⏳ Are you up for a challenge? — Time Billionaires #010

What's the highest ROI you can make from $5?

Aadit Sheth

Aug 16, 2022

Hey Time Billionaire — Aadit here.

This week I’m covering an interesting story I read on Twitter.

It was about a challenge given to a group of Stanford Business students.

The challenge: “What’s the highest ROI you can make from $5 in 2 hours?”

Trust me, you’ll want to hear how it ends (12,900% ROI).

But first:

Now, let’s jump in ↓

I’ll cut to the chase. Here were some of the results;

A team flipped an item from $5 to $8.

Not bad. That’s a 60% ROI. But in the end, the group made $3. I bet you could crush that. So let’s continue to another group:

Another team ditched the $5 altogether and tried to make money by selling restaurant reservations to people waiting in line.

They did much better. They brought in a couple hundred dollars. But this is what the winning team did:

The winning team sold an ad.

What? An ad?

Yeah.

The winning team realized that the $5 starting point was mainly a distraction. But another fact they realized (and leveraged) was that they had to present their findings to their peers via a presentation at the end of the class.

So they sold an ad to a local company hoping to recruit students from that Stanford class.

Now, how creative is that?

The lesson we learn here is that it’s easy to dismiss assets you currently own. In today’s example, we saw that every other team dismissed the audience they had access to during the presentation — students.

And that audience is an asset to companies looking to hire students.

Do a fun exercise this week. Note down some assets you have that you take for granted.

I wrote about this last week.

If money is an asset, so is the following: