Ep. 4: The Overlooked Potential of Midjourney for Business and Side Hustles

0:00Nostalgia Trip: 90s Movies and Podcast Intro

Play from 0:00 8:88 0:00 what's up everybody Rory and I are back for episode 4 Midjourney Fast Hours podcast welcome back it always feels good to be here Rory what's happening buddy nothing much man just uh you know kicking it through the rest of the week here got a lot of stuff going on of course never a d moment just you know reminiscing over heavy weights over here because your hat is just fire so you know if you can't see it it says buddy on it so yeah a little little heavy weighs a little like 90s vintage throwback Nostalgia for you I mean if you don't recall I mean this is one of Ben Stiller's first big movies probably are we dating ourselves with this one people even remember heavy weights me that was childhood classic

Play from 0:46 8:88 0:46 though Jerry get on the scale get off the scale my favorite lines of all time oh so epic dude so epic oh man goes right up there with like little Giants and sand lot for me in terms of like my childhood man we are speaking the same language right now absolutely those are all classics I mean heavyweights you had uh Keenan Keenan was in heavyweights you also had uh gold actor Goldberg yeah forget his name No One Ever Knows His Name Goldberg yeah Mighty Ducks Goldberg that's a good one man what happened what happened to those movies like what happened to you know kids movies that were fun like that I don't know seems like that whole genre disappeared why why is the Golden Age of

Play from 1:32 8:88 1:32 everything 80s and 90s I that's my question you're just ripping that was that was good stuff Mighty Ducks D2 come on that's that's classic everyone knows everyone knows Queen from that song If you were in your like your your first like seven to eight years of life you now know Queen because of you know D2 Mighty Ducks so we will rock you can't get much better than that that was like a you can't epic moment in time I mean even D1 dude I mean you got you got Gordon who his probation includes him coaching a youth hockey team I mean how how epic is that exceptional exceptional the bash Brothers very T very timely I mean look how we just segued that in beautifully yeah so so we're back guys

Play from 2:18 8:88 2:18 we are back thanks for hanging with us as we just sort of Reminisce there but uh we got a great great episode I think for today we're going to try to jam this into our usual hour because staying true to the name Midjourney Fast Hours and we've got a lot to discuss we're going to talk about specifically all the ways that you can take ideas and use Midjourney to realize their outcomes so all the different use cases that are available that either Rory and I have done ourselves or we've thought about or just the way other people are using these things and then kind of break that out into how could you use this for Brands and businesses and maybe in your professional life and then how could you also use this for personal gain and monetization because there are obviously both ways to leverage the technology and I think both are equally fascinating to

3:00Midjourney's Big Break: Solving the Asset Dilemma

Play from 3:03 8:88 3:03 think about because there just are so many ways 100% so many ways when I first started I mean I remember looking up stuff on like YouTube you know com com full circle now like how you know how are people actually making money with this cuz it was it wasn't necessarily good but I remember like the first was you know print on demand people you had to jump through a lot of Hoops back then to make something look good and get it print on demand but people are doing it phone cases t-shirts we're going to go a little deeper than that today a little bit more robust I think but you know that was some of the first stuff it was like again it was a first idea everyone has when they're going to start a product t-shirts right the way it goes you know it's like let's make t-shirts yeah okay it's a a little bit harder than it you know than it seems you can make the t-shirts but then you got to Market them and actually find an

Play from 3:49 8:88 3:49 audience that wants to buy them which I think is underrated it's like these that's so funny dude that's so true right it's like these affiliate plays you know I see this on Instagram a lot not to go too off track here but you know if anyone's familiar with affiliate marketing basically you know you can click through and you're just driving eyeballs from one site to another but you know there's all these like influencers that are like this is how I make $9,000 a day by tell driving people to Amazon it's like all you need to do is just like comment Amazon and I'll send you my guide and you know everyone's like oh my God I want to make $9,000 a day yeah they don't tell you the person that's driving you know all that traffic and have has all those sales has 9 million followers like that's the hard part not not the driving people to Amazon it's getting the 9 million followers yeah you got to build the Community First which oh my God you

Play from 4:36 8:88 4:36 can't do that overnight you can you certainly cannot not with this LinkedIn algorithm at least not not right now so brutal soal guys I mean what are we doing here I mean oh dude it's just so bad we we talk about this all the time but you know we we reminisce nostalgically about last summer you know like the kind of impression share and eyeballs that you could get on a given post and just oh so brutal so brutal but um yeah man let's get in let's get into like all the different ways that maybe people can turn ideas into ways that are actually you know that are actionable for business for personal gain so like maybe we start with how we used them in the past like and maybe that brings us to sort of like the inflection point of

Play from 5:21 8:88 5:21 us going even further into Midjourney ourselves and just why we're so passionate about it you know like how did that start to come to life for you maybe in the early days and what did you kind of realize with uh the use cases specifically yeah man well I think you know we talked about this in like the first episode where I was mentioning a lot of this was SP like kind of started with email marketing we just needed assets I mean that was just the end of the end of the road there we had no other option we just didn't have anything else so we kind of had to create them but that was kind of like the eye opener like oh they work and no one's like emailing us saying you guys got to stop sending us AI images like we don't like this for our products you know we're not going to buy from you cuz using AI images so that was kind of like oh the market says it's okay they're still buying they're still clicking through you know it wasn't like we were

Play from 6:07 8:88 6:07 doing anything revolutionary actually some of the stuff was pretty funny at the time when I go and look back at it now like it was so comically bad but it worked right I think a lot of it was there was a novelty to it like the novelty to the aesthetic um like kind of when you think about how CGI came onto the scene and it was like that's different doesn't look like you know Jurassic Park looks a certain way and then you get some new the newer Jurassic Park and you're like that looks different that doesn't look like it used to so there was definitely like that aspect of it that sort of pushed into a lot more directions where you know it's like where else can this work but my head initially went to mobile right because we didn't have like a good breadth of upscaler at the time so the upscales weren't there to make things bigger to put them on things like you know actually you know they really had

Play from 6:53 8:88 6:53 trouble even with Carousel covers back in the day that was, 1500 pixels by 1200 pixels and that was like you still blurry so you know my my head always went to mobile I was like what can we do with mobile can we do organic can we do ads can we make things at least look you know passable in that sense obviously we went down the rabbit hole on Photo realistic prompting last week that's where we went you know to try and get it there to look like that but also like there's been shifts I think everyone wanted to make things look great and then there was like this movement towards making things look kind of weird and different and unique cuz that's really what the key benefit to me has always been like how do we stop the scroll and how do we give you something that you haven't seen today that's really the impetus of it all so I think organic social is great for it cuz it can accompany a ton of different things whether that's you know in a carousel on Instagram whether that's like you know

Play from 7:40 8:88 7:40 doing b-roll for a Tik Tok reel or an Instagram reel you know kind of visual storytelling when you're creating organic or video content so that's obviously a good use case for it but you know there's so many that we can get into let's let me let me rip it over to you real quick so you can you can get some words in so I shut up well I no I mean I I think you brought up some really great points and I think email social slides like those things are really lowrisk as well I think it's fascinating that you started with sort of like this email approach um mobile approach too because smaller size images people aren't dissecting these things too much it's more of like a attention grabber or scroll stopper if you will and it's it's there as a complimentary purpose and it's a very singular purpose

Play from 8:25 8:88 8:25 and so like those to me feel like very lowrisk use cases for me we talk about this again like I think this was our first episode where we were just talking about how we got started with Midjourney like what drove that sort of obsession that nerdy Obsession that we have for me the story went back to the idea of applying this in my role my full-time role which at that time was leading a marketing team and we had no assets that were you know that that really felt like us because we were in a niche and so this idea that we could create images that felt more like us and you know were pretty passable really at that time even um because some of it kind of had like a little bit of this illustrative look and so I don't think people really knew to necessarily consider it photo realistic if you know what I mean you know so I I I think that also was a nice little balance and way

Play from 9:10 8:88 9:10 to introduce it but using Midjourney for things like website images blog images icons illustrations slides we use that for Customer Events and some of the things that we would show on demos like all that stuff that's more complimentary to the brand at large I mean those all felt pretty low risk and great ways to stand out because in any I I guess field you know even in your field in the agency side but mine on the B2B side you're just used to seeing all the same images and you know there's that running joke of like so and so's using Sally you know on their web page and like 50 other brands use Sally on their web page right and she's a happy customer she's got this to say right and so things like that were just eye openers immediately so when you think about all the different use cases that come to mind

Play from 9:56 8:88 9:56 for something like Midjourney we're not just talking about photo realism I mean you can we've talked about storyboarding before we've talked about mood boards we've talked about ux UI design ideas we've talked about oh God help me out dude I mean just like everything that was one of the interesting ones was the like the uiux designs I remember when that was like a big thing when you know was kind of trending on social but I was like cool everyone's doing like you know notion dashboards and stuff like that I was like can you create an email template cuz that'd be cool you know so we that's how we started to get a lot more creative with our template design like the thing you know this is this is very email marketing Centric but at the same time you know you don't realize how many times you use the same template and it could either be a good thing or a bad thing if it doesn't work and you need to create more they take time so creating a

10:00Leveraging Midjourney for Scroll-Stopping Content

Play from 10:41 88:88 10:41 template that you can utilize over and over again is not something that is simply done and from the agency side has to get client approval so it has to fit brand standards it has to go through a bunch of rounds of revisions so you know we started generating some really unique ones on there to give us ideas and then we also started playing around with removing stuff and basically taking those templates and turning them into templates so you can actually go and generate like an email like placeholder template where it had you know colors and unique different ways to add the products to it so that you had like these little guidelines almost and you could just remove whatever imagery or text was in there and then just add your own that was an interesting way either that or mimic it ourselves so it was a way to get inspiration which sounds like you know again everyone knows that you can use AI for inspiration at this point but we were actually taking it and just kind of building off of it so it's a

Play from 11:27 88:88 11:27 starting point again like always this piece to a whole mentality CU that was really important again especially that's a great point I mean not everything has to be a finished product when you take it out of Midjourney there are certain cases where yes like ideally it'd be great if you could just create something and use it right away is that the reality sometimes maybe not especially like maybe for more of a business use case so you have to think about you know what other tools go along with that which I think is an interesting conversation and maybe that's something we get into today too is you know the workflow of it all like are there other tools that you stack with it in your process what are those tools and why do you use them so it is fascinating to think about like the rough ideas you know anything from mockups to product visualizations to illustrations to we

Play from 12:12 88:88 12:12 used it for trade show design God I mean there's just so many right like mascot design cartoons illustrations like all these things I think are just fascinating to think about and it kind of get lost in the sauce when you think about Midjourney because you and I specifically we talk a lot about photo realism and sometimes we kind of need to be pulled back back and you know reminded too that hey like are we not thinking about how we could have used it here too that's just important to note because not everybody's trying to use it for photo realism yeah Everyone likes to you know there's a there's a big part of the community that just likes to create right they want to create and they want to create whatever they like it has no like there's no end goal for it only for personal satisfaction but I look at it in terms of like when we started doing this stuff then we realized we could implant it into operations that's when it became really powerful just cuz it was a timesaver right if we're spending two hours on something and we could

Play from 12:58 88:88 12:58 spend 10 minutes on it and that 10 minutes was actually high quality and not crap then it was like okay we can really start to you know the compounding effects over time that's where it's going to help so you know like that template idea right that was just to us to have templates right like we needed templates that would that didn't essentially bleed into the rest of it until we figured out we could use that in onboarding where it was like okay we have assigned a new client now you know we have to get the initial design sort of like consultation out of the way if you want to call it that how we basically align their brand values in our design style so then we could use instead of like you here's the other emails that we've created for other brands that have literally no relevance to you you know instead we can go mock up these things real quick this can happen on a kickoff call which is like 2 days after a contract signed here here's like four or five templates that we think might work for you based on you

Play from 13:43 88:88 13:43 know what's worked in the past and also tailored it's like a client experience thing too where that helps and or you know we look at something like Black Friday coming around the corner you know I say that now because we were thinking about Black Friday like today like August one was when I was like okay time to kick it into gear because September gets crazy October you're basically too late so probably probably one of the most important dates for you every year yeah and that was like again okay we have Black Friday coming up we're going to run an amplified amount of campaigns of what we normally do so instead of running four to five maybe six to seven campaigns a month we're going to be at like 14 or 15 we kind of need some stuff that's a little bit different so we're coming up on that time here's what we're thinking here's a couple different you know options for you choose your own path essentially and then it was just a good way to have interaction and also

Play from 14:30 88:88 14:30 it's low risk in terms of design so we didn't have to waste a lot of time mocking up these big ass templates you that would take forever for designers and then clients be like I don't like that I want to like change put the text on the right side not the left side you know so like like that could be really turned around and not just go put the designers back to work on something trivial so little things like that let's let's unpack that that prompt template sort of idea as a whole for a second because it seems like you and I have sort of utilized that in a similar but different way and I think that applies to a lot of these business use cases as well especially if it's a client or you're using it for somebody in a larger capacity like the idea is to ultimately create something that is repeatable that can be basically front-loaded with the work and then applied over and over with

Play from 15:17 88:88 15:17 less effort right so it's that idea that you're doing 90% of the work up front and then 10% after that how did you come across that idea to land on a template and are there any like things that you learn in particular with that idea of using templates in your business use cases totally it's one thing for me to do it it's another thing to have a whole team do it right so when I was was really the first one taking the shots at it and it was like okay you know it's like science it's like a science experiment right like it it only it can only be turned into an actual like physical law if it's repeatable and it's repeatable by everyone so you know I could have this one prompt and it works for me it doesn't work for anyone else like if it only works one time it's pointless so it's like drilling it down to the main points of like where the emphasis is and like these prompts where you want them so that you can then like

Play from 16:03 88:88 16:03 assign values or like terms to it like a prompt formula that's when we start to like kind of break it down because if it was just me and I didn't care about doing it for someone else or teaching someone else how to do it I probably would have never had to use them probably would have just been like let's wing it let's go for it but when you have to teach other people how to do it they need like a road map so this was kind of like all right I tested these prompt formulas this is what works for this you know these are the types of keywords this is the type of format now you can go and you know change the colors change the you know the the structure type or like you know what are some of these other elements in here but keep XYZ so it was a good way to get people off the ground but also to teach them how each little individual aspect of a prompt affected the output so I would say that was integral in everything cuz without it we would just

Play from 16:49 88:88 16:49 been like kind of shooting in the dark and there was no starting point talking about time optimization and a lot of this stuff that helps it helps people get a starting point start generating understand where the issues are within their initial Generations edit quickly get to something more usable cuz we all know you can go down the you can just stay in a you know like a funk with prompting for like you know an hour or two you're like I everything sucks I think that's fascinating too because we've talked a lot about prompt structure mostly in the last episode but I think prom structure really was a byproduct of this deed for templates and predictability and consistency because otherwise it's not necessarily a thing it's not like you have to use that but when you're thinking about using it in mass or with teams like you just mentioned it becomes a prerequisite to ultimately get all of the potential Roi

Play from 17:36 88:88 17:36 out of Shifting your workflow your operations in that direction 100% it's hard to like you can't really have this I talk about this often there there's a couple different stages of of adoption in the AI workplace to me there's like it starts with like you know you discover tools individually you work on the side the second stages you start to use it in in your job but like you're the only one doing it or you're just doing it in your own way stage three is kind of to me like where everyone is utilizing it but no one's doing it in like an organized fashion there's no Sops it's just like you're over there doing your thing I'm over here doing my thing no one's taught us how to do anything and we're just kind of like winging it which is where I think a lot of people are right now you know then it's like it's that next step where you start to kind of collate everything make the Sops or the standard operating procedures for anyone you know who's not

Play from 18:22 88:88 18:22 up with the corporate acronym lingo and I hate that I have to use that term in my in my real life but I do hey Rory let me let me let me stop you right there for a second you specifically have talked about this on a number of different podcasts or speaking engagements you've done some of these talks I think it's fascinating to think about the volume game that you created in doing that and then also the oper operationalization yes operationalization did I say that right I don't know that I've ever said that like that um anyway yeah the oper like oper one more time we got this operationalization got it that's good uh this is a fascinating conversation to have also for people that are using mid

Play from 19:08 88:88 19:08 Journey they're using it more often and they're trying to apply it more toward a business case can you give us like some of the things that were either unlocks for you as you were going about this or like any mistakes that you made along the way that you wish you would like you would do differently if you got that chance again as you're thinking about integrating AI image gen into your processes from a company or a team standpoint I would say it's you know 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 that is luckily I spent a lot of time in sales picking through people's email channels to try and find holes so that I could sell them it's like oh here's the issue it's like you think it's X but it's really Y which I wasn't lying it was you know people are like just to give an example as to how

Play from 19:53 88:88 19:53 I'm thinking about this from a whole General perspective email marketing typically you're driving traffic to a website there's a land there's like a email capture that comes up popup window everyone hates them but that's how you sign people up for your list right now if you're driving traffic and then you know the email sign up on the back end is super low then it's not the email that doesn't work because your emails on the back end they're just you're sending to the same people all the time you have no new blood no like it's like a river that's run dry there's like nothing new coming in so you're just sending the same thing to the same people over and over again so everyone be like my email sucks and like a lot of times look back there be like well your email doesn't really suck it's the pop-up window like you have traffic you have decent emails but there's just no new people so you just have a fatigued list so really the popup window is a variable that same

20:00Creative Catalysts: Unique Midjourney Use Cases

Play from 20:40 88:88 20:40 type of thought process when you look at an operation where it's like okay we're looking at you know this whole workflow from creative brief down to the actual execution it's like where are the actual choke points because you can find places where it's like what what takes the most time in this entire process right and everyone would be like it's the design it's like yeah it's the design design of course but are the copywriters not getting you copy quick enough are there too many copy edits cuz if you've ever worked in design if you have to go and remove copy or add copy it can change the whole design so you know sometimes it's not exactly just the Design's fault you know design team's fault it could be the copywriting you know that that could go back you know you sending a finished design to your your client and they're like we don't like this copy scrap it add this take this out do this and then designers have to go and rework the

Play from 21:26 88:88 21:26 entire visual aesthetic of it because it doesn't fit with the new copy that they put in so really long answer to say that I think people have an issue with problem identification more than they have finding solutions for it because once you do you know then you can use a tool for example one more is you know when we started realizing we could direct photo shoots with Midjourney it was way easier cuz we didn't have to rely on telling a photographer what we were looking for in like an arbitrary fashion it was more so like we need these types of shots you know you can do a mood board on Pinterest or whatever and be like we kind of want these shots or we could tell them basically exactly what we want by utilizing Midjourney and trim probably a week or two off the time frame from you know idation to execution again it was just like where are these little areas that we can help where can we find 10minute wins not

Play from 22:11 88:88 22:11 million dooll wins can we find 10minute wins and that'll lead us you know to the million dollar wins so that's kind of a that was very pontification pontification pontificating we're using big words here today guys o they're tough they are so tough no I think that's great we've got really good perspectives on this because we lived it and we sort of operationalized it for me it was the idea that I could like our biggest problem was Finding on brand assets that felt like us and then having that access for everybody in the company that could grab images whether that's the marketing team whether that's the sales team CS team because you get into these small organizations there is no designer there's no designer you've got brand guidelines but guess what people

Play from 22:57 88:88 22:57 aren't following them and what happen happens is because there's no designer and you can't necessarily give tasks to somebody that also has 50 other tasks where design is just one part of their job people then take it upon themselves to create things and that's where the brand starts to really sort of degrade because you've got different qualities of the brand inconsistencies maybe the voice isn't the same like some of those key points it was this idea that I could create these things in bulk provide this on brand custom library that my team could access for all the things right and just some of the use case that we already talked about social ads emails blog images all those things were instantly grabbable and we didn't have to go find them we didn't have to do the whole stock photography game which you and I just love to blast stock

Play from 23:43 88:88 23:43 photography but we we all know that pain if you've ever spent time creating visuals of any any kind like it's just that's what you start with because it's either that or you've got the professional photographer like Rory mentioned each has their own problems they all have cons and so there's this space in between where AI can play a large role and that was really my inflection point was just like I don't like the stock photography plus it takes up way too much time the professional photographer I don't have the budget for and even if I did it doesn't excite me that I got to think about all the logistical planning behind it I got to find the photographer where are they at where are we shooting who are the people we're shooting do they have the right clothes what's the location and after all that you get a finite number of images so once you go through those then what do you do so done you you run

Play from 24:28 88:88 24:28 through him 100 million times and everything looks the same that's exactly what happens and not in a good way interesting that how are you so then if you didn't have a designer like who was actually creating the materials was it like just you know social media team or you I was going to ask is it just you then you know I'm not saying this is right or wrong but I think it's like you almost build a team with people that have different strengths than you and then you you might be good at a few different things so you know as the leader of that team I had to let go of some things that I knew somebody could do better than me the problem is we didn't have anybody that was a better designer or brand person than me so I I took that on you know if we had somebody better I could I could obviously offset that but that was just one of the many roles that I had as a team leader and probably not one of the more impactful roles from a revenue standpoint and so I

Play from 25:15 88:88 25:15 think about these small marketing teams and I have just so much empathy there because you do have so many priorities and marketing is sort of seen as like this thing that you can just kind of turn on and the truth is like there are so many parts of the machine that you have to get going and it makes it very difficult and so that's what was really appealing to me is this ability to almost think of myself as a photographer but apply a totally different technology to solve that problem you know looking back on it I don't know that I really thought how big of a thing that was that I was solving it was more just because I was curious and fun you know and I think like that also speaks to why a lot of people are on Midjourney anyways it's fun and there it is cool to think about different images that I could potentially use in different ways which is what this podcast is all about today is the business side but also the personal side and there are literally

Play from 26:01 88:88 26:01 thousands of ways to use Midjourney it's insane it started like I said it was Carousel covers but two things can be true right like a carousel cover can stop the scroll on LinkedIn because no one's seen it on LinkedIn before but also what does that mean that means I can probably use it on organic social not just LinkedIn but maybe on Instagram or on Tik Tok maybe it's used for thumbnails on YouTube right I remember the YouTube stuff it was like basically Mr Beast had these crazy thumbnails and everyone tried to like mimic them then AI came along and like my whole YouTube homepage changed it was like it was like whoa explosion of just craziness which I love I think it's awesome like to all the thumbnail designers out there like props it's gotten so much better but that was one of those things where I was you know remember talking to people that

Play from 26:47 88:88 26:47 were on YouTube and they were like how are you doing this and I was like this tool called uh Midjourney just like please please say more you know so that was you know that was interesting also going back to your point about uh stock photography the biggest pain point of them all for me I used to hate this was when you'd find the right image and it was the wrong aspect ratio like nothing simple things brother simple things God man so bad like all right let me take this into Photoshop let me like resize and then like you know I'll I'll mask or clone some of the you know some of the sides on sides of the images so that I can put a black background and fade it in it's like just I just want a banner you know like I so much damn work dude so much damn work this is a good chance to maybe pivot to more of the personal

Play from 27:32 88:88 27:32 monetization side of things I get questions about this all the time I do some of these Midjourney trainings for people that are trying to think about how to monetize it I know you're getting that too what are some of the ways like let's just start with us what are some of the ways that you've been able to monetize Midjourney and then we can kind of get into thinking a little bit broader across maybe the listeners and how they might think about it there's obviously the content there's content that you can sell on educational side of things that's one I think corporate training is very interesting because everyone here that's listening potentially has been in either some role or another for probably many years or at least knows a job function very well so it plays well for me when I look at corporate training opportunities where you know there's teams creative teams things like that that are interested in

Play from 28:18 88:88 28:18 Midjourney they don't know how to use it they don't know how to like really leverage it in their workflow so something like storyboarding right I like I fell into that I knew agencies used it I didn't realize how how important it was to a lot of agencies how often and how many they're doing so that was something that I had just developed to do basically for Runway I wanted to make Runway stories and make them cohesive but I was making storyboards I started getting reached out to like oh can you teach our team how to make story boards I was like is this a thing you know there's little problems in every workflow that you can solve if you have an area of expertise so anything that's creative often times right whether that's in the ad process the email process whether that's in in you know presentation design whether that's in whatever whatever the business is you know creating marketing materials

Play from 29:04 88:88 29:04 things anything there's a workflow that specifically is struggling somewhere and if you can figure that out with a tool like Midjourney and then train someone how to do it they will pay you they will pay you often times what that's worth so you look at also from a structuring standpoint there's obviously companies that if you go in there and save them two weeks worth of time you know what is that worth to them so you know you can solve problems creatively with the tool and you know corporate training is ailable but it's that's just one thing I mean you know there's there's number of other ways to monetize but I've okay I mean like that that's a that's a great starting point like we we both kind of started with the digital productization that felt kind of like a very organic thing because I think you and I probably both realized relatively

Play from 29:49 88:88 29:49 quickly that not many people were as far along in the learning process as we were at that time I think my biggest mistake early on was thinking oh everybody's jumping on this you know and then as I started to share more and more like I quickly realized like no people may have been in the tool and generate a few images but they don't know the ins and outs right so then I took that as an opportunity just like well if that's a case like I gotta I gotta bring them along I gotta I got to lay down the bridge and bring them from beginner to normal user right and there's a ton to go into so digital products there are individual verticals and niches that you could you know put a a digital product out just on a course on that real estate architecture food so that could be its own course so you

30:00Scaling Success: From Individual Use to Company-Wide Adoption

Play from 30:35 88:88 30:35 think about like digital products right now are awesome because if you've got any sort of community or following because it's again that front-loaded work you do 90% of it up front you're not touching it again and guess what just passive income rolling in and so that's an easy way to set it up but there are just so many other ways like to think about I'll just run through a few of these that I wrote down too I was just kind of going through some of this stuff but you mentioned sort of Swag right like putting this on t-shirts hats sock any any sort of apparel you've got digital art prints you've got icon illustration packs you've got prompts you've got you know personal brand visual identity creation you've got portraits and avatars you've got album art you've got custom wedding imitation stationary Pet Portraits you know like what are we talking concept art for game

Play from 31:22 88:88 31:22 developers I know people that you know like especially when you're in the rating images in Midjourney you see a lot of those coloring books like people are books illustrations like there's whole markets for that it literally is endless so think about specifically what you want to focus in within there because there are literally hundreds if not thousands of options and if you think very distinctly about where there's low competition which in a lot of ways there is right now go in on it give it a shot there's you know if you want to go go look at a great place to where Midjourney is probably super applicable it's Etsy you know you go on there and you look at kind of the top sellers what they're selling what kind of designs work things of that nature I'm sure you know you go in there and look there's a there's a billion ideas and I'm sure you can also siphon or filter out kind of what the what the hot product categories are what the best

Play from 32:07 88:88 32:07 Search terms are on a site like that cuz everything's really easy now I remember thinking about print on demand when I was in college cuz I was like this doesn't make sense like why can't I just like give someone a design and they print me a t-shirt why do I have to buy 100 what was interesting is that I saw a lot of people utilizing it you know the T-shirt route right away on Midjourney which was kind of crazy phone cases stickers things like that I mean you want to go low that's you know that's going to be low volume or uh high volume low price points again there's other services I think you know service route is always a good way to think about providing you know if you're looking to to start this and make a business out of it the service route to me is always the the fastest path path to cash but also you know you're going to grind you're going to grind with clients you know

Play from 32:54 88:88 32:54 that's a depending on what that is whether that's with you know creating visual brand identity whether that's doing you know ad creative for them whether that's doing website design however but you know to me I always like to find like a a very relatable Niche that I can talk to because I think that's often times underserved I think people think we're going to go really broad like oh like a billion people are going to love this you know I mean I've developed products for media buyers it's one you know for one task in one role in one workflow in the entire organization but that one has been a calling card for me for almost eight months now because it's just such a need that's one function of one job and one little like I said like one little task there's a

Play from 33:40 88:88 33:40 billion tasks out there that need some sort of artwork so it's you know I think it's everyone has to like kind of Zone into their their own genius and where they're comfortable the other thing that this is just a hot take here I think a lot of people try to you know get into Ai and go outside their means like oh I'm going to train ChatGPT I'm going to teach you how to write like a copywriter in ChatGPT but they've never copy they never been a copywriter before they like don't know the intricacies they don't know the ins and outs of what it's like to work in copy so like maybe they've never dealt with clients before or you know high volume copyrighting absolutely you know what I mean so yes like that stuff always that stuff always yeah Lean Like lean into your zone of Genius there's something that you do that you do probably better than 90% of other people right like start there and uh you

Play from 34:27 88:88 34:27 know I think that was sort of what we realized quickly with Midjourney is just we were we had adopted it so so much faster than a lot of other people and actually put it into application in business too like if we were just still using it for fun and didn't do that I don't think we would be doing this today like it would just it would have stayed more Hobby esque and so I think like the fact that we got a little bit of a taste of that we got the appetite to say okay like there's more out there and there's a lot that needs to be solved for that only sort of encouraged us to go a little bit deeper I am curious what's either the funniest or the strangest way you've made money with Midjourney right now oh my God there's definitely been some weird stuff but I wouldn't call this necessarily weird but cool so I I spoke to a uh a private Community there

Play from 35:13 88:88 35:13 Security Group so they work in digital security and a lot of them represent like CEOs or high netw worth targets and things like that they wanted to know about how to break down like deep fakes and how to like create them so took them on like a little red through my crazy brain luckily again something that was stupid that I didn't even know would be valid I put a you know if anyone doesn't you know hasn't seen this stuff before basically at the end of every Carousel that I do on LinkedIn I do an avatar of myself basically in the area or zone of whatever I was talking about so I do a lot of these avatars and had to figure out how to do them you know of myself like doing random stuff so they reached out to me saying can you like show us how to do this and break it down and then also show us how to like detect this stuff so it was definitely cool and interesting cuz I'm I'm definitely

Play from 35:59 88:88 35:59 intimidated by who I was on the phone with like I knew that there were people there that could you know basically probably hack me and send me crashing and burning um but it was interesting because I you know to even go back and look I never put a presentation together like that before a lot of the you know if anyone's not familiar with this stuff a lot of the presentations you do are kind of regurgitated or pieced together from other presentations but this one was totally new and I was like you know what I do know how to look at these images and tell that they're fake like symmetry number one I always say it's the you know if you could fold it over in half and it looks exactly the same AI we are not perfect beings that was one you know odd-shaped odd-shaped features you know like long arms or short legs things like that skin tone is too smooth eyes are off um you know earring phys

Play from 36:45 88:88 36:45 like earrings and jewelry physics oftentimes the jewelry is so big that it doesn't make sense like who would wear that much jewelry like hair that's kind of got like random wisps out of place so there was you know the one the other thing it's noise like there's not a lot of noise in AI photos like you look at a you look at you know the film grain for a lot of analog you know photos there it's there like you open it up in Photoshop and scroll in you get a lot of pixels but like something on AI doesn't have that it's not it's like kind of completely polished so there's a lot of different ways to go about it but that was an interesting one I mean I was like I said I was kind of I told the guy before I got on I was like I am nervous cuz should I be nervous is there CIA on this call I don't necessarily want to be putting

Play from 37:30 88:88 37:30 it out there I don't I don't need any more malware or spyware on my computer I'm sure the dark web has taken over it and is watching this right now but you know like come on I'm I'm a little bit intimidated by who you got on the call here guy super cool man I mean anything weird there's some cool unlocks I mean like the I I think I keep going back to this art DJ thing you know like so basically this this art consultancy hired me to work one of their events at a at a trade show and essentially what we were doing for the entertainment of that was prompting things that people requested on demand so they would wait in line you know in a lot of ways they don't even know what they want to create they're just like oh like they've never even seen the technology before in most of the cases some had maybe use Dolly but never Midjourney like so it was really

Play from 38:17 88:88 38:17 appealing to a lot of people that had not even seen this stuff before and then just like producing something based on their thoughts so I would walk hand inand with them in terms of like hey what do you want to create today like we could literally create anything it could be photorealistic it could be like a painting it could be an illustration like give me a subject right and so we'd start with a subject and we would say okay like what is that subject doing right like sort of building that prompt structure in real time and then you know obviously the pressure of it all was trying to get an image that they would like relatively quickly you know but like that was so much fun because it's like you know company paid me to basically create prompts on the Fly I mean like how cool is that right and so you know I did that for them actually a couple times I mean just really fun stuff that's really cool couldn't have imagined that I know that you've spoken internationally before to large crowds

Play from 39:05 88:88 39:05 we couldn't have imagined that when we started I just actually landed a new project too there's a there's a bigger company whose CEO is resigning and basically they're doing this whole like restructuring of his old office for their 100y year anniversary and he had these certain paintings in there and I'm recreating these paintings using Midjourney so I'm like not trying to create an ex act replica but like 95 to 99% of what that image is so that's just like sort of like a cool way that like a bigger brand has embraced AI as like sort of like this little use case to tie into like a bigger company event and so you know it's just like really cool stuff like that I don't know that people know this stuff about us because we don't really like talk too much about

Play from 39:51 88:88 39:51 the projects that we do but like those are things that we couldn't have imagined before and so I think like the whole point is if you become known as a quote unquote expert whether that's at large or in a particular Niche these things will come and so you got to put yourself out there create show your work too like maybe even put together some sort of portfolio site that's a great way to Showcase it because I keep this stat in the back of my head on one of these Midjourney office hours from six to9 months ago where David basically says 99.9% of images created in Midjourney have never been seen publicly they're just not shared so you're talking about like the 0.01% so I'm constantly thinking about all the images I create like can I reuse these in a different way and obviously there's only so many things that you have time to do but that's the power of

40:00Market Mastery: Turning Midjourney Skills into Revenue

Play from 40:37 88:88 40:37 this like what do you want to lean into because there are so many use cases to use images that you created like even just stock photography sites like Adobe stock takes AI photos now if you wanted to do a whole thing on that like you could go really far down that path and just upload a bunch of images to repurpose them that way like there are just so many things out there so think about that you an llm use chat G GPT or something like that to brainstorm ideas for you you probably find something that that sounds appealing yeah the AI DJ thing is awesome nobody please take that idea and run with it and create a billion- Dollar business without letting us know first please thank you um AI DJ I feel like that's how many conferences do you think go through Vegas on a you know daily basis I I can't even imagine it just

Play from 41:22 88:88 41:22 like seems like the perfect place for a business like that to be set up and to be utilized at every single one of those shows for something now the other side of is I do remember someone this is even going back like way back going into that space though was like trade like trade show booth design where they were like oh you know we're doing like this special activation for XYZ brand can you create like a just like a thought starter of some of the ways that it could look which I was like that's a unique idea I mean how much budget do you have because those things cost a ton they're just like don't worry about it it's like all right cool so let's like you know let's throw some crazy stuff in there and it was it was really interesting that that was a use case CU again starting point of design I mean a lot of Architects reach out that's another interesting one I'm sure you had that over the course of time you know they're like how can we utilize this I'm

Play from 42:07 88:88 42:07 like again to me it's always going to be about internal usage just as how I'm wired because I just want everyone to get their job done you know without having to want to kill themselves so that's kind of the uh kind of the idea where I'm like that's sweet of you by the way I I know that that's where this whole thing came from I was like I I can't have my team quit cuz you know they just stacked with work all the time and agencies are a grind anyway I mean agencies are a grind I mean and so when you unlock something like that dude that's got to be a huge morale booster massive plus also the creative like freedom of expression that they then have to go and like do whatever they want when they want you know it's a good exercise right like until then you're just designing an illustrator and you're designing you know maybe sketching but this is like another way to get like a quick fix of creativity if you need it I

Play from 42:53 88:88 42:53 thought I thought the other cool thing that you implemented over there and you didn't get into it in this story but like you this was before rooms were around but like Discord maybe you had a channel but you guys were all creating together it's this idea that teams can collaborate in a space and that's why I think you and I have at least dabbled and talked about rooms I don't they really don't get talked about that much but if you're a team or an organization and you're utilizing Midjourney that's a complete Game Changer like you can literally ideate and iterate in real time and let's just say Rory puts in a prompt and I'm in the same room I can very subtle or very very strong His Image right I could upscale this or I could look at his promp structure and adapt that to what I have in mind right like so that is a breeding ground for creativity and I would say efficiency at

Play from 43:39 88:88 43:39 the same time because you're obviously working together in real time to align yourselves with what you have in mind but also bringing in the like the creative Liberties into one spot to connect the dot so man that's so underutilized dude but I thought that was like genius for you guys even early on in the Discord Channel piece cuz I'm all about fun right like I don't think I'm going to get anyone to do extra work unless it's fun so you know if someone told me when I was 27 like hey you're going to go learn a new tool because you have to I'd be like I hate you like that's just my mentality you know like you're going to spend five hours a day learning a new tool while also doing your job um you know I'd be like f off right it's got to be fun dude it's got to be fun right so when we make the daily prompt challenge like make yourself a you know an 80s kung fu movie

Play from 44:24 88:88 44:24 poster like that's you know put yourself into an 80s Kung F movie poster like and that's the the daily challenge it's not like go create a uh you know a product a product mockup for a skincare brand it's like you know that stuff that comes but when you're doing things like that you know like make yourself as a Shrek character or something that was like stuff that was like so stupid but it was funny you know it was like a way to get everyone sort of like jazzed about the day and like just getting like actually doing something on this tool but again you start going you send people down that path for 20 minutes they already love it it's like it's not like they start going off in their own Direction you know like oh I did that but I also created this you know it's like oh sick so it opens up opportunities we found more stuff playing around than we did like working on projects if that makes

Play from 45:10 88:88 45:10 sense that was to me probably the best part of it was like just people either Mis prompting or like misunderstanding what the topic was and like going in a totally different direction and would be like well that's cool like let's catalog that one you know for next time but the operational side right we look at prompt and talking about going back to like full circle the beginning here you know Phil mags over at superside when he first talked to me he told me they were doing something very interesting with the with their clients and how they were basically utilizing those shared channels they had built an integration into Discord so whenever a client like whenever a mid-journey image was approved by a client they went back and they starred or they liked one of those images in Discord which they set up like basically a zap or integration into

Play from 45:56 88:88 45:56 either a spreadsheet or own custom llm where it then went and Cat cataloged all those prompts basically as approved prompts for their clients so that then you know anyone on the team could access those and go back and utilize them because they' already been approved you can iterate off them build off them so think about how small of a piece that is but how much impact that could have in terms of time and efficiency this is what we're talking about we're when you look at this stuff it's not you know we're going to go create Bill boards immediately with Midjourney it's we're going to catalog prompts sounds so boring but like compounded over time makes a ton of difference it's even hard to Fathom the ROI because in a lot of ways you're saving headcount you can make that argument for starters so you're talking about some sort of yearly salary table Stakes like you additionally can save the expense of

Play from 46:43 88:88 46:43 benefits and a salary for a business by you using a tool like this on the size of a team really I would say almost any size of a team yeah and then depending on like how many assets you're creating like an agency obviously that's probably more so the case but even on my team team like we weren't ever going to hire a designer for a company that is a series a series B startup that that's not going to happen until you know late series B series C like when you've raised more money when you've got higher ARR coming in from a revenue standpoint so like you start there then you talk about all this time in my example it was creating these images in almost like this infinite bottomless library of custom on brand images because I took that front load of time built those templates out and I could just run those when ever I wanted because I knew they worked right and I could just add to it

Play from 47:30 88:88 47:30 add to it and it got to the point where you could just copy paste reroll reroll reroll reroll okay like what are the what are my 10 favorite out of here and then boom so so I mean like that in itself from a Time perspective money perspective and the other thing I like to point out is like creative compromise perspective when you have a tool like Midjourney you don't have to compromise on some of the creativity you can put some AB absurd unique attention grabbing scroll St stopping imagery together that you don't have to go find and chances are if it already exists and it stops to scroll somebody's probably already used it so these are unique things that like headcount you've got salary you know like Roi on the time the money the creative compromises I mean those things are just so big it's hard to it's hard

Play from 48:17 88:88 48:17 to even convince people how big they are it's also there's intangibles too like I I talk about a lot of times there's team turnover in agencies right like if anyone works for an agency you know there's turnover it happens all the time it's a lot of young people you don't get paid a lot the hours are crazy and you know you take you jump at opportunities so there's always like this thre Monon ramp up for whoever new is starting but that that there's like a loss there's like a you know basically like a loss there so not just not just from a body perspective but from a finance perspective and then that work gets dispersed to people who then get more overworked who are already overworked so how do we basically I essentially like that was the problem like how do we fix that like how can we make something even from an onboarding perspective for a new employee to get them ramped up quicker

Play from 49:02 88:88 49:02 so this stuff they can just jump right in even if that's working on small pieces of the AI stuff to get them moving you so they could really get up to speed quickly and get functioning better you know if you save a month on that it's insane you two months instead of three you that's a lot L you know you're going to lose business a lot of times you know you lose you know account managers you lose strategists you lose business people like working with the people that they've worked with um the other thing was like revisions right that was there's one metric that was the key indicator in the whole thing which is why we started this oh that's interesting revisions because it's killer and anyone who's worked in agencies before you know it because there's nothing worse from a designer perspective I think than you've created like this Missin star meal of a design and then you hand it over to the client and they come back with a ton of red lines and it ends up looking like you

Play from 49:48 88:88 49:48 know a McDonald's hamburger so there's nothing more soul sucking cuz I don't think art was supposed to be produced at this volume right when you think about creating like art is always like it took a long time you know you spent a lot of time you put a lot of emotion into it now it's just like soulless lifeless volume a lot of the times I don't care what anyone says sorry hot take like your marketing assets they're not like they're not da Vines you know unfortunately that's the case you're there to sell other people so let's get real we're not supposed to produce at that much volume it's just like it doesn't make sense to our psyche having that art critic criticized all the time by often times like CFO or someone who's never like you know in the never drawn a stick figure in their life it like kills you so again like that's why I'm

50:00The Numbers Game: Quantifying Midjourney's Business Value

Play from 50:34 88:88 50:34 thinking about how can this be better how can we work on revisions as the single metric take that from cuz you know we're doing 900 designs a month if that's three rounds of revisions per which is what it was it was 3.4 rounds of revisions we tracked it that's 20 2700 Plus designs for a very small set of designers that's that's unsustainable over the course of the revisions the more revisions the less time you spend with other clients right so or or new clients for that matter how I mean that could also affect how much revenue you bring in from a larger perspective too right like optically you could look at it like that and say okay we can only handle this many clients because our operations are X yeah so that's that's pretty fascinating I mean I I think you made some really good points there and you know just

Play from 51:21 88:88 51:21 historically they say that Art and Design and great architecture was created created in times where there wasn't War so when the when their country was not at War they had all this extra time and that is I think the real like nail in the coffin to your point of you don't have that luxury and and marketing in general I would say just kind of gets on you know in a lot of ways because it can be seen as an arts and crafts department but we also realize how important those quote unquote arts and crafts are and so you have to balance this this this really like thin line of how much time should we actually be spending here in order to produce a quality that's good enough it's never going to be perfect but is good enough to exceed expectations not

Play from 52:08 88:88 52:08 necessarily just meet them too at the same time and so I just think that's a fascinating point maybe even to just wrap up with here in terms of like how you operationalize look at that look at that operationalize W I got it that time but like that's how that's really how you could be thinking about this in terms terms of the Roi you're bringing and if you are going to use this you are going to use AI image generation Midjourney things for both personal or business case you are going to have to show Roi so in order to get you know Midjourney expensed and to integrate in a new technology or workflow or oper operationalization look at that you you're going to have to prove your case you're goingon to have to prove your case right especially if you're early on

Play from 52:53 88:88 52:53 in the AI adoption phase as a company so I think like we really I think we really kind of tied all that together in a in a weird fun funky roundabout ad it works way yeah it works guys we still don't know what we're doing we're just throwing this stuff together like I said give us a break but the one one last thing on that before you know I got a little heated on the on the you know the that that art Department piece of it by and the revisions often times I think people are too soon to cut these ideas too because of that static art I sort of mentality where the CFO looks at the p&l and says like this is the way that it is it's not making us any money cut it right now for us because we let it run there was intangible effect that happened long

Play from 53:39 88:88 53:39 term because our revisions dropped right that means our designers were less overloaded they had more time to get ahead of projects instead of just executing on the fly every single day because they had to left more time for strategy and communication with our clients our clients then in turn because they were happy stayed longer so you look at that we think we added 1.6 I think it was 1.6 additional months to our average retainer not not average retainer just our average monthly revenue from our clients so they stayed instead of 6 months they stayed 7.6 months so that might seem like a very small number but you extrapolate that across x amount of clients that's the ROI that's where it starts to compound significantly so sometimes might look like we paid $300

Play from 54:25 88:88 54:25 for people to use Midjourney and we did not see $300 of return this month it's like dude look look further are you sure right and I like that I I'm so glad you brought that up because that is a mindset that's all too common when you get into this revenue revenue revenue growth growth growth at all cost sort of mindset from a business standpoint is what is the ROI yeah what's the hard number well not you can't tie everything directly to Roi some things you can tie indirectly sometimes it's more about the the turn on the objectives themselves there are other things that are Roi that aren't Roi and so you know it may not be super clear and I think maybe the point is this right like if you're going to think about using this or you are using this in either capacity personal or

Play from 55:12 88:88 55:12 professional document it track things like become a nerd with that stuff like I think the fact that you guys tracked revisions and then lifetime value for the customer I mean those are gamechanging stats to bring to any seep executive level L person and then obviously like if you were on the personal side or trying to sell something to clients for yourself like those are great numbers to show and provide credibility and sustainability for your approach there so both things are super important but I think that's a great way to to wrap it up you know wrap it up I dig it you know get my shot into a CFO every once in a while feels good Stick it to the Man my least favorite sorry guys being honest so yeah man I think we there's

Play from 55:58 88:88 55:58 some real tangible information in there that you can go take and apply especially on you know some of the metric side some of the stuff that Drew was talking about in terms of optimizing internally and what you can do even with a very small team and a very limited budget so yeah man I'm looking forward to uh the next time we do this hopefully we'll have maybe a little 6.5 action maybe some live who knows who knows I like it yeah I'm thinking maybe by the next time we do this we're gonna have something by the way just a little anecdote here on office hours Wednesday they said it's not gonna be 65 they're gonna do a six 61 and a 62 oh because they they think they're going to like basically divide the differences in the versions one is going to be focused I think 6.1 is going to be focused more on like the

Play from 56:44 88:88 56:44 clarity coherence and then 62 is going to be something uh a little bit more it's going to be built on top of the training data that they get back the information and the data and the insights that they get back from one so they're trying to ship that pretty soon but no 65 61 6'2 we'll see but uh hey guys we appreciate you joining us if you haven't already follow the show subscribe to us on YouTube all the things we we love your support we appreciate all the the kind things people have said so far in our journey and uh we'll keep things rocking and rolling man we'll uh we'll catch you guys next time see you