The Four Ways to Make Money

Investment and Monetization, Seen Through Lump Sums and Installments

Making money means investment, and then monetization. 

You need both of these flows.

Working as a publishing editor, I get a lot of chances to meet people from all kinds of fields, and the ways they make money are just as varied. But when I look closely at the patterns, it turns out that investment and monetization always come down to how lump sums and installments are mixed.

Let me lay out how lump sums and installments operate across the investment and monetization process, using a 2×2 matrix. It's something I was never taught—despite an undergraduate degree in economics and a stint in business school—but it's a genuinely simple idea.

First: Lump-Sum Investment → Lump-Sum Monetization (The Hunter)

You build a product or service, deliver it, and monetize all at once.

This is the made-to-order world—developing custom software, or taking on a large construction project. When an order comes in, you build exactly that much, and as you deliver it you book revenue in one big chunk. It's a structure built on producing and delivering on the strength of relationships with creditworthy partners, like business-to-business or government contracts.

I compare this to hunting. You bring down a mammoth, deliver it, and earn big money.

The upside is that once you sign a contract, a large sum is guaranteed. The downside is that when the contract ends, you have to go find a new customer all over again. Two things to weigh here: whether you have the ability to take down a mammoth, and whether you're connected to reliable partners who actually need one.

Second: Lump-Sum Investment → Installment Monetization (The Farmer)

You make the product up front, and revenue comes in as people pay for it bit by bit.

This covers buying inventory wholesale to resell, or planning a product, putting it on the market, and selling it. It's a field that's manufacturing-based while also handling the whole process—creating the product, building a point of contact with the market, and seeing it through to the sale. You invest to make a product, stock it as inventory, and sell that inventory down over time.

Publishing falls precisely here. We work the manuscript together with the author, manufacture the printed book, and warehouse it with a logistics company. When bookstores place orders, we distribute through the supply chain.

Two things matter in this model: cutting the initial cost—the cost of goods—and securing content that will sell steadily. A product you make once has to be able to generate steady cash flow.

This model is growing fast in the digital realm. SaaSsoftware as a service​ is the prime example: software you build once, monetized in installments as a subscription fee. According to Fortune Business Insights, the global SaaS market is projected to grow from about $266.2 billion in 2024 to $315.7 billion in 2025—an 18.6% year-over-year increase—and to surpass $1 trillion by 2032. Korea's subscription-economy market has likewise grown steadily, from about 26 trillion won in 2016, by KT Economic & Management Research Institute estimates.

The core is the same: the stamina to absorb the upfront investment, and the quality of a product that will keep selling.

Third: Installment Investment → Lump-Sum Monetization (The Startup)

You invest a little at a time, grow the value, and then sell it all at once.

For an individual investor, that means accumulating shares little by little and selling at the right price; for a company, it's the startup. You spend three to five years building the company hard, and once it has grown enough, you walk away with a big lump sum through an M&A (merger and acquisition) or an IPO (going public). This is what people call an 'exit.'

A few eye-catching Korean exit cases make this structure clear: Delivery Hero's acquisition of Woowa Brothers (Baedal Minjok), Match Group's acquisition of Hyperconnect, Coupang's listing on the New York Stock Exchange, and Zigbang's roughly 23 billion won acquisition of Hogangnono, among others.

The reality, though, isn't so forgiving. The exit rate for Korean startups averages around 2.3%. According to the Startup Genome report, Seoul's average time to exit has stretched to 9.2 years and keeps lengthening, and data from Startup Alliance shows the number of domestic startup M&As fell sharply from 150 in 2022 to 88 in 2023. Data from the Federation of Korean Industries (FKI) also shows that while 82.8% of exits among the world's top five unicorn hubs are M&As, Korea sits at just 52.9%—a sign that the environment for exits via M&A is still underdeveloped.

This approach demands a long-term investment mindset. It's hard to make money quickly, but there's potential to earn big. The flip side—and the major risk—is that you might earn nothing at all over the long run. It's worth attempting only if you have both a strong idea and the ability to execute.

For what it's worth, a book published by our company, 『1%의 가능성에 투자하는 사람들』 (The People Who Bet on a 1% Chance), collects interviews with the venture capitalists who invest in startups. As the saying goes, know yourself and know your enemy and you'll never be in peril. If you're preparing a startup and hoping to raise venture funding, you'll find some insight in it.

Fourth: Installment Investment → Installment Monetization (The Content Creator)

You invest a little at a time and earn a little at a time.

Creators with content—YouTube, blogs, online courses—fit this business model. If you run a blog, every day you post one piece of content that fits the character of the blog you're trying to build. At first it looks like nothing is happening, but over time the views climb and ad revenue starts coming in.

You invest steadily and draw steady revenue in return. Quit partway and the revenue disappears too, so consistency is everything.

I also tell authors thinking about publishing to consider this approach. From the publisher's side it's the second model—lump-sum investment, installment monetization—but for the author it's different. If you invest time consistently, day after day, and build up a body of content, publishing becomes an opportunity to monetize it in installments.

One caution here. You have to let go of the idea of monetizing a single piece of content in one lump sum. Dramatic cases do crop up now and then, but lump-sum monetization isn't for everyone. Installment investment through making content consistently, and installment monetization through that content—this is the lens you should use to build your business model.

If You Depend on a Single Model

How do you make your money? And what kind of business model do you want to make it with?

If you're leaning on just one approach, it's worth considering adding another. The idea is to use the models in combination rather than relying on only one.

For example, you could be building a startup to grow and sell for a lump sum, while at the same time creating content on YouTube or a blog to raise your own personal value as a founder and earn installment revenue.

To sum up:

Whichever of the four you fall into, simply recognizing the structure of investment and monetization changes how you see the design of a revenue model. If you can, try adding one more model to the one you're running now.