If you are reading this I would guess there is a very high likelihood you have been stuck in the same feedback loop as me (as an internet enjoyer in the age of AI).

Have idea

Build thing

Realize thing is trivial to build

Maybe send one tweet about thing you built

Build another thing

Repeat

I have been spending hundreds of hours making improvements to visualizevalue.com these last couple of months. If you ever bought anything (thank you) you are grandfathered in to the new system, and I’d love to know what you think.

A few recent “one tweet” experiments:

jackbutcher.md - my writing voice distilled into a markdown file you can give to any AI.

Package - a tool that instantly gives you multiple dialed in marketing angles for your product.

Context Score - see how your site ranks for AI discoverability.

All that said, I started writing this to share an idea I had that I’m trying to break out of my previous cycle of sending a single tweet about - it’s called talktoreview.com, you can sign up for free and use it to gather voice reviews via a single link.

It’s free for now while I get it dialed in, so I’d love your help testing it.

Cheers,

Jack

Skip the read and try the product.

Like most, I have been down the Claude Code rabbit hole the last couple of weeks, transitioning from technically illiterate to technically illiterate but with an infinitely patient teacher.

I’ve probably worked on a dozen ideas that I’ve gotten 50/60% there before abandoning to the realization that they are trivial to copy and I don’t have any sort of distribution advantage in getting them off the ground.

The first one I’ve gotten in good enough shape to share more broadly is called Pattern.

The idea initially came from a tweet I saw by Scott Belsky a couple of days ago:

A couple of prompts later I had a version of this working, submit your prompts, upvote etc. Anyone who read that tweet and can write a few sentences could have made the same thing in a few minutes.

The immediate weakness is the degree to which you rely on people to create the content that makes the product compelling. What is their incentive to do so, etc. These great prompts are more likely to circulate on already established networks like X.

So as I was populating the feed with examples (so people wouldn’t arrive at an empty screen) I tested a few of them in my own LLMs.

The first response I got is why I’m writing this email, here’s the prompt:

From our conversations, what creative practice do you think I've abandoned? Why did I stop, and does that reason still hold?

I (Claude) continued to buildout sign up/sign in, accounts, bookmarks, then remove it all last minute in favor of a “Follow” button that directs people here.

Why? The friction in signing up for thousands of software products with individual accounts is exhausting. I have no idea if anyone will find this interesting or useful, and if they do, they can follow this account instead of memorizing another password.

Usually I would just tweet something like this out, but I’ve also found the shape of the X algorithm to have changed so significantly that this feels like a more appropriate place to share it.

One other detail on the product itself, removing accounts and upvotes in favor of a global counter of how many times each prompt has been copied, which (in theory) with enough engagement can act as a filter of sorts to both surface great prompts and train for better ones.

Thanks for reading and let me know if you get any value from this.

The entire process of producing something revolves around the “creative brief.”

A single document that forces a degree of constraint, articulates an objective, frames the problem a certain way, how to measure success or failure, and outlines how much time, money, resources you have to spend.

Generally speaking, the tighter the brief, the better the product.

Typically the brief is written by someone that isn’t you. This is a forcing function for accepting the constraints contained within it.

When you leave these environments to operate independently, you must become both the writer of the brief and the executor of it, which can often feel like this endless tug of war between you and yourself.

No direct recommendation or advice contained here, simply an observation that constraints imposed upon you externally are much easier to accept and work against than when you are trying to both design and enforce them yourself.

-

In other news, you can now configure your vv.xyz to receive daily visuals straight to your inbox.

I like to think we've accomplished this at Visualize Value with each of our products, and hope a large percentage of our 50,000 customers would agree.

Our flagship training program "Build Once, Sell Twice" speaks to an overarching idea, creates intrigue, and can be unpacked 1,000 ways.

What's in a name?

Language is one of the oldest and most resilient forms of leverage.

If you nail the language that represents your idea, and deliver on the promise that it makes, the validity and memorability of it gradually increases.

Build once, sell twice has become memorable because many people have experienced its truth first-hand.

You can think of this feedback loop as continually injecting reputation into a memorable and repeatable phrase.

The better the overlap between the name and the thing the name represents, the less work required to get people to remember it.

This is particularly powerful when talking about unchanging intellectual property or ideas.

Another thought experiment you can run: imagine two 300 page books with exactly the same contents inside. The best name wins.

P.S. Don't judge a book by it's cover is terrible advice in an infinite market of information (which you are currently browsing).

To make this happen, you can try and coin a name first, or you can record a sprawling set of ideas and try to reverse engineer language that represents the overarching theme.

Our ideas introduce themselves to the world using their name, just like we do, so not spending time and energy finding a good one is a huge waste of the time you're spending on everything else.

Consider these examples and how quickly you can extrapolate the overarching theme or idea, and likely recall the author's name:

Antifragile
Tipping Point
Atomic Habits
4-Hour Workweek
How to Get Rich (without getting lucky)

For Visualize Value:
Permissionless Apprentice
Build Once, Sell Twice
How to Visualize Value

Why do names matter so much?

You can only remain independent to the extent you can communicate your ideas independently. If you can't name your ideas well, you have to pay someone else to do it for you.

Naming is a bottleneck, it either vastly restricts or accelerates the flow of attention.

You can write an incredible book, but if you give it a bad title, it will only reach a fraction of the people who'd benefit from reading it.

It is my hypothesis that the quality of a name reflects a deep understanding of the thing being named. A great name communicates the most information in the most compressed way.

Generic names often indicate a generic perspective on the thing being named. In our world this would be things like "Digital Marketing" "Social Media" or "Graphic Design."

While there is logic in competing in an established market, names play a huge part in how much of that market's attention you can garner. There is nothing new under the sun, but you can combine things that exist to make new things.

Creating and owning new language is a powerful way to introduce your new combination of ideas to the world.

"Visualize Value" is not a new idea, it is a combination and repackaging of many old ideas.

The goal is to get the response "that's so simple I could've done it." Which paradoxically implies something that is seemingly obvious being acknowledged for the first time.

A great name lands like the punchline of a joke, I recorded a short video with David Perell unpacking this idea last year.

I'll wrap with some more practical advice on naming:

If this doesn't come naturally to you, you can work in reverse too.

Take this example by Balaji Srinivasan, his book The Network State is a great example: Distill from a book to an essay, to a paragraph, to a sentence, to a title:

Going through this process of reduction gives you a meta scaffolding for what you're trying to communicate.

It forces you to think in hierarchy, to consider which ideas need to be introduced in which order, which are most salient, which can lead you to a great name.

In summary, a name is an interface to the market, the better it is, the more opportunity it can create.

“99% of all effort is wasted.” -

The first time I read this statement I thought to myself “Nice, I will simply only do the 1% that matters.”

Obviously that’s not how it works.

You only figure out what the 1% is in hindsight.

This is particularly true in asymmetric environments like the internet, where inputs are linear but outcomes are not.

You can write 1,000 blogs, make 100 videos, build 10 products, and experience almost the entirety of the external upside at post 999, video 99 or product 9 (or not at all).

The helpful reframe, though - is that you will get better at whatever it is you’re doing either way.

That process really got traction with an idea called Visualize Value in 2019 - originally a service business that helped people take complicated ideas and turn them into simple visuals.

To win clients for that business, I started finding ideas that resonated with me, turning them into simple black and white diagrams, and posting them on Instagram and Twitter every day.

I grew a handful of accounts (personal included) to an audience of around 1,000,000 people doing that one thing.

Eventually the demand for that service exceeded my ability to fulfill it, so I started building digital curriculums. This was an incredibly healthy business with a very simple feedback loop. Visualize ideas, broadcast them, get clicks to site, sell stuff.

In the last couple of years I have been almost exclusively practicing as an artist, transitioning from making these artifacts as advertisements for a product, to the artifacts as the products themselves.

Work with Visualize Value’s cryptographic signature has now done around $340,000,000 in volume, and trades between $20,000 and $50,000 of value daily.

The point of this email is to both highlight the absurdity of the above, and to acknowledge that all of that optionality is derived from this one very simple, very consistent creative practice I started 5 years ago.

A practice that at times I have massively neglected the significance of, strayed from, let the muscle atrophy, etc.

I record a weekly podcast with a couple of friends called Not Investment Advice - in Episode 66 we interviewed Micheal Saylor, who talks about the concept of Laser Eyes:

”Once you do one thing, if you have a modicum of success, and you think you can do a second, third and fourth thing, you’re wrong. You can’t.”

There’s obvious nuance in that every practice and career evolves, but I write this as a warning (mostly to myself) that if you’re ever lucky enough to find it, never take for granted that one thing.

long overdue, the VV app, coming soon

a single home for every visualize value idea — cleaned, tagged, searchable.

what you get
• iOS app, widget, web app & chrome plugin.
• free tier: one daily idea, synced across the network.
• paid tier: full vv vault + ai copilot, $100/yr (lock‑in for $50/yr pre‑launch).
• browse by keyword, theme, mood, objective.
• submit ideas for visualization.
• remix context, export unlimited visuals to use however you like.
• stuff we haven't thought of yet
• stuff you haven’t asked for yet

why it exists
an opinionated response to infinite doom scrolling.
vv in its own context.
to open on purpose, not on impulse.

how we’ll ship
in public, transparently documenting product decisions, bugs, pivots, accidents, etc.
follow the wip thread here.

alpha version will be live in the next few days, pre-sale price will be live until then.

thank you for your time and attention.

overthinking

trying to anticipate how (x) will be received

thinking ten steps ahead when you haven’t taken one

what feels like a higher vantage point is in practice a form of blindness

every misstep illuminates the edges of a path

We survive by naming shapes.

Lion, lightning, invoice. Commit to memory, move on.

That shorthand spares calories, keeps skin intact, and lets us cross streets without philosophizing about trucks.

The tradeoff: the moment a thing fits a label, its edges fade.

Nuance gets deleted, anomalies slip through the net, the field of possibility shrinks.

Useful for survival, fatal for discovery.

As traction increases, whether in influence, output, or visibility, so does the volume of incoming signals.

These can include feedback, requests, scrutiny, flattery, criticism, opportunities, distractions masquerading as possibilities.

The more reach you gain, the more noise you’re exposed to.

This is not incidental. It’s systemic.

Traction enlarges your “surface area of attention.” What once felt like a direct line between idea and execution becomes layered with reflection, reaction, and redirection.

The act of being seen introduces new vectors of cognitive load. You begin to allocate bandwidth not just to what you're building, but to how it’s being perceived, interpreted, echoed, and imitated.

From a systems perspective, the rise in traction creates more inputs than most minds are wired to process efficiently.

These inputs fragment your internal focus. You’re no longer operating in a closed system, you’ve become a node in a dense, recursive network of attention.

So, distraction isn’t a flaw in the system, it’s a byproduct of traction. The more signal you send, the more echo you receive. And unless you insulate your process, you risk being pulled into managing resonance instead of creating the original tone.

In short: growth creates drag.

Attention creates entropy.

And unless you consciously reduce surface area, the system wins.

assume avg. tweet read-time = 5 sec
60 min × 60 sec ÷ 5 sec per tweet = 720 tweets
discounting repeats, bots, noise (~30%), leaves ~500 opinions/hr

enjoy.

You have probably encountered this idea at some point:

- Cheap
- Fast
- Good

Pick two.

Like all clichés, we dismiss it at first, until we accrue enough experience to understand why it is deservedly in the cliché hall of fame, because, of course, it is true.

• New tool x arrives

• “I will be able to do 10x more now”

• So will everyone else

There are no level playing fields, only better players.

—

Subscriber graph deservedly looking like a Thanksgiving Turkey after the 3 year hiatus.

The unsubscribe button is beneath here somewhere, highly encourage you to smash it immediately should these posts be uninteresting to you.

For whatever period of time I had your attention, thank you very much.

I clicked into the VV feed and realized I hadn’t published anything here in 3 years, despite spending almost all of my time on the internet since. Diabolical.

Even more frustratingly, the last post I shared was about giving up because a commitment to a schedule I had set was preventing me from being spontaneous, or making me write superfluous stuff in service of a deadline.

It is obvious, but I try to be in the obvious business:

The act of forcing yourself to write is the only thing that gives you something to say.

—

Unrelated note:
We just reworked the VV Chrome Extension due to a compatibility issue.
If you have 5 seconds to leave a review, much appreciated.