In this video, Akeel Jabber—GP and investment director at Horizon Capital—answers the common question of how to allocate a $10,000 savings pool for the highest return. He first frames the decision as a choice between passive and active investing. For passive routes he outlines three low‑effort options: broad stock‑market index funds (5‑10% annual return), a high‑yield savings account (1‑2% annual), and leveraged real‑estate purchases (potential 10‑20% return if the numbers work). He then pivots to active investing, recommending that with $10k the most effective path is to build a small business rather than buy an existing one. He focuses on two business models that can be launched on a shoestring: e‑commerce and service‑based businesses. The bulk of the capital should be spent on a high‑quality landing page (design, development, copywriting) and on targeted advertising to generate real‑world feedback and sales. He stresses rapid supplier/contractor testing—buying tiny sample orders, trialing freelancers, and iterating—rather than bulk purchasing. For service businesses he suggests a white‑label partnership to outsource execution while retaining client‑facing branding. Throughout he warns against common money‑wasting pitfalls (over‑stocking inventory, mis‑targeted ad spend) and frames the $10k as a stepping stone: successful execution can grow the capital to $50‑100k, opening the door to buying established companies in future videos. The tone is conversational and instructional, with an enthusiastic but measured optimism about the upside of active, hands‑on approaches.
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Question I get often from people who come up to me and say, Akeel, I've got $10,000 in my savings and I don't know where should I invest it? I'm clueless about where I should put this money. How can I get the highest ROI on my investment? How can I get the highest return on my investment? And I'll say there's 2 different ways you can look at it, right? The one way is, do you want to be— do you want this to be an active investment or do you want this to be a passive investment? And do you want a passive income and return, or do you want an active income and return? So there's 2 different ways that you can look at it, and that's exactly what I'm gonna cover in today's video on how to best leverage that $10,000. Hey guys, welcome back to another video here at SaaS District. Really excited to be here with you guys. I really appreciate you listening in and watching. If you guys like these videos, if you're enjoying what I'm putting out there, please make sure to subscribe, hit the like button, and hit the bell so that we can create— continue to create more videos and content for you guys. So if you guys don't know a little bit my background, I'm a GP and investment director at Horizon Capital where we now invest in B2B SaaS companies. We work with them, help accelerate the growth And generate high returns for our investors and our LPs. We generally get somewhere between 30% to 50% ROI on an annual basis. But that's not what we're going to talk about today because that's a whole different ballgame, whole different conversation, because we're talking about $10,000. And if we're talking about $100,000, we're talking about $1 million, that's a whole different conversation. And you can check out those videos which I'm going to release for you guys as well. Well, let's talk about— I have $10,000. And where should I invest it? So like I said, the first thing is passive versus active. So if I'm doing a maybe more of a passive type investment, which I'll talk about, there's 2 ways where I'd look at it. You're going to get a lower return because you're not putting in the time and effort to actually grow it. You can invest it into the general stock market. Don't try to pick and choose individual stocks. If you want to pick a blue chip stock or as part of a fund, You know, you can invest in there and, you know, let it sit and grow over time. You might get, you know, somewhere between 5% and 10% a year. You have no work, you put in it, you look in it, you look at your portfolio, you check how it's doing, and you can pull out at any time and the money's there. You can put in a savings account and maybe get 1% or 2% a year. That's another option. So those are passive investments. Kind of stepping up the scale a little bit, another thing you can do with $10,000 is invest in real estate. Now people might say, well, how can I buy a house or property for $10,000? You can actually use that $10,000 plus using leverage to be able to finance and buy a place. And I'm talking obviously not a big place. You probably don't want to buy anything more than, you know, $100,000, maybe, you know, $150,000, $200,000 depending on the bank you're working with. But generally, if you're putting 10% down, you can buy a property and rent it out. Okay, so for $10,000, You buy a place for $100,000. Maybe it's a one-bedroom apartment. Maybe you can Airbnb it. Maybe you can rent it out and get some cash flow. As long as the numbers make sense, that's what I would do. I would take that $10,000, find some leverage, and buy a place and convert it into a rental property. With that, it's a little bit more active. You have to put a bit of time to, you know, set it up, getting the right people in, you know, getting the contract. But once you have that contract with the right tenant, it becomes quite Passive if you have the right system in place. Okay, and I have some real estate. I love that, and I do recommend that. Now, I would, I would say you probably can get anywhere between, you know, maybe 10%, 15%, maybe even 20% on your return of money on that $10,000 if you do it right and you're able to find the right opportunities. That's passive. Let's move on to active. Active is probably where you want to put that money to use and generate a higher return, maybe even a a full-time income to be able to live off of and, and make the best of the use of that money. Best way to do that is to invest into a business. Okay, so you can— same thing, you can actually invest in businesses passively. Like we talk about the public markets, you can do it in private markets just like we do with our LLPs, where they invest in, in us, we invest in private companies, and then we, we help them grow. We manage and grow them. But it's different where if you're just starting off You probably want to take that money and build something. Okay, there's always that build or buy, and those are 2 different things. If you have $100,000 or $1 million, I would more suggest going to the buying route. With $10,000, I'm going to suggest going the build route. And what do I mean by build route? I mean building a company from scratch that'll generate enough money. With $10,000, if there was 2 different businesses that I would focus on, it would be either an e-commerce business or a service-based business. Those are the 2 different types of business. I'll go specifically into where I would spend it for regardless of which one. If you're selling a service, okay, what you can do is you have— whether it's yourself or you have a contractor who's only— you're only going to pay them once you have the contract and the work. You're not going to pay for product in a way like the backend where, you know, with SaaS and tech, you have to build all this money into the backend infrastructure. Here you're only going to bring it on and pay for it after you get revenue. And you can do the same with e-commerce. Actually, what I would suggest is, you know, if you have a product or something you build and you have ready to sell, you know, whether you build it, get samples, get a few orders. You know, it's very common what I hear is people want to source things from China and they go to China and they say, yes, but you need to buy 100, you need to buy 1,000, and they buy 10,000 to get the best rates. Don't worry about getting best rates at this point, right? Because I think that's the point people get stuck on. It's like, I have to get it for $30 apiece. If I buy 10, I'm gonna have to pay double and my profit margins are not there. Don't worry about profit margins, right? That's not the point of this at this point of the game. Buy 1, buy 2, buy 3, buy a few, test it out. Buy from different vendors, see what you like, feel it, touch it, see how fast they respond. Get a feel for the supplier, what the relationship is like. Same thing with contractors, give them small tests, See what they're like, check out the quality, and then decide, all right, I want to work with this one person. I know their price. If I do well, then I can buy 100, then I can buy 1,000, then I can buy 10,000, and then I can build and scale my company. Let's start with the one. Let's start with the 2, see how it's like, and then we go out to market. All right, back to the point. $10,000, where do I spend it? When it comes to pre-selling, which is what you're going to do here in building your product, the couple of areas where I really focus a lot of energy on time is really high-quality design and copy of your landing page. Hire a— put that money towards a really good web designer, put it towards, you know, the developer who's going to build it, or use a template if you need to, and get a copywriter. Don't underestimate the value of a copywriter because that sales copy is going to make or break kind of what your conversions are and how much— where you're going to spend your marketing and if it's going to lead into actual sales. So get a landing page up of your product that sells exactly what you have. Get an add to cart button, add a subscription button, add a call to action where people can sign up for your service or they can buy your product right there. And then from there, that's probably going to cost you at least $1,000 or $2,000 if you want to do it really, really well. The rest of the money I'm going to spend on marketing. And the reason why is you want to get feedback. You can do this through Google AdWords, you can do this through Instagram ads if you have a product. TikTok ads, Google search, so many different ways you can test it out. But I'm going to spend all my money there to get people to give me feedback, to test it out if there's demand. And I'm going to spend all my money on content, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, whatever it is that where you're selling your product, for example, in e-commerce. And you're going to spend your money getting people into the funnel of building awareness, knowing about your product and testing it out and getting sales. Seeing if there's actually people who are willing to put their credit card and pay for your product. And that's going to decide at this point whether your product is worth it and you want to keep investing and you should start seeing sales pretty quickly, or if you want to change out the product, change the offering and try again. Well, your chances of succeeding and getting a high ROI are a lot higher if you invest it in the right place. So, so I mentioned, you know, ways obviously where you can easily, you can be inefficient with your money and actually, you know, spend money wrongly— sorry, spend money in the wrong way. One of them is, you know, buying way too much stock that doesn't sell. Number 2 is spending money on the wrong channel. Know where your market is, know where your audience is. You have to understand that and then build content, drive ads exactly where they are, because that's what's going to get you the right results. And when it comes to service-based business, you know, some people say, okay, I struggle with finding high-quality contractors or people who can execute the work. One thing you can do to save money, to save money and wasting money on the wrong people and what they do, is become a white label partner. That means you— what that means is you sell your product under your own service, your own name, and your own brand. That's your website, your name, and on your own price. And then you work with another agency who offers white labeling, and they sell it to you for a lower price, and they'll do the backend work. So all you have to do is focus on the marketing, the sales, and the client communication and the client communication and client relationships, and they focus on handling the backend for you. So that's a nice way to build a small business as well, and you should be able to see high results off that $10K versus just investing it passively. And you want to think about it like a stepping stone, right? Like I said, you can go passive, you can go into real estate, you can then go into active and starting a business. From there, if you can turn that $10K into $50K to $100K, Now you're in a different position. You can take that $100K and you can invest it in buying another company which is already successful and already in place and already growing to help you to continue to grow, which I'll talk about in the next video. So hope you guys enjoyed this video. If you guys liked it, once again, like it, subscribe and hit the bell and let me know where are you investing when you have $10,000 saved and getting what kind of returns you're getting from your investment. All right guys, thank you. See you on the next video. Bye.
