From 0 to 100 million US dollars, Jack Butcher's creative life from being a worker at Party B to VV Checks

"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.

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

1. Who is Jack Butcher and how to achieve "after-sleep income" from 0 to 1 million US dollars within a year
2. Integrate the idea and skills of "making complex things easy to understand through visual effects" into NFT to create phenomenal projects
3. Inspiration to me

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:

Jack Butcher is a 10-year-experienced graphic designer in the advertising industry. He earns money by catering to client needs; in January 2020, he found that the company’s bank account was only $58, and he was exhausted physically and mentally. Then he learned from the pain and completely changed himself His business model has changed from "selling time" to "selling products", and has achieved product sales of more than 1 million US dollars within one year; at the same time, he has also done a lot of exploration on NFT, and launched Checks VV / Opepens one after another. / Checks Elements and other influential projects.

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

• Learning graphic design (2007-2010)
• Do 3 unpaid graphic design internships (2010)
• Get the first Agency job (2011)
• Resigned from Agency (2012)
• Continued 7 Agency jobs (2012 -2017)
• Founded his own advertising agency (2017)
• Change Direction (2017)
• Change direction again (2018)
• Create Visualize Value (2018-present)

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)

1. Selling time/services can never let you rest, only selling products can
2. Passive pick-up will never allow you to accumulate your own reputation/traffic, you must establish your own positioning and brand

Therefore, Jack Butcher has to answer the following 2 questions

1. How to discover and build your own positioning and brand?
2. How to turn your own skills into products that can be standardized and sold?

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

2. No one cares about what you can do, everyone cares about what problems you can solve for them.
3. In the relationship between supply and demand, the more unique the supply, the more valuable the product and the higher the price.
4. The Internet has greatly impacted the viability of being rewarded for uniqueness. In a local market, uniqueness almost always shrinks the market; but on the Internet, the opposite is true, and uniqueness alone acquires users.

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

1. Build content that demonstrates your unique skills to interested users
2. Build a service that proves it solves a real user problem
3. Build products, standardize sales services, and realize "after-sleep income"
4. Accumulate reputation and build brand

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:

1. These "philosophical quotes" have passed the test of time, and the only thing he needs to prove is the skill of "making complex things easy to understand through visual design"
2. Proved by the content of "visual design", it is sufficiently lightweight and effective

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"

• The fastest contact with market front-line issues
• Prove yourself by solving customer problems with minimal overhead (a computer and some software)
• Provide a solid income (before building a product)

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

1. Build process
2. Build a portfolio from work to process
3. Mindset changes: from "passive response to demand" to "active demand creation"

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

1. What's the problem?
2. How do we know this is a problem?
3. What is the solution?
4. How do we summarize the solution into a product?
5. How do we prove it works?

Case Study: Creating a Product "How to Visualize Value"

• Problem: Non-designers also want to master the skill of "visualizing value"
• How do we know?
• Issues based on insights from user tweets

• Then tweet for verification

• Solution: Start a digital "how to visualize value" workshop to verify whether the service provided can solve customer problems
• Summarize the solution into a product: "How to visualize value"

• How do we prove it works? Customer Reviews

2.3.2 Build a combination from work to process

Jack Butcher's definition of service, productized service, and product is particularly good:

1. Service is work without process. (acquiring specific knowledge)
2. Productization service is a work with a process. (stabilize your time and income)
3. A product is a process without work. (buy back your time)

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:

• Service: VV Consulting ($20,000+ per month)
• Productization service: VV Trust Profile Sprint ($3,000)
• Product: Build Once, Sell Twice — Productization Playbook ($297)
• Product: * How to Visualize Value — Design Fundamentals ($297)
• Product: Compound Content ($297)
• Product: VV Community & Vault ($149/year)
• Product: VV Daily Manifest ($19)
• Product: VV Wallpapers ($10)
• Product: The Permissionless Apprentice ($1)

This combination brings two distinct benefits:

1. Structured and enjoyable consulting work that exposes us to new problems and aligns us with market needs.
2. Product revenue disconnected from the hours we work.

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

1. Build content that demonstrates your unique skills to interested users
2. Build a service that proves it solves a real user problem
3. Build products, standardize sales services, and realize "after-sleep income"

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

1. You are the most valuable asset in your portfolio and your reputation is a proxy for future income
2. The long-term goal of cementing a unique reputation is to be completely free from competition. What people buy is not a commodity, but a relationship between people, you need to play a long-term game
3. Reputation is a simple construct built on two ideas:

• Capabilities: what you can do.
• Reliability: what you actually did, so "proof matters", not just thinking you can do it

10 tips from Jack Butcher on "How to Build a Reputation"

• Deliberate action: make noise, listen to the signal. When you start to get a signal, it takes extra effort. Focus on substance and accelerate cycle times. If you want to be recognized by the market, you have to deliberately make yourself recognizable.
• Strong self-confidence: Now, the market has given you the confidence and permission to stand out and be conspicuous in your professional field. People will only believe in you if you have confidence in yourself. Speak in a declarative tone. People only trust those who are confident in themselves.
• Keep the mentality unbreakable: When you reach a certain size, criticism and imitation are inevitable, which shows that your audience is growing. Business needs to run through opinions, separate yourself from the business.
• Stay productive: Find 1000's of ways to say the same thing and keep showing people what you're working on. Your audience should feel like they can see you wherever they look.
• Make good use of leverage: The leverage effect is the core concept of the "build once, sell many times" strategy, and it is also one of the secrets of "prolificacy". Through the Internet, amplify your efforts. Say it once, broadcast it twice; write it once, publish it twice; design it once, use it twice; build it once, sell it twice (my content on Newsletter can also be used on Twitter, and it can also be nourished for podcasts. In addition to In addition to content leverage, there are also software leverage, interpersonal leverage, and capital leverage, which will not be expanded here, and interested partners can search by themselves).
• Keep it open: Take people behind the scenes and prove that you can solve specific problems by showing how you do it. Make your "secrets" public, and people will pay you to realize them.
• Be yourself: Too often, marketing is the firewall we put in place to protect ourselves from the market. The closer to the natural state in communication, the more effective it is to avoid competition.
• This can be very uncomfortable at first, but it will definitely be worth it in the long run. After all, people buy relationships between people.
• With this in mind, in a company where you are an asset, how you present yourself can have a huge impact on the growth vector.
• Own a Reputation: Build mutually beneficial relationships based on your unique assets and abilities. Work with those who can complement your skills. As your network grows, so does reputational value, and so do the participants and the opportunities you have. This compounding effect allows you to be increasingly selective about the opportunities you pursue.
• Embrace your failures: In growing the Visualize Value business, Jack made some mistakes. Openly acknowledging and asking for forgiveness leads to the most amazing bursts of growth every time something goes wrong. Because what users buy is the relationship with you, honesty makes you more real
• Have patience with compound interest: compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world, but it takes time, and many people give up before reaching the threshold where compounding can meaningfully work
• Whether it is the growth of Jack’s Twitter account or the income of Visualize Value, it basically started to explode after 1 year (thanks to Jack for his generous sharing)
• The growth of my own Twitter account is also similar, so my own perception is to do things that are interesting and can be invested in for a long time, otherwise it will be difficult to persist to the critical point.

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

• Integrate the idea and skills of "making complex things easy to understand through visual effects" into NFT to create phenomenal projects
• Jack Butcher inspired me