for $20k/year. (Although you could easily live in a ton of countries if you pick your town/city/area correctly) Then smash out all those side-gig bootstrap ideas that come to mind. If you can build MRR of approx $6k, then you've effectively built up the equivalent of $1M earning 7% in the bank.

Actually, my latest company was started 3 years (and nearly a month) ago, and is now earning easily that in revenue from one of its Saas products, so yeah, it's definitely acheivable.


👤 jameshush
Spend $2000 on all the FAANG interview prep courses/mock interviews you can, interview at 10 places, get 2 offers, take the offer that pays the most. Move to SF, live with 10 people in a 5 bedroom place (with bunk beds) for $800ish/month to save money. Eat free food at your new FAANG job and rice/beans on the weekend. Work freelance on nights and weekends on the highest paying, most boring bank/adtech software projects you can find. Save more than half your income. In 3 years the market should be back to normal so your stocks should 2x or so bringing you to close-ish to $1m, realistically it’ll take 7-10 though if you live like you’re broke.

👤 brudgers
Most people will struggle to turn $100k into $100k in ten years.

👤 merek
How much risk are you willing to take?

High risk appetite: You might see massive returns, but will most likely lose a lot (e.g. gambling, speculative stocks).

Low risk appetite: Achieve much smaller returns, but the chance of any loss is much lower (e.g. blue chip stocks, bonds).

Maybe you're asking how to earn massive returns with minimal risk? If I knew, I wouldn't tell you. I'd be busy taking advantage of the opportunity. If a stranger on the internet wanted to share their secret on how to make 10x your money in 3 years, it's almost certainly a scam.

Sorry, there are no easy answers.


👤 MilnerRoute
Doubling your money -- three years in a row -- would get you to $800,000. That's asking a lot. I think the only way to do it is make a lot of high-risk investments, and hope some of them pay off.

But I also think we're undervaluing the possibility of just hanging on to $100,000.


👤 marssaxman
If there were any reliable way to do this, people who knew the trick would be doing it, not talking about it. As soon as the opportunity became common knowledge, it would be flooded, and the margin would disappear.

👤 pdevr
Find a product you can promote using paid traffic, which yields you enough margins.

Assuming that you get paid monthly, that there are no caps on the product, and that you get the same margins consistently:

A product with 100% margin will have you grossing $1 million in four months.

A product with 50% margin will have you grossing $1 million in six months.

A product with 25% margin will have you grossing $1 million in eleven months.

A product with 20% margin will have you grossing $1 million in fourteen months.

Even a product with a mere 10% margin will have you grossing $1 million in a little over two years.


👤 chinabot
I know this Nigerian Prince...

👤 xupybd
Horses, the casino, maybe some other sports betting?

It doesn't really matter to do that in 3 years you're gambling.

If you have a business that you're passionate about and are willing to spend huge amounts of energy on you might be able to generate that sort of money with 100K starting. However I'd argue you're putting in a lot more than $100k. You'd have 3 years of lost earnings.


👤 GianFabien
By using compounding. If you net 5% profit per week, then you'll have $1.26M in a year ! Or at 1.5% net per week $1.02M in three years. If monthly, then 7% net per month for three years $1.14M.

The trick is to find something that you can buy low, sell high consistently. Obviously in the above scenarios you are reinvesting all your gains to operate with ever greater amounts of capital. It would also be prudent to pick transactions at some small fraction of your total.

BUT ... it is unlikely that you can implement the above as a passive investment and it might require to do a considerable amount of work. Oh well .... them's the breaks!


👤 PaulHoule
What probability can you accept for losing it all?

👤 yucky
Since you didn't specify legality, the easiest way would be to move to a college town and become a drug dealer. Although if your goal really is a million then I would suggest you walk away at that point before getting caught, since it will take less that 3 years to do if you aren't using your own product..

👤 bfrog
If I knew I’d already have the idea in play!

👤 quickthrower2
Assuming you are a DINK or SINK.

1. Move to cheap COL.

2. $100k = 3 years run way, and some modest expenditure (ads, servers, etc)

3. Build a bootstrapped business.

4. You might have $1m or be on your way to it.

DINK = Dual Income, No Kids

SINK = Single ""

COL = Cost of living

Or downpayment on home in upcoming area while working at FAANGs leetcoding and playing offers off each other. Renting all your rooms out, sleep in garden tent.


👤 yuppie_scum
Wait til the next time you hear about the market having a terrible day and dump it all in VOO. That’s the easiest way to make garunteed money. But a 10x is gonna be real tough in 3 years.

Alternatively, look into REIT limited partnerships.


👤 TotoHorner
It depends on the time and risk you’re willing to take.

If you’re high risk, low time then I’d just put it all in Ethereum.

If you have a large amount of time, I’d start an online business and use the $100k to hire international contractors.


👤 Deprogrammer9
Buy a two men & a truck moving company franchise. During peak months in a large city you can profit 1.5 million a month IF iffffffff you can pull it off. :P

moving companies are money printing presses.


👤 deadcoder0904
hire a cheap developer from a 3rd-world country to build a lensa ai clone in react native so you get both android/ios version.

since ai art is popular right now, make it better than lensa.

hire influencers with a 20% cut if they refer your app.

invest in pr & aggressive marketing in addition to that.

if you do it right, this should turn your $100k into $1m in <3 months of launch.

if you don't get it done fast, then you can try instagram photoshoots or try to automate onlyfans with an ai.

this will take some work but its a sureshot way to make >$1m with the ai hype.


👤 jacknobody
Buy and sell... but know your market!

Remember - before you buy something - be quite sure you can sell it quickly and that you won't lose money on it.


👤 leonewton253
250: APPL 250: GOOGL 250: NVDA 250: AMAZN

Will take prolly 8 years though. But you have 25K available cash as a margin loan/credit line.


👤 kmoser
1. Start your own crypto coin or NFT

2. Pump

3. Dump


👤 082349872349872
Inherit. But the 3 year window suggests it'd be more feasible to marry well.