The $168 million moonshot: a batshit crazy goal
I woke up in the middle of the night with a thought that wouldn't let me fall back asleep: why not go for the single craziest goal I could set for this lifetime? Not one million. Not five. $168 fucking million USD.
That number isn't random. In Chinese numerology, 168 sounds like "yī lù fā," which roughly translates to "prosper the whole way" or "get rich all the way through."
It's the reason you'll see it stamped on license plates, phone numbers, wedding dates, and price tags across Chinese-speaking countries. I even have a limited-edition watch, and I specifically asked to have the serial number 168 imported into Taiwan just for me.
People pay extra for it, just like I did with the watch. It's considered one of the most auspicious number combinations, and once I heard that, the number stuck in my head and wouldn't leave.
Million-dollar challenges have been done before. I did a quick search for "road to $100 million" and found no shortage of blueprints, playbooks, even entire books built around scaling to that number.
Nobody has done a road to $168 million. As far as I can tell, that specific target has never been claimed.
The more I let the idea sit, the more it felt completely detached from reality. Then I zoomed out, and it stopped feeling that nuts. It felt more like achieving legendary status forever.
Context
For years I was out of the game, in pretty much everything. It's only this year that I picked up vibe coding, started building real startups, and found a new drive to build something that isn't a unicorn swing but a mixed bag: micro-SaaS projects, experiments, publishing, and a permanent capital strategy under Ryoka Group.
I tried a million-dollar challenge before. It ended in a half win. I never completed it.
This time is different. I'm going for the absolute fucking home run. I want legendary status, and the way I've defined that for myself is reaching $168 million USD in total lifetime earnings, counted from today forward.
Why am I doing this?
Honestly, I don't have a real reason. I think it's a great way to document everything, and even if I never touch that number, I'll still be able to look back in a decade and see exactly where I landed.
There's also the shock value. If I tell people I'm running a $168 million challenge, the first reaction is disbelief. And from disbelief, I get the chance to show them the actual numbers: how far along I am, or how badly I've missed without feeling ashamed.
But underneath both of those reasons, I think this is just about pushing myself to the absolute limit. I've had single days trading futures where I made $50,000 to $100,000. I've had online poker sessions where I ran a $2,000 stack up to $30,000 in high-stakes Pot Limit Omaha.
From a solo dev or indie hacker seat, $168 million looks astronomical, completely out of reach.
From Ryoka Group's seat, I don't think it's impossible at all. Everything is on the table to get there, and I plan to put real effort into expanding Ryoka's core activities.
That includes building a handful of flagship SaaS products, going for one large B2B SaaS product by 2027 or sooner, running a tiny day trading fund with no outside capital, just my own money, and acquiring small projects with a steady existing user base so I can skip the initial build entirely.
Mix building and maintaining my own products with acquiring ones I can hold long-term, some of which I'll eventually sell at a real valuation, and that $168 million number starts to shrink.
I'm going all in
Even with a playbook already in my head, nothing stops me from adding more fuel to the fire, especially this early. The first $500,000 to $1 million is the hardest part. Once I get past that, multiplying it gets a lot easier. None of it is risk-free.
I haven't earned a dollar in a long time. I did some occasional futures trading this year, and my last real online poker session was back in February. After that, I pulled all my liquid cash out and made a hard stop to focus on being a content creator. Well, that ship has sailed, and I went pretty much the other way.
Now I'm going back to mixing my activities daily, so I don't burn out purely on app building, and so I don't lose focus on the flagship product I'm building right now.
Read also: MVP is finally live, and I'm proud of it: update #7
How I'll calculate it
Starting today, I'm counting every dollar of lifetime earnings: every app I've built, every micro-acquisition I make going forward, all affiliate income, YouTube, services, poker, futures trading, and donations through Ko-fi or Buy Me a Coffee. Anything that hits my accounts counts.
I'm building a custom tracker for this blog where all of it gets logged, including total expenses, from subscriptions to acquisition costs, so the real difference between what comes in and what goes out is visible.
The tracker will run through milestones from zero to $5K, $10K, $50K, $100K, $500K, and then $1 million, $10 million, $50 million, and beyond. It'll have an overview page and a full breakdown of everything I've done, earned, or spent.
I know $168 million is not a fucking joke. The odds of getting there are practically zero without grit, resilience, a lot of luck, and a few pivotal decisions landing right.
Current status: zero dollars on the scoreboard. I'm betting that number stays there for a while. But it's the starting line, and now it's public, which means I can't quietly let it go.p