Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - Scaling to $1M/mo Selling Courses | Jack Butcher - Founder of Visualize Value

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Lessons - Scaling to $1M/mo Selling Courses | Jack Butcher - Founder of Visualize Value · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  You'd launch the course, the way that you've scaled it to a million dollars in revenue
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  in 18 months.
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  That's also slightly unorthodox compared to many other course creators that launch on
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  you to me, your skillshared, whatever.
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  Walk me through your strategy for your growth as a course creator and as a brand.
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  Sure.
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  We haven't spent any money on advertising ever, zero dollars on ads, and that's been
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  the signals you get back from the content I think has informed the journey massively
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  so I started my, started soliciting for business for a opponent on Facebook.
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  This is like, I don't even know how I ended up down that rabbit hole, but maybe somebody,
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  this is like the Facebook ad algorithm working a treat, right?
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  They're seeing what I'm reading, what I'm looking at, and I go on Facebook and it's
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  like, join this thing, like, scale your business, do this thing, so I end up in all these
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  different groups and things, and I just, for whatever reason, it's a really closed
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  garden, right?
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  The Facebook thing started to get really like, it's like really micro-economies of the
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  same kinds of people buying stuff from one another and there's a few dozen people that
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  are sort of sustaining each other's business and whatever opinion you want on that is fine,
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  but it was really when I've discovered Twitter that the dynamic change completely, so the
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  open network of Twitter, if you have, I think if you can produce content that has like
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  this natural velocity to it, like it will get shared organically, it really opens you
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  up to all manner of possibilities, right, depending on the products you create, depending
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  on the work you do, I think you can use an organic audience that is attracted to a very
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  specific type of creative output, you can offer all manner of unique things to those people,
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  and the course thing was never really in the roadmap or something that I even thought
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  about doing, so the first six months was really just consulting and design projects and
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  just getting more and more narrow on that, so obviously the bigger the reach becomes
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  like the more choosy you can essentially get with who you work with, right, you can
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  qualify the people that are going to get the most out of what you do, the people that
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  you want to work with the most, and that was going well, and the network was just growing
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  naturally on Twitter, and it was actually a tweet by David Perl, you know David Perl?
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  Yeah, he's an incredible writer, obviously that's just thing. Yeah, and he wrote a tweet
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  in maybe May of last year saying one skill I really want to sharpen up this year is my ability
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  to design, and he, I think tagged visualized value in that post and is like this is something
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  that I'm studying, and that again is like because you have the audience and the reach can act quickly
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  on a concept like that, and there's an element of social proof in his, you know, in his
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  acknowledgement of it, so that was just a quote tweet I believe I said, is anybody, you know,
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  if I was to put something together on this topic, like a asynchronous course that you could go
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  through, would you be interested in it, and it got a great response, so then I said, okay,
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  give me a week, I'll make it, and that, that did well, and obviously you have the content
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  engine that's still ticking in the background, which is bringing more people in to hopefully see
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  expose the people that might want to learn that to that content, that I think we ran that for
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  like three months very specifically, and you can imagine how tight of a relationship there is
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  between posting these images that are the output of this, like honing this skill set,
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  yeah, and then, yeah, maybe three or four months after that, a lot of people reached out to me
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  and they're like, how did you take design as a skill set and codifier into this curriculum
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  that people can follow, and I hadn't done it before, but it is a, you know, it is just an exercise
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  in design thinking, it's just a different sort of different slant on it, like how do you structure
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  information, how do you break up these principles into a sequence where people can kind of
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  a step ladder of knowledge, right? You interview someone to this principle, and that principle,
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  you haven't do this exercise, so there was essentially someone else in the Twitter audience
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  challenged me to codify that, and that thing became another education product called build
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  once cell twice, which is how do you productize something that you have stumbled on really
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  specifically, right? Like those ten years of corporate experience, and like a couple failed
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  businesses landed in this place where there is this skill set that you don't necessarily need a
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  higher me to capitalize on that thing, you can buy it for your designer, you can learn it yourself,
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  you can start to bring these principles into your work, so that became, and that's not just
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  true of design, right? There's anybody that has a very specific skill set can scale their knowledge
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  that way, so. What was the first iteration of that product? Was it you building a social media
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  profile brand community around the product, or was it actually trying to productize it?
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  So it was a service business to begin with, so I think this is a common misconception that
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  there's this like cut off point where okay I'm doing this now, but it was more of a
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  okay I have some corporate clients I'm doing this like generic creative work, but I'm going to
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  start to promote the agency with this more specific aesthetic, so I'm kind of failing in business
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  at that point, right? I'm completely burned out, making okay money, everybody I tell what I'm
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  doing is like wow this is the most incredible thing ever, but it doesn't really align with my
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  experience, so start reading more, start discovering great authors that have written about the things
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  that I'm struggling with, and started basically applying my skill set to that content, so like the
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  Seth Godans of the world, Navarrava can find there the things that they've said that helped me sort
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  of break through some of these barriers in my understanding of how to operate a business, turn
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  that into an asset that was uniquely, you know, that had my unique perspective embedded in it,
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  which in this case was these visuals, and that kind of became this
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  this different magnet for my services as an as an agency, so a few people reached out and they're
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  like, oh, can you help me visualize my ideas, or I have trouble explaining this thing, and when I
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  looked at that visual, it helped the idea land for me, and I think people can kind of reverse
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  engineer what it would be like to have their own ideas represented that way, or their own talking
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  points represented that way, so posting a few of those visuals early on wasn't called visualized
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  value, it wasn't like, I'm not starting this thing and calling it this thing, it was my
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  agency still exists, it's called opponent, and that was like this idea of like contrarian thinking
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  like we're going to challenge you on your ideas, and we're going to push you to
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  that's a clever thing for a business, I like that a lot actually, I didn't know that.
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  Yeah, and it resonates with people, but when you run into like Fortune 500 infrastructure,
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  it doesn't matter what your intentions are, it just you just get like completely worn down, so
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  that was like, I loved building out that brand and that story, but it's really hard to deliver
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  on the promise because of just the experience that I'd had today and like my ultimately my
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  naivety that I could do that individually, not saying that there aren't great agencies out there
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  that can like lead big businesses in new and different directions there are, but did I want to
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  go that route or did I have the skill set that I felt like I was the person to go and do that?
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  No, so it's taken time, but it's taken a significant amount of time to get there where you're like
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  you have to be like I think you have to love different things like I love making the stuff,
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  and if you're like really good at coaching people individually or you know like
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  strategically leading a group of people in a certain direction and investing years in like
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  coaching the leadership team of a business, that's a different skill set and people do that well,
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  but that's not that's not me. Yeah, so started posting this stuff and then that just became more
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  of the mix of work, so people were approaching me specifically for visual narratives,
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  whether that was a pitch deck, a landing page that explained their process, and there's a few
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  people that I just had as close friends that I met in entrepreneurial groups on the internet and
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  meetups that I went to in the city that when they'd explained their business to me I'd be like
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  oh have you tried explaining it like this, or you know you can distill your value proposition to
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  this one diagram, this one slide, and I thought it was so obvious and they'd look at it and be like
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  wow that's great, I'm going to start using that like this napkin sketch, so then like the dots
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  started to connect, I was like okay I can really narrow in on this and there's not going to be
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  you know there's no dearth of opportunity for people that want to more clearly communicate,
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  I'm not going to run out of literature, so then visualise value is born and all of the
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  think learnings from that had been beaten into me in the corporate America world, or it's like
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  pick a style, stick to it, build visual equity, stick to your brand guidelines, that's definitely
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  you know that training kind of kicked in and that's why the aesthetic is very specific and
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  you know spend time choosing the name and getting all that stuff dialed in, so yeah it wasn't a
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  smooth transition by any means, but it still isn't, right sir.