From Shitshow to Global Design Movement: Instagram Versus Reality!
This Story is About You
If you’ve ever felt stuck, stressed, or lost in life, these stories are for you. Our scars and success stories can become your shortcuts.
We share them to give you hope, inspiration, and concrete advice on how to turn your pain into power.
If you want more love, freedom, wealth, and joy, you’ve come to the right place. You can create your dream life. We all can.
And don’t limit your pursuit of happiness to your own life. You can work towards something bigger: the impact you have on the people around you and on humanity itself.
Who Are We? Two Hearts. One Mission. Zero Plan B.
We’re Rikke and Mads: founders of IxDF and soulmates on a shared mission.
This is our love story. Our love for each other and for our life’s mission: to empower people like you to design a life you truly love.
Why is it our life’s mission? Because our childhoods were shaped by pig shit, alcoholism, and humiliation, but we used education to build a life we love.
That’s why we pour our hearts into giving the same opportunity to every corner of humanity through IxDF. Since 2002, our mission has been to build education of higher quality than anything taught in Silicon Valley companies or Ivy League universities.
Education Became Our Ticket Out of Pain, Shame, and Humiliation
I, Rikke, grew up on a near-bankrupt pig farm and went to school each day literally stinking of pig shit.
In high school I won the award for “biggest loser with the ugliest clothes.” Yes, it was an actual graduation ceremony award. I “won” the award and was humiliated on stage in front of the entire high school. But shame and humiliation isn’t the end. It’s a powerful fertilizer, just like pig shit.
I thought I was too dumb to pursue my real dreams. I thought university was only for privileged kids who’d never, like me, had jobs scrubbing toilets or picking up human flesh from the floors of operating rooms.
I was destined to become a pig farmer, but access to high-quality education became my ticket out of the pigsty.
I, Mads, grew up in the shadows of alcoholism, neglect, and a victim narrative that taught me I was worthless.
My school class was ruled by bullies, and I lived in fear of being attacked with bike chains and knives. My teachers openly humiliated me and called me a loser. And as a child, I didn’t question those judgments but absorbed them as my truth. That is, until I chose to transmute my pain, humiliation and rage into forward motion and rewrite my identity.
Just like Rikke, education became my lifeline and obsession: it was my ticket out of misery and into a life full of opportunities.
We Fell Madly in Love: With Each Other and With Our Shared Mission
We met each other at the age of 30, fell madly in love and decided to dedicate our lives to building IxDF into the gold standard for design education. Growing up, we both used education to build a life we love. Now, it’s our life’s mission to help others to do the same.
That’s why “Design a life you love” isn’t just a tagline. It's the gift we give to our members, and we mean it from the bottom of our hearts. We help IxDF members build amazing careers and prosperous, meaningful lives for themselves. We’ve transformed our childhood pains into a positive societal contribution, and that gives our past suffering a purpose. From pain to purpose.
But Why Design Education?
Because great design has the single greatest potential to impact the world in a positive way.
It touches every moment that matters. It holds the power to change the world, one experience at a time.
Design is not just for people with “designer” as a job title. The goal of great design is to empower people to reach their goals with ease and efficiency. That’s why we’re all designers, regardless of job title.
When you create a website or app, you design the behavioral pathways that influence every tiny choice: the tap, the swipe, the spark of trust, and the moment a user becomes a customer.
When a nurse guides a mother through birth, she designs the very first moment of a new life: the breathing, the fear, the tenderness, the first cry, the miracle of being held for the first time. Every word, touch, and quiet instruction becomes an intentional act of design.
And when an undertaker prepares a funeral, they design the last chapter of a life: the silence, the muted colors, the hand resting on a coffin, the soft closing of a door, and the final moment of letting go.
Design is everywhere and in everything. Design is how we shape the human experience.
That’s why design skills hold enormous power for anyone, in any job. Just remember this: with great power comes great responsibility, and our responsibility is to empower people, not exploit them.
Instagram Versus Reality: Success Story or Shitshow?
Today, IxDF stands as a global leader in design education.
That may sound impressive, but it’s the classic case of Instagram versus reality.
We’ll tell you the completely honest story of our glamourous highs and brutal lows. Both the Instagram-worthy moments and the moments where everything went to shit.
It certainly felt like a shitshow from time to time, so brace yourself for a rollercoaster ride.
Above all, remember that this story is not about us, but about you: We hope our story gives you hope, inspiration, and concrete methods to build your own dreams and help design a better world.
Your life will feel like a shitshow from time to time. But you can turn pain into power. If you want the Instagram-worthy days, you need the shitty days too: they are your fertilizer.
Go for it. If we can design a life we love, you can too!
Sneak Peek Into Our Airbrushed Instagram-Worthy Lifestyle
We get to work side by side with our favorite person. Each other.
After twenty years together, we’ve never been more in love, more fulfilled, and felt more alive.
We travel the world full-time in one-month increments to create courses on great design. One month in Saint Tropez. Another in Gstaad in the Swiss Alps. Then Nepal, and then a luxury resort in Thailand.
We never travel alone. Our two sons are part of everything we do. They see the world, experience it firsthand, and make it their classroom. Each month brings a new country, a new adventure, and another chapter in their school of life.
We live, work, learn, and explore as a family.
We wake up grateful every morning that we have a life filled with love, meaning, passion, and freedom. And we’re grateful to help our members achieve the same. We celebrate every single success story our members share with us. These moments fill us with energy, gratitude, and motivation to do more. Their success is our success.
We’ve always worked 100% remotely, even back in 2010 when we heard people whisper “weirdos” as we sat under palm trees with our laptops: “Look at those two weirdos. They think they’re in an office!”
Well, joke was on them. We were in an office. The best office in the world.
Our Tree of Life: The Internet Coconut Palm
For years, IxDF’s success literally hung from a palm tree.
We bootstrapped IxDF with zero investment capital, so we cut costs to extremes. We moved to a Thai island so cheap it didn’t even have internet. IxDF’s life depended on catching a faint 3G signal from a neighboring island.
Our jungle Wi-Fi involved a coconut tree, a rope, a rock, a smartphone with a Thai SIM card, and some serious out-of-the-box thinking.
We tied the rope to Mads’ phone case, tied a rock to the other end, and hurled it over a proud coconut palm. We scrambled to catch the rock on the other side and hoisted the phone high into the branches, where it aimed straight at that elusive mast on the neighboring island.
Hallelujah. Our unhinged entrepreneurial hack worked. IxDF survived. Our dream survived.
We named it the Tree of Life: our internet coconut palm.
How To Build a Unicorn, Savage Style
To stretch every dollar and increase our financial runway, we lived on just $11 per day—for both of us. That covered food, shelter, and life itself in a Thai bamboo hut.
Our neighbors were rats, bed bugs, frogs, and giant 3-meter lizards who roamed the piles of trash in search of a snack.
We had no running water and had to use the jungle as a toilet. Our meals consisted of rice and instant noodles. We watched our bodies deteriorate from malnutrition. It felt like starvation with a palm tree view.
Yes, we were dreaming of Silicon Valley while using a jungle as toilet.
Feast your eyes on the IxDF Headquarters.
You might find this funny now, but mark our words: In a few years, IxDF will be a unicorn. And when it happens, you'll catch us on a podcast, TED stage, or major conference, dishing out some unconventional advice to budding entrepreneurs:
"If you're serious about building a unicorn, you'd better be savage enough to shit in a jungle."
Entrepreneurship 101: Eating Insects at 80 km/h in a 1985 Toyota
They say extreme people get extreme results. We admit it: we're pretty extreme.
In Denmark, we bought a dumpster fire of a house to bootstrap IxDF and had to climb into the sewer to battle rats ourselves because we couldn’t afford pest control.
It was part of a brilliant (crazy?) master plan to increase our financial runway: turn the dark, moist, fungus-infected basement without windows into two nice rooms we could rent out to students to earn a basic income.
We strapped 25–50 kilo cement bags and demolition hammers onto our bikes because we couldn’t afford a car.
Mads’ sister saw our deep despair and gifted us an old rust bucket of a car, a 1985 Toyota Carina. But… we couldn’t afford repairs, so in the picture above you see us driving without a windshield and eating insects at 80 km/h.
We Breathed Fear of Bankruptcy for Breakfast
We breathed fear of bankruptcy for breakfast until we were in our 40s.
We couldn’t afford to buy a bed until we were 38. Every morning felt like a chiropractor’s business plan.
We know what life feels like when $1.50 for a shared café coffee is a rare luxury. For a decade, in our 30s, we shared a single coffee in cafés instead of buying one each—as a financial survival tactic.
From 2006 to 2013, every single cent we spent was a significant decision. Financially and emotionally, they were eight very long and brutal years. Mads had even pushed on since 2002.
In our “spare” time, we mopped floors, wiped bums, and renovated ruins to pay for the few pennies we needed for food.
The Love That Built IxDF: Two Hearts. One Mission. Zero Plan B.
We know what you’re thinking.
Building IxDF from scratch should have been impossible. It broke the rules of physics, business, and common sense. But our dream consumed every fiber of our being, and we were too busy to think about physics, reality, money, or other earthly constraints. We just knew in our hearts that we had to brute-force our dream into reality. We had zero plan B.
So we told reality to sit down and take notes: You can eat glass and walk through fire when you love someone the way we love each other, and when you share a mission that’s bigger than your own lives.
From our very first date, we knew we were meant to be. We had the same dream, the same drive. We’re perfectly unhinged, gritty, and obsessed in all the right ways:
Adventurous enough to hitchhike 500 km through a burning desert to a remote Bedouin village after just one week of dating.
Bold (unhinged?) enough to threaten the currently highest-ranking officer in the entire Danish army with gay porn as part of a power play (and win!).
Ambitious enough to start a tech company to compete with Hotmail (and succeed!).
Driven enough to sell peas at the side of the road at age 8.
Resilient enough to be humiliated while soaking your hands in human piss and shit.
Persistent enough to sleep on cardboard boxes and pick up blood-soaked human flesh to pay for diving adventures and ultimate freedom.
Willing to take things to the extremes: do user research in operating theaters during live surgical procedures, with patients’ bodies laid open and a full view of their intestines.
Strong enough to face years of loneliness while friends got married and had children, and to live with the painful question, “What’s wrong with me?”
Visionary enough to pioneer online video-based courses way back when online learning was in its infancy. And ambitious enough to be able to attract the world’s best design experts to create our courses.
Unhinged enough to steal toilet paper to save money. Zero dignity, but also zero burn-rate.
Dedicated enough to turn down wedding invitations from friends (and lie to them) because we couldn’t afford to buy a gift, let alone the bachelor’s party.
Strong (or crazy?) enough to endure a decade of technical insolvency to build IxDF. On paper: bankrupt. In reality: trapped in a financial death spiral where every bill created shame and dread.
Even then, we turned down millions in investment capital to protect IxDF’s freedom and independence. But poverty is not freedom. Quite the opposite. We felt more tied down than at a Berlin bondage fest.
A year after our first IxDF paycheck, we lost it all again, had to fire all IxDF employees, do a 180-degree pivot of our business model, and turn down speaking invitations at Google headquarters and Stanford University.
Naked in a Berlin Park and a Million-Dollar Lunch
Truth be told, we’ve also got a few screws loose.
We told our bank advisor that money would never be a goal for IxDF, and that our only KPI is to serve other people and help them become successful. We told her we believe in karma: if we keep serving others, the universe will take care of us financially.
She thought we smoked pot. (We didn’t)
So, back in 2012 we were bold (crazy? desperate?) enough to casually ask for 1 million dollars over a 2-hour lunch with the CEO of one of the world’s biggest software companies—and convincing enough to actually get it!
When the money arrived, Mads fell apart in tears, vomit, and diarrhea, but we still found the strength to decorate our table with Danish flags. Rikke cracked open an alcohol-free beer like it was champagne, and then... we did the unthinkable… we ordered TAKE-OUT!
And speaking of having a few screws lose…. We were also fearless enough to strip down naked in a public park in Berlin and ride an actual unicorn deep in the forests of Hungary on a team trip. We wanted to awaken the inner unicorn in each of our employees. To make them aim higher and chase their highest selves.
We were also unorthodox enough to launch a 40,000-Mile bike tour around planet earth—and get featured in TV, radio stations and news outlets like Forbes. We even got police escorts and university pep rallies to cheer for IxDF’s noble mission of democratizing design education!
The Darkness Behind the Instagram Filter
Today, our life looks like an airbrushed Instagram success story. And yes, we’ve truly built a life we love.
But remember, the tallest mountains cast the deepest shadows. Success doesn't rise in a vacuum. So, if you're going to read about our Instagram-worthy highs, you deserve to see just how deep we had to fall to earn them.
The Shitshow It Took to Get Here
This is me, Mads. I was supposed to spend quality time with our son, Felix. Instead, I passed out from exhaustion, collapsed on the grass, while Felix tried to wake me up. I felt like a fraud of a father, too broken to show up for my own son.
I’d been knocked out by a toxic mix of sugar, alcohol, SRRIs, weight training, long-distance running. All desperate attempts to force dopamine and serotonin into a system on the verge of collapse. We have similar pictures of Rikke, equally crushed.
Nature’s math is merciless and demands brutal symmetry: Every one of our Instagram-worthy moments is mirrored by a low of equal force. A darkness that sometimes felt savage and soul-stripping.
In full disclosure, some days we woke up with anxiety attacks so violent it felt like drowning in adrenaline. But we never gave up. We knew that no one was coming to save us. We had to push on.
So, let’s pull back the curtain and show you some of the shitshow it took to get here.
Black-Belt Bullshitters, Betrayal, and Machiavellian Hellscape
From the very beginning, we built IxDF as a fully remote company on a foundation of radical trust—only to be exploited by employees who saw that trust as weakness. Again and again. Betrayals came from the people we believed in and invested in.
We came to the cruel realization that many old friends, and even family, were secretly hoping we’d fail. Not because they hate us, but because our success reminds them of everything they never dared to try.
We hired a high-paid management team, C-level executives we hoped would carry us forward, who instead turned out to be black belts in bullshit. Gas-lighting, nepotism, theft, Machiavellian power games, lies, manipulation, you name it. Millions of dollars lost. Until one day, we finally realized the painful truth, looked each other in the eyes and said: “This is corrupt as fuck! We need to fire the entire executive layer and their fucking goons”.
Design influencers and self-proclaimed “gurus” have spread lies about IxDF just to boost their own status. Trolls. Haters. Opportunists feeding their egos by throwing stones at us.
A trusted IxDF employee who siphoned off money while he smiled in our Zoom meetings and asked about our sons. Or an employee who, with tears in his eyes, asked to borrow $15,000 to save his dying wife—then ghosted us the moment we asked about a plan for repayment. We never saw him or the money again.
Luckily, we had this view to keep us sane:
We also had to build a fully multi-national corporate architecture with four legal entities across four countries, anchored by a global HQ. Each entity with localized statutory compliance, multi-jurisdictional financial harmonization, payment gateways and banking infrastructures. It’s a soul-grinding continuum of legal entanglement, compliance recursion, and administrative entropy.
Let’s just be honest… it’s a FUCKING bureaucratic nightmare.
Turn Pain Into Power. Turn Victimhood Into Agency
Should you feel sorry for us?
Nope, not for a single second. This is not victimhood Olympics or a pity contest.
All of it… every humiliation, every betrayal… made us grow. It made us resilient and helped build our character. We feel a deep sense of gratitude for every bit of hardship we’ve experienced.
It’s almost poetic: the smell of shit fades but gratitude lasts forever. Hardship is a powerful fertilizer. It grows character, wisdom, and courage.
And this is the reason we’re telling you our story in such a brutally honest way:
Our story is not about us, it’s about you: Your life will be a shitshow from time to time. You will face chaos. You will feel stuck, broken, or betrayed. But you can turn your pain into power. Your wounds into wisdom.
Go for it! If two losers from a pig farm and a broken home can build a life we love, you can too!
Our Daily Lives Today? The Happily Ever After!
Like all good fairy tales, the story arc ends with a happily ever after. The treasure is worth the trials, and the bigger the dragon, the more epic the adventure becomes.
So what does our life look like today?
Let’s start with our work-life balance: We don’t have one!
We work 12+ hours a day, no weekends, no holidays. Non-stop. Simply because we love what we do. IxDF is not a job. It is our life’s mission.
We raise our children inside that mission. They play, learn, and fish right beside our remote offices. They grow up with family, freedom, and purpose blended into one.
Check out the great fishing location behind us. When we travel, we ONLY live by lakes, rivers, and the ocean so our sons can fish as soon as they’ve done their daily reading, writing, AI, and math.
They often call us in for dinner after they’ve caught, cleaned, and cooked the meal themselves. They’re grounded, non-entitled, hard-working, empathic, and rarely waste time in front of a screen. They’re sons of nature.
Rikke was born and baptized in pigshit, and that close connection to nature still shapes our family life and values.
We eat ultra-healthy. When our kids don’t catch the dinner, we eat nutritious chef-prepared food. We exercise and grow together as a family and with our friends.
We track 60+ biomarkers quarterly, optimize and rejuvenate our organs and metabolic health with brilliant doctors (and a pinch of AI). We push physical limits.
Mads runs marathons in the Swiss Alps, on Antarctica, and once in circles around our house during COVID lockdown. We can do more pull-ups and push-ups than at 20.
Life is full of uphill battles and sometimes you need the people you love to carry you through the hardest parts. In this mountain marathon, that wasn’t just metaphor but a literal push and pull across the finish line. We’re in this together.
When we bring our remote teams together, Felix and August often lead the adventures, kayaking through mangroves and exploring remote beaches. Barefoot, they teach our IxDF teams about the local wildlife. Yes, you can actually eat a horseshoe crab, as Felix recently showed our developers during a team trip in Thailand.
From Helicopters to Monasteries: The Adventure of Growing Design Skills
Design is everywhere and in everything. That’s why we travel the world to show you how design, both brilliant and broken, shapes all aspects of your everyday life.
And most importantly, together with IxDF’s hundreds of industry-leading designers and instructors, you’ll learn how to turn frustration into joy and complexity into simplicity.
You’ll instantly understand the principles of the circular user interface in an Apple Watch when you watch Rikke circling a famous stupa in Nepal in the middle of a thunderstorm. When you walk in circles around a stupa, you experience the same principles of orientation, flow, and continuous motion that make circular interfaces easy to use.
You’ll learn from the world itself, not from a slide deck.
To get just the right footage for our courses, we also do things on impulse, like taking a helicopter from Saint-Tropez to Monaco, to experience and capture the exclusive feeling of a seamless customer journey. That way, you can create that same feeling for the people you design for.
We crawl through deep, dark, muddy tunnels because even the rawest corners of nature hold inspiration for world-class user experiences.
We booked a private jet, so we can learn what millionaires expect in terms of user/customer experience. That way, we can teach you how to bring the same level of experience to everyone.
Meet up with royalty and attend their birthday party at their monastery while shooting content on design thinking? Check!
Now It’s Your Turn: Design a Life You Love and a Future That Feels More Human
We started by saying that our story is about you, not us.
The biggest obstacle to everything you dream of—wealth, love, purpose, creativity, freedom—is often yourself.
If you feel stuck, unfulfilled or lost, it’s time to believe in yourself and design a life you love.
And it’s not just about you, your salary, and your career. You can work towards something bigger than yourself: the impact you have on the people around you.
In a world that’s becoming more artificial, lonely, and divisive, you can help bring the heart back.
We need people like you who choose to care. Together, we can build a future that feels more human, more connected, and more alive. What greater purpose could there be?
With gratitude and love, Rikke and Mads
