The Constraints in the Visual Style

Jack Butcher is the founder of Visualize Value, a design, consulting, and educational company in New York City.

Jack spent 10 years working in advertising for Fortune 100 companies as a creative director for multi-billion dollar brands that include Amazon, Nokia, McDonald’s, and Mercedes-Benz. It was a job he found enjoyable but constraining.

In search of freedom, Jack started his own advertising agency, which he describes as “No fun, and even less freedom.” However, after two years of iteration, Jack figured out how to transition to highly specialized (and fun) consulting, and a product business that scales infinitely.

Visualize Value is the product of that transition, a project Jack has used to build a network of mentors, a $1M/year product business, and a media platform with an audience of over 500,000 people.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How to use your unique skills to stand out on social media
• Why repetition in your design is the fastest way to build your brand
• How designing for niche markets makes your job much easier
• How to scale your business without compromising quality

Links & Resources

• DHH on Twitter: @dhh
• Jason Fried on Twitter: @jasonfried
• Basecamp
• Nick Huber on Twitter: @sweatystartup
• David Perell on Twitter: @david_perell
• Write of Passage
• Brian Norgard on Twitter: @BrianNorgard
• Anthony Pompliano on Twitter: @APompliano
• Maven Adviser

Jack Butcher’s Links

• Jack’s website: Visualize Value
• Jack’s email newsletter: VV/155
• Jack’s Twitter: @jackbutcher
• Visualize Value merchandise
• Visualize Value on Twitter: @visualizevalue
• Jack’s Instagram: @jckbtchr
• Visualize Value on Instagram: @visualizevalue 
• Build Once, Sell Twice

Episode Transcript

Jack: [00:00:00]
You build something digital that runs on code or media, and can be served up infinitely at zero cost replication to you, something like a product or an information product you build at once, and you can sell it to a hundred, a thousand, 10,000, a hundred thousand people. The bulk of the value is created once.

And then just becomes a game of how effective are you at spreading that story and reaching people that need the thing that you’ve done. 

Nathan: [00:00:37]
In this episode, I talk to Jack Butcher. Jack has a really interesting visual style where he’s taking these complex concepts: it could be leverage, it could be this idea of build once, sell twice (that I’m super jealous of by the way), how he framed that… any of these things, he takes them and distills them down to these graphics:

Black background, white text, white line drawings, slightly pixelated looking. It’s very distinct style and he’s used it to build a massive following; well-over a hundred thousand followers in social media, he built his email list, he’s doing fantastic revenue from courses. So, we dive in on what it takes to be unique.

How a lot of marketing Twitter, you know, marketers talking about marketing is repetitive. A lot of people don’t have a unique angle on it. And so how he makes unique content that’s more interesting and engaging and stands out.

How constraints really drive that.

We talk about a lot of other things, exactly how he makes money and monetization. There’s a lot of great stuff, who inspires him, so much more. 

Jack’s someone that I’ve wanted to have on this show since I started it. And so I’m very excited to talk to Jack. 

Let’s dive in. Jack, thanks for talking with me today.

Jack: [00:01:49]

Thank you for having me, man. I appreciate it. 

Nathan: [00:01:51]
Okay. I feel like so many people on the internet are—especially in the content marketing audience growth space—are doing the exact same thing as other people, you know, it’s just like, it’s similar playbook. Everyone’s going over it repeatedly. The amazing thing is that it still works. You don’t actually have to innovate that much to make like a hundred grand a year or more on the internet, which is mind blowing, but then you come out and you actually have like a really unique visual style.

You’re doing something different instead of just like another random tweet thread, or like summarizing the same quotes that everyone else is doing. It feels like you’re doing something unique. And in, you know, in these little graphics, you’re explaining these same concepts that everyone else has talked about, but in a really condensed format.

So, I’m curious, well, one, let’s just start with where that came from, and then I want to get into like what you think other people should do to differentiate and not be the same. Like, you know, it’s just copying everybody else.

Jack: [00:02:52]
Yeah, sure, so very quick background. I studied design in school, graduated in 2010. That was in the UK. I moved to New York and started working agency jobs in basically every different capacity. So design art direction, creative direction, worked for small boutique agencies that would build like, small brands to big global behemoths at work on like.

Multinational billion dollar brand campaigns. And one of the skills, one of the skills I built up, I think, across all of those experiences was working on pitch decks. So what all of these different ad agencies have in common is you have to tell compelling stories to get the opportunity to work on a project.

But the pitch deck is kind of a work in the agency, right? Nobody wants to be the last one in work on the pitch deck, waiting for everybody’s emails to say include this, include this. So, early in my career I sort of got stuck with that by default, but for whatever reason, not quite into it quite, enjoyed the process of distilling all of these different people’s ideas that would come at you from all different parts of an agency or trying to convey something to a business.

Basically tell their story back to them in a more compelling way than they’ve ever heard it told. And that’s essentially what gets you the opportunity to work on these projects? So, yeah, a lot of late nights working on pitch decks was the, I think the eventual catalyst for visualized value as a style, I went through a ton of iterations to get there.

Worked at agencies for eight years, started my own agency and then slowly narrowed down the type of work I was doing as an agency to that really, , specific aesthetic and that very specific deliverable. So before visualize value was a media company, it was a very hig...