$1 million sales in 1 year- A Chronological Study of Jack Butcher's Visualize Value Part 1: The Unsung Era
Jack Butcher’s Visualize Value is often hailed as the poster boy of how creators can succeed in the creator’s economy. But few knew that Jack spent the first 11 months without making a single cent from VV. What did it take for Jack to build Visualize Value from nothing to a million dollar business?
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In part 1, we examine the foundation phase of Visualize Value, including how Jack:
attracted attention to his tweet despite having no following,
built synergy among his various media,
iterated till he found his first profitable and scalable product
This story takes time to develop, but it encapsulates the creator's struggle of putting in thousands of hours of work with little returns to show for. Get a sense of what it was like for Jack; and if you are a struggling creator, I hope this will also provide you with the motivation to keep going. Let’s dive in.
Because of the sheer amount of visuals that Jack uses, this post is best viewed in your browser.
The Early Years
Jack graduated with a degree in graphic design in 2010, worked at multiple agencies till 2017, then started his own agency. He got burnt out, then iterated on the agency model till he landed on Visualize Value.
🗓 Jan 11 2019: Jack announces The Trust Accelerator. This is Jack's first project to 'automate' aspects of the agency model- he wanted to create efficient processes for the onboarding process of the agency's clients, instead of reinventing the wheel for each of them. At this point, Jack is already thinking of creating systems for his workflow. If you are currently involved in providing a service, it will be extremely helpful to think if you can productize part of that service/workflow. This is exactly the same tactic that Jack used for Visualize Value's Daily Manifest, as we shall see in the later part of this article.
🗓 Jan 19 2019: 8 days later, there was Visualize Value's first Tweet (2 retweets, 9 likes). Jack essentially ran two concurrent experiments- The Trust Accelerator and Visualize Value. The latter is meant to be an evolution of the former- while The Trust Accelerator still needed the physical presence of the agency's staff, Visualize Value productizes the whole process of content creation, and allows clients to do so asynchronously.
Jack has a very interesting approach to productizing- instead of thinking of a single product, he launches several products at once, which allows him to capture different points on the scale of automation. If your goal is point e, you can always start by launching products on points a and b, then slowly progress towards your goal as you get better at the scale you choose to improve your products on.
🗓 January 22 2019: Jack's output with VV is stunning- he creates 3-5 visualizations a day. In addition, he did not just focus on a single person's thoughts and quotes. Instead, he covered a wide range of individuals, ranging from Seth Godin to Nassim Taleb, and of course, Naval.
Because he tags each of these individuals, he is increasing his reach to fans of each individual. These fans may be non-overlapping, thus increasing his efficiency in building VV's brand.
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