Lessons - How to Build a Valuable Community Without Venture Capital | Jack Butcher - Visualize Value Founder (1.2M Followers)

In this lessons episode, explore why showing your work publicly has become the ultimate currency for building credibility and opportunity online. Discover how transparency and proof-of-work drive community growth and long-term success understand how creators can productize their skills to create scalable income and uncover strategies to stay focused amid distractions and avoid chasing every new trend. I'm not sure if you if you if you did this purposefully or not, but also I found that everything you did you built a great community around it so it wasn't just putting out great content like there was a great community that you built it and if I'm not mistaken even the products that you the the the course the final the second course I'm not sure about the first one but did you build those in public as well like you involved the community and so that's something else that I noticed that people that do it very well especially on Twitter just because it seems to be like such a huge or the organic reaches immense compared to many other social platforms. So walk me through if you have any tips on on building that community because if somebody does build one sell twice that's they have a product fine but how do you build this reach because that's really what's going to really benefit right. Yeah I think one of the one of the advantages I have as a designer and one of the things that's been like extremely instrumental in the like the development of my career is showing my work so it's like nobody's ever cared about my degree nobody's ever cared about where I went to school every interview I've gone to every like job I've even every project I've gotten to work on internally and agency has been because of the thing I did last so and you have a very tangible set of assets to point to as a designer because you you produce a portfolio of work like this is a project I worked on this is a brand I designed this is a website I built and I think that was almost a subconscious advantage for such a long time because I'd always had that mentality right so it doesn't it doesn't matter what you tell me show me what you did and that's how that's how I managed to move jobs and get a job in the first place by showing my portfolio so I think that's a skill that other not even a skill it's a practice I should say that other industries and other disciplines are coming around to now so if you're you know if you're academia does this like they publish what they're thinking about right they're always producing there's always an output of okay this is the research that we've done this is how we're going to present it this is you know our thesis and I think convincing people whatever it is you're thinking about you have an opportunity to produce deliverables that convey that right and that to me is it's like a fundamental shift in thinking that seems completely obvious to me as a designer but when I introduce that concept to other people they're like oh yeah that's a great idea I'm going to start doing that and the idea that you think you're going to get discovered or people will you know actively seek out your thinking without doing that is I mean it's insane when you look at it that way but it's obvious but that's what everybody does that's what everybody does right right boom that someone's just going to come and like pluck you out and be like oh can you yeah can you uh sell me on your services and you know the way the I mean the internet is just a monstrous force in that equation right every there's an aval quote the the internet the internet democratizes consumption but consolidates production so if you're the best in the world at anything you get to do it for everyone and that's like a really huge overlooked force in society I think that just because you've had this experience offline or because you have this anecdote of a friend of yours that got you know that new somebody and got this job here proof of work is now like the currency that is going to move your career forward I think in almost every field and people who can produce visual assets or tangible assets or record podcasts or make videos are just that much more likely to generate luck uh you know create relationships at scale because you know it's just sheer surface area and that is uh uh just uh the one thing I think that is hugely underestimated and it takes a long time to build it and get good at it and all of those things but um yeah that but that's what differentiates that's that you're having that asset right is what differentiates how do you so this is something that now you teach over to people that are building the the build one the build once sell twice so um as part of that I'm assuming you actually have the the way to ideate on on how to productize your your knowledge and your your experience but also part of that is also the the building the community building the brand and that's is that the core less than the core learning is to is to show your work in some format or another and I guess I'm just thinking through like for for somebody who isn't a designer a podcast youtube whatever it may be that's probably the easiest way there are there are other ways that you can show work I'm just curious I don't know yeah there's something else that you would recommend people do to build out this brand well another thing that's interesting and this is like there's so much nuance to this and it often doesn't get covered in conversations about it but the one of the fundamental things I think is do you have a skill set that allows you to produce a result for someone on your own if you do then you have a massive opportunity to teach other people that skill set right if you're a designer a writer a video producer if you produce something tangible or you have you can analyze data in a certain way there is it's like reverse engineering the result so a huge part of the curriculum is to get people focused on the result they generate and then essentially build things that help you deliver that result with a less linear relationship to your time over time so you begin as a designer that spends three days with a founding team getting all the information out of them and then turning that into an asset the second iteration of that is you have systems to collect that information from them and you write better questions and you spend less time you spend less time like grilling people individually so it gets more and more efficient and then eventually you have a program that's so watertight because you've sent a hundred people through it and you've like figured out all the blind spots and figured out what you need to introduce somebody to at what time in order to get them to think about something in a different way that helps you like slowly divorce your time from the delivery of the result but I think that is the introspective question that all of this begins with is like if if I if I can create leverage for someone else on my own then I can produce an asset that essentially replicates my ability to do that and that like we're in a period of time now where it's really hard to build that very specific skill set and stay focused long enough to be able to produce that result right when I started my career I would get like two text messages a day and I'd read them on my lunch break people that are like practitioners and trying to learn skills now are going on Twitter or Instagram every 45 seconds and it feels like you're missing the bow every time you look at something else right it's like oh I should be working on this or I should be you know I should learn that skill or I should be following this person and and like emulate what they're doing so I'm really empathetic to the fact that it's harder or at least my perspective of it is it's really difficult to build these stand out skills yeah and you have that shiny object syndrome for sure right that's that's always an issue now with social and constant exposure and you're always questioning whether or not you're doing it right even if you're getting results should you redo it or learn something new or do it a different way so how do you how do you personally focus on what's driving results and not follow that shiny object all the time it's increasingly difficult right the the amazing thing about building a business like this is it sort of trails your curiosity so you have to you have to be interested in something that you're not quite great at in order to continue to like deliver those learnings to people who haven't gone down the same path as you but you also have to recognize when you are like just completely distracted and wasting time and that's the the like the amazing thing about the internet as it cuts both ways right you can go super deep and build one cell twice the addressable market for that is enormous you could go and sell that for a decade probably right there's enough people that have not been exposed to those ideas but you can get in this little echo chamber where you've you you start to burn out on on that thinking because you've been teaching it for a year for example but then you you could switch too far in a different direction right or for me like my shiny object is crypto so I'm like down all these different rabbit holes you know I played around with NFTs this year and I'm incredibly like I'm a huge believer in all this technology but there's also a cost to being distracted from the thing that a hundred thousand people know you for for example thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you want to dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one