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Let me answer the question you asked, and, then the question that you did not ask. The fastest and dependably assured way to make a million dollars to build a
by lifeofanalysis 12y ago
Let me answer the question you asked, and, then the question that you did not ask.
The fastest and dependably assured way to make a million dollars to build a product/service that is profitable and sell it. If you can project annual profits of more than $100K, you can sell it for a million dollars. Want concrete examples:
- There is this guy who provides "Text Messaging" service to his B2B customers. So, he will go to your local gas station, ask them to sign up their customers' telephone numbers, then sends texts to their signed up customers with their coupon special on non-busy times like "20% off on oil change on wednesday before lunch". These coupons get pretty good response. If you use Twilio, it costs $1 to send 100 coupons. So he charges them $30/Month to send out 4 texts to 100 customers. Net profit: $26/month per customer. Spend this year, and, go around within your 30 mile radius, sign up a bunch of businesses and get rich.
- This guy built a profitable business in a very unsexy category: maidsinblack.com. He writes about it on Reddit sometimes. Check it out.
- A guy places, seriously, mylar balloons at flower shops, hospital shops, etc. And takes a cut of the sales. Makes $60K a year.
Ok. So now the question that you did not ask: to college or not to college.
I know there is an opinion floating around that in this age of easily accessible self learning, you can skip college. Here is the thing though: to be a successful business owner/manager, you have to make a lot of decisions. And that means a lot of analysis, data etc. Intuition/gut-check helps; but analysis is the foundation that can not be taken away. So working backwards from this, to do/understand analysis, you have to be pretty good at unsexy things like Math, Logical Reasoning, Model Building. Now, you can learn all that on your own. But will you have the self-discipline to do it on your own -- or will the structure/rigor of a college (even evening courses at a community college) be a better way?
Sometimes when you look around, you think people like Bezos just sit in meetings and make decisions while someone else does the analysis and presents them with alternatives. That could not be further from the truth; to make good decisions, 1-2 big ones and 10-20 small ones every day, you have to be able to quickly understand the "insides" of an analysis -- and for that you can not avoid at least the foundations of an numbers based education. And, don't forget, there was a time not too long ago (1995?) when Bezos went around looking for money for his start-up; he did all that analysis/projections all by himself. It doesn't hurt your persuasion skills if you are good with numbers and can counter with numbers when they have objections.