"Never give financial advice for free:
if it is good advice, you won't get credit,
and if it is bad advice -- you'll get the blame".
You should consider why anyone here would give you advice on how to turn xx,xxx into millions quickly. HN is full of smart people who are fully capable of getting their hands on that much in vc/other leverage and doing it themselves. Any advice they give you, from a purely competitive standpoint, erodes their chances of success.
tl;dr - If anyone knew of a way to turn 24k into millions, why would they say how to do it for free?
If anyone knew of a way to turn 24k into millions, why would they say how to do it for free?
Because people are social creatures and often take great pleasure in talking about something they know a lot about and may have difficulty finding many people that really want to listen/discuss it. Besides, as gets stated here often, a great idea isn't worth much. You still have to put in the time and effort to get any payoff. So it's not much of a threat, really.
Someone smart enough to create a black box (which a million dollar business never turns out to be) that takes input of 24,000 and returns as output 2.4 million is not going to give it away at a marginal cost.
He's asking, in essence, how to get rich quick. If i have a grq idea, i'm either already doing it and getting rich, or planning on doing it (raising capital, finding co-founders, et al).
A lot of excellent ideas are viewed as "crazy" when first proposed. That is probably a bigger reason you aren't going to get a qrq scheme from an online discussion: Either they are burned out on trying to convince people casually or you won't recognize it as brilliant. And that comes back to my earlier remark: An idea isn't worth that much. Execution is what brings in the money.
That still won't prevent some folks from wanting to discuss it just because that's the kind of thing that floats their boat. Maybe you aren't that type. Some people aren't. But some people just like talking about stuff. <shrug>
Ok, I'll bite. I just don't like talking about this sort of thing because it often devolves into scammy ideas. For instance here is a dead simple way to make money if you are really hard up:
Build a site where the only goal is to serve ads and get visitors. Give away N of your ad revenue to a random visitor. Write viral hooks into it to propagate it faster. Of course it won't work for long - someone will eventually try to increase their chances by registering thousands of accounts - but while it works you could probably make a ton of cash.
Edit: perhaps with his appstore experience he could do this on the iphone - figure out a way to make it cost prohibitive to register thousands of accounts by tying accounts to a phone number?
I think you and I probably see this much the same. It's not like I've made any grq suggestions. I'm just one of those annoyingly chatty people who likes to talk -- and it gets me in hot water all the time. I have refrained from suggesting that this is a bad idea because a) sometimes a discussion is useful to someone, even if it doesn't accomplish the stated goal and b) long experience tells me that no one wants me to rain on their parade and say "Gee, that doesn't sound like a great thing to be asking".
In addition to your concerns, I will add that people seem to typically get rich pursuing a niche market which is a good fit for them as an individual. Which means a potential billion dollar idea is only a billion dollar idea for some people and not just anyone....um, which comes back to "execution", I think. :)
Nice chatting with you. I should probably shut up now and let people carry on with discussing what this individual might want to do with their money.
tl;dr - If anyone knew of a way to turn 24k into millions, why would they say how to do it for free?