Lessons - Scaling to $1M/mo Selling Courses | Jack Butcher - Founder of Visualize Value

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