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Ask HN: You have 3 months and $1000. What would you do?

7 points by peacemaker ↗ HN
If you were in the situation that you had 3 months where all your regular expenses were taken care of and you didn't have to work AND you had $1000 to spend on your project/business, what would you do?

14 comments

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oscar-the-horse
learn a new skillset. sometime it can be hard to find the time in the bustle of business.
peacemaker
Do you think 3 months is long enough? I guess if you spent every day focussed you could learn quite a bit
oscar-the-horse
depends what you're learning. but like you said, if you focus you can learn quite a bit.

i've done it a few times and it's been great.

robdoherty2
I agree. Find a hard problem you'd enjoy solving, and figure out what skills it takes to solve it.

I'd use the $1k for books and/or new gear.

pkamb
Ship a simple product that earns a (small) paycheck every month.
peacemaker
I think this would be my choice too
TheFman
You could try starting a business, create new product or site. With the limited time what I can suggest is try playing Options in stock market.

I have turned $600 into $21,000 in the last 2 months. With the European debt crisis looming it is perfect time to play options as well. You can get 1000% percent return in a day.

there is not much risk if you spend time understanding how it works. Also From my learning, you don't need 50 stocks to make money. Just focus on Google and apple options. They are most volatile and predictable.

hansef
What did you read/study? Do you have a finance background? I've heard of people getting pretty burnt in options trading as well. :)
TheFman
I have a background in Analytics and Economics. No I don't have a finance background but I do very well in options trading these days. I lost in options trading for 4 straight years till I got a valuable advice from a seasoned option trader. He turned 10k into few millions over few years. Then things turned around.

The Mantra is "Discipline"

[dead] thedangler
Indulge us on your success story and how it came to be.
helen842000
This is something that I would love to do. It would be awesome if I had the time to do things with great focus.

I think I'd keep hold of as much of the $1k as I could and try to bootstrap a couple of projects to make a small but regular income.

It's so much more satisfying and stress free when profit is made on sale #1 (even if it's just a small amount)

It would certainly still be 3 months of hard work & continuous learning.

I'd like to build something that teaches me better how APIs work. Perhaps with Twitter Bootstrap.

Aside from business, in life in general I would clear so much junk out, it feels so therapeutic!

I'd spend un-rushed, quality time with friends & family.

I'd probably spend some of that thou on a small break away and try to not stick to an itinerary.

ja27
I've kind of lived this for the past couple of months. I haven't spent the time as well as I'd hoped due to some family and other issues. Picking something to focus on was my hardest part. Lots of interesting startups, technology, and stuff to read. I'm now doing what my gut told me originally - building iOS apps for a niche I'm interested in.

So if it were me, I'd spend the $1000 on a Mac of some sort (if you don't already have one), take the Stanford iOS Programming class on iTunes, and maybe pick up a book or two on iOS programming / app business. Worst-case, at the end of the 3 months you'll have a skill that's getting to be in more demand every month and an app or two in the store as proof.

euroclydon
Build something for small businesses in the creative arts industry. I haven't seen a lot of innovation in online design tools for wedding and party invitations, but if you can work the font problems out, the time is ripe to use HTML, SVG and canvas to make a fun webapp for these customers.