Yesterday I asked on my Instagram how you would make $10k in 10 days if locked in a room with an iPhone:
The rules are:
- You have no money
- No social media following
- No using special contacts or network
BUT you do have your skills, such as your qualifications and work experience.
This is actually a great exercise in understanding how money flows, and how to get money to flow you quickly.
So how would I do it?
It’s quite simple.
To receive money, you need to sell something.
Meaning someone needs to buy something from you.
People only buy things that provide them value.
For example, your hair is a mess, you go to a hairdresser and buy a haircut.
It provides you with comfort and self-confidence.
You are hungry, you buy food to sate your hunger.
In both these scenarios, you are giving money to another person in exchange for some type of value.
So how can we receive $10,000 in 10 days?
The obvious answer – provide $10,000 of value!
What is something that people will pay $10,000 for?
That’s the real question.
We also need to be able to provide this product/service using only an iPhone locked in a room.
However, when you think about it – this isn’t that different from being locked in a cubicle with a computer, which is practically how 90% of New Zealanders make their money anyway.
So basically we just need to recreate a regular side hustle or job, but speed up the timeframe with which we get paid.
Here’s how I would do it:
- Since I’m a (former) Chartered Accountant, I know that my skills are in huge shortage right now. I know CA’s earn around $6-$10k per month, so I would spam every single accounting firm in New Zealand and offer work for them for 3-6 months for $10k, but only IF they give me the $10k in advance. I would offer the first 9 days as a trial to prove that I can provide massive value and do the job, on the tenth day I’ll receive the $10k – success!
- The above approach could also be done with almost any skill/profession – for example, when I first started freelancing I made $4,000 USD in my first month, which I detailed in this article. To make $10k in 10 days, I would use exactly the same approach, but after the first job I would ask for a $10k advance to do X amount of articles over X amount of months. If you’ve proven your value, there’s a chance the client will say yes.
- Another option – since I’m pretty good at making/designing websites (like the one you’re reading) I would spend the first day scouring the web for medium-sized businesses that have shitty websites. Then I would spend the second day mocking up a few sample websites, then I would cold call businesses and tell them I could help them get way more clients/customers (providing value!) by redesigning their website or building them a way better one from scratch. I’ll show them the mock samples and make tweaks for anyone interested. Finally, once you’ve proven your service, ask for the $10k in advance, or a $10k retainer to do more work in the future.
Will all of these work? Of course not, but they all have a pretty good chance to. With a simple change in strategy/mindset, suddenly making $10k in 10 days goes from sounding impossible to sounding very doable.
Here are some other ideas that fall outside my skillset, but would still work:
- Sales is one of the fastest way to make money. To make $10k you’ll need a high-end product you can earn a good commission on. You most likely won’t have time to create this product, so you’ll need to sell an existing product owned by someone else. If you can find a product that sells for $5k, such as private coaching or mentorship, a high-priced course or education product, or even a Saas or some other subscription, if you earn 10% on each sale that’s $500. Make 20 sales and there’s your $10k. Sales is not an easy skill to learn quickly, but it is something anyone can do and can start immediately with no prerequisites. Many closers and salespeople make $10k in a week.
- Open a dropshipping or e-commerce store on Shopify. Sell whatever you have specialised knowledge on, whether it’s sports gear or clothing or supplements or just some random crap from AliExpress. Start reaching out to influencers to promote your product on a commission basis. In 10 days you could literally reach out to thousands of different channels and see what bites. You could also spam it on forums and Reddit. Aim to make $10k in sales – don’t even worry about fulfilling the product. Just make the sales and get the revenue in, you can worry about actually shipping the product later (many dropshippers do this with new stores).
- Content creation is huge right now. Reach out to businesses and offer to create a huge amount of content in advance for $10k. For example, if you offer to do 10 months of content that’s $1k per month, which is crazy cheap. If your content is good, many businesses will jump at the chance. As an example, you can find a fitness apparel business, and offer to write a weekly newsletter of fitness tips, 3x texts, 3x short videos/reels and 3x graphics per day for FB, Insta, Linkedin, Twitter, TikTok, plus a weekly blog post about something current in the health/fitness space. I know if someone reached out to me with that offer I’d probably say yes straight away! Do the first week of content during your 10 day lockup and make everything so freaking AMAZING they’ll probably keep you on afterwards at $10k/month.
- How creative/funny/entertaining are you? Start a TikTok and start making videos about yourself locked in the room (or anything else). Spend the entire time making content and you could probably pump out over 500 videos. Within 4 days you could probably get your channel monetized. If you get sponsors reach out to you – try to pre-sell them $5k of sponsored videos over a year. Get two or three sponsors and there’s your $10k.
As you can see, a lot of the approaches would require you to ask for payment in advance or a retainer, but that’s only due to the constraints of the challenge (we only have 10 days). You will see the central idea of making money is still the same – you sell a product or service of value.
All of these approaches above you can use to make $10k in the next 2-3 months and to be honest it wouldn’t even be that difficult if you set your mind to it. These are all methods myself or people I know personally have used successfully. Along with the other methods I’ve literally done and documented step-by-step on this very blog, such as flipping, matched betting and niche sites. No need to reinvent the wheel – just get your nose down and grind!
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