How Jack Butcher Built Visualise Value to a $180k/Month Online Course Business

This week I thought i’d take a look at a phenomenal new online business: Visualise Value.

Hope you enjoy.

Story Time

Jack Butcher is the entrepreneur behind Visualise Value, a design agency and digital brand that has hit $180k a month revenues in just 18 months through the sale of online courses and a community that operate at near 99% margin.

Visualise Value’s success is the product of the extraordinary times we live in and the power of the internet.

It also provides a killer framework for any would-be online media business to follow.

Background

Just a couple of years ago Jack was grinding in a New York agency, burnt out and feeling sub-servient to his fortune 500 clients. He was craving the personal and financial freedom that he is rapidly on track to achieving.

So what’s Jack’s story and how has he built such a good business seemingly overnight?

Jack’s background is pretty interesting, he is not a high school dropout who’d made his first million by age 16 selling chocolate at the college gates.

He actually has followed a path that so many of us do, school followed by University and a degree in his chosen subject Graphic Design, graduating from Cardiff, UK in 2010.

He interned in a couple of design companies before taking a punt and moving to New York in the hope of finding work there.

Jack hit lucky through a job listing on Craigslist to join an agency and then followed 7–8 years of working for various agencies in New York.

So it was a decent punt.

This time was important for building his craft, gaining super valuable experience working for global brands such as Ralph Lauren and new businesses that were just starting out.

Evolution

Eventually he was operating at a level in these agencies where he could hear and see what brands were paying for work. Jack realised that he could offer 90% of the services his employers were providing, but take home a greater share of the margin if he went out alone.

There started his own agency and the beginnings of Visualise Value.

Immediately came the false start.

Agencies fundamentally provide service work: effectively the selling of time.

So, as a one man band, Jack was quickly overwhelmed.

Stuck in this awkward position where the more work he got, the harder it was to make money. He consistently felt like he was on the edge of breaking through, but there was this fundamental flaw in the business model that prevented him.

And so Visualise Value started to evolve.

Getting Specific

As a small agency Jack was winning work based on his ability to pitch, to articulate strategies and create beautiful pitch decks, just enough to get in and do the above the line work for brands.

This pitching process is a niche in the agency world and a job that most people don’t like doing. So Jack wondered what would happen if he just focused on that.

Instead of serving his handful of Fortune 500 clients where he was being presented all kinds of varying demands, dictated how they should be done and then doing them.

What would happen if he just focused on offering pitch design to clients?

He started building visual assets in an extremely constrained style to explain concepts for clients, using the methods that had proved so successful in his own pitch work.

Sharing the process of making these assets for others on Twitter. The work started to gain good traction with followers.

Jack knew though, that the assets he was sharing were not always the most exciting of subjects because of the nature of his service work — for example supply chain logistics. It looked great but was explaining something boring as hell.

Social Traction

He transitioned the social assets to explain business and philosophical concepts which might have stronger traction and engagement.

Particularly effective was sharing existing business ‘influencers’ concepts in the beautiful Visualise Value style, so that they would be crazy not to share them with their own audiences.

The likes, re-tweets and follows started to pile in.

Jack names this tactic ‘the permission-less apprentice’.

At this time the assets and social following weren’t generating any money themselves directly, but they were serving as the perfect lead generation for service work, with companies asking Jack to create similar assets for them.

Visualise Value was now moving in a good direction, no longer competing with multiple agencies for low margin work, but being called upon by customers who specifically wanted this style created for them and giving Jack much greater price control, the ability to choose who he worked with and a common product / process that was simpler to repeat.

Clients were coming from Twitter saying, ‘I want that for my business, can you do that for me?’.

Naval Wisdom

It was about this time that Jack hit on Naval’s famous tweet storm ‘How to get rich without getting lucky?’.

So much of what Naval was saying resonated with Jack and his experience. Concepts like:

‘Make recognisable work’

‘You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity — a piece of a business — to gain your financial freedom.’

‘Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media)’

‘You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.’

For that first 11 months Jack had made no sales direct to consumer or had the digital products to do so.

But he was now iterating on a digital store. He ran various experiments, initially offering prints of the designs from the Twitter page.

Naturally he thought, ‘everyone loves these images, so surely they would pay for them?’.

But they didn’t. And for those few that did, he had all the hassle of fulfilling the physical orders and shipping them worldwide, with so many variables that could go wrong.

Digital Breakthrough

Gradually though, Jack edged closer to a good formula.

He launched a downloadable PDF framework that people could use to plan their day with. That experience of selling a PDF with zero marginal cost VS the pain of physical prints, was a light bulb moment.

Jack invited purchasers of the daily planner to a private Slack group community which would prove to be equally important.

The community told him what people wanted from Visualise Value, what they were interested in and the problems his audience were struggling with.

One prominent member of that audience was the marketing sensation David Perrell on Twitter. Who, in one simple tweet, would give Jack the nudge that really set Visualise Value alight.

Jack had:

• An active community who loved the content Visualise Value was producing
• Good traction with a digital product that could be sold at zero marginal cost (the daily manifest)

And then David Perrell fired of a tweet saying he bet people would be interested to pay for an online course on how to design like Visualise Value.

The likes and retweets raged in.

David had hit on what Jack had been edging closer to, his audience loved the content but super powerful would be to learn the process and how to emulate it in their own work. Empowering them to win promotions, jobs and clients.

Execution, Execution, Execution

Jack’s execution was then impeccable.

He immediately ask’s his audience if they want a course, and promises them a complete product ready in 7 days.

So begins a sprint.

Pre-orders are launched on Gumroad and Jack drives engagement by creating an event out of the next 7 days, live tweeting course progress, publishing snippets of what’s going to be in the lessons and teasing insights you’ll be able to learn.

Each tweet pushing more followers to purchase.

Jack uses the transparency of building in public as a super effective marketing tool. There isn’t much complicated about documenting your process but the benefits it can reap if done smartly, are borne out in his example.

Over 700 copies are pre ordered @ $99 in just 7 days.

A home run.

Build Once, Sell Twice

In the preceding months that success has sustained in steady growth.

Jack has launched a second course ‘Build Once, Sell Twice’ and sales of his digital products have risen to above $180k a month.

Over 18 months the transformation from overstretched, hard to scale service agency to infinitely repeatable digital product is remarkable.

What’s awesome is that these are only early days for the business.

For Visualise Value, this is just the beginning.

Lessons

So what can we learn from the Visualise Value playbook?

Let’s consider four themes:

1.

If you are going to become known for doing something, it needs to be something you can consistently do.

Visualise Value does an exceptional job of making recognisable work. It adopts a simple black and white minimalist style using only geometric shapes.

It is instantly recognisable.

We know how powerful this is for brand building but perhaps equally important are the strict parameters that Jack designs in.

Production of assets is made easy by using severe limitations and constraints.

They allow no room for procrastination or excuses.

The approach was a game changer for a designer used to getting lost in the stylistic, spending hours iterating and pondering which shade of blue to use.

Jack freed himself to think ‘if I cannot communicate within these strict parameters then its on me’.

It took 12 months of building and iterating on ideas for Jack to edge closer to a great product. In that time there was lots of work with little reward, lots of doing, playing, improving, slowly gaining traction and followers.

There are lots of things you can and would like to do, but not many you can make 500 of per year.

Which is what Jack needed to able to do for traction on Twitter.

On Youtube, Joe Rogan does the same, consistently putting our content in the same format as a podcast once a week.

For Martin Scorcese, it’s filmmaking with different timeframes again.

You need to match the output to the platform you deliver it on and make it easy to achieve.

Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.

Jack enjoys design, philosophical and business concepts, so this crossover of subjects was easy and fun for him to consistently produce.

It was play, and stayed fun thanks to the instant positive feedback on social.

2.

Visualise Value could operate as a service agency in parallel to building its consumer facing brand.

In fact the two fed each other.

B2B work can fuel the D2C and vice versa.

So that initial 12 months of no DTC sales wasn’t a problem, Jack could do service work whilst he built online and what’s better, the building online was feeding high value leads to the agency.

The agency continues to do service work.

The difference to its generic beginnings is that is has no competition for what it does, there is only one Visualise Value, there are many design agencies.

3.

Where the value really lies.

Prints of the designs that people came to follow Visualise Value for were not the product as you might have thought. There was little value to the audience in paying for a physical copy of something that they got provided lots of, for free, each day, digitally. Only a handful were purchased.

The skill of designing the content that resonated with such a big audience was the product that they would pay for, in the Visualise Value design course.

Next, the process of building that digital product that sold in thousands at no marginal cost, will become an even more powerful and valuable product.

Jack is already on it, taking orders on his second course: ‘Build Once, Sell Twice’.

The product was not created in 7 days but 7 years.

Visualise Value is a product of Jack’s 30 years on planet earth and especially those most recent 7 years of 9–5 grind working with exceptional clients in reputable New York agencies.

Without that, the product wouldn’t be possible.

That gives Jack price discretion.

He is not selling a 3 hour video course, but every ounce of expertise he has built up over his career. What is that truly worth?

Arguably it’s far below the fraction he paid personally — 10s of years of life, 10s of thousands of dollars of successes and failures.

4.

Unconventional, Super Effective, Tactics

Visualise Value does an amazing job of adopting unique tactics which many operators might think irrational.

Does the product get more valuable the more people have purchased it?

Since launch, Jack has actually steadily increased the price of his products. Creating a super compelling incentive to buy now.

You might think this would piss off his followers.

Instead, consumers want to get in first while they still can.

Underpricing is a tactic.

When a swathe of customers pay a low price and leave 50 five star reviews saying this is insanely underpriced, Jack is left with some exceptionally happy customers and reviews that will sell the product on their own.

They give him a fair justification to later raise prices.

Be a permissionless apprentice.

You don’t need permission to work for the people you admire. What anyone can do is increase access to others ideas.

Jack work’s on others brands for free by creating unique social assets.

An easy win in building the Visualise Value brand has been taking cultural equity or relevance of something that is already out there like a quote, putting the VV spin on it and posting an asset to social feeds.

That lead’s to inevitable shares from the subject and their audience.

Likes and engagement pile in, new audiences are reached and fuel is added to the fire of growth that is the Visualise Value brand. Everyone wins.

Jack plays positive sum games.

Reference

For more on Visualise Value and Jack, I recommend you check out: https://shop.visualizevalue.com and follow Jack on Twitter.

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This post was originally written for the Digital Evolution newsletter.

Check it out here: https://digitalevolution.substack.com/welcome

Follow Callum on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/McdonnellCallum