Jack Butcher

Jack Butcher: from a 400 sq ft studio to NFT millions in 18 months

Sam recounts how designer Jack Butcher came to NYC from Britain, shared a 400 sq ft studio apartment with his wife, tried and failed at an agency business, and was nearly broke just 18 months before becoming an NFT phenomenon.

“He's British. He came here 10 years ago. They shared a one-bedroom— or sorry, a studio apartment that was 400 square feet. And he was— they were nothing. I mean, they were— they tried to start an agency business. It didn't go so well. And they were on their last dollar. And this is only like 18 months ago.”

Visualize Value: turn ideas into one repeatable black-and-white graphic

Jack Butcher built his brand by taking concepts (starting with Naval's tweets) and rendering them in one consistent minimalist style: a black background with white text and a simple graph or drawing. The single recognizable format became the engine of his audience growth.

“And so he started off getting popular by just taking a bunch of Naval's popular tweets, sayings, his little kind of one-liners, and he would create a graphic out of it. And he has this one graphic style. If you're on Twitter, you've seen it. It's this black and white. It's always a black background with white text on top and a little kind of like very simplistic, minimalistic graph or chart or drawing on top of it.”

Steal thisPick one repeatable visual format and apply it to every idea so your work is instantly recognizable.

Visualize Value does $1M+/year with just Jack and his wife

Before the NFT windfall, Jack Butcher's Visualize Value course-and-community business was already generating north of $1 million a year in revenue with essentially no expenses beyond software and the two-person team.

“And he does north of $1 million a year in revenue. And the only expenses are like him and his small software stuff and then him and his wife.”

Sell mystery 'packs' of your art like baseball cards

Jack Butcher created 12 numbered 'packs' of NFT art that buyers purchased blind, not knowing which artwork was inside, styled like baseball cards. Each pack sold for roughly $10,000 to $15,000.

“And you would buy these packs having no idea what the NFT art was in it. He had 12 of them and people were bidding on them. And each one sold for around $10,000 to $15,000.”

Steal thisPackage your work into blind, numbered 'mystery packs' to add scarcity and collectibility on top of the art itself.

Shoot for the stars, land on the moon: the no-loss bold price

Shaan breaks down why pricing an NFT at $77M is a no-loss move: even a 2-5% chance of selling is huge, and even a far lower 'land on the moon' sale of $1.7M is money manufactured from creativity in about 4 days of work, while the audacious ask alone generates attention and press.

“so he might not sell it for $77 million, but even if it sells for $1.7 million, that's $1.7 million that he just, you know, manufactured through his own creativity and, you know, and probably I would bet you like 4 days of effort.”

Steal thisPrice your boldest offer at a headline-grabbing number; the attention pays off even if nobody buys at the ask.

BitClout's growth hack: scrape Twitter and pre-fund influencer accounts

Shaan marvels at BitClout's aggressive growth design: they scraped Twitter profiles without permission, listed everyone's coins, raised $100M from top investors, and pre-loaded influencers' accounts with money (his had $55K) claimable only by tweeting the platform out.

“They're aggressive because They went and scraped Twitter and they put all of our profiles on their website and said, come buy their coin without anyone's permission. That took a level of aggression and sort of like willing to operate in the gray that most people wouldn't really have. And then the smart thing was they said, well, how do we make this network really valuable? Well, if we get really valuable people on it, how do we get really valuable people on it?”

An NFT as marketing spend: 4M impressions for the price of art

Jack Butcher reframes buying NFTs as a marketing expense: his 'NFT Explained' piece got ~4 million Twitter impressions, so buyers (often Ethereum whales spreading the gospel) are effectively paying for distribution and cultural velocity that would cost a fortune to buy outright.

“So the NFT Explained piece, which was by far the most expensive or the largest sale of the last few I've done, I think I got 4 million impressions on Twitter. So if you think about what it would cost you to buy 4 million impressions on Twitter, or if what it would cost you to develop something that has that level of resonance, I think it's easy to get distracted from that as, as like the three of us have distribution, but that is a valuable thing, right?”

Chuck E. Cheese money: why whales overpay for NFTs

Shaan explains why buyers drop $69M on a Beeple or $150K on a Jack Butcher piece: someone like MetaKovan turned a $5,000 Bitcoin bet into over $1 billion, so spending 70 ETH feels like cashing a few Skee-Ball tickets from a giant jackpot, not real money.

“So he's invested $5,000 into Bitcoin and is worth over $1 billion based on when he invested it. So he's reinvesting. Like I said, you go to Chuck E. Cheese, you're great at Skee-Ball, you hit the $5,000 jackpot, the tickets start spitting out of this machine. You don't think about it like spending $150,000. You think about it like spending 70 Ether and you have 70,000 Ether or whatever, right?”

Jack Butcher got famous turning Naval's ideas into daily visuals

Shaan notes Jack Butcher built Visualize Value by taking Naval's philosophy, creating sharp visuals around it, and tweeting them daily until they caught on, rather than fighting to make his own original ideas famous.

“Jack Butcher got famous too with Visualized Value. He just took Naval's philosophy and created dope visuals around it and tweeted it out every day until those caught on. And so like instead of being, you know, I, I'm going the long, hard, slow, shitty way trying to like come up with my own ideas and make those famous. I should just be hijacking these other people's fame and building content about them and then slowly slip myself in.”

Jack Butcher built Visualize Value to ~$1M/year in 18 months

Sam tells the story of Jack Butcher, a former ad-agency designer who started the Visualize Value Twitter account 18 months ago, grew to 100,000 followers making infographics, launched a course, and is on track for close to $1M in revenue this year as a solopreneur.

“And then 18 months ago, he started a Twitter handle called Visualize Value, where he would write, create one. It's almost like an infographic where he would explain different things with one infographic. And that got quite popular to the point of in 18 months he got 100,000 followers on Twitter. Then he created a course that teaches people how to make these things. And in his 18th month or in the trailing 12 months, 18 months into his journey, they'll do close to $1 million a year.”

Visualize Value hit ~$1M/yr revenue in 18 months

Jack Butcher built Visualize Value (a design course plus a productization course) to close to $1 million a year in revenue in only 18 months, from scratch.

“But he built this business to close to $1 million a year in revenue in only 18 months.”

Visualize Value hit ~$1M/yr revenue in 18 months

Jack Butcher built Visualize Value (a design course plus a productization course) to close to $1 million a year in revenue in only 18 months, from scratch.

“But he built this business to close to $1 million a year in revenue in only 18 months.”

The $30k email that made Jack start his own agency

Once Jack climbed high enough to see the agency's client bills, he saw they charged $30,000 to design a single email and figured one client of his own would set him up. He underestimated the infrastructure — 12 people, strategists, late-night emails — and got overwhelmed running a full-service shop.

“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, it's 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.”

The $30k email that made Jack start his own agency

Once Jack climbed high enough to see the agency's client bills, he saw they charged $30,000 to design a single email and figured one client of his own would set him up. He underestimated the infrastructure — 12 people, strategists, late-night emails — and got overwhelmed running a full-service shop.

“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, it's 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.”

The self-fulfilling content-to-course feedback loop

Jack stays relevant by publishing his learnings on social, which both promotes the course and feeds new material back into it — a self-fulfilling feedback loop. Because the productization course isn't tied to an expiring tactic, he believes it has a long runway as long as he stays a couple steps ahead of his audience.

“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.”

Optimize by subtracting what you don't want to do

Rather than chase arbitrary 5-year goals, Jack runs his business by continually removing the work he doesn't want to do until most days are spent doing what he enjoys. He argues fixed targets force aggressive compromises for arbitrary reasons.

“No, honestly, um, 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.”

Steal thisOptimize your business by subtracting the work you hate, not by hitting arbitrary targets.

Exotic Car Hacks doing high six figures a year

Jack estimates the Exotic Car Hacks course — which teaches buying and reselling luxury cars at little loss — is generating high six figures a year in revenue.

“How big is it? Yeah, I would think they're probably doing high six figures a year off that.”

Exotic Car Hacks: a course on buying luxury cars at a discount

Sam describes a course that teaches you to buy a luxury car at a discount, drive it for a year, then sell it for roughly what you paid. The course, Exotic Car Hacks, is promoted via an exotic-car Instagram/YouTube presence.

“Uh, Exotic Car Hacks, I think it's called.”

Build a course where the content engine sells itself

Jack argues the courses that win have a front-end content engine so naturally aligned with the product that viewers see the work, think 'I want to learn that,' and funnel themselves into buying. Visualize Value took off for exactly this reason — point at something cool that makes people want to learn it.

“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 Visualize 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.”

Steal thisPick a course topic where your free content output is itself a live demo of the skill.

Go niche and direct to capture more of the revenue

Jack explains that a hyper-niche tutorial (e.g. getting the most out of a specific facet of AWS) sold direct can charge a similar price to a book while capturing far more revenue, because a book's return is low unless you have a huge publisher and reputation.

“So it's like super niche. And you can imagine if you wrote a book on that, you know, you might charge a similar price for it, but it would be the return would be significantly lower, I would imagine, unless you're with some huge publisher and you've got big reputation. But you can get into that niche and capture so much more of the revenue.”

Steal thisSell a hyper-niche tutorial direct instead of a book to keep most of the revenue.

Test your curriculum on a non-expert before launch

Jack made his wife Celia — not a designer — work through his draft curriculum in order to find gaps, asking whether each step made sense without context. Her outsider feedback forced him to include steps a practitioner would assume were obvious, and made the launch land far better.

“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 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.”

Steal thisHave a non-expert in your target audience walk through your course draft to surface the steps you assume.

Productize expensive 1-to-1 consulting at a tenth of the price

Jack sees a large untapped opportunity in consulting businesses that sell pricey one-to-one services: package a productized version at a tenth of the price. Skills that make people self-reliant — design, writing — are especially strong candidates.

“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 productized version of it that exists at a tenth of the price. That's essentially what we have going on now.”

Steal thisTake your expensive 1-to-1 consulting and ship a productized version at 1/10 the price.

Ezra Cohen: 7 figures a year selling video templates

Jack cites Ezra Cohen, who sells pre-packaged creative/video templates plus tutorials, doing an estimated 7 figures a year — then launched a course teaching creatives how to templatize and package their own work.

“I think he's doing 7 figures a year selling like these pre-packaged 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 next— it's like the layer on top of that as his next course.”