What's I Will Teach You To Be Rich all about?

I started this blog in 2004 when I was in college because I had gotten a few scholarships for college, and I had invested one of them in the stock market and lost half my money. So I figured it's probably time to start learning about money. And I eventually started a blog, and I wanted to write like you and I are sitting here. I wanted to make fun of you, you make fun of me, talk about the things we do with our money and what we care about. And so I started it, and nobody read it for the first six months, but after a while, it took off, and now it hosts about 175,000 readers, mostly young people.

Yeah, 175,000 readers.

Yeah.

I mean, it doesn't seem to be a subject that younger people are interested in. Their finances, apart from spending.

No. It sounds really boring. Well, I think we are all interested in money. We're not necessarily interested in learning from some old white dude about what he thinks interest rates will be in two months. So, you know, we all want to know, where's our money going? How do we make it go into things we want to, Whether it's an iPhone or saving or going on vacation, we all want to think about that. And I think we all have this feeling of guilt that I should be doing something, but I just don't know what to do.

So there's an element of awareness education within this site.

Yeah, exactly. It's about just, first of all, recognizing that, hey, I should be doing something. And then what are the steps to take in order to set up an automatic financial infrastructure?

So what did these people come and learn? And then what happens next? What's going to happen next in terms of that?

Well, what happens to them when they come to the site? They read it and they might say, what happens is they come and they say, oh, wow, there's an article on weddings. I happen to be planning a wedding. Or they'll say, oh, thinking about buying an iPhone. I am actually thinking about it. And then they start clicking around and saying, oh, wow, that's really interesting. I never thought about investing for the future. And what my favorite thing is is when they send me an email or write me a comment, and they say, wow, I used to be $17,000 in debt two years ago. Now I have $5,000 saved in the bank. I mean, I have hundreds of comments of people saying how they turned their lives around financially so that they could actually do what they wanted. And that's the point of the site. Rich is not just about money. It's about Being able to do what you want to do, like sitting out here and chatting, you and me right.

Now, I mean, can't I find this information by going to my bank or going to my bank's website?

Well, have you?

Yes, I am rich.

There's plenty of information out there. You could certainly find it anywhere else. You can find it on my blog or in the Wall Street Journal. The point is that we need it presented to us in a way that we actually care about it. And then we need to take action. You can read my site, but if you read it and then you go like this, oh, great, I'm educated, and then you go lay on the couch, then, then I have failed. The point is that you need to get up and take action and do something. And whether it's through my side or others, it doesn't really matter.

Okay, so you have all these people coming to find out how to be rich. How are you going to become rich after this site?

Well, two things. So first of all, in my day job, I'm a co founder of PBWiki, that's a collaboration company in Silicon Valley. And we have grown quite a bit. So we now host about 500,000 wikis. But the site itself is really interesting. On the monetization side, I. I actually held off putting ads for about three years. I didn't want to ruin the credibility and I wanted to really understand my readers before I put a bunch of making money things. Plus, it wasn't really for me about making $10 a month or $50 a month. I wanted to make much more. And so what I did, you know, I've done speaking. I now have a book coming out in January and I actually have put ads on. So the site is doing really well. But the real point is to help more and more people manage their money. More and more regular people, not just the San Francisco geeks or people in New York. Sure.

I mean, beyond the book and the speaking engagement, how does this scale, how does this turn into a business as an entrepreneur?

Yeah, that's the whole challenge, which is having one person have the voice of 10,000. And I think that scales in a few ways. One is you start getting other people to come in and start contributing their unique ideas, pick the very best and feature them on the site. The other thing is I'm going to be building a few different micro sites. I will. I'll tell you one of them, which I haven't told anyone about publicly, and it's called Negotiate like an Indian. So I'm going to teach people how to negotiate like an Indian, because, of course, I learned how to do that since I was a young child. And so I think you start moving towards doing, speaking, packaging up some of the knowledge. And most importantly, and what other people are not doing is having your readers go out and spread the word. There are plenty of people who love iwillteachytoberich.com they want to spread the word. So I'm going to give them the tools so that they can go do that and teach their friends how to manage their money.

But then you don't make money out of that.

That's okay. I'd rather have a million people who know about the I Will Teach youh Be rich principles than 5,000 who are paying me a lot of money. I would rather scale it way out because people need to learn this stuff, and it's about giving them the tools to do. Sam.