My First Million - MFM x Trends - How Jack Butcher Used Twitter to Generate $1m in 18 months (From Scratch)

Episode Date: November 9, 2020

Jack Butcher talks about how he's built up Visualize Value and "Build Once, Sell Twice", where he's productized his services. Sam and Jack talk about scaling to $1m in revenue in 18 months, plus other opportunities that Jack sees for content creators, how he runs his course, the economics of agencies, and more. To listen to the full episode, head over to trends.co for your $1 trial. You'll get access to future bonus episodes plus our weekly Trends reports, access to a community of entrepreneurs and a lot more!  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What's going on, my first million listeners? This is Sam Parr. Today, we have another special episode. This episode is for Trends members only. I know it stinks if you're not a subscriber. But what we're going to do is give you 15 minutes or so of the episode for free. If you like it, you can go to Trends.com and sign up and listen to the rest of the episode. Or if you sign up for the hustle in your email, you'll see.

We'll send you some show notes. So even if you're not a subscriber, you're going to get some value. But on Trends. you'll get the full episode and transcription, and then you'll get access to community where this guest is actually a member of the community. But today's guest is Jack Butcher. I met Jack in our Trent's community,

and I actually went to his house a few weeks ago. My wife and I went to his house and met up with him and his wife. And Jack Butcher, I've met a lot of people in my business just because of, you know, with the media business, you get to meet a lot of interesting folks. He's one of the more interesting folks

because he's got such a great energy. But basically his story is that Jack came to America at age 22 from England and then worked his way up where he worked in an agency as a designer. And things were going okay. But he decided to start his own agency and it sucked. It was a lot of work. And it definitely paid the bills, but still was a ton of work. And so he started dabbling with some digital products where he launched just like a $19 daily planner on Gumroad.

And it kind of took off. I mean, it opened his eyes to sales, to digital products. And so he decided to do this thing where he productized his service. And he created this course called Build Once, Sell Twice, the productization of ideas, I think it's called.

And then he also created this other thing called Visualized Value, which is a design course that teaches you how to take concepts that are kind of complicated and put them in really digestible, easy to understand graphics. And I've paid him to do this with some of our stuff. And it's just crazy fascinating.

But he built this business to close to a million dollars a year in revenue, in only 18 months. And so in this episode, I talked to Jack about courses that he's seeing out there that are awesome, that he loves, opportunities for content creators to build courses. I talked to him about how he runs his course and what works and what doesn't. We also talk about the economics of the agency business and where some opportunity is. And then we also talk about productization, productizing different services and what he sees

as different opportunities that are out there. It's an incredibly fascinating episode. I learned a lot. I think you guys will too. So check it out. Again, you're going to get the first few minutes, 15 minutes or so for free. But if you want the whole thing, go to trends.com and sign up and you'll see the rest of the episode. All right. So what I'm, we're recording now.

Oh, good. You're drinking my drink. Our drink now, I guess. We're mutual Heineken zero lovers. We should get that sponsorship rolling. I know, I wish. I'm going to put, so this podcast, what we're talking about right now, this is going to be live on our main podcast feed. and it'll get listened by a ton of people.

And then we're going to chop it up at one point and only trends members are going to see it. Nice. And so what I wanted to talk about today was some of your course stuff. But right now, I've already written the blog posts. And we're live now. We're recording.

I've written the blog post. And what I've said about you is that I don't know how I met you on Twitter or something in the group. I don't remember how I met you. But then we went and hung out in real life. And I have to say, you're one of the more interesting people I've ever met. And your business is fascinating. The summary that I'll give and then I'll let you do all the talk in is that you came from England at, what, 22?

21, I think, yeah. 21. You did a bunch of part-time, low-paying agency gigs. Kind of worked your way up the totem pole a little bit. Eventually quit and you're like, I'm going to start my own. agency. You started your own agency and it did mildly well. Like it paid the bills for sure, but it was a pain in the ass hard work. You hated it. You created a $19 like gum road thing on how to organize your thoughts. And it did okay. But that kind of clicked for you. And then you created

this visualized value store, course, whatever you want to call it, community. And you share your revenue numbers. And 18 months in, you're in the ballpark of like 800 to a million a year in revenue. Yep. Great. So what, I don't, I mean, I care a little bit about your journey, but tell me just like a little bit in your words, even though I'm doing all the talking for you. No, you got, you got, it's a great overview. So the, all of the agency jobs kind of touched on a little bit of, a little bit of each part of the agency world. So I trained as a designer, came in as a designer on the, you know, the bottom of the totem pole and you're doing all the production.

doing all the stuff that nobody else wants to do. So that's like working on pitch presentations, you know, running around town, picking things up and, you know, doing all the stuff that is considered too low level for the executive team to get involved in. And went, bounced around from like tiny agencies, big agencies, worked in-house at a startup for a little while, worked at Bloomberg for nine months on the design team there.

And then got to, I think, a point in my agency career where I started to see the economics of the agency. So I like climbed up enough for them to like show me the the project, like the bill essentially that they were sending clients. And I was like, hang on a minute. You charging $30,000 to like design an email. It's like if I could get one of these clients on my own, then I'm going to be set. But what I didn't realize is kind of an arrogant way to approach it is that there's all of this infrastructure and 12 people, strategists and people that have to answer emails at the middle of the night and all that stuff. So jumped into that world and just quickly overwhelmed by all the stuff that, you know, wasn't first nature to me or the administration

or the other stuff that comes with running a like complex service business. And then, you know, over the course of six to nine months, started to dial in on the product side as a result of like starting an agency that was everything to everyone. So we'll shoot car commercials, will build websites, we'll design apps, we'll do branding exercises. Then I just narrowed in the service mix to just do one thing. And that's how we met, if you recall, was the presentation for the ideation boot camp. And I just went all in on this idea of visualizing value, which was something that I did to acquire business.

I was building pitch decks to basically win business. And that was the asset that I would never get paid to make. but it would always get me a job. And I was like, you know, a bell goes off. It's like, oh, maybe there's a market to just make these assets as the agency service. Then obviously you hit a limit there with the time. And then started, yeah, looking at how I could productize that skill set. And that's where the course products started to come from.

So maybe we should break this conversation up. And I asked you to prepare a little bit with some course ideas. Maybe we should break this conversation. I want to learn about the agency business. I want to learn about productizing a service, and I want to learn about courses. Let's start with courses. So your business is like in the $800 to a million range now.

And this is all public. You tweet this out. Yeah, yeah. With a lot of times with courses, I've got friends that have them, and they like get big fast, but then they kind of teeter out. Do you think that's going to happen with you? It may, what's interesting, I think, is the thing that brings in business for the course is like remaining relevant on the front end. So this like my social presence in itself,

I think the learnings that I'm producing as a result of the promoting the course go back into the course. So it's like this self-fulfilling feedback loop. And while one of the courses is specific to design, the other one is about productization. So it feels to me like it has a longer runway because that is, you know, a huge, there's a huge market of people that have an incredible amount of knowledge or experience that they want to turn into something that they can, you know, detach their time and income and sell repeatedly. And the way I think about it is because that's not even the design product, it's not riding a trend of a tactic or anything like that is going to expire.

So I figure as long as I stay ahead of the market, then I have a lot to show. share to people that are a couple steps behind me in that journey. So my gut is I could keep it running for a while. What's the end game? I think building the, like, building the media component of the company up a little more than it is now. So the courses sell as a result of the things. that I'm producing in real time on social.

So there's a pretty linear relationship between, you know, me making content and posting it on social and earning from the course. So the end game is to just slowly increase, well, it's not an end game, but the target that's ahead that's going to stay ahead is, like, decrease the amount of like daily, creative input to sustain a certain volume of sales. Does that make sense? So, but like, do you have a goal? Like by 40, you want to do something.

Like, do you want to sell this business? Do you want to, do you have like a kind of something? No, honestly, it's been just a process of doing less of what I don't want to do over time. And I've kind of hit that point now where most days I'm doing what I want to do. So like the goal thing always tends to put me on a path for a certain amount of time that I have to make some aggressive compromise. or try and hit a target for some arbitrary reason. So there is no like, you know, five year, like this is exactly what needs to happen.

I think just optimizing for having a good time. You're just living. Yeah, trying. Try and, yeah. My friend Andrew, so this is only the second time that we've done this. And he was like, I just want to figure out what makes me miserable and avoid it. Yeah, it's about spot on. That's very articulately put.

You, okay, were you able to think about this? This whole course thing. I imagine what you felt is what a lot of people feel, which is like there's no way someone's going to pay me money for this. Sure. Yeah, 100%. What do you think is, where do you think are some interesting courses that are doing well? You told me about one that I'm going to buy, actually.

So I take courses a lot. There's one on how to buy a luxury car at a discount and sell it after you drive it around for a year at a similar rate at what you purchased it for. That's a great example, yeah. How big is that one? How big is it? Yeah. I would think they're probably doing high six figures a year off of that.

That's crazy. What's that one called? Exotic car hacks, I think it's called. God, that's brilliant. Yeah, so fascinating. The way that you get customers for that is you just have an exotic car Instagram handle or YouTube page, which is fun. Yeah, I think those are the ones that tend to do well, right? is when you have some way to promote it on the front end

that's so naturally aligned to the course itself. And that's one of the reasons in hindsight why I think Visualized Value took off is you have this organic content engine on the front end where you can produce something. So I was like, oh, that's cool. I want to learn how to make that. And then you can feed them into the product loop.

So that's like a huge part of making it sustainable and work the like sell as a result of producing content on the front end. And so that I think is a trend and the exotic cars is a great example of that. You have something to point out that makes people want to learn the thing. What are some other examples that you like? I mean, I've seen people, there's a few people on Twitter that are like AWS. I don't know the intricacies of some of this stuff, but like dissecting some facet of like Amazon AWS. You should check out Daniel Vassallo.

he's doing a good numbers on gum road with an AWS product and there's a few people that are what's that what's that mean a WS product Amazon web services yeah but what's that mean a product oh it's like a tutorial on how to get the most out of some facet of AWS so it's like super niche and you can imagine if you wrote a book on that you know you might charge a similar price for it but it would be the return would be significantly lower, I would imagine, unless you're with some huge publisher and you've got big reputation. But you can get into that niche and capture so much more of the revenue. I know people with big books. You make more money than they do. Right. Yeah, it's fascinating. You go direct to consumer, yeah. For some reason, you call it a course, so you could charge $299. You call it a book

and outmost 29. Right, right. That's outrageous. Yeah, $29 for a book. Someone's life work. it's not yeah it's just a slight tweak in positioning obviously you can do things with a course that are slightly different than a book can't put a video in a book or you can't you can but you can get close enough with the information it's just uh yeah there's a there's a different perception of it for sure if what do you what did you use to learn how to do this uh i think it's a probably a byproduct of taking a fair few and like figuring out what i like and don't like when i'm learning And I also did, like, had this feedback loop with Celia, who you met, my wife. She's not a designer.

That's when I first did the thing. I was like making the curriculum and giving it to her. I was like, does this make sense? Can you follow this? If you had no context, would you be able to do this? Or is, am I missing something? So finding somebody like, obviously who is your target audience and making them go through it in order. And they're like, yeah, I've no clue how you got from here to here or this thing is missing.

So that little feedback loop made it was like instrumental. When we launched it, everyone's like, oh, yeah, this makes a ton of sense. And her feedback actually made me include stuff that I wouldn't have ever thought to include. Maybe, you know, you as the practitioner, maybe don't think that point X is necessary to communicate, but you probably need to. So that's a huge part of it. I don't, there's no like official resource on how to do it, just responding. Well, there will be, but I didn't.

use any. When you when you look at like who does it best, who do you use as an your North Star? First courses. Yeah, I I logged into that Sam Ovens guy, consulting.com. He comes off as a scammer, but damn, his shit's good. Yeah, I mean, it's like incredibly comprehensive. I think so much of it has to do with like learning style. Like some people want to sit through a two and a half hour like webinar style. Show me the like full-on philosophy principles, like the psychological breakdown of how this ad works and other people are like, you know, want to read a 45-second article and understand what it is. So it's hard to, it's hard to, hard to say who's doing it best because I think everybody's

kind of got a different take on it. Yeah. And I still think it's, I still think it's early. When I first got into it, I was like, oh, there's so many people doing this. You know, I've, I've seen like thousands of different courses and feels like getting in late into the game. But when you get into that world, there aren't really, you know, they aren't that, like there aren't a huge amount of people doing it. And if they are, they're kind of not a standalone brand. They're using something like a teachable or a thinkific or it's like they exist within this marketplace.

They don't have a brand unto themselves. So a lot of those platforms dictate how the courses work versus people that are building like custom configured things based on how they like to learn. Is there anything that you've seen like someone's blog or a YouTube page and you're like, man, if you had a learning component to this,

your business would be significantly larger. Anything that comes to mind, that's an obvious move that someone hasn't pounced on, in your opinion? I think there's like loads of consulting businesses that could be doing this. You know, people that have like really expensive services that they sell one to one, but could have a productized version of it that exists

a tenth of the price. That's essentially what we have going on now. Specific examples, I'm thinking like a lot of skills that teach people to be like self-reliant in some way. So like creative, the ability to like, I think design is a good example. Writing is a good example. Writing is a popular one. My best friend Neville has copywriting course.com. He's been doing that for 15 years, maybe 10 years, making an awesome living. Then there's that guy, Dave Perel. It's called the Write of Passage, I think.

It's called, I think he charges two or $4,000 to learn how to write. Writing is like a massive market. I think your market of design is huge. I think that other markets that are huge, but they're played out a little bit, is Excel. I think Excel is a little played out. I think that the whole no code thing still has a lot of room, like how to just hack your way through Webflow. That's kind of interesting.

Yeah, there's a guy, as a couple of other examples come to mind, there's a guy, Ezra Cohen, who sells, you seen this guy, sells like video templates on Instagram. I think he mostly runs his stuff. But I think he's doing seven figures a year selling like these pre-packaged, like creative templates and some some guidance, some tutorials that go along with it. And then I think he jumped to how to help creatives package like templatized work

as the next, like the layer on top of that as his next course. I don't know how he's doing with that one, but I know his template stuff was flying. All right. Sorry. I know. I'm a tease. This is the end of the episode.

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And I've actually met up with a ton of the folks who I've met in the group. So it's so fascinating. So go to Trends.com if you want to join that and get the full episode. And I'll keep doing these where you'll get a little bit of access to some of the paid stuff. But we have a ton more. So check it out, trends.co. See ya.