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

what's going on in my first million listeners this is sam par 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 fifteen minutes or so of the episode for free if you like it you can go to trends dot c 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'll you're gonna get some value but on trends dot c 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 trans community and i actually went to his house a few weeks ago my wife and i went to his house and met 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 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 although 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 nineteen dollar daily planner on gum road and it kinda of took off i mean it it opened his eyes to sales to digital products and so he decided to do this thing where he product his service and he created this course called build one sell twice the product customization 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 kinda 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 eighteen 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 we also talk about the economics of the agency business and where some opportunity are is and then we also talk about product prioritization product 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 fifteen minutes or so for free but if you want the whole thing go to trends dot c and sign up and you'll see the rest of the episode alright so what i i'm we're recording now oh good you're drinking my drink our drink now i guess we're a mutual he zero lovers we get that sponsorship rolling i know i wish i'm gonna put so this podcast what we're talking about right now this is gonna be live on our main podcast feed and it'll get listen by a ton of people and then we're gonna chop it up at one point and only trans members are gonna see it gotcha 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 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'm i don't know how i've 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 and your is your business is fascinating the summary that i'll give it 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 twenty one you did a bunch of part time low paying agency gigs kinda worked your way up the tote and 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 gum road thing on how to organize your thoughts and it did okay it it but that kinda clicked for you and then you created this visualize value store course whatever you wanna call it community and eight and you share your revenue numbers in eighteen months in you're in the ballpark of like eight hundred to a million a year in revenue yep great so what what 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 you you got 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 trained as a designer came in as a designer on the you know the bottom of the tote 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 start up for a little while worked at bloomberg for nine months 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 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 charge thirty thousand dollars to like design an email was like if i could get one of these clients on my own then i'm gonna 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 twelve people strategist and people that have to answer emails at the middle of the night and all that stuff so jumped into that world and just caught quickly overwhelmed by all the stuff that you know wasn't first nature to me or the administration or the other stuff that comes with running up like complex service business and then you know over the course of six to nine months started to dial in on the product side 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 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 the idea aviation 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 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 bell goes off like 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 product that skill set and that's where the the course products start 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 product sizing a service and i wanna learn about courses where you 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 all a lot of times with courses i've got friends i have them and they like get big fast but then they kinda tee out do you think that's gonna happen with you it may 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 product prioritization so it feels to me like it has a longer runway because that is you know a a huge there's a huge market and people that have an incredible amount of knowledge or experience that they wanna 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'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 micah gut is i could i could keep it running for a while what's the endgame i think building the like 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 it's there's there's a pretty linear relationship between you know me making content post out social and earning from the course so the game is to just slowly increase but it's not an end game but the target that's ahead that's gonna stay ahead is ink like decrease the amount of like daily 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 you wanna be you wanna do something like do you wanna sell this business do you wanna do you have like a kind of something honestly 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 targets for some arbitrary reasons so there is no like you know five year like this is exactly what needs to happen i think just for having a good you're just trying 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 wanna figure out what makes me miserable and avoid it yeah it's about spot art that's very articulate put you 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 where where do you think are some you 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 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 that's a great one for yeah what what how big is that one how how big is it yeah i would think they're probably doing high six figures a year off that that's crazy what's it what's that one called exotic car hacks i think it's called yeah god that's brilliant yeah and the way that you get fascinating well the the way that you get customers for that is you just have an exotic car instagram at or youtube page which is fun yeah i think those are the ones that tend to do well right 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 as you have this organic content engine on the front end where you can produce something i was like oh that's cool i wanna 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 and work the like sell as a result of producing content on the front end and so that i think as a trend and the exotic cars it's a great example that you have some 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 onto twitter it other are like aws i don't know the intricacies or some of this stuff we're like dissect some facet of like amazon aws you should check out daniel vas he's he's doing a good numbers on gum road with an aws product and as if you people what what what's that mean aws product amazon web services yeah but what's going mean the product oh it's a 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 the return would be significantly lower i would imagine unless you 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 cor so you could charge two hundred ninety nine you called a book and twenty nine you're right right that's outrageous just yeah twenty nine hours for a book someone's life work it's right yeah it's a 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 put a video in a book but you can't you can but you can get close enough with the information it's just 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 i think it's a probably a byproduct of taken a fair and like figuring out what i like and don't like when i'm learning and i also did like had this feedback loop with sealer who you met my wife the she's not a designer that's 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'm 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 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 when we launched it everyone's like oh yeah it 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 there will be but i didn't use any when you when you look at like who does it best who do you use as an your north star first you said this is yeah you i i i logged into that sam evans guy consulting dot com he comes off as a scammer 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 it's hard to it's hard to hard to say who's doing it best because i think everybody's kinda got a different take on it yeah and i still think it's i still think it's early when i first got into it i was like 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 aren't really you know they aren't that like they're on 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 think 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 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 if someone hasn't pounce 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 services that they sell one to one but could have a product sized 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 a lot of a lot of think 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 writing is a popular one my best friend neville has copy course dot com he's been doing that for fifteen years maybe maybe ten years making an awesome living then there's that guy dave per that's called the rite 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 it sells 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 web flow that's kind of interesting yeah there's a guy as a couple of other examples come to mind there's a guy es ra cohen who sells you've 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 pre packaged like creative templates and some some guidance some tutorials that go along with and then i think he jumped to how to help creative package like temp work as the necklace like them 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 wanna hear the full thing go to trends dot c it calls a dollar to try out if you don't like it just cancel and you could listen to the episode and it's a buck and you're only out of dollar if you do like it it's gonna be about three hundred bucks a year you're gonna get access to weekly report 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 access to more weekly podcast podcasts like this and finally this is kinda 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 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 hoo sweet 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 dot c if you wanna 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 dot c see you