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

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.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  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 gonna do is give you 15 minutes or so of the episode for free. If you like it, you can go to trends.co 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 gonna get some value. But on trends.co, 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 Trends community and I actually went to his house a few weeks ago.

• 0:45Sam Parr?

  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, in my business, just because of, you know, it's 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 this like a $19 daily planner on Gumroad and it kind of took off. I mean, it opened his eyes to sales, to digital products.

• 1:30Sam Parr?

  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 Visualize 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.

• 2:14Sam Parr?

  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 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.co and sign up and you'll see the rest of the episode.

• 2:40Sam Parr?

  All right. So what I'm recording now. Oh, good. You're drinking my drink, our drink now, I guess we're mutual Heineken Zero lovers.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  We should get that sponsorship rolling.

• 2:50Sam Parr?

  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. And so what I wanted to talk about today was some of your core stuff, but right now I've already written the, the blog post and we're live now, we're recording. I've written the blog post and what I've said about you is that

• 3:23Sam Parr?

  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.

• 3:35Sam Parr?

  And your business is, your business is fascinating. The summary that I'll give, and then I'll let you do all the talking is that you came from England at what 22?

• 3:47Speaker 01

  21, I think, yeah.

• 3:49Sam Parr?

  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 Gumroad thing on how to organize your thoughts. And it did okay, but that kind of clicked for you. And then you created this visualize 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.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 4:29Sam Parr?

  Great. So what, uh, 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.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  No, you got, you got, uh, it's a great overview. So the, all of the agency jobs kind of touched on a little bit of, little bit of each part of the agency world. So I'd trained as a designer, came in as a designer on the, you know, the bottom of the totem pole and you doing all the production work, 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.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  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're 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, uh, jumped into that world and just caught quickly overwhelmed by all the stuff that, you know, wasn't

• 6:04Speaker 01

  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. Um, as a result of like starting an agency that was everything to everyone. So we'll shoot car commercials, we'll build websites, we'll design apps, we'll do branding exercises. And then I just narrowed in the service mix to just do one thing. And that's how we met. And if you recall, was the presentation for, uh, Ideation Bootcamp and I just went all in on this idea of visualizing value,

• 6:44Speaker 01

  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 then 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 skillset. And that's where the course product started to come from.

• 7:14Sam Parr?

  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 where you, let's start with courses. So your business is like in the 800 to a million dollar range now. And this is all public. You tweet this out.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:35Sam Parr?

  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?

• 7:44Speaker 01

  It may, um, what's interesting, I think, is the, 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, 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.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  And the way I think about it is because that's not even the, 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 share to people that are a couple of steps behind me in that journey. So my gut is I could, I could keep it running for a while.

• 8:56Sam Parr?

  What's the end game?

• 8:58Speaker 01

  I think, um,

• 9:01Speaker 01

  building the like,

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Building the media component of the company up a little more than it is now. So the the courses sell as a result of the things that I'm producing in real time on social. So there's, 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 in like, decrease the amount of like, daily creative input to sustain a certain volume of sales. Does that make sense?

• 9:45Sam Parr?

  So, but like, do you have a goal? Like, like by 40, you want to do, you want to, you want to do something like, do you want to sell this business? Do you want to, do you have like a kind of some of the?

• 9:57Speaker 01

  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 targets 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.

• 10:30Sam Parr?

  You're just living.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Trying, trying, yeah.

• 10:32Sam Parr?

  My friend Andrew, who, so we, 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.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's about spot on. That's very articulately put.

• 10:43Sam Parr?

  You, um, 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.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah, 100%.

• 10:56Sam Parr?

  What do you think is, where do you think are some, 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.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  That's a great example, yeah.

• 11:16Sam Parr?

  What the, what, how big is that one?

• 11:19Speaker 01

  How big is it?

• 11:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  I would think they're probably doing high six figures a year off that.

• 11:25Sam Parr?

  That's crazy. What's that one called?

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Uh, exotic car hacks, I think it's called. Yeah.

• 11:32Sam Parr?

  God, that's brilliant. And the way that you get customers, the way that you get customers for that is you just have an exotic car Instagram handle or YouTube page, which is fun.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  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. Someone's 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. So that I think is a trend and the exotic cars is a great example of that. You have something to point at that makes people want to learn the thing.

• 12:23Sam Parr?

  What are some other examples that you like?

• 12:26Speaker 01

  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 just dissecting some facet of like Amazon AWS. You should check out Daniel Vesalo. He's, he's doing a good numbers on Gumroad with an AWS product. And there's a few people that are.

• 12:47Sam Parr?

  What's that mean? AWS product?

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Amazon Web Services.

• 12:52Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but what's that mean a product?

• 12:54Speaker 01

  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 a big reputation. But you can get into that niche and capture so much more of the revenue.

• 13:20Sam Parr?

  I know people with big books. You make more money than they do.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, it's fascinating. You go direct to consumer. Yeah.

• 13:29Sam Parr?

  For some reason, you call it a course, you could charge 299. You call it a book and at most 29.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Right, right. That's outrageous. Yeah, $29 for a book. Someone's life work. It's nuts. Yeah, this is 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.

• 13:55Sam Parr?

  If, what do you, what did you use to learn how to do this?

• 14:00Speaker 01

  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, um, I also did, uh, like had this feedback loop with Celia, who you met, my wife, the, uh, she's not a designer. So when I first did the thing, I was like making the curriculum and giving it to her. And 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 I'm, am I missing something? So finding somebody who like, obviously is your target audience and making them go through it in order. And they're like, yeah, I have no clue how you got from here to here, or this thing is missing. So that little feedback loop made it was like instrumental in, uh, when we launched it, everyone's like, oh yeah,

• 14:43Speaker 01

  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, um, I didn't use any.

• 15:08Sam Parr?

  When you, when you look at like, who does it best? Who do you use as your north star?

• 15:14Speaker 01

  First courses.

• 15:16Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I, I, I logged into that Sam Ovens guy, consulting.com. He comes off as a scammer, but damn, his shit's good.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's like incredibly comprehensive. I think so much of it has to do with like learning style. Like some people wanna 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, wanna read a 45 second article and, and understand what it is. So it's hard to, it's hard to, hard to say who's doing it best. Cause I think everybody's kind of got a different take on it.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  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, there 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.

• 16:39Sam Parr?

  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?

• 16:54Speaker 01

  I think there's like loads of consulting businesses that could be doing this.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  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,

• 17:18Speaker 01

  a lot of, a lot of things, 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.

• 17:32Sam Parr?

  Writing is a popular one. My best friend Neville has copywritingcourse.com. He's been doing that for 15 years, maybe, maybe 10 years, making an awesome living. Then there's that guy Dave Perrell. It's called the Rite of Passage, I think it's called. I think he charges $2,000 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 that are 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.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  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 prepackaged like creative templates and 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 net, that's 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.

• 18:51Sam Parr?

  All right. Sorry. I know I'm a tease. This is the end of the episode. If you want to hear the full thing, go to trends.co. It costs a dollar to try out. If you don't like it, just cancel and you can listen to the episode. It's a buck and you're only at a dollar. If you do like it, it's going to be about 300 bucks a year. You're going to get access to weekly reports. So we have a team of analysts who breaks down interesting ideas and trends in the in the world of business and how to capitalize on them and pounce on them. You're also going to get access to more weekly podcasts like this. And finally, this is kind of shocking, but this is every everyone's favorite part, which is you're going to get access to the community. I pretty much live in the community. Jack is in the community and our team's in the community and tons of crazy, interesting people like the CEO of HubSpot, the founders of Shopify, founders of Hootsuite.

• 19:37Sam Parr?

  All these amazing people are in the community and we all just share ideas and we comment on each other's ideas. 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.co if you want to join that and get the full episode. And I'll keep doing these while you 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.