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

What's going on, my first million listeners? This is Sam Parr. Today we have another special episode. This episode is for trans members only. I know. It stinks if you're not a subscriber. But What we're gonna do is give you fifteen 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. Um, or if you sign up for the hustle.

In your email, you'll see we'll send you uh some show notes. So even if you're not a subscriber, you'll you're gonna get some value. But on Trents.co uh 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. My wife and I went uh to his uh house and met well 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 uh, 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 twenty-two 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's all 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 Uh a$19 daily planner on Gumroad. And it kind of took off. I mean, it it opened his eyes to sales uh to digital products. And so he decided to do this thing where he productized service and he created this course called Build Once, Sell Twice, uh, the Productization of Ideas, I think it's called. Uh, and then he also created this other thing called Visualize of. value, which is a design course that teaches you how to take concepts that are kind of complicated and put them in really digestible, uh 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 uh about courses that he's seeing out there that are awesome, that he loves, uh opportunities for uh content creators to build courses. Um I talk 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 are is. And then we also talk about productization, uh 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 gonna 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 uh the rest of the episode.

I 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 um get that sponsorship rolling. I know, I wish. I'm gonna put uh so this podcast, what we're talking about right now, this is gonna be live on our main podcast feed, and it'll get listened by a ton of people, and then we're gonna Chop it up at one point and only trends members are gonna see it. Nice. And so

What I wanted to talk about today was some of your course stuff. But Uh right now, I've already written the uh the blog post and and we're live now. We're we're recording. I've written the blog post and what I've said about you is that I met I don't know how I met you on Twitter or in the 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.

Uh And your business is Ha your business is fascinating. Uh the summary that uh I'll give and then I'll let you do all the talking is that you came from England at what, twenty two? Twenty one, I think, yeah.

T twenty one, you did a bunch of part time low paying agency gigs, kinda worked your way up the totem pole a little bit, eventually quit, and you're like, I'm gonna 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 nineteen dollar Like gumroad thing on how to organize your thoughts. And it did okay. It it but that kinda clicked for you and then you created this visualized value Store course, whatever you wanna call, community.

And eight and you share your revenue numbers and eighteen months in you're in the ballpark of like eight hundred to a million a year in revenue. Yeah. Great. So what uh w 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 y 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 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 when Bounced around from like tiny agencies, big agencies, worked in house at a startup for a little while, worked at Bloomberg for

Nine months uh 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 charge in thirty thousand dollars to like Design an email. It's like if I could get one of these clients on my own, then I'm gonna be set. But what I didn't realise is kind of an arrogant way to approach it is that there's all of this infrastructure and

twelve people, strategists and uh people that have to answer emails at the middle of the night and all that stuff. So uh jumped into that world and just caug quickly overwhelmed by all the stuff that, you know, wasn't first nature to me, or the administration, all the other stuff that comes with running a like complex service business. And then Yeah, over the course of six to nine months started to dial in on the product side. Um

А за резултат Like starting an agency that was everything to everyone. So we'll shoot car commercials, we'll build websites, we'll design apps or do branding exercises. Then I just narrowed in the service mix. To just do one thing.

And that's how we met, uh, if you recall, was the presentation Yeah. Uh that 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 deck 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, 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 um

Then started yeah, looking at how I could productize that skill set. And that's where the the course product 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 wanna learn about the agency business. I wanna learn about productizing. a service and I want to learn about courses where you uh let's start with courses. So your business is like In the eight hundred to a million dollar range now. And this is all public. You tweet this out.

Yeah, yeah. With a a lot of times with courses, I've got friends that have'em and they like get big fast, but then they kind of teeter out. Do you think that's gonna happen with you? 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 the s 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. And

The way I think about it is because that's not even the the design product it it's not riding a trend of a tactic or anything like that is gonna 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 steps. behind me in that journey, so

My gut is I could I can Keep it running for a while. What's the end game? I think um Building the

Wait. Building the media component of the company up a little more than it is now. So the The course is

sell as a result of the things that I'm producing in real time on social. So it's there's a 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 gonna stay ahead is in like

decrease the amount of Like. daily uh creative input to sustain a certain volume of sales. Does that make sense? So but like do you have a goal like like by forty you wanna do w you wanna have be you wanna do something like

Do you wanna sell this business? Do you wanna do you have like a Oh. Honestly, um, it's been just a process of doing less of what I don't wanna do over time. And I've kinda hit that point now where most days I'm doing what I wanna 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 s for some Arbitrary reason. So there is no like You know? five year like this is exactly what needs to happen.

I think um just optimising for having a good time. You're just living. Trying, yeah. 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.

Yeah, it's about spot art and that's very articulately put. 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 gonna pay me money for this. Sure.

Yeah, hundred percent. What do you think is what what do you think are some interesting courses that are doing well. You told me about one that I'm gonna buy, actually. So I I take courses a lot. Uh 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 and what you purchased it for? That's a great, yeah. What the what big is that one?

How w how big is it? Yeah. Yeah. I would think they're probably doing high six figures a year off that. That's crazy. What's it w what's that one called? Uh exotic car hacks, I think it's called. Yeah. God, that's brilliant.

Yeah, and the way that you get customer. Well the the way that you get customers for that is you just have an exotic car Instagram panel or YouTube page, which is fun. Yeah, I think uh 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 wanna learn how to make that.

And then you can feed'em into the product loop. So that's like a huge part of making it sustainable and and work the Uh like sell as a result of producing content on the front end. So Yeah, I think is a trend and

The exotic cars just 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 uh Like AWS I I don't know the intricacies of some of this stuff, but like dis dissecting some facet of like Amazon AWS. Uh you should check out Daniel Vasalo. He's he's uh Do not

Good numbers on Gumroad with an AWS product and there's a few people that are wha what what's that mean? AWS product? Amazon web services. Yeah, but what's that mean a product? Oh, it's a like a um 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. Y you know, you might charge a similar price for it, but it would be the 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 chorus you could charge two hundred ninety nine, you call it a book and at most twenty nine.

Right, right. That's outrageous. Yeah, twenty nine dollars for a book. Someone's life work. It's nice. Yeah. It's just this is just a slight tweak in positioning. Obviously you can do things with a course that are Slightly different than a book. You 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 Taken 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 Cela 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.

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 mem am I missing something? So finding somebody who 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 in uh 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

Uh 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 there will be, but Um, I didn't use any.

When you when you look at like who does it best, who do you use as in a your North Star? For this. Yeah. You I I I logged into that Sam Uvins guy, consulting dot com. He uh comes off as a scam, 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 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 like

You know? Wanna read a forty five second article and and understand what it is. So I It's hard to It's hard to Hard to say who's doing it best,'cause I think everybody's kinda got a different take on it.

Um Yeah, I I and I still think it's um 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 Um 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 f 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 Um services that they sell one to one, but could have a productised version of it that exists at a tenth of the price. That's essentially what We have going on now. Specific examples, um

Thinking like Um A lot of A lot of things that teach people to be like self reliant in some way. So like creative

uh the ability to like I think design is a good example, writing is a good example, um Writing is a popular one. My best friend Neville has copywriting course.com. He's been doing that for 15 years, maybe maybe 10 years, making an awesome living. Um, then there's that guy Dave Perrell. It's called The Right of passage, I think it's called.

I think he charges two or four thousand dollars 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's a little played out. I think that um 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 uh 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 um Instagram I think he mostly runs his stuff, but uh I think he's doing seven figures a year selling like

These prepackaged Like creative templates and some Um 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 neck that's like the m 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. Alright. 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 out of dollar. If you do like it, it's gonna be about 300 bucks a year. You're gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna get access to the community. I pretty much live in the community. Um, Jack is in the community. and our teams in the community and tons of crazy interesting people like the CEO of HubSpot, the founders of Shopify, Founders of Hoot Sweep. 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, uh who uh 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'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.

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