IWillTeachYouToBeRich - Behind the scenes of our new design

Reader,

Today, we’re rolling out an all new design for I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

You’ll find our new design on our website, Instagram, our emails, and across our brand.

I thought it’d be fun to take you behind the scenes of our design process.

“3 clicks to an answer”

Early on in the design process, I had a call with the team. We worked with our internal team of engineers, designers, growth/SEO experts, plus our external design partner, Engin.

I shared some of my philosophies about our brand and design philosophy. One of them: “3 clicks to an answer.”

If you come to iwt.com and you want to know how to negotiate your salary, let’s get you there within 3 clicks.

If you want to find a business idea or learn how to make more money, same thing.

The idea is that companies love to talk about themselves (“Here’s our brand purpose...ZzzzZzzzZ”), but users mostly want answers to their own problems.

In our company, we have a phrase about our readers:

“At IWT, we are but a moment in their day.” 

That means we spend hours, months, and years thinking about the concepts behind IWT…but most people give us 10 seconds of their time — if we’re lucky.

That means we need to earn your respect with every email we send and every Instagram post. And our team will be working on making our site even more user-friendly over the coming months.

Sharing what a Rich Life is

Here’s an evolution of design at IWT:

In August 2004, I was talking about banking and budgeting.

By 2009, I was talking about earning more. In 2012, finding a dream job and negotiating.

And it grew from there.

Today, our brand represents dozens of people, 47,000+ customers, a New York Times bestselling book, and regular appearances in the New York Times and on Tim Ferriss’s podcast.

I wanted to showcase what we stand for and why we’re different.

We believe...

There’s a limit to how much you can cut, but no limit to how much you can earn.

You can buy all the lattes you want.

You should spend extravagantly on the things you love, as long as you cut costs mercilessly on the things you don’t.

Your Rich Life is yours — not mine and not anybody else’s. If you want to rent instead of buy, great. If you want to live in an RV, or retire early, or grow a business to millions of dollars a year, that is awesome. We can help.

Money is political. You can support personal responsibility and simultaneously acknowledge the need for systemic change.

If you read this and it doesn’t resonate with you, our site won’t be for you. That’s fine!

But if you read it and say, “Hey, that’s interesting...I’ve never heard someone talk about money like this,” we might be a great fit.

It was also important to highlight the policies we’ve adopted, like not accepting people with credit card debt in our flagship programs, a decision that costs us millions of dollars per year.

And our goal of making our free material better than others’ paid stuff — a goal we work at every day.

Improving our Products page

A few years ago, I posted an Instagram post about someone using the I Will Teach You To Be Rich book to pay off $70,000 of debt.

Within 20 minutes, I had 20+ questions that all said this:

“What book?”

…What book?

…WHAT BOOK?

THE BOOK I SPENT MY LIFE WRITING!!!!!!!!!

WHAT BOOK????

I had to remind myself it wasn’t their fault. Many people don’t even know we sell 20+ programs on starting a business, growing your business, finding a dream job, and mastering your psychology.

It’s not their fault. It was mine. After all, we are but a moment in their day.

To improve this, we redesigned our Products page. Instead of focusing on our product names, like Earnable, we focus on what you get:

• More money
• More time
• A flexible job with no commute

To see this in action, check out our Products page.

Success stories

Around 2012, we had more success stories than we knew what to do with. We’d post hundreds of testimonials in emails and sales copy. But we started to notice something interesting: By 2013, people were skeptical these were real. There were too many people creating fake testimonials on other sites that they’d lost all credibility.

We added full names. People were still skeptical.

We added photos. People were still skeptical.

(This is where you start to take a hard look in the mirror and ask yourself: “Are we listening to insane people who are skeptical of everything?”)

But we kept going. We even added URLs of our successful students.

Then we added videos.

We even brought them to NYC for an in-person event.

Along the way, we started highlighting that Rich Life means different things to different people. In the past, we’d highlight people getting $50,000 raises. Now, I’m just as interested in seeing someone walking their dog at 3pm on a Wednesday.

See some of the stories on our new Success Stories page.

We have more to come. Stay tuned.

And as always, thanks for reading.