Today @jackbutcher has over 500k followers on the internet, earns $100,000 a month, and runs an infinitely scalable business.
Just 4 years ago, in 2018, he was burnt out running an ad agency serving corporate clients.
A thread about Jack's journey productizing himself 🧵:
He started down the standard career path.
Studying design at university and working in the design industry.
He spent a decade working as a creative director for several Fortune 500 companies.
Bouncing around different jobs, picking up new skills, building new connections.
In 2018, he started his own advertising agency.
Shooting videos, commercials, and full-stack creative work.
Serving corporate clients as a single-person agency turned out to be super exhausting and he was feeling burnt out by the end of the year.
While working on his agency he noticed that clients weren't coming to him for his skill-set.
There was no reason to choose him over another agency specialising in (say) video ads.
He had built up a strong network while working at his previous jobs
His new agency was getting business from the connections he developed at his prev agencies.
He quickly understood that this wouldn't be sustainable and he had to either scale up or pivot.
1. He could hire either some designers, managers and scale his agency to handle corporate clients; or,
2. Pivot the agency in one specific, narrow direction to eliminate competition.
He chose to dig in and focus on a very specific part of the ad process : pitch decks.
A pitch deck is essentially a sort of presentation used to introduce and communicate an idea to win a job or contract.
It itself is (usually) not the product.
But he had spent so much time refining that process, he built a brand around that as a product.
As a graphic designer, he had to compete in a massive market against a massive pool of other designers.
But layering his skill as a graphic designer with his expertise for understanding and communicating value, he created a whole new market with no competition.
To advertise his skills and services, he started posting on social media (@visualizevalue) and over time the number of requests became too great.
"Now I spend all of my time making things that make it easier to learn, teach, build, and sell."
Thanks for reading this thread. I hope you learned something new.
Checkout @visualizevalue for some wisdom.
If you enjoyed this thread, you might like my thread on wordle:
twitter.com/_yashKarthik/status/1501767340538556423?s=20&t=Bk1B8fBmwK1urDBlC_ocXw