What's going on? My first million listeners, this is sampar. 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 going to do is give you 15 minutes or so of the episode for free. If you like it you can go to Trends dotco and sign up and listen to the rest of the episode or if you sign up for the hustle and your email you'll see we'll send you some show notes. So even if you're not a subscriber you're going to get some value but on Trends Dot,
You'll get the full episode and transcription and then you'll get access to community where this guess 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 to his house and 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.
Great energy, but basically his story is that Jack came to America at age 22 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 its role. 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 his like a $19 daily planner on gumroad and it kind of took off. I mean it opened his eyes to sales to digital products. And so
Decided to do this thing where he productized his service and he created this course called build once sell twice. The product is ation 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 kind of 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 too close to a million dollars a year in Revenue in only 18 months.
And so in this episode I talk 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 ization productizing different services and what he sees as different opportunities that are out there. It's 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 dotco and sign up and you'll see the rest of the episode.
All right. So what I'm recording now, oh good. You're drinking my drink or drink now, I guess we're neutral Heineken zero lovers. Yeah that sponsorship rolling. I know I wish I'm going to put so this podcast what we're talking about right now. This is going to be live on our main podcast feed and it'll get Listen by a ton of people and then we're going to chop it up at one point and only Trends members are going to see it. And so what I wanted to talk about today was
Some of your course stuff but right now I've already written the blog posts and we're live now we're recording I've written a blog post and what I've said about you is that I'm 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 and like your business is your business is fascinating.
The summary that I'll give it and I'll let you do. All the Talking is that you came from England at what 22:21?
I think
21 you did a bunch of part-time low-paying agency gigs kind of work your way up the totem pole 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 $19 like gumroad thing on how
Organize your thoughts and it did okay it but that kind of clicked for you and then you created this visualize Value Store course, whatever you want to call it community and eight and you share your Revenue numbers and 18 months in you're in the ballpark of like 800 to a million a year in Revenue. Yeah, great. So 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
know, you got you got a great.
A 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 I trained as a designer came in as a designer on the you know, the bottom of the totem pole and you do another 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 it's 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 at start up for a little while worked at Bloomberg for nine months at on the design team there and then got you I think a point in my agency career where I start to see the economics of the agency. So I like climbed up enough for them to like show me the the project that the bill essentially that they were sending clients. I was like, hang on a minute you charge in $30,000 to like
design an email 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 have to answer emails at the middle of the night and all that stuff so jumped into that world and just 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 at like complex service.
This and then 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 will build websites will 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 and if you recall was the presentation for the 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 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. So I got 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 yet looking at how I could product Ties That
Skill set and that's where the course product 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 want to learn about the agency business. I want to learn about productizing a service and I want to learn about courses where you let's start with courses. So your business is like in the 802 million dollar range now in this is all public you tweet this out. Yeah with a lot of times it courses. I've got friends that have them and they like get big fast.
Fast but then they kind of Teeter out. Do you think that's going to happen with you
it may what's interesting. I think is 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. It's like this self-fulfilling feedback loop and why?
One of the courses is specific to design. The other one is about product ization. So it feels to me like it has a longer Runway because that is you know 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 design product. It's not riding a trend of a tactic or anything like that is going to expire so I figure as long as I stay ahead of the market then I have a lot to share to people that are couple steps behind me in that Journey. So my gut is I could I could keep it running for a while.
What's the end game? I think?
building the like
building the media component of the company up a little more than it is now. So the the courses cell as a result of the things that I'm producing in real time on social so it's there's a pretty linear relationship between you know me making content posting on social and learning from the course. So the end game is to just slowly increase. It's not an endgame but the target that's a head that's going to stay ahead.
Is in 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 40 you want to do you want to be you want to do something like you want to sell this business? Do you want to do you have like a kind of some of the
Yoke? Honestly, 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 where now 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. So there is no like, you know five-year like this is exactly what needs to happen. I think there's just utilizing for having a
good time. Then you're just living Ryan Tryin. Yeah, my friend Andrew who so we this is only
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 on this very articulately
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 a hundred percent.
What do you think is where do you think are some some interesting courses that are doing? Well, you told me about one that I'm going to buy actually, so 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 and what you purchased it for. That's a
great lesson for yeah,
what's up? What how big, is that one?
How well how big is it? Yeah, I would think they're probably doing High six figures a year after
that. That's crazy Mike. What's it? What's that one called?
Exotic car hacks. I think it's called.
Yeah God that's brilliant
and the way that you
Fascinating what the way that you get customers for that as you just have an exotic car Instagram cattle or YouTube page, which is fun.
Yeah. I think those are the ones that tend to do. Well rise when you have some way to promote it on the front end the 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. So I was like, oh, that's cool. I want to learn how to make their and then you can feed them into the product Loop so that
That's like a huge part of making it sustainable and work the like cell as a result of producing content on the front end so that I think as a trend and the exotic cars is a great example that you have something to point out that makes people want to learn the
thing. What are some other examples that you
like we have seen people there's a few people on Twitter that are
Like AWS, I don't know the intricacies of some of the stuff. We're like dis dissecting some facet of like Amazon AWS. You should check out Daniel vassallo. He's doing a good numbers on gumroad with an AWS product. And as if any people that are what's that mean AWS product Amazon web services?
Yeah, but what's that mean a product?
So it's like a tutorial on how to get the most out of
One 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 return would be significantly lower. I would imagine unless you with some huge publisher and you 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 called A Chorus you could charge 299. You caught a book and out most 29 it right,
right. That's outrageous. Yeah, $29 for a book. Someone's life work is right. Yeah, this this is just a slight tweak in positioning. Obviously, you can do things with a course that are slightly different than a book can put a video in a book for you. Can you can but you can get close enough for 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 few 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 Celia who you met my wife the she's not a designer. So 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 as I'm 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'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 when we launched it. Everyone's like, oh yes 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 what 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 a your North Star
first? You said this is
yeah. Yeah, I logged into that Sam Evans guy consulting.com. He comes off as a scammer. But damn his shits
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 want to 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 want to read a 45 second article and understand what it is. So it's hard to it's hard to
How to say who's doing it best because I think everybody's kind of 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 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, 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 teacher ball or think if it costs like they exist within this Marketplace. I 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 You Tube 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 someone hasn't pounced on in your opinion.
I think there's like loads of consultant 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 productize version of it that exists a tenth of the price. That's essentially what we have going on now at specific examples. I'm thinking like a lot of a lot of thing 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 copywriting course.com. He's been doing that for 15 years, maybe 10 years making an awesome living then there's that guy Dave / L is called The Rite of Passage. I think it's called I think he charges to or $4,000 to learn how to write writing is like a massive Market. I think your Market of designed is huge. I think that other markets that are huge but they're played out a little bit is Excel.
I think excels 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 Ezra Cohen who sells you seen this guy sells like video templates on Instagram. I think he mostly runs this stuff, but I think he's doing seven figures a year selling like
These prepackaged like creative templates and some 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 necklace like them. The layer on top of that as his next course. I don't how he's doing with that one, but I know is template stuff was
flying.
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