Building the Right Product, At the Right Time, For the Right People - with Jack Butcher

0:00welcoming Jack butcher to the show um selfishly I wanted to catch up with Jack and figured the only way he'd catch up with me would be on a show public not true not true you know you never know you never know um there's two areas I want to get into today Jack uh so one is just learning about visualized value how you structure the business and the other area is just how you're thinking about web3 yep [Music] um but let's start with for those of you who don't know you what visualized value is and maybe if you can talk through a little bit about the vision and actually

0:48our friend Aaron Alto had a really amazing map that he drew about really like a Walt Disney map almost of like the the vision of a lot of ways visualize value and I was hoping you can maybe walk us through a little bit about that yeah sure yeah sounds good man let me do a 30 seconds of context setting so my professional background is in graphic design study graphic design and got started on the internship circuit in London straight out of school working for tiny little Design Studios and um had a couple friends that were going to New York I went out to New York on a

1:32whim set 150 emails to Craigslist classified ads to try and get some a design internship while I was in New York got one response it worked out and uh kind of got into the New York agency scene and moved around there for about eight or ten years bunch of different jobs bunch of different scales of businesses so I started out in like a boutique branding agency doing like little independent businesses restaurants stuff like that went to huge consulting firms 15 000 employees doing like massive redesigns of big digital products and websites and you know like complete opposite experience of that worked in um a couple other agencies after that

2:15that were smaller that specialized in different things uh like an experiential agency that would do point of sale stuff in stores Museum exhibits stuff like that so basically got a little bit of exposure to every like little Avenue of like graphic design in a professional context I guess and then come about late 2017 had the I guess the naivety and arrogance to think that I could start my own agency and do it better than everybody else that I'd worked for in the past and uh I think to some degree like your energy when you're that age is like what gives you the advantage but you obviously have to have the

2:57skills to build a business and hire people and you know get to the scale that the people that you're working with need you to be in order to interact with you right like you have to play the role of everyone to begin with and that's what I did for the first six or nine months and I burned out horribly so this is beginning of 2019 and that the like genesis of the idea that created visualized value was basically the in the agency process or in the agency environment I should say the process where I was I think retroactively thinking about it adding the most value was in the pitch process

3:37so I'd sit down and you know there's 10 people in a room and you try and distill all of these ideas into a compelling narrative to go and take to a client and ask them for six figures seven figures whatever it might have been at the time in the different agencies and that process I've found very rewarding and it was almost the thing that nobody else wanted to work on at least in the places where I was is like this is the thing that you have to get there first for and you leave last and it's kind of a thankless job a lot of the times you're just doing the

4:08production work of putting together PowerPoint slides basically and um then I realized after burning out trying to do everything as an agency uh owner I was like okay I'm just going to focus on this and the name visualized value actually came kind of in collaboration with an early client who I think used that phrase it's like oh like we have all this intangible value you're able to help us visualize it and that was really the guiding principle from that point forward was just working with people who have ideas that they find difficult to explain or they have businesses that are intangible right if you're not selling a

4:47pair of jeans no one can like look at your product and say I want to buy that so a lot of our early clients were service businesses software companies uh people that build things that you can't like see traditionally and then visualize value social channels came as a device for basically finding leads for that service business so I was visualizing these Concepts that I thought had like broader appeal so the books that I I'm reading at the time or people that were like remote mentors to me through whether it was Twitter or books that I've been reading take their ideas add this visual context to it and

5:31that's where the social unlock came from so finding ideas that other people had already kind of perfected add some visual context they retweeted it my network grows as a function of that and then originally that led to us some more service work but then there came a point where the so the demand for service work kind of exceeded my ability to deliver on it and that's when visualized value became a product business it's about 6 35 a.m here and I'm just about to have my ag1 by athletic greens it's this powder that I look forward to having every single day I put it in about 10 ounces of water it contains

6:16vitamins and probiotics and Whole Food Source ingredients that really uh gets my energy up my recovery up and my focus up and I look forward to it really really every single day just like how I have my morning coffee I love having my my morning agey one so for listeners to the Pod I think you might like ag-1 too so athletic greens is offering a one-year supply of immune supporting vitamin D and five of these free travel packs uh with your first free purchase all you have to do is go to athleticgreens.com slash wih and and claim it I hope you enjoy it as much as I do

7:03when you were sort of remixing other people's content and adding a visual element on it were you like did you have a grand plan being like hey I'm gonna go and create social content and my plan is to get to 100 000 followers within 12 months or was it more naive than that in the sense of like you kind of followed your curiosity 100 100 more naive so uh this I was really new to Twitter as a platform too so I wasn't really aware of the fact that people of huge stature many many steps ahead of me were like waking up and checking their Twitter every day

7:41like the first couple weeks I was on Twitter I just I didn't I didn't understand how people used it as a platform I thought it was another like you know Facebook fan pages for example like people have that stuff uh made for them or they have teams managing it and stuff like that so I think like this really weird uh Arbitrage thing became clear to me it's like wow the people who I'm making this about are actually reading it as soon as that idea clicked it was an accident that I figured that out but as soon as that clicked I started to lean into that more for sure yeah I feel like

8:12you started doubling down because it's like a positive reinforcement Loop you're like okay and let's be honest we're all addicted to the likes and Retreats to a certain extent even if it's subconscious it's just like a pad on the back yep so it's like oh that thing performed well maybe this thing will perform well that's kind of similar and then you kind of just like before you know it you're on that treadmill indeed indeed yeah yeah yeah yeah and that probably was six or nine months of doing that before anything meaningful like that was it was a good a good amount of time between that transition

8:48from like the slow drip of you know maybe one or two people reaching out by email a week and saying like do you do commissions or can we sit down and work on something together I'm trying to think weirdly enough I know you I saw on Twitter just before we got on here you were interviewing David perel today it was actually a David perrell tweet that was the Genesis for the first product that we put out seriously put out there was a couple little experiments before that but our first like education product which was focused on the design style of visualized value was prompted by a David perrell tweet so you

9:28were following David perrell who writes about writing on Twitter he puts out a piece of content that's around productizing something via education or something like that that prompts well he actually no he actually said the skill that I'm trying to learn next is design and he tagged me in that post and then that was the you know that was the Catalyst for saying who else is interested in this I think I quote retweeted it it got a decent amount of attention I mean by today's standard not a huge amount honestly but it was enough at that point in in uh my Twitter journey to be like okay there's

10:06a there's more than you know half a dozen people that are signaling that they would pay for something like this so I'm going to put it together you know when I was coming up the Lean Startup was such a important book yeah yeah and it was a book about how do you you know test ideas iterate validate the ideas and this whole loop around it and I feel like that was very very much based on a web and buying traffic right web pages like now it's more social based I feel like like he tweeted at you you retweeted it you got some validation then you're like hey it's probably worth

10:44it to spend some hours dedicate to this and see if I can build a product yeah and I think even if you didn't build a product like just the direction that that points you in in terms of the content you start creating or the things you start talking about it's all as you say like just leading you in a more pointed Direction than just like spray and pray hear uh you know I think there was already some direction based on the fact I was looking for Consulting clients but I never really thought of myself as an educator or somebody who should be creating materials to educate people

11:19until someone asked me to do it and that like making that leap I think is uh quite empowering when you're making the material when somebody's asked you to do it right as opposed to you like just sitting down at a keyboard with a blank piece of paper and saying I'm going to teach people this this and this um knowing that there's a demand to learn it before and that doesn't necessarily have to be someone asking you directly that could be another Trend that you're observing I do think there was something distinct about visualized value that helps Channel some demand because this is actually when I was developing

11:56it I think I started with like design right here's a design course it's like that's just so ridiculously broad I have no idea where to start and then it narrowed down it became the title of it is how to visualize value so it's a very very narrow subset of design like how do you take an idea and use Simple geometry to turn it into a concept that people can look at and read visually and that like narrowed it down to the point where it feels like manageable both from like teaching and consuming I would imagine yeah some takeaways I have from that is well one is there's there's almost this

12:36invisible hand that exists on social that as you put out content there's this like invisible hand that's saying like put out more of this content or hey this product that you know you should probably go and build it so it's trust your trust the Invisible Hand I think that often we don't trust it and yeah for sure it's like there's a reason why people are resonating with it and then and the second lesson I have is that I'm taking from you is how much the importance of owning a phrase is um oh yeah for sure right like if visualized value was called something else like yeah graphic design

13:19it was broad as that right it's like how to how to do graphic design you just can't you don't build equity in that idea the same way and people just don't latch onto it I feel like we under index for naming a ton I 100 agree yeah yeah for sure like I spend so much time thinking about names like I have a a note in in iOS where I have like a million names and you know I follow New York Times new word mention you know what I'm talking about yeah yeah the Twitter account yeah yeah the Twitter account where it's like the first appearance of a word in the New York

13:57Times so like let's say like visualize value is published in the New York Times for the first time ever this Twitter account is going to public is going to tweet it and it kind of gives you some hint as to where culture is going and there's opportunities to buy those domains create products around that curious your thoughts on naming yeah I 100 agree and there's if you go back to that map idea the couple of other things that exist on that map after we created how to visualize value the second product was called build once sell twice which is like a meta commentary on if you have a skill set and you can

14:41organize it and productize it in a way that can transmit it to other people you can essentially build it once and sell it infinitely zero cost of replication and again you could find a way to describe that generically and it's not compelling at all versus you have this forward phrase that people are repeating back to you after you've said it three times yeah and I think uh what I love about uh build one sell twice is it fits into that category of like like a mantra um it's something that people can say repeatedly keeps them grounded it reminds me of um the founder of shopify's arm the

15:24rebels and yeah that's great Stuart Butterfield the founder of slack has we don't sell Saddles here I think it's important you know when you're coming up with an idea for a product or you want to come up with an idea for a product based on an audience which is what you had is thinking about what are different phrases that could come to mind um and what are uh emerging phrases um and how could you own them yeah yeah I think that's a lot of that came from the advertising world too you know when you're like in a war room in an agency environment and you have to

16:08distill this entire Brand Story or product story into something that fits on a subway ad or you know a banner or uh out of home ad that somebody's driving past at 70 miles an hour that muscle memory I think that I picked up in those environments definitely helped teach me the lesson that language is just incredibly powerful the first guy I ever worked for was a creative director with a writing background and that you know as I came out of school I put way I'd put so much more emphasis on how something looked or the you know the nuances of the visuals because I was a

16:51graphic designer um and then when you get into a commercial environment you start to get introduced to like what persuasion is what advertising is and how even looking at like print ads if you if you run through like uh David Ogilvy annual or any kind of OG advertising character they've got these print ads where there's five words on a piece of paper and you just like knocks you over how clever it is this is another lesson that I learned from being a designer is going into interviews and thinking that I was going to have to present my you know degree the way I thought about everything and like kind of communicate

17:37my perspective versus just showing up and opening my portfolio they and people look at it and be like that's good how much of that did you do do you want a job right and there was this one example that still stands out in my mind there was an agency that I always wanted to work for that used to do uh kind of spec work so they would just mock something up that they wanted to work on like they would say let's imagine the future of air travel this is in like 2012 and then mocking up these like incredibly thoughtful UI and ux patterns and animating them they

18:14didn't write any software they were just showing their vision for the space and then once they'd done all that work all the clients would come to them like Virgin Atlantic American Airlines Delta whoever else would be like we basically just want to put our logo in the top left hand side of the work that you've already done and that was so different than the agency environment that I've been in where clients would send you a request and they would often have misdiagnosed their own problem right there they've gotten to a point where they've made a bunch of decisions internally and they're like we need a campaign for this versus you know

18:53coming to you and saying we're not selling enough of these or like we want more of these types of people to buy our stuff they don't really at least in the environments that I was in didn't approach the problem that way versus this agency that I admired that would kind of create these magnets where here's what we're capable of here's the type of work we're interested in doing we've already done a bunch of the work and the thinking come and get involved and that I think translated over time to me it it's kind of reflected in that uh what we talked about with making the visuals for people without their

19:29permission just trying to add some visual context to these ideas I already appreciated and seeing the kind of Ripple effects of that so permissionless Apprentice is a really uh simple curriculum that talks about that idea of starting projects without permission using the internet to create opportunity attract collaborators clients etc etc it's a dollar and it's like the the portal into it's the first stop on that map that Aaron Drew that's really like starting to hopefully Prime a way of thinking that will make you uh much more able to take advantage of the vast opportunities that exist on the internet with a few tweaks to how you

20:17think about publishing your work when I think about visualized value it's different portals that are basically education community and tools to help you unlock pieces of the internet is that yeah that's excellent there I have to have to run that back clip that okay so you've built this ecosystem and you didn't talk about daily manifest which really in my opinion is the entry to you know the entry portal can you actually talk a little bit about that so we skipped over that that was actually the first product so before the David perel thing that we talked about um when I was making this transition from like agency burned out crazy like

21:01everyone else has control over your day right you're just like reacting to meetings and deadlines that are being set externally once I decided to stop doing that I had to like consciously make an effort to plan out my days and the daily manifest was like this little tool that I used to scribble out on a piece of A4 paper and uh when I was putting content out on Instagram sharing all these ideas that I was really latching on to what they were really helping me like think about how to build uh visualized value or transition it into a proper brand and business from this like chaotic service

21:44world I was living in a lot of the feedback I got from people was time management you know I'm procrastinating I can't manage my days I don't know how to like consistently work on something and the daily manifest was just like a test product I was like okay I'll take this thing that I write down every day formalize it basically put into a template in figma and uh package it up and give people access to the PDF and a community on the side so you buy the plan with the plan comes or the by the template sorry and with the template comes access to what was at the time of

22:25WhatsApp group and I think I sold it for nine bucks and I got probably 60 people in a few months to buy that so you know nothing nothing outrageous but again some validation and an opportunity to just talk to people one-on-one that were already interested in the stuff that visualized value was talking about and uh yeah that product is now free there's uh fifteen thousand twenty thousand downloads at this point and that is really the the foundation for all of these ideas is you know carve out a certain amount of time a day where you can start to work on something that will compound over time start to figure

23:06out what it is that you can do that is unique to you or that and a an Arbitrage opportunity that exists based on your experience and the fact that you have access to anyone in the world you have to kind of get to a point where you do something long enough to see a return start to happen and I think that you know I had the I guess the luxury of making that transition from already having some connections in the design world and had some service work going on if I was starting from scratch this was the tool that I thought would be the most helpful to kind of stay on

23:46track and start to record what's happening in real time so you can look back on it because we have a very strong tendency to kind of forget the evidence in favor of progress we're making right like even now you look at the stuff you're putting out and compare it to two three years ago it's improved massively but if you're not consciously making a record of that and reflecting on it very hard to see that I don't know if this was intentional with daily manifest but what you did with daily manifest is what I call building a community magnet and the old way of thinking about it you

24:22know from the advertising world too which is like a lead magnet which is yeah how do you create a piece of software or a product that people want access to and in return you get their information which you can then sell them things what you did was you created something free daily manifest which we focused on a niche that you understood well because at the same time you were building the social presence on Instagram and Twitter today you have hundreds of thousands of followers on both but back then when you're starting out you know you had a few thousand followers but it was enough to get

25:02started so now all of a sudden you have these people in your WhatsApp group and it's like oh hey like what do we share in common what do we you know what are we building here like what what could I build for you and it was basically like a very cheap quote-unquote way of having co-founders really in something yeah yeah yeah yeah uh it's very hard to even understand what attracts somebody to the thing you've built even after you've built it and gone through that process a bunch of times so even just having conversations about like you know why why does visualized value resonate with you which of the

25:40visuals was it that caught your attention first and just trying to really understand which uh pieces of all of the things that we put out are the most um are the most interesting or the most useful to people and then drilling down into those things and building more stuff around those insights has been the has been the formula since since starting it and it's still the formula now if you were to ask me what is the formula to the success of visualized value the formula for me is you focused on a niche that you understood really well you built a set of phrases that you owned you gave a lot of value up front

26:23you created a community magnet you owned an aesthetic the aesthetic of visualized value when you were posting and still posting to this day on Instagram and Twitter is you were like the reason why it turned heads of David perrell Etc was because we just never saw images like that um it was so simple your color palette was black and white that level just wasn't posted often and especially with the consistency the be consistent of you know every day like I see you even to this day like you're constantly tweeting you know the way I see it is you're putting you know idea germs out there and you're

27:08seeing what is resonating what isn't resonating and then you're storing that in your jack butcher brain which is so amazing and you're kind of like oh I should do this with that and while you're doing all this you're building new products new educational products new communities you're selling things we haven't talked about web3 and we will but you're selling things on Foundation nfts Etc um but thank you for explaining a little bit about how we got here where are we today with the business and you know where are you going with it sure yeah I think um one of the things and this is the first

27:48um conversation I'm having publicly about some of these Milestones so visualized value has also started mid pandemic or like early pandemic so there were a lot of different Tailwinds that made it popular at the beginning that I you know was aware of at the time but in hindsight with like Behavior changing back closer to what it was before the pandemic there's a few a few ways in which that's affected the business so obviously I don't have any metrics on it somebody's probably done this research but maybe screen time was up three four five x two years ago and everybody's just sat in front of their computer all

28:31day long and we didn't know how long this thing was gonna last and everybody's trying to figure out how to become more economically resilient like start participating on the internet et cetera Etc so this is like blowing up at the same time that visualized value is building all these digital resources I think that was 2020. so our biggest like it just exploded in 2020 that was like you know critical mass got to probably 10 000 students by the end of 2020 from the summer um last year nft craziness visualized value is still growing on the community and education side but not at the same clip it was in 2020 still does

29:15very well but the nft narrative actually I think consumed a lot of the people that were interested in visualized value previously so I'm sure you've seen this too like the idea of the Creator economy as a label for people who are interested in making they're living on the internet you know terminally online people a lot of those people transitioned into web 3 nfts things of that nature so I kind of again taking cues from the people that are consuming the stuff that I'm making or a part of the community of visualized value paying attention to the things that are interesting to them is also kind of part of the job

29:55so I say part of the job it's also like where I'd have naturally gravitate to as well like I'm I'm interested in the same thing so I'm kind of a consumer of the same things and uh that led me to start playing around with nfts personally in March of last year and the really amazing thing about that originally is kind of the thought that the art itself became the product versus the art being this proxy or this like thing you use to get attention to then have to build products build these additional things on the other side of the art in order to make the art

30:42sustainable and I think you could take either side of that argument now because obviously that was heavily propped up by a maniacal market last year so there's a sustainable like I think nfts do offer a sustainable way for artists to make money but there's also that is contingent on their ability to like build and maintain a network which I think visualize value had proven before I even knew what an nft was and that's why that's why it was successful and in the conversations I've had with people that have collected the work that's basically what they're looking for right it's like my bet is on the fact that the

31:23visualized value Network continues to grow into the future and nfts represent you know a bet on that Network and you know a piece of art that I want to hang up on my wall or stare at on my computer whichever whichever takes you fancy but the um the education piece of the business last year definitely shifted like attention shifted to nfts that stuff's still sold but if you think of it like an adoption curve what started to happen is I started to notice like companies more interested in some of these ideas so visualize value as a product that can help a company articulate their value proposition versus a person we

32:07still like it does really feel like an adoption curve where you're going from the like Niche Twitter you know this is a new trendy interesting thing that I want to master to this is like now a piece of your social media strategy like this is a new way for you to communicate with people so it's kind of gone from The Fringe of Twitter to small businesses and like a lot of the stuff that I've been working on the background is way more tedious than messing about on Twitter all day but longer sales cycles of getting this stuff into small businesses medium-sized businesses ultimately Enterprise over time

32:49but that's like I see the the kind of each of the products is slowly maturing into different parts of the market and then I spend a bunch of my time playing around at the edges you know the web 3 the nft stuff which you're getting is probably a long way away from being at the top of its adoption curve and I think you share that same thesis is we're a way away from that but we're there's there's so much interesting stuff happening so many cool ways to play around with it that um yeah that's the business is kind of uh it like Trails my interest by about six

33:27months you know like the stuff that I learn and the stuff that becomes like a proven something that I can prove I can then like codify backwards into a product and continue to like stay on the edge and try and learn and then put that stuff back into the stuff that we offer does that make sense it does so basically 2020 was a whirlwind education and Community products were growing by virtue of right place right time and also write product right time um 2021 nft Mania you it you know participated in that I think like you sold tens of ether hundreds of eth you know worth of stuff correct yes

34:17um and she made hundreds of thousands of dollars if not million you know seven figures selling nfts you know fast forward to today 2022 you have basically these concurrent paths around deepening um some of your existing products and basically applying them to more Enterprise or other use cases while at the same time what you're doing is you're like okay web3 isn't exactly where we thought it would be but you're still a Believer it sounds like and you're gonna Tinker until everyone catches up with you yeah for sure and uh also listen to what the people who have supported visualized value from day one are interested in too and you know

35:07the macro promise of web3 in my opinion is kind of slowly divest ownership of this thing and and allow the people that have contributed to it for all of these years benefit from the network effect so all the Enterprise stuff is happening and there's also a lot of like little products spinning up from within the community itself so the idea there being either it's a co-branded thing or it's just lives uh you know it just benefits from the distribution that VV now has but there are you know say half a dozen products that have been Community built within the last six months you know people find each other in Discord or

35:52they uh see something that someone else is working on on Twitter and they get involved in that project it's built by the VV community and by virtue of having you know a couple hundred thousand followers on the on a few social platforms we could get the first hundred users for that product right we can get something from zero to one way faster than somebody who would be trying to build the distribution and the product at the same time so it feels like it's getting to that level of maturity where it can be this kind of decentralized product studio uh and then would almost come full circle on some

36:26other things where visualized value can now partner with a startup that needs help articulating their value proposition but do it now with a lot more Authority and benefit that we can send back to anybody we'd partner with because we can distribute that stuff too so you know say we partner with a startup that needs help with their raising their series a and they need to articulate exactly their results over the last two years the concepts and the Tailwinds and the trends that made their business successful will do that and eventually I want to get the community involved in doing that so you almost make this Marketplace of

37:08people who've gone through all these education products and learned how to visualize value and companies individuals people that just want to pay somebody to do that put them together and use the distribution of visualized value to get more attention on everybody in that scenario so honestly it's kind of overwhelming there's a lot of different directions you could take it in but that's another thing that's you know another area that we're playing around with I actually um bought venturewith2vs.com so uh watch this space for that that's going to be a under construction there isn't a domain with two v's available anymore with you no no no no

37:49we're buying them all up volume all up I uh I love that I think one of the things you're hitting upon which I think is brilliant is this idea around once you've aggregated audience and community you've and you're essentially trained people with your way of how you see the world there's a set of products to be built for them and also with them so an example of that would be Dickie Bush and Nicholas Cole uh ship 30 for 30 which is a great program where it teaches people how to write for the internet and they you know people post every day 30 shipping 30 tweets a day or 30 threads a

38:32day they built a product called typeshare typeshare.io and like their product is so useful in the course um so they're like training people and then they've got this amazing product that they can do right and just sort of onboard it and you know one of the hardest parts about building a startup as you know is just the distribution is just a heading and so if you have that solved then you know you could do a lot of stuff yeah exactly the world is your oyster so I think you have that solved right you have 25 000 plus people who've gone through visualized value in some shape or form

39:14and they all have this you know some you know there's different segments to it right you have your daily manifest people you have your build ones sell twice people you know you have different segments and even within that there's niches within there there might be more web three people might be more web two people and then you have to ask yourself what are what is the product that I can build for them SAS style SAS multiples right forget you know service business that's what I would be doing I'd be I would be looking at how do I build products for these people and on a consistent basis

39:47for sure yeah there's we got a few uh a few under construction right now so we'll see we'll see we'll be testing them testing the waters but yeah there's definitely this feedback loop that takes a massive amount of time but also like requires you to go through these iterations of like gradually making the business less dependent on your time or one for one exchange right time for money so the really really bad version of the agency business is like I'll do anything for anyone that's like version zero and then version one is like I'm gonna do this very specific thing for everyone and then version two is I'm gonna do this

40:26very specific thing for a very specific person etc etc you know how that goes and then eventually you get to the point where I have this distribution and people know what the brand is about and that gives me the optionality to make a tool that people want to use and I don't have to change the functionality of that thing for everyone because I have the distribution to get it out there um I forget this quote you probably know uh you probably know it exactly but it was like second time founder first time founder versus second time founder the second time Founder's always going to pick distribution but I forget what the

40:58I forget what the comparison is between I mean it doesn't even matter the point is like distribution is King and getting distribution is fighting what's the expression tooth and nail it's like you have to kind of just like you're grabbing a customer over here you're grabbing a customer over there and like every day you can get you know one or two customers is an incredible day and and then there's churn and then it's like then you have to fight the churn battle and it's just like battle after battle and you know what's amazing about the Empire that you've built is that you have not endless people but you have

41:38people that are willing to test the products that you create and that's the thing that I think people are starting to realize about creators and in general is the op I mean you obviously you saw Kim Kardashian raise that PE fund like hey it's it's starting to hit mainstream where it's like if you combine a creator bonus points of that Creator if that Creator is focused on a particular Niche like with high Affinity yeah High trust like you've built a lot of trust with your community and I've been in your community I've done a talk in your community I've seen firsthand how trust trust how much trust they have in you

42:21once you have that trust and that audience and you combine that with product Builders who know to iterate that who are who are building non-cookie cutter products with a unique aesthetic that's the formula for like the next wave yeah I agree the brand or the individual that I think Affinity first is is uh a great way to put it it's like you can imagine it's not really white labeling but it's if this product is useful to more than 50 of the people that are already here then we both benefit from it being you know pushed out via the distribution of visualize value and this is where the

43:07web 3 my fascination with web3 comes in as an infrastructure layer to enable that permissionless contribution and run in experiments and um there's more of a legal and um you know entity debate around how to make that happen and obviously behavior and people like being open to doing that but a lot of it is like how value is exchanged in the real world is more held up by the rules then it is the technology that makes it possible does that make sense internal tools the software you build to help your team operate better dictates how fast every team from Engineers to sales reps can't execute but you know this building internal

43:58tools from scratch and maintaining them takes a ton of engineering time and tedious work retool is a much faster way to build internal tools it has a complete library of 100 plus fully featured accessible UI components that you can just drag and drop any interface and retools platform lets you build the custom internal tools your team needs 10 times faster it's one platform to build your interface all you have to do is connect any data source or API and you can publish employee-facing apps in record time it's also pretty flexible you can write custom code nearly anywhere to customize how your app looks and works in app environments

44:50SSO permissions and other critical app functionality are all available right out of the box the result well you can build production grade internal tools without the wasted effort of Googling component libraries debugging dependencies or rewriting boilerplate code thousands of teams at companies like Amazon doordash NBC and our own company lay checkout collaborate around custom build retool apps to operate faster and better also teams up to five can build retool apps for free so we're big fans I'm a big fan of of retool if you want to learn more about retool you can just check it out at retool.com so I feel like the fascination for you

45:41around web3 is is twofold I feel like it's one because you're in the business of visualizing value how do you distribute the value in for all the people involved where it's just like automatic you know like you know I made a coffee this morning and one of those automatic coffee machines and I pressed cappuccino and I just like press the cappuccino button and then like I don't know how it you know how it worked but like the milk was froth and the beans were grinded and in the water like that's web3 at scale is like the automatic cappuccino maker basically so I think the cappuccino maker piece you like and the other piece

46:23is just the art piece right like if you're gonna create art why not give people the opportunity to collect it yeah and if you're like gonna support a network if you're gonna give your time energy anything you're going to contribute anything to a network then the technology that exists to share upside in the growth of that network is uh currently limited but with time over time that's I think the the web 3 promise right it's like I've spent hundreds or thousands of hours sharing posts from this thing or talking in the Discord or making suggestions for what to do next or contributing to a product and in like an internet native

47:09World hiring everybody as a contractor or a W-2 employee that wants to contribute to the network is just not possible like it's literally not possible so the friction that you can remove by tokenizing some of that process is uh is what's very interesting but I think a lot of it is both behavior and just structuring entities and a lot of my frustration with web3 is people go okay come at it from the wrong end you don't need any of that technology to build the bond between the people necessarily I think there are a few examples where like you know people who built ethereum for example have

47:49a common goal and an incredible like Bond over the technology itself but you know to try and spin up a community just based on the fact it's uh the same thing that already exists but there's some web3 infrastructure from xero I find it hard to believe that you can like rally people around something like that for a long time versus standing for something for a number of years putting out art in this case that a lot of people identify with and then just integrating technology as it becomes more uh appropriate to do so or any technology that makes the your relationship with that brand or that Network Superior in

48:31some way you can integrate it but you know visualized value still continues to be visualized value whether with or without that but the advances that happen there can improve it with time it's uh you know October November let's say it's November 2030. what does the internet look like inside jack butcher's brain man I honestly think the world is going to be just so bizarre by that point in time it's gonna be crazy man like I'll make your life easier here will we be using Twitter in 2030 oh I'm gonna say no I think we're going like fractured networks will spin off my vision as like maybe Twitter

49:18is a protocol right that isn't called Twitter and visualize value for example is the network versus existing on a Twitter or uh Instagram or wherever else like I think the promise of this over the long term is this frictionless movement between networks and everything that people create can kind of be ported across these different networks I think I don't know how that's going to happen but it feels to me like that is the prevailing desire and I think we'll figure out a way to you know to get that I don't think the Twitter I don't think Twitter the way it currently works is a sustainable way for

50:00us to communicate for much longer it feels like it's starting to break in my opinion there's also the Wild Card of Elon Musk and and Co and how much they're going to change the product and backlashes from the change for the for the bet you know they might change it for the better or they might change it for the worse and you might just see you know we've seen in you know for example we've seen social networks have exoduses before um you know I was at StumbleUpon and stumbled upon was bigger than Reddit and that's crazy that's crazy to think it was bigger than Reddit and at one

50:40point bigger than Twitter and they StumbleUpon had a famous redesign and their redesign everyone was like this is horrible and they went to Reddit and Reddit became Reddit because of the redesign so there is a non-zero chance that there is a large redesign or reframing of how Twitter works that completely alienates a group of people and they move to other platforms I think the yeah maybe I should have answer should have been I think the intention is for it to not be Twitter by 2030 right if uh Elon hangs on to it he wants to turn it into a the X right exactly the everything app

51:28which is I think WeChat inspired or at least like analogous to WeChat right everything digital is happening there but yeah I mean it's incredibly hard to build these things and obviously there are a lot of people try we'll see what happens um so Twitter we'll see okay what else how about will my dad own an nft in 2030 oh yes yes what will my dad's first nft be it'll probably be like uh loyalty card or a plane ticket or uh concert to something like that you know something that's like membership oriented in some way come like uh to interact with a business in some fashion I reckon right yeah I think

52:17that's I think that's right I think he'll go somewhere and and the nft will give him either some access to something um or commemorate it and but there'll be some incentive for him to to do it and I think with so much like we work with a lot of athletic we work with like a ton of big Brands doing loyalty stuff and there's just loyalty is going to be huge with with web 3. yeah and I think this uh like portability of affinity and like the power of trust and attention having instruments that are uh like reward that feels to me like that's a natural progression a natural

53:05response to how the world is organizing itself and the type of things that we value as we value collectively is web3 is one of those things I think we saw this uh with Reddit which was basically the most like the antithesis of the nft argument for so long right I was like nfts are destroying the world they're stupid they're idiotic blah blah but I'm gonna spend 10 hours a day contributing to this platform generate gobloads of advertising revenue for you know a handful of people and then when you interact with this technology where it's like oh yeah there is I have created a bunch of value for

53:45this platform therefore this proxy for the value I've created is worth some money because there's a status signal I can send on this network I think it becomes really obvious when you interact with it that there's something intrinsically interesting to people about it uh but I understand why people who have never interacted with it think it's completely moronic I completely understand okay last one let's do it okay oh with all this you know gtp3 Dolly stuff and not getting bigger and bigger in 2030 will there be more graphic designers or less graphic designers than there are today interesting I think I think less people calling themselves graphic designers but

54:38more people doing graphic design and inverted commas more people like generating visuals whether that's like through a text interface or like sitting down and uh I kind of view it like the you know if you were a graphic designer in the 60s you have this like wooden drawing board where you're like sliding rules across and you know taking out Letterpress type forms and gluing them on one by one from that transition to Adobe Illustrator there's a huge leap in technology and then there's you know the ability to create prompts there's still going to be differentiated outputs based on the talent of the person who has been who's using the technology so I

55:26think in general I think a lot of these titles would just kind of fade away and it's like Greg and Jack these are the things that we do and we're interested in and this is our Network versus there's that good there's a great meme about like job titles in the past job titles in the future I'm sure you've seen it and like it goes from yeah I don't know uh blacksmith to gpt3 prompt engineer or Discord Community manager and uh I don't know I just think job titles in general are probably gonna be uh not as prominent in our culture in 10 20 30 years time especially for the terminally

56:06online like ourselves terminally online I love it I love how you call us it's true we are terminally online that is we are sick but it's fun it's really fun we're having you're having a good time yeah I'm having a great time man great time I met like honestly through the last three years I've met so many incredible people it's been a huge shift in the way I thought things were going to be going you know being on the agency career ladder in New York which is fine in its own way it's just different um this is like as entrepreneurship is man you don't really know what's going to happen and

56:45that's like unsettling but also very exciting so uh got the internet to thank for both of those both sides of that which is uh I don't know if I would want to be doing anything else so it's fine yeah it's a lot of fun yeah I mean that's the cool thing about Twitter and our whole world is like we put out content and we can just chat with cool people and I met you through Twitter and it's cool because like where you live like you can live in a town of 20. and as long as there's Wi-Fi you can still meet cool people and visualize value right and now we're back

57:25out touching grass as well so we're living the dream yeah exactly so without further Ado I'm actually gonna go touch some grass yeah all right good man and uh but this has been fun love your thoughts obviously on on building community-based businesses and also just web tree where things are going and people could find you where Twitter at Jack Butcher and at visualize value you can get to everything else from there cool and and you have a pod that you do as well yeah with a couple friends called not investment advice comes out on Wednesdays we just did one on uh ligma Johnson so go check that out yeah check out the

58:06Pod and uh thanks for thanks for coming man mate thanks for having me it's great

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