EP 004 · 57 MIN FEWER REVISIONS BOUGHT 1.6 EXTRA MONTHS
The Overlooked Potential of Midjourney for Business and Side Hustles
The short version
Episode 4 turns two years of running Midjourney inside an agency and a B2B marketing team into a business and side-hustle playbook. Rory says tracking revisions per design added 1.6 months to his agency's average client retainer, while Drew describes replacing stock photography with an on-brand Midjourney image library. Side-hustle stories include Rory training a private security group to spot deepfakes and Drew live-prompting for trade-show attendees.
Key takeaways
- 01
Track one metric to prove creative ROI: cutting revisions per design added 1.6 months to Rory's agency's average client retainer.
- 02
Don't keep a one-off prompt to yourself: turn it into a repeatable formula with fixed keywords and format before handing it to a team.
- 03
Diagnose the real bottleneck before blaming the creative: a weak email list is often a landing-page problem, not a content problem.
- 04
Have clients approve work inside Discord: one agency contact auto-logged starred, client-approved Midjourney renders into a spreadsheet via an integration.
- 05
Start teams on low-risk assets first: website icons, slide decks and blog images build confidence before riskier client-facing work.
- 06
One narrow, boring product can carry a business for months: Rory's single tool for media buyers became an 8-month calling card.
- 07
Study a marketplace before launching a product line: check Etsy's bestsellers and search terms before designing for print-on-demand.
Receipts · said on the record
“The biggest problem to me isn't that people don't know how to use it or integrate it. It's they don't understand problem identification.”
“Marketing assets, they're not Da Vinci's. Unfortunately, that's the case. You're there to sell other people's sh*t. So let's get real. We're not supposed to produce that much volume.”
“That's the power of this, right? Like what do you want to lean into? Because there are so many use cases to use images that you've created, right?”
“We added 1.6 additional months to our average retainer … they stayed instead of six months, they stayed 7.6 months.”
“It's not … we're going create billboards immediately with Midjourney. We're going to catalog prompts. Sounds so boring, but compounded over time makes a ton of difference.”
“I think my biggest mistake early on was thinking, everybody's jumping on this. … I quickly realized, no, people may have been in the tool and generate a few images, but they don't know the ins and outs.”
Chapters
- 0:00 Nostalgia Trip: 90s Movies and Podcast Intro
- 3:00 Midjourney's Big Break: Solving the Asset Dilemma
- 10:00 Leveraging Midjourney for Scroll-Stopping Content
- 20:00 Creative Catalysts: Unique Midjourney Use Cases
- 30:00 Scaling Success: From Individual Use to Company-Wide Adoption
- 40:00 Market Mastery: Turning Midjourney Skills into Revenue
- 50:00 The Numbers Game: Quantifying Midjourney's Business Value
Questions this episode answers
How did tracking revisions affect client retainers, according to Fast Hours episode 4?
Rory says his agency tracked revisions per design as its key metric, and as that number fell, its average client retainer grew by about 1.6 months, from roughly six months to 7.6 months.
What are some ways to monetize Midjourney skills that the hosts describe?
Drew and Rory point to corporate training, digital products such as prompt packs and courses, print-on-demand and Etsy shops, agency-style service work, and paid gigs like Rory's private deepfake-detection talk and Drew's live prompting at a trade-show activation.
What is the Discord Rooms feature Drew mentions?
It's a shared space where a team can prompt together in real time, letting one person build on or upscale another's Midjourney generation; Drew says it's a favorite feature that teams rarely use.
Did the hosts discuss an upcoming Midjourney version in this episode?
Yes. Drew reports that Midjourney's Discord office hours indicated the next releases would be V6.1 and V6.2, not the previously rumored V6.5.
What mistake does Drew admit to early on in teaching Midjourney?
Drew says he assumed everyone was adopting the tool as fast as he and Rory were, then realized most people had only generated a few images and didn't know its deeper techniques.
Show notes
Attention all Midjourney enthusiasts and curious entrepreneurs!
This episode is your golden ticket to using your Midjourney skills and turning them into serious business advantages and lucrative side hustles.
Drew and Rory dive deep into the world of Midjourney applications, sharing their ideas, practical use cases, monetization opportunities, and ROI potential.
Get ready to transform your work, wow clients, and maybe even score a gig with the CIA (yes, really!).
