Visualize Value: Jack Butcher Closed His Ad Agency and Reached $1.1M a Year on Black-and-White Diagrams

Diagrams drawn with nothing but black-and-white squares and arrows scroll past on the timeline. Jack Butcher’s “Visualize Value” is a business that sells courses teaching how to make those diagrams, plus digital products built from the diagrams themselves. On Nathan Barry’s podcast (published July 5, 2021), Butcher describes the previous year’s revenue: “Yeah, we did a 1.1 million last year.” The split runs roughly 60/40, 60 from “Build Once, Sell Twice,” 40 from “How to Visualize Value.”

That $1.1M is not an extension of the ten years he spent in advertising. If anything, it emerged after he shut down the agency that was that extension. Butcher worked as a creative director on accounts including Amazon, Nokia, McDonald’s and Mercedes-Benz before going independent, and of his own agency he says simply: “No fun, and even less freedom.”

Every figure and date below comes from just two secondary sources: Nathan Barry’s transcript and Growth in Reverse’s timeline analysis. Both quote Butcher’s own words, and both are readable in full for free.

From closing the agency to seven figures

What stands out in that sequence is that the first course took seven days to build and did $51,000 in under two weeks of selling. In cost terms, the only input was seven days of his own time.

What “build once, sell twice” actually points at

Butcher’s flagship product name doubles as the name of the method. On the podcast he puts it this way: “you build something digital that runs on code or media, and can be served up infinitely at zero cost replication.”

The important part is that what he sells has two layers. On the surface is the teaching product, diagram-making as a skill. Underneath it, the diagrams he posts every day function as free advertising. A diagram states a concept in a single frame, so it spreads on its own as a screenshot. The product sample is also the unit of distribution. Unlike a blog post or a video, there is no need to engineer a “read on” path. One frame completes itself and circulates.

That structure shares its economics with the case that reached $1M in Notion template sales and with Justin Welsh’s one-person business portfolio: increase how often you sell without increasing how often you build. What is unusual in Butcher’s case is how short the distance is between what he posts and what he sells. Someone who sees a diagram and thinks “I want to make that” is already the buyer, no translation step sits between interest and purchase.

The September 2020 giveaway is the other distinctive move. He gave away $70,000 worth of products, but because they were digital, the actual cost of distribution was close to zero, and the campaign added more than 2,000 email subscribers in a day or two. With no inventory, neither discounting nor giving away hurts unit economics, so he used it in place of paid acquisition.

What $0 in ad spend produced

According to Nathan Barry’s transcript, 80–90% of sales came through organic social, with $0 spent on paid advertising. This reads more accurately as a constraint that shaped the product than as a boast that advertising was unnecessary.

In a business that cannot (or will not) buy attention, acquisition depends entirely on the volume and quality of posts. So Butcher kept publishing diagrams daily from early 2019, and it took more than a year before growth accelerated in March 2020. Put the other way around: in front of that $1.1M sits a full year of posting that produced no direct revenue. Skip that lag and you lose the heaviest part of the case.

What did not work

Butcher spent roughly three weeks developing a cohort-based course, the format that was fashionable at the time, before deciding “this is not me” and stopping. The reason was not that the format is inferior. A cohort requires him to hand over his own time every time it runs, which contradicts head-on the reason he closed his agency: getting out of a structure that sells hours.

He is equally direct about why his agency struggled, a lack of focus. A shop that can say “we do car companies, finance, fashion, all of it” is, inverted, nobody’s first thought for anything. Visualize Value’s extreme narrowness, turning concepts into black-and-white diagrams, makes sense as the reversal of that failure.

One diagram works as product sample, advertisement and course material

What makes Visualize Value interesting is that building, selling and advertising are folded into the same act. Make one diagram and it is a product sample, an advertisement, and course material at once. One unit of work does three jobs, which is why a business run by one person (effectively two) holds together. The September 2020 giveaway of $70,000 worth of products, which added more than 2,000 subscribers without hurting margins, is an extension of that fold.

Few fields allow it, though. Unless the artifact communicates in a single screenshot and there is demand for how it was made, the same compression is unavailable. The quality of the diagrams is itself a barrier to entry, resting on visual craft built over a decade in advertising. The $1.1M is a 2020 figure, coinciding with a moment when demand for remote work tooling and online courses rose all at once. More than a year of daily posting that did not translate directly into sales also sits in front of that number and is part of it.

A word on the sources. Both are secondary, and the $1.1M is Butcher’s own statement, not a figure verified against books by a third party. Margins, costs and after-tax take-home are not disclosed, so the real profitability of the business cannot be confirmed from outside. On team structure, the sources go no further than noting that he and his wife run it. As a record of digital-product economics from the seller’s side, it reads well next to Sahil Lavingia’s trajectory at Gumroad, which shows the same structure from the platform side.