Build once, sell twice: Earn $1M a year selling digital products


Hey Reader,

If you're in the US I hope you enjoyed a lovely holiday weekend. We went boating and hung out on the farm. It was low key and just what I needed after a week of in person meetings!

FROM ART OF NEWSLETTERS

Jack Butcher - Build once, sell twice: Earn $1M/year selling digital products

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.

Watch the episode »

WHAT I'M READING

Boise was the America I was thinking of

I've been wanting to tell the story of refugees in Boise for a long time. My hometown has long been a place where displaced persons land when they first arrive in the states. I'm so proud of the way we've welcomed and helped people who's home countries have turned into inhospitable places for them. Amanda Patchin wrote this article for From Boise, my local newsletter, and she did such a great job telling this story. Its full of heart, struggle, and frustration as government decisions have impacted how individuals can help people in need. I'm passionate about this and hopeful that over time Boise will be able to welcome more refugees into our city once again.

Read the article here »

WHAT I'M READING

This thread about precedent bias from Julian Shapiro

This is so interesting to think about. We as humans have a hard time imagining things that don't have a precedent. And yet, that is where both the greatest opportunities and the greatest dangers are. Lack of precedent is certainly a signal, but maybe if we can look past it we can create amazing things, and avoid horrible ones.

Read the thread here »

WHAT I'M LEARNING

Moving day in Quebec

One of our team members shared this last week and its so interesting! I never knew that the vast majority of leases in Quebec end on July 1. Which means that everyone moves on the same day every year. This results in some wild stuff like movers working 24 hours a day, piles of discarded furniture on the streets, and traffic delays because moving trucks are double parked.

It started as a way to keep feudal landlords from kicking people out in the cold of winter and now is on Canada Day (a national holiday) so people don't have to take off work to move and kids can stay in the same school district through a full school year.

Here's a little more about it if you're interested »

Thanks for joining me this week,

Nathan Barry

I'm a designer who turned into a writer who turned into a startup CEO. My mission is to help creators earn a living. Subscribe for essays on building an audience and earning a living as a creator.

Read more from Nathan Barry
Selling ice cream in the park

Hey Reader, What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? You’ve probably seen some version of this question before. It’s a good one, though sometimes the answer isn’t immediately obvious. That’s why I like Graham Weaver’s 8 questions for what to do with your life. Graham founded the private equity firm Alpine Investors, and he teaches at Stanford. In Chapter 2 of my upcoming book, The Ladders of Wealth, I credit him with a principle he shared with his MBA students called "worse first",...

Hey Reader, If I could solve only one thing in my business, that would have the biggest impact, what would that be? This is the question every great entrepreneur obsesses over. Rather than trying to do everything at once, you look for the bottleneck and focus on solving that. There’s a book called The Goal by an Israeli physicist named Eliyahu Goldratt. It’s a 1984 business novel that business systems nerds love. However if you’re not a business systems nerd you probably… won’t love it. It’s...

A hundred dollar bill against a plain light background.

Hey Reader, Have you ever spent money on something and immediately felt guilty afterward? Will Guidara spends his money foolishly on purpose. And he thinks you should too. He once bought an entire barrel of whiskey and put it in his basement. He also put a skee-ball machine in the office. Is he going to get a monetary return on either of these things? No. But that’s kind of the point. He calls it the 95/5 rule: Manage your money and time like a maniac 95% of the time (no expense is too...