The Startup Ideas Podcast - Building the Right Product, At the Right Time, For the Right People with Jack Butcher

Episode Date: November 23, 2022

Are you ready for the next iteration of Where It Happens? Greg Isenberg is now the host of the podcast, which will be focused on catching up with incredible guests at the intersection of community, commerce, and content. Today, Greg is joined by Jack Butcher, the founder of Visualize Value, which offers community and content for building independent income on the internet. In this episode Jack tells Greg how he pivoted from the chaos of running an agency to building products for a community he understood. ►►Subscribe to Greg's weekly newsletter for insights on community,creators and commerce.You'll also find out when new and exclusiveepisodes come out from Where it Happens. And it's totally free.https://latecheckout.substack.comFIND ME ON SOCIAL:Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@gregisenbergLINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:Production Team: https://www.bigoceanpodcasting.comJack Butcher: https://twitter.com/jackbutcherA SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS►► This episode is brought to you by Retool.Retool is the fast way to build your own custom internal tools for your business. With a complete library of 100+ fully-featured, accessible UI components that you can drag and drop into any interface, Retool’s platform lets you build the custom internal tools your team needs, 10x faster.Thousands of teams at companies like Amazon, DoorDash, and NBC collaborate around custom-built Retool apps to operate faster and better. Also, teams of up to five can build Retool apps for free. We're huge fans of the product! If you want to learn more, go to https://retool.com/►► This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens.AG1 by Athletic Greens is incredible and we have been starting every day with it for several years. It’s just one scoop in 8-12 oz. of water each morning, and you're getting 75 high-quality vitamins, whole-food sourced ingredients, probiotics, and adaptogens to help you start your day right. It's one daily habit that supports gut health, supports the immune system, recovery, energy, and focus!Right now, Athletic Greens is giving you a free 1 year supply of immune-supporting Vitamin D and 5 free travel packs with your first purchase. Take ownership of your health today by going to https://athleticgreens.com/wihSHOW NOTES0:00 - Intro0:37 - The vision for Visualize Value10:14 - Testing, iterating and validating an idea13:28 - How to name your product or service20:19 - What is Daily Manifest?26:06 - The success formula of Visualize Value33:46 - How Jack Butcher's brain thinks about Web338:56 - Future product mapping for Visualize Value48:41 - Jack Butcher peers into the crystal ball of Web3

welcoming Jack Butcher to the show. Selfishly, I wanted to catch up with Jack and figure the only way he'd catch up with me would be on a show publicly. Not true. Not true. You know, you never know. There's two areas I want to get into today, Jack. So one is just learning about visualized value, how you structure the business. And the other area is just how you're thinking about Web 3. Yep.

But let's start with, for those of you who don't know you, what visualized value is. And maybe if you can talk through a little bit about the vision, and actually, our friend, Aaron Alto, had a really amazing map that he drew about really like a Walt Disney map almost of, like the vision of a lot of ways, visualized value. and I was hoping you can maybe walk us through a little bit about that. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Sounds good, man.

Let me do a 30 seconds of context setting. So my professional background is in graphic design, studied graphic design and got started on the internship circuit in London, straight out of school, working for tiny little design studios and had a couple of friends that were going to New York. I went out to New York on a whim. sent 150 emails to Craigslist classified ads to try and get some design internship while I was in New York. Got one response. It worked out and kind of got into the New York agency scene and moved around there for about eight or 10 years, a bunch of different jobs, bunch of different scales of

businesses. So it started out in like a boutique branding agency doing like little independent businesses, restaurants, stuff like that, went to huge consulting firms, 15,000 employees doing like massive redesigns of big digital products and websites and you know like complete opposite experience of that worked in a couple other agencies after that that were smaller that specialized in different things like an experiential agency that would do point of sales stuff in stores museum exhibit stuff like that so basically got a little bit of exposure to every like little avenue of like graphic design and a professional context, I guess.

And then about late 2017, had the, I guess, the naivety and arrogance to think that I could start my own agency and do it better than everybody else that I'd worked for in the past. And I think to some degree, like your energy when you're that age is like what gives you the advantage. But you obviously have to have the skills to build a business and hire people and, you know, get to the scale that. the people that you're working with need you to be in order to interact with you,

right? Like you have to play the role of everyone to begin with. And that's what I did for the first six or nine months. And I burned out horribly. So this is beginning of 2019. And the like genesis of the idea that created visualized value was basically the in the agency process or in the agency environment, I should say, the process where I was, I think, retroactively thinking about it, adding the most value, was in the pitch process.

So I'd sit down and, you know, there's 10 people in a room and you try and distill all of these ideas into a compelling narrative to go and take to a client and ask them for six figures, seven figures, whatever it might have been at the time in the different agencies. And that process I've found very rewarding and it was almost the thing that nobody else wanted to work on, at least in the places where I was, is like, this is the, thing that you have to get there first for and you leave last and it's kind of a thankless job a lot of the times you're just doing the production work of putting together PowerPoint slides basically and then I realized after burning out trying to do everything as an agency owner I was like okay

I'm just going to focus on this and the name visualized value actually came kind of in collaboration with an early client who I think used that phrase it's like oh like we have all this intangible value, you're able to help us visualize it. And that was really the guiding principle from that point forward was just working with people who have ideas that they find difficult to explain or they have businesses that are intangible. Right. If you're not selling a pair of jeans, no one can like look at your product and say, I want to buy that. So a lot of our early clients were service businesses, software companies, people that build things that you can't like see, additionally. And then visualized value social channels came as a device for basically finding

leads for that service business. So I was visualizing these concepts that I thought had like broader appeal. So the books that I were reading at the time or people that were like remote mentors to me through whether it was Twitter or books that I've been reading, take their ideas, add this visual context to it. And that's where the social unlock came from. So finding ideas that other people had already kind of perfected, add some visual context, they retweet it. My network grows as a function of that.

And then originally that led to some more service work. But then there came a point where the demand for service work kind of exceeded my ability to deliver on it. And that's when Visualized Value became a product business. It's about 6.35 a.m. here and I'm just about to have my AG1 by Athletic Greens. It's this powder that I look forward to having every single day. I put it in about 10 ounces of water. It contains vitamins and probiotics and whole food source ingredients that really gets my energy up, my recovery up, and my focus up. And I look forward to it really, really every single day.

Just like how I have my morning coffee. I love having my morning AG1. So for listeners to the pod, I think you might like AG1 too. So Athletic Greens is offering a one-year supply of immune-supporting vitamin D and five of these free travel packs with your first free purchase. All you have to do is go to athletic greens.com slash WIH. and claim it. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

When you were sort of remixing other people's content and adding a visual element on it, were you like, did you have a grand plan being like, hey, I'm going to go and create social content and my plan is to get to 100,000 followers within 12 months, or was it more naive than that in the sense of like, you kind of followed your curiosity and when was it? Yeah, 100% more naive.

So I was really new to Twitter as a platform too. So I wasn't really aware of the fact that people of huge stature, many, many, many steps ahead of me were like waking up and checking their Twitter every day. Like the first couple weeks I was on Twitter, I just, I didn't understand how people used it as a platform. I thought it was another like, you know, Facebook fan pages, for example. Like people have that stuff made for them or they have teams managing it and stuff like that. So I think like this really weird arbitrage thing became clear to me. It was like, wow, the people who I'm making this about are actually reading it. As soon as that idea clicked, it was an accident that I figured that out.

But as soon as that clicked, I started to lean into that more for sure. Yeah, I feel like you started doubling down because it's like a positive reinforcement loop. You're like, okay. And let's be honest, we're all addicted to the likes and retweets to a certain extent. Even if it's subconscious, it's just like a pat on the back. Yeah. So it's like, oh, that thing performed well. Maybe this thing will perform well. That's kind of similar. And then you kind of just before you know it, you're on that treadmill. Indeed. Indeed. Yeah. Yeah. And that probably was six or nine months of doing that before anything meaningful.

Like, there was a good, a good amount of time between that transition from like the slow drip of, you know, maybe one or two people reaching out by email a week and saying like, do you do commissions or can, we sit down and work on something together. I'm trying to think, weirdly enough, I know I saw on Twitter just before we got on here, you were interviewing David Perel today. It was actually a David Porell tweet that was the genesis for the first product that we put out, seriously put out. There was a couple little experiments before that,

but our first education product, which was focused on the design style of visualized value, was prompted by a David Perrell tweet. So you were following David Perrell, who writes about writing on Twitter. He puts out a piece of content that's around productizing something via education or something like that. That prompts you. No, he actually said the skill that I'm trying to learn next is design. And he tagged me in that post.

And then that was the, you know, that was the catalyst for saying, who else is interested in this? I think I quote retweeted it. It got a decent amount of attention. I mean, by today's standard, not a huge amount, honestly. But it was enough at that point in my Twitter journey to be like, okay, there's more than half a dozen people that are signaling that they would pay for something like this.

So I'm going to put it together. You know, when I was coming up, the lean startup was such an important book. And it was a book about how do you test ideas? iterate, validate the ideas and this whole loop around it. And I feel like that was very, very much based on web and buying traffic to web pages. Like now it's more social based, I feel like. He tweeted at you. You retweeted it. You got some validation. Then you're like, hey, it's probably worth it to spend some hours dedicated to this and see if I can build a product. Yeah. And I think even if you didn't build a product, like just the direction that that points you in in terms of the content

you start creating or the things you start talking about, it's all, as you say, like just leading you in a more pointed direction than just like spray and pray here. You know, I think there was already some direction based on the fact I was looking for consulting clients, but I never really thought of myself as an educator or somebody who should be creating materials to educate. people until someone asked me to do it. And that, like, making that leap, I think is quite empowering when you're making the material when somebody's asked you to do it, right, as opposed to you, like, just sitting down at a keyboard with a blank piece of paper and saying,

I'm going to teach people this, this and this, knowing that there's a demand to learn it before. And that doesn't necessarily have to be someone asking you directly. That could be another trend that you're observing. I do think there was something to, distinct about visualized value that helps channel some demand because this is actually when I was developing it I think I started with like design right here's a design course it's like that's just so ridiculously broad I have no idea where to start and then it narrowed down it became the title of it is how to visualize value so it's a very very narrow subset of design like how do you take an idea and use simple geometry to turn it into a concept that people can look at and read

visually. And that like narrowed it down to the point where it feels like manageable, both from like teaching and consuming, I would imagine. Yeah, some takeaways I have from that is, well, one is there's, there's almost this invisible hand that exists on social that as you put out content, there's this like invisible hand that's saying like put out more of this content or, hey, this product that you know, you should probably go and build it. So it's trust your trust the invisible hand. I think that often we don't trust it. And it's like there's a reason why people are resonating with it. And then and the second lesson I have is that I'm taking from you is how much the importance of owning a phrase is. Oh yeah.

For sure. Right? Like, if visualized value was called something else, like... Yeah, graphic design. It was broad as that, right? It's like how to do graphic design, you just can't... You don't build equity in that idea the same way. And people just don't latch on to it.

I feel like we under index for naming a ton. I 100% agree, yeah, yeah, for sure. Like, I spend so much time thinking about names. Like, I have a note in Iowa. where I have like a million names and you know I follow New York Times new word mention you know I'm talking about yeah yeah the Twitter account yeah the Twitter account where it's like the first appearance of a word in the New York Times so like let's say like visualized value is published in the New York Times for the first time ever this Twitter account is going to public is going

to tweet it and it kind of gives you some hint as to where culture is going and there's opportunities to buy those domains, create products around that. Curious your thoughts on naming. Yeah, I 100% agree. And there's, you go back to that map idea, the couple of other things that exist on that map.

After we created how to visualize value, the second product was called Build Once, Sell Twice, which is like a meta commentary on if you have a skill set and you can organize it and productize it in a way that can transmit it to other people, you can essentially build it once and sell it infinitely, zero cost of replication. And again, you could find a way to describe that generically and it's not compelling at all versus you have this four-word phrase that people are repeating back to you after you've said it three times.

Yeah, and I think what I love about build one, sell twice. is it fits into that category of like a mantra. It's something that people can say repeatedly, keeps them grounded. It reminds me of the founder of Shopify's, arm the rebels. Yeah, that's great. Stuart Butterfield, the founder of Slack,

has, we don't sell saddles here. I think it's important, you know, when you're coming up with an idea for a product, or you want to come up with an idea for a product based on an audience, which is what you had, is thinking about what are different phrases that could come to mind and what are emerging phrases and how could you own them? Yeah, yeah. I think that's a lot of that came from the advertising world too, you know, when you're like

in a war room, in an agency environment and you have to distill the advertising world. this entire brand story or product story into something that fits on a subway ad or, you know, a banner or a out of home ad that somebody's driving past at 70 miles an hour, that muscle memory, I think, that I picked up in those environments definitely helped teach me the lesson that language is just incredibly powerful. The first guy I ever worked for was a creative director with a writing background. and that, you know, as I came out of school, I put way, I'd put so much more emphasis on how something looked or the, you know,

the nuances of the visuals because I was a graphic designer. And then when you get into a commercial environment, you start to get introduced to like what persuasion is, what advertising is, and how even looking at like print ads, if you run through like a David Ogilby annual, or any kind of OG advertising character. They've got these print ads where there's five words on a piece of paper and you just knocks you over how clever it is.

This is another lesson I learned from being a designer is going into interviews and thinking that I was going to have to present my degree, the way I thought about everything and like kind of communicate my perspective. versus just showing up and opening my portfolio. And people look at it and be like, that's good. How much of that did you do? Do you want a job? Right.

And there was this one example that still stands out in my mind. There was an agency that I always wanted to work for that used to do kind of spec work. So they would just mock something up that they wanted to work on. Like they would say, let's imagine the future of air travel. And this is in like 2012. and they're mocking up these like incredibly thoughtful UI and UX patterns and animating them. They didn't write any software. They were just showing their vision for the space.

And then once they'd done all that work, all the clients would come to them. Like Virgin Atlantic, American Airlines, Delta, whoever else would be like, we basically just want to put our logo in the top left-hand side of the work that you've already done. And that was so different than the agency environment that I've been in, where clients would send you a request and they would often have misdiagnosed their own problem, right? They've gotten to a point where they've made a bunch of decisions internally and they're like, we need a campaign for this versus, you know, coming to you and saying, we're not selling enough of these or like we want more of these types of people to buy our stuff. They don't really, at least in the environments that I was in, didn't approach the problem that way versus

this agency that I admired that would kind of create these magnets where here's what we're capable of. Here's the type of work we're interested in doing. We've already done a bunch of the work and the thinking come and get involved. And that I think translated over time to me. It's kind of reflected in that what we talked about with making the visuals for people without their permission, just trying to add some visual context to these ideas I already appreciated and seeing the kind of ripple effects of that. So permissionless apprentice is a really simple curriculum that talks about that idea of starting projects without permission using the internet to create opportunity,

attract collaborators, clients, etc, etc. It's a dollar and it's like the portal into it's the first stop on that map that Aaron drew that's really like starting to. hopefully prime a way of thinking that will make you much more able to take advantage of the vast opportunities that exist on the internet with a few tweaks to how you think about publishing your work. When I think about visualized value, it's different portals that are basically education, community and tools to help you unlock pieces of the internet. Is that?

Yeah, that's excellent. I have to have to run that back. clip that. Okay, so you've built this ecosystem and you didn't talk about Daily Manifest, which really, in my opinion, is the entry to, you know, the entry portal. Can you actually talk a little bit about that? So we skipped over that. That was actually the first product. So before the David Perel thing that we talked about, when I was making this transition from like agency, burned out, crazy, like everyone else has control over your day, right? You're just like, reacting to meetings and deadlines that are being set externally.

Once I decided to stop doing that, I had to like consciously make an effort to plan out my days. And the Daily Manifest was like this little tool that I used to scribble out on a piece of A4 paper. And when I was putting content out on Instagram, sharing all these ideas that I was really latching onto or they were really helping me like, think about how to build a visualized value or transition it into a proper brand and business from this like chaotic service world I was living in. A lot of the feedback I got from people was

time management, you know, I'm procrastinating. I can't manage my days. I don't know how to like consistently work on something and the daily manifest was just like a test product. I was like, okay, I'll take this thing that I write down every day, formalize it, basically put into a template in Figma and package it up and give people access to the PDF and a community on the side. So you buy the plan, with the plan comes, or the buy the template, sorry, and with the template comes access to what was at the time, a WhatsApp group. And I think I sold it for nine bucks and I got probably 60 people in a few months to buy that. So, you know, nothing, nothing outrageous, but again, some validation and an opportunity to

just talk to people one on one that were already interested in the stuff that Visualized Value was talking about. And yeah, that product is now free. There's 15,000, 20,000 downloads at this point. And that is really the foundation for all of these ideas is, you know, carve out a certain amount of time a day where you can start to work on something that will compound over time, start to figure out what it is that you can do that is unique to you or that an arbitrage opportunity that exists based on your experience and the fact that you have access to anyone in the world. You have to kind of get to a point where you do something long enough to see a return start to happen. And I think that, you know, I had the,

I guess the luxury of making that transition from already having some connections in the design world and had some service work going on. If I was starting from scratch, this was the tool that I thought would be the most helpful to kind of stay on track and start to record what's happening in real time so you can look back on it. Because we have a very strong tendency to kind of forget the evidence in favor of progress we're making. right like even now you look at the stuff you're putting out and compare it to two three years ago it's improved massively but if you're not consciously making a record of that and reflecting on it very hard to see that i don't know if this was intentional with daily manifest but what you did with daily manifest is what i call building a community magnet and the old way of thinking about it you know from the advertising world too which is like a lead magnet which is how do you create a

of software or a product that people want access to. And in return, you get their information, which you can then sell them things. What you did was you created something free, daily manifest, which you focused on a niche that you understood well because at the same time, you were building the social presence on Instagram and Twitter. Today, you have hundreds of thousands of followers on both. but back then when you were starting out, you know, you had a few thousand followers. But it was enough to get started.

So now all of a sudden you have these people in your WhatsApp group. And it's like, oh, hey, like, what do we share in common? What are we, you know, what are we building here? Like, what could I build for you? And it was basically like a very cheap, quote unquote, way of having co-founders, really, in something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. it's very hard to even understand what attracts somebody to the thing you've built even after you've built it and gone through that process a bunch of times.

So even just having conversations about, you know, why, why does visualize value resonate with you? Which of the visuals was it that caught your attention first and just trying to really understand which pieces of all of the things that we put out are the most, are the most interesting or the most interesting or the most. useful to people and then drilling down into those things and building more stuff around those insights has been the has been the formula since since starting it and is still the formula now. If you were to ask me, what is the formula to the success of visualized value?

The formula for me is you focused on a niche that you understood really well. You built a set of phrases that you owned. You gave a lot of value up front. a community magnet. You owned an aesthetic. The aesthetic of visualized value when you were posting and still posting to this day on Instagram and Twitter is you were like the reason why it turned heads of David Perel, et cetera, was because we just never saw images like that.

It was so simple. Your color palette was black and white. That level just wasn't posted often. And especially with the consistency. see, the be consistent of, you know, every day, like, I see you even to this day, like, you're constantly tweeting, you know? The way I see it is you're putting, you know, idea germs out there and you're seeing what is resonating, what isn't resonating. And then you're storing that in your Jack butcher brain, which is so amazing. And you're kind of like,

oh, I should do this with that. And while you're doing all this, you're building new products, new educational products, new communities. You're selling things. We haven't talked about Web 3 yet and we will, but you're selling things on foundation, NFTs, etc. But thank you for explaining a little bit about how we got here. Where are we today with the business and, you know, where are you going with it? Sure. Yeah. I think one of the things, and this is the first conversation I'm having publicly about some of these milestones. So visualized value was also started mid-pandemic or like early pandemic. So there were a lot of different tailwinds that made it popular at the beginning that I,

you know, was aware of at the time, but in hindsight with like behavior changing back closer to what it was before the pandemic, there's a few ways in which that's affected the business. So obviously, I don't have any metrics on it. Somebody's probably done this research, but maybe screen time was up three, four, five X two years ago. Everybody's just sat in front of their computer all day long. And we didn't know how long this thing was going to last. And everybody's trying to figure out how to become more economically resilient, like start participating on the internet, et cetera, et cetera. So this is like blowing up at the same time that visualized value is building all these digital resources. I think that was 2020. So our biggest

like just exploded in 2020. That was like, you know, critical mass got to probably 10,000 students by the end of 2020 from the summer. Last year, NFT craziness. Visualized value is still growing on the community and education side, but not at the same clip it was in 2020. Still does very well. But the NFT narrative actually, I think, consumed a lot of the people that were interested in visualized value previously. So I'm sure you've seen this too. Like the idea of the creator economy as a label for people who are interested in making their living on the internet, you know, terminally online people, a lot of those people transitioned into Web3 NFTs, things of that nature. So I kind of, again, taking cues from the people that are

consuming the stuff that I'm making or a part of the community of visualized value, paying attention to the things that are interesting to them is also kind of part of the job. So I say part of the job, it's also like where I naturally gravitate to as well. Like I'm interested in the same thing. So I'm kind of a consumer of the same things. And that led me to start playing around with NFTs personally in. March of last year. And the really amazing thing about that originally is kind of the thought that the art itself became the product versus the art being this proxy or this like thing you

use to get attention to then have to build products, build these additional things on the other side of the art in order to make the art sustainable. And I think you could take either side of that argument now because obviously that was heavily propped up by a maniacal market last year. So there's a sustainable, like I think NFTs do offer a sustainable way for artists to make money, but there's also that is contingent on their ability to like build and maintain a network, which I think visualized value had proven before I even knew what an NFT was and that's why that's why it was successful and in the conversations I've had with people that have collected the work that's basically what they're looking for right it's like my bet is on

the fact that the visualized value network continues to grow into the future and NFTs represent you know a bet on that network and you know a piece of art that I want to hang up on my wall or stare out on my computer whichever whichever takes you fancy but the um the education piece of the business last year definitely shifted, like attention shifted to NFTs. That stuff still sold. But if you think of it like an adoption curve, what started to happen as I started to notice, like companies more interested in some of these ideas. So visualize value as a product that can help a company articulate their value proposition

versus a person. We still like, it does really feel like an adoption curve where you're going from the like niche Twitter, you know, this is a new trendy, interesting thing that I want to master to this is like now a piece of your social media strategy. Like this is a new way for you to communicate with people. So it's kind of gone from the fringe of Twitter to small businesses. And like a lot of the stuff that I've been working on in the background is way more tedious than messing about on Twitter all day. But longer sales cycle. of getting this stuff into small businesses, medium-sized businesses, ultimately enterprise over time.

But that's like I see the kind of each of the products is slowly maturing into different parts of the market. And then I spend a bunch of my time playing around at the edges, you know, the Web 3, the NFT stuff, which again is probably a long way away from being at the top of its adoption curve and I think you share that same thesis is we're a way away from that but we're there's there's so much interesting stuff happening so many cool ways to play around with it that um yeah that's the business is kind of a it like trails my interest by about six months you know like the stuff that I learn and the stuff that becomes like a proven something that I can prove I can then like codify backwards into a product and continue to like stay on the edge and try and

learn and then put that stuff back into the stuff that we offer. Does that make sense? It does. So basically, 2020 was a whirlwind. Education and community products were growing by virtue of right place, right time and also right product, right time. 2021 NFT mania you participated in that

I think like you sold tens of eth or hundreds of eth and you know worth of stuff

correct yes and so you made hundreds of thousands of dollars if not million you know seven figures

selling NFTs you know fast forward to today 2022 you have basically these concurrent pass around deepening some of your existing products and basically applying them to more enterprise

or other use cases. While at the same time, what you're doing is you're like, okay, Web 3 isn't exactly where we thought it would be, but you're still a believer, it sounds like, and you're going to tinker until everyone catches up with you. Yeah, for sure. and also listen to what the people who have supported visualized value from day one are interested in two. And, you know, the macro promise of Web 3, in my opinion, is kind of slowly divest ownership of this thing and allow the people that have contributed to it for all of these years benefit from the network effect. So all the enterprise stuff is happening.

And there's also a lot of like little products spinning up from within the community itself. So the idea there being either it's a co-branded thing or it's just lives, you know, it just benefits from the distribution that VV now has. But there are, you know, say half a dozen products that have been community built within the last six months. You know, people find each other in Discord or they, see something that someone else is working on on Twitter and they get involved in that project, it's built by the VV community and by virtue of having, you know, a couple hundred thousand followers on a few social platforms, we could get the first 100 users for that product, right?

We can get something from zero to one way faster than somebody who would be trying to build the distribution and the product at the same time. So it feels like it's getting to that level of maturity where it can be this kind of decentralized product studio and then we're almost come full circle on some other things where Visualized Value can now partner with a startup that needs help articulating their value proposition, but do it now with a lot more authority and benefit that we can send back to anybody we'd partner with because we can distribute that stuff too. So, you know, say we partner with a startup that needs help with their raising their series A and

they need to articulate exactly their results over the last two years, the concepts and the tailwinds and the trends that made their business successful will do that. And eventually I want to get the community involved in doing that. So you almost make this marketplace of people who have gone through all these education products and learned how to visualize value and companies, individuals, people that just want to pay somebody to do that, put them together and use the distribution of visualized value to get more attention on everybody in that scenario. So honestly, it's kind of overwhelming.

There's a lot of different directions you could take it in, but that's another thing that's, you know, another area that we're playing around with. I actually bought Venturewith2Vs.com. So watch this space for that. That's going to be under construction. There isn't a domain with two Vs available anymore with you. No, no, no, no.

We're buying them all up. following them all up. I love that. I think one of the things you're hitting upon, which I think is brilliant, is this idea around once you've aggregated audience and community, and you're essentially trained people with your way of how you see the world, there's a set of products to be built for them and also with them. So an example of that would be Dickie Bush and Nicholas Cole. ship 30 for 30, which is a great program where teaches people how to write for the internet. And people post every day, shipping 30 tweets a day or 30 threads a day. They built a product called TypeShare. TypeShare.io. And like their product is so useful in the course. So they're like training people. And then they've got this amazing product that they can do, right?

And just sort of onboard it. And, you know, one of the hardest parts about building a startup, as you know, is just the distribution is just a heading. And so if you have that solved, then, you know, you could do a lot of. Yeah, exactly. The world is your oyster. So I think you have that solved, right? You have 25,000 plus people who've gone through a visualized value in some shape or form. And they all have, you know, some, you know, and there's different segments to it, right?

You have your daily manifest people. You have your build once, sell twice people. You know, you have different segments. And even within that, there's niches within there. There might be more Web3 people, might be more Web 2 people. And then you have to ask yourself, what are, what is the product that I can build for them? SaaS style, SaaS multiples, right? Forget, you know, service business.

That's what I would be doing. I'd be looking at how do I build products for these people and on a consistent basis? for sure yeah there's we got a few uh a few under construction right now so we'll see we'll see we'll be testing them testing the waters but yeah there's definitely this feedback loop that takes a massive amount of time but also like requires you to go through these iterations of like gradually making the business less dependent on your time or one for one exchange right time for money so the really really bad version of the agency business is It's like, I'll do anything for anyone.

That's like version zero. And then version one is like, I'm going to do this very specific thing for everyone. And then version two is I'm going to do this very specific thing for a very specific person, et cetera, et cetera. You know how that goes. And then eventually you get to the point where I have this distribution and people know what the brand is about. And that gives me the optionality to make a tool that people want to use.

And I don't have to change the functionality of that thing for everyone because I have the distribution. get it out there. I forget this quote. You probably know, you probably know it exactly, but it was like second time founder, first time founder versus second time founder. The second time founder is always going to pick distribution, but I forget what the, I forget what the comparison is between. I mean, it doesn't even matter. The point is like distribution is king. And getting distribution is fighting, what's the expression, tooth and nail? It's like you have to kind of just like, you're grabbing a customer over here, you're grabbing a customer over there. And like every day you can get, you know, one or two customers is an incredible day. And then there's churn. And then it's like, then you have to fight the churn battle. And it's just like battle after battle. And, you know, what's amazing about the empire that you've built is that you have not endless people, but you have people that are willing to test the products that you create. And that's the thing that I think people are starting to realize about.

creators in general is the, I mean, obviously you saw Kim Kardashian, raised that PE fund. Like it's, it's starting to hit mainstream where it's like, if you combine a creator, bonus points of that creator, if that creator is focused on a particular niche, like with high affinity. Yeah. High trust. Like, you've built a lot of trust with your community.

And I've been in your community. I've done a talk in your community. I've seen firsthand how much trust they have in you. Once you have that trust and that audience, and you combine that with product builders who know to iterate, that who are building non-cookie cutter products with a unique aesthetic, that's the formula for like the next wave. Yeah, I agree.

The brand or the individual that I think affinity first is a great way to it. It's like you can imagine it's not really white labeling, but it's if this product is useful to more than 50% of the people that are already here, then we both benefit from it being, you know, pushed out via the distribution of visualized value. And this is where the Web 3, my fascination with Web 3 comes in as an infrastructure layer to enable that permissionless contribution and running experiments and there's more of a legal and um you know entity debate around how to make that happen and obviously behavior and people like being open to doing that but a lot of it is like how value is exchanged in the real world is more held up by the rules than it is

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I feel like it's one, because you're in the business of visualizing value, how do you distribute the value for all the people involved where it's just like automatic? You know, like, you know, I made a coffee this morning. I want of those automatic coffee machines and I press cappuccino and I just like press the cappuccino and then like, I don't know how it, you know, how it worked, but like the milk was frothed and the beans were grinded and the water. Like that's Web 3 at scale is like the automatic cappuccino maker basically. So I think the cappuccino maker piece you like. And the other piece is just the art piece, right?

Like if you're going to create art, why not give people the opportunity to collect it? Yeah. And if you're like going to support a network, if you're going to give your time, energy, anything, you're going to contribute anything to a network, then the technology that exists to share upside in the growth of that network is currently limited. But over time, that's, I think, the Web 3 promise. I was like, I've spent hundreds or thousands of hours sharing posts from this thing or talking in the Discord or making suggestions for what to do next or contributing to a product.

And in like an internet native world, hiring everybody as a contractor or W2 employee that wants to contribute to the network is just not possible. Like it's literally not possible. So the friction that you can remove by tokenizing some of that process is what's very interesting. But I think a lot of it is both behavior and just structuring entities. And a lot of my frustration with Web3 is people go, like come at it. from the wrong end. You don't need any of that technology to build the bond between the people necessarily. I think there are a few examples where like, you know, people who built Ethereum, for example, have a common goal and an incredible like bond over the technology itself. But, you know,

to try and spin up a community just based on the fact it's the same thing that already exists, but there's some Web3 infrastructure from zero. I find it hard to believe. believe that you can like rally people around something like that for a long time versus standing for a number of years, putting out art in this case that a lot of people identify with. And then just integrating technology as it becomes more appropriate to do so or any technology that makes your relationship with that brand or that network superior in some way, you can integrate it. But, you know, Visualized value still continues to be visualized value with or without that. but the advances that happen there can improve it with time.

It's, you know, October, November. Let's say it's November 2030. What does the internet look like inside Jack Butcher's brain? Man. I honestly think the world is going to be just so bizarre by that point in time. It's going to be crazy, man. I'll make your life easier here. Will we be using Twitter in 2030?

I'm going to say no. I think we're going like fractured networks will spin off. My vision is like maybe Twitter is a protocol, right? That isn't called Twitter. And visualized value, for example, is the network versus existing on a Twitter or Instagram or wherever else. I think the promise of this over the long term is this frictionless movement between networks and everything that people create can kind of be ported across these different

networks. I think I don't know how that's going to happen, but it feels to me like that is the prevailing desire. I think we'll figure out a way to, you know, to get that. I don't think the Twitter, I don't think Twitter the way it currently works is a sustainable way for us to communicate for much longer. It feels like it's starting to break. in my opinion. There's also the wild card of Elon Musk and co and how much they're going to change the product and backlash is from the change for the, you know, they might change it for the better or they might change it for the worse and you might just see, you know, we've seen and, you know, for example, we've seen social networks have exodus is before. You know, I was at

stumble upon and stumble upon was bigger than Reddit. And that's crazy. It's crazy to think. It was bigger than Reddit and at one point bigger than Twitter. And they stumbled upon had a famous redesign. And the redesign, everyone was like, this is horrible. And they went to Reddit. And Reddit became Reddit because of the redesign.

So there is a non-zero chance that there is a large redesign or reframe. of how Twitter works that completely alienates a group of people and they move to other platforms. I think the, yeah, maybe my answer should have been. I think the intention is for it to not be Twitter by 2030. Right. If Elon hangs onto it, he wants to turn it into X, right? Exactly. The everything app, which is, I think, WeChat inspired or at least like, announcement.

analogous to WeChat, right? Everything digital is happening there. But yeah, I mean, it's incredibly hard to build these things. And obviously there are a lot of people try. We'll see what happens. So Twitter, we'll see. Okay, what else? How about will my dad own an NFT in 2030? Yes. Yes. What will my dad's first NFT be? it'll probably be like a loyalty card or a plane ticket or a concert to something like that you know something that's like membership oriented in some way like to interact with a business in some fashion I reckon right yeah I think that's I think that's right I think he'll go somewhere and and the NFT will give him either some access to something um or commemorate it and but there'll be some incentive for him to to do it and I think with so much like we work

with a lot of at Leichika we work with like a ton of big brands doing loyalty stuff and there's just loyalty is going to be huge with with web three yeah and I think this like portability of affinity and like the power of trust and attention having instruments that are our like reward that feels to me like that's a natural progression, a natural response to how the world is organizing itself and the type of things that we value as we value collectively. Web3 is one of those things. I think we saw this with Reddit, which was basically the most, like the antithesis of the NFT argument for so long, right?

It's like NFTs are destroying the world. They're stupid. They're idiotic, blah, blah, blah. but I'm going to spend 10 hours a day contributing to this platform, generate goblodes of advertising revenue for, you know, a handful of people. And then when you interact with this technology where it's like, oh, yeah, I have created a bunch of value for this platform. Therefore, this proxy for the value I've created is worth some money because there's a status signal I can send on this network. I think it becomes really obvious when you interact with it.

that there's something intrinsically interesting to people about it. But I understand why people who have never interacted with it think it's completely moronic. I completely understand. Okay, last one. Let's do it. Okay. Ooh, with all this, you know, GTP3 dolly stuff

and that getting bigger and bigger, in 2030, will there be more graphic, designers or less graphic designers than there are today. Interesting. I think less people calling themselves graphic designers, but more people doing graphic design and inverted commas, more people like generating visuals, whether that's like through a text interface or like sitting down and, uh, I kind of view it like the, you know, if you were a graphic designer in the 60s you have this like wooden drawing board where you're like sliding rules across and

you know taking out letter press type forms and glue them on one by one from that transition to Adobe illustrator there's a huge leap in technology and then there's you know the ability to create prompts there's still going to be differentiated outputs based on the talent of the person who is who is using the technology. So I think in general, I think a lot of these titles would just kind of fade away. And it's like Greg and Jack, these are the things that we do and we're interested in and this is our network versus there's a great meme about like job titles in the past, job titles in the future.

I'm sure you've seen it. And like it goes from, I don't know, blacksmith to GPT3 prompt engineer or Discord community manager. I just think job titles in general are probably going to be not as prominent in our culture in 10, 20, 30 years time, especially for the terminally online like ourselves. Terminally online. I love how you call us. It's true.

We are terminally online. We are sick. But it's fun. It's really fun. You have a good time? Yeah. I'm a great time. man. Great time. I met like honestly through the last three years. I've met so many incredible people.

It's been a huge shift in the way I thought things were going to be going. Being on the agency career ladder in New York, which is fun in its own way, just different. This is like as entrepreneurship is, man, you don't really know what's going to happen. And that's like unsettling, but also very exciting. So got the internet to thank for both of those. both sides of that, which is, I don't know if I would want to be doing anything else. So it's fun. It's a lot of fun. Yeah, I mean, that's the cool thing about Twitter in our whole world is like we put out content and we can just chat with cool people.

And I met you through Twitter. And it's cool because it's like where you live, like you can live in a town of 20. And as long as there's Wi-Fi, you can still meet cool people and visualize. value, right? And now we're back out touching grass as well, so we're living the dream. Yeah, exactly. So without further ado, I'm actually going to go touch some grass. Yeah, all right, good money. But this has been fun. Love your thoughts, obviously, on building community-based businesses and also just web three, where things are going. And people could find you where? Twitter, at Jack Butcher and at Visualized Value. You can get to everything else from there.

Cool. And you have a pod that you do as well. Yeah, with a couple of friends called Not Investment Advice comes out on Wednesdays. We just did one on Ligma Johnson. So go check that out. Yeah, check out the pod and thanks for, thanks for coming, man. Mate, thanks for having me. It's great.