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From 0 to 100 million US dollars, Jack Butcher's creative life from being a worker at Party B to VV Checks
Written by: Starzq, Ruby Wang
Although the NFT market has been extremely cold recently, there is still a project that has attracted the attention of the market and the media, that is, Jack Butcher's Checks Element, which consists of 152 NFTs and corresponding single prints.
Among them, the top "Earth", "Air" and "Water" were exhibited and auctioned at Christie's Rockefeller Plaza in New York from May 20th to 23rd. 6529 NFT Fund Shot.
In addition, VV Checks, the predecessor of Checks Element, has quickly become a phenomenon-level project since it was launched in January at a price of 8 US dollars. So far, the transaction volume on Opensea has exceeded 75,000 ETH (135 million US dollars)
Christie's official website
In fact, Jack's journey has been very difficult. On May 15, 2019, 4 years ago, Jack held his first art exhibition in Queens, New York. He paid to exhibit 3 original Visualize Value posters at $20 each.
Going back to 3 years ago, in January 2020, after Jack found out that his design company’s bank account was only 58 US dollars, he learned from the pain and completely changed his business model. Within 1 year, he obtained more than 1 million US dollars in product sales Forehead.
What kind of profound understanding did Jack Butcher make? In one year, he went from a designer who was about to go bankrupt to a free life with an income of 1 million U.S. dollars last year, and then to NFT projects with more than 100 million U.S. dollars in transactions. As soon as it is revealed.
The full text contains 3 parts
Considering the length of the article, this Newsletter will focus on the first part, how Jack can achieve "after-sleep income" from 0 to 1 million US dollars within a year; next week, we will continue to bring you how Jack integrates the same ideas into NFT to create a phenomenon Class projects, and what inspired me.
Enjoy!
(Special thanks to my old friend Shaonan, who recommended Jack Butcher as a top creator in the legendary experience of web2, which gave me a lot of inspiration for planning the next Newsletter)
Who is Jack Butcher and how to achieve "after-sleep income" from 0 to 100w dollars within a year
Who is Jack Butcher? TL;DR version:
Let's take a look at how Jack Butcher completed the work from 10 years of work "the exhausted selling time results in only 58 dollars" to "reaching 1 million dollars through the power of products and compound interest" within 1 year, while also establishing influence in the NFT field, The thinking behind it is worth learning and reference for each of us
0. Exhausted selling time ended up with only $58 left
Jack Butcher has a typical experience of a graphic designer in the advertising industry: internship → working for an agency → starting his own agency
As can be seen from the yearly change of direction after starting his own agency, Jack Butcher's life has not been smooth. In January 2020, after discovering that the company's bank account was only $58, he made the following two profound reflections (obviously inspired by Naval)
Therefore, Jack Butcher has to answer the following 2 questions
1. How to discover and build your own positioning and brand?
For the first question, Jack Butcher's answer is
Greatly narrow my focus and work on solving the [uniqueness] problem
There are 3 more insights behind this
What is the [uniqueness] problem that Jack Butcher can solve?
He looked at all his experiences and realized that he had spent years at work producing presentations for clients, a job that most of his colleagues weren't good at, or interested in.
The purpose of these presentations is to visualize intangible concepts: how logic in a software product works, how process X saves a company time, what is the competitive landscape in industry Y, and so on.
That is to say
Make complex things easy to understand through visual design
Here's a presentation I did for a supply chain company:
2. How to turn your own skills into products that can be standardized and sold?
For the second question, Jack Butcher did the following disassembly
2.1 Build content that demonstrates your unique skills to interested users
Jack Butcher established a corresponding brand "Visualize Value" based on his unique skills of "making complex things easy to understand through visual design".
In the first 6 months, he posted 2-3 visual design content on Twitter and Instagram every day, mainly philosophical quotes and mental models, and gradually expanded to email (Substack) and YouTube.
From here, we can also see the ingenuity of Jack Butcher:
These visual designs have gradually attracted some small business interactions and inquiries, and Jack Butcher has proven his unique skills to have interested paying users.
2.2 Build services to prove that they can solve real problems of users
After proving that its unique skills have interested paying users, the next step is to prove that it solves real problems for users
Although the service can neither give you time freedom nor generate "after-sleep income", it is the lightest way to "prove that it can solve the real problems of users"
Customer Feedback: Prove Yourself
But the "service" cannot be expanded. If you want to make more money, you can only sell more time. In the end, you are exhausted, overworked, and underpaid. So we need "products".
2.3 Build products, standardize sales services, and realize "after-sleep income"
A picture is worth a thousand words. When Jack Butcher began to learn from the pain in January 2020, the income through "services" fluctuated greatly. The main bottleneck was how much time he could sell each month; after launching the "product", Jack Butcher successfully broke the "time barrier". More than 3 times the revenue of "service" in less time and zero extra labor, and finally brought in more than $1,000,000 in product sales in 2020.
This is undoubtedly a skill that everyone dreams of. Below we will disassemble how Jack Butcher builds and sells products to achieve "after-sleep income". divided into 3 parts
2.3.1 Build process (build process)
The transition from service to productized service to product is essentially about building the process.
If you can't describe what you're doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing. — W. Edwards Deming
When we have process, we have predictability. When we have predictability, we have peace of mind. Productizing services is where we start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. (This is similar to the problem that product managers have to solve. Based on the product, everyone can clearly know whether a certain problem can be solved and what the cost is, so-called predictability; otherwise known problems may be treated as new problems , reinventing the wheel, reducing the ROI per unit time)
We can build products by answering the following 5 questions
Case Study: Creating a Product "How to Visualize Value"
2.3.2 Build a combination from work to process
Jack Butcher's definition of service, productized service, and product is particularly good:
With the end point of building process products, services are the source of obtaining user needs, and productized services are the intermediate state of building processes. All three have their own value.
Visualize Value offers different levels of services and products:
This combination brings two distinct benefits:
2.3.3 Changes in Mindset: From "Passive Response to Demand" to "Active Demand Creation"
There is no problem with the service itself, the problem is that "only selling services for a long time (such as working all the time)" will cause people to take on problems that they are not particularly qualified to solve (in the name of providing services**)**, making people lose their building Product and business capabilities will only respond to needs passively (accepting orders from bosses and customers at work).
Responding to demand passively means that you are selling time; selling products means that you must first create a standardized demand, then prove that users are interested, and finally use standardized products to meet this standardized demand.
Start with the lightest content and build your product step by step
2.4 Accumulate reputation and build brand
Whether it's content, service or product, (strange) target users need to believe that you have what they want, and brand is the bridge between the two, Brand is all about trust.
A brand consists of differentiated value + reputation. How to find and prove the value of differentiation has already been discussed a lot above. For "what is reputation", Jack Butcher has output the following 3 insights
10 tips from Jack Butcher on "How to Build a Reputation"
Summary of the first part: "Selling time" was also a good choice 10 years ago, but now you need to learn to "sell products" if you want to be free
In the past 2 weeks, I spent more than ten hours reading and watching Jack Butcher-related content, including Blog, course notes and YouTube interviews. If Naval is an enlightenment thinker of "selling time → selling products", Jack Butcher is a top practitioner and educator. Not only has he realized the transformation of "selling time → selling products", but he has also made it very practical The course "Build Once, Sell Twice" gave me more confidence to do similar things.
In my opinion, both "selling time" and "selling products" had the opportunity to make people free 10 years ago.
Ten years ago, after graduating and entering a large factory, improving one's professionalism and position, selling one's time more expensively, and achieving a certain level of financial freedom under the triple growth of cash, stocks, and real estate is a more important thing for ordinary people. Easy mode, because it is enough to continue to meet the requirements, and there is no need to bear the initial time cost and trial and error cost in building products.
But in the current environment, it is almost impossible to achieve freedom by "selling time". Under the macroeconomic environment, there are fewer and fewer high-paying positions that large factories can provide. With the reduction of staff and efficiency, time will no longer be sold more and more expensive, and it is cheaper and cheaper. If you want to be relatively free (including time and finance), "Selling products" is one of the only options (the other is investment, which is more difficult for ordinary people to grasp).
If you also want to achieve relative freedom of time and finances, or hope to have a backup in addition to "selling time", the summary of this article and the courses of jack butcher in the appendix are worth a look.
This is the end of the first part, please look forward to the next 2 parts of Newsletter next week