The $5 Challenge
What students with five dollars taught me about constraints
Hey, I’m Marco 👋
One person. One laptop. Building digital products in public on the road to €1M.
This post is part of Superbuilders, a series from One Million Goal where I share everything behind the scenes, from the first line of code to the latest revenue update, with complete transparency.
Picture this: you’re a Stanford student, it’s Wednesday afternoon, and your professor just handed you an envelope.
Inside: five dollars ($5).
Your assignment: once you open the envelope, you have two hours to generate as much money as possible. You have until Sunday night to complete the challenge. On Monday, you’ll present your results to the class in three minutes.
What would you do?
This was the challenge Tina Seelig gave her students at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design in 2009.
Before you keep reading, pause for a second.
Actually think about it.
Five dollars. Two hours. Maximum profit. What’s your move?
The Obvious Path (That Nobody Took)
Most of us would probably think: “Five dollars… I could buy something cheap and resell it. Or invest it somehow. Or use it as seed money for a quick service.”
We’d open the envelope and start planning.
But here’s what happened: The teams that made the most money never opened the envelope.
They realized that focusing on the five dollars framed the problem too narrowly.
Instead, they asked a different question:
“What would we do if we started with nothing?”
And that changed everything.
What Teams Actually Did
Team 1: The Restaurant Reservation Arbitrage
One team identified a common problem in college towns: long, frustrating waits at popular restaurants on Saturday nights.
Their solution was brilliantly simple.
They spent the week making reservations at the busiest restaurants in town. Multiple reservations. Different times. All the good spots.
Then, as Saturday approached, they started selling those reservations.
$5 to skip a 45-minute wait. $10 for prime dinner time. $20 for the most popular spots.
People paid happily.
But the team didn’t stop there. They observed and optimized:
Discovery 1: Female students were better at selling the reservations than male students. Customers felt more comfortable being approached by them.
Decision: The men ran around town making more reservations. The women stayed at the restaurants, selling spots in line.
Discovery 2: The whole operation worked better at restaurants using pagers (those vibrating devices that buzz when your table is ready). The physical exchange made customers feel like they were getting something tangible for their money.
Decision: They focused their efforts on those restaurants.
By the end of the weekend, they’d turned human attention and a bit of hustle into real revenue.
Team 2: The Bike Tire Stand
Another team took an even simpler approach.
They set up a stand in a park and offered to check bicycle tire pressure for free.
If the tires needed air, they charged $1 to inflate them.
Most people paid.
Here’s what they discovered:
Discovery 1: Even though cyclists could inflate their tires for free at any bike shop, they felt grateful for the convenience and paid willingly.
This is the principle of reciprocity in action. When you give something first (even something small like checking tire pressure), people naturally want to give back.
Discovery 2: Halfway through their two hours, they stopped asking for a fixed price and started asking for donations instead.
Revenue immediately jumped.
A suggested price creates resistance. An open donation creates generosity.
Team 3: The Three-Minute Masterstroke
But the team that generated the most profit, $650, did something completely different.
They never used the five dollars. They never used the two hours either. They looked at the entire assignment and asked:
“What’s actually the most valuable asset we have?”
The answer was the three minutes of presentation time on Monday in front of a room full of Stanford students. So they sold it.
They created a three-minute recruitment video for a company that wanted to hire Stanford students, and they played it during their presentation slot.
While everyone else was explaining what they did with five dollars, this team was running an ad.
They recognized a resource nobody else even noticed: attention.
A room full of smart, ambitious students, all focused on one screen for three minutes.
That’s worth a lot more than five dollars.
The Lesson I Keep Coming Back To
I’ve thought about this story a lot over the past few months.
Because when you’re building solo, constraints are everywhere.
Limited time. Limited money. Limited attention. Limited reach.
It’s easy to fixate on what you don’t have.
But here’s what the $5 Challenge taught me:
The constraint you think you’re facing is rarely the real constraint.
Those students weren’t limited by five dollars.
They were only limited by five dollars if they chose to frame the problem that way.
The moment they stepped back and asked “What do we actually have access to?” the problem transformed.
Team 1 had time and effort. They turned that into restaurant reservations.
Team 2 had a service people needed and a psychology principle. They turned that into donations.
Team 3 had three minutes of attention in a valuable room. They turned that into $650.
None of them were limited by the five dollars.
They were limited by how they saw the problem.
There’s Always a Path
When I’m stuck on a product decision or frustrated by what I can’t do as a solo builder, I try to remember this:
There’s always a path forward. It’s just not always the obvious one.
Maybe you can’t afford ads, but you can write in public.
Maybe you can’t hire a designer, but you can study design systems and build taste.
Maybe you can’t raise funding, but you can talk to users every single day and build exactly what they need.
The path reveals itself through experimentation.
Not through planning. Not through waiting for the “right” resources.
Through trying, observing, adjusting, and trying again.
So here’s my question for you:
What constraint are you fixating on right now?
And more importantly:
What resource do you already have that you haven’t noticed yet?
Maybe it’s not the five dollars in the envelope.
Maybe it’s something else entirely.
Thanks for reading One Million Goal. A special thanks to Irene for sharing the original article with me.
Love how team 3 completely reframed the problem. When I was consulting last year, we had a similiar moment where the actual constraint wasnt budget but stakeholder attention during quarterly reviews. The attention arbitrage insight is brutal because most founders are so focused on their product they miss the distribution moment sitting right in front of them.