If you had five dollars and two hours, what would you do to make as much money as possible?

This challenge was presented to a group of students at the Design Institute at Stanford. Each group took a different approach as to how they would use the $5 to make even more.

The teams who did the best were the ones who didn't use the $5 at all! That seed money was actually a limitation on what they would have been able to achieve. The more a team challenged the assumptions of the project, the better they did.

And even in the relatively short time period of 2 hours, some teams iterated on their idea to maximize their return.

When I was 11 years old, I took a job as a paperboy. I delivered The Daily Breeze on bike to our neighbors. It was a fun job but it didn't pay very well at all. I realized that the real money was in selling newspaper subscriptions, not delivering the paper.

I started going door to door selling subscriptions to my neighbors. It was a tough business. A subscription cost $5 per month, but I was paid a $25 bounty for each new customer. It didn't take me long to realize I would make more money giving the paper away. So I offered people a free month of the paper, out of my own pocket.

After signing up a bunch of customers in my neighborhood, I realized a couple things:

I had exhausted the doors that I could knock on. Being 11 years old, I couldn't travel far outside my neighborhood
I actually didn't want to sign up people in my delivery area. That just meant more work for me delivering newspapers. I had to expand out

I opened up the phonebook. I literally just went to a page and went down the list. I offered them a free month of The Daily Breeze, which I paid on their behalf. If they didn't want to continue service after a month, it was up to them to call and cancel.

I already had all their contact information in front of me. So I could get through a call (whether I made a sale or not) in two minutes or less.

I did this for several months and made more money than an 11 year old knows what to do with. The only reason I stopped was I got sick of delivering newspapers on Sunday mornings. :)