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EVERY SPOKEN WORD
60 min read · 11,984 words- 0:00 – 8:35
I helped a dentist create one of the greatest marketing campaigns
- JHJeff Harmon
Everybody who starts a business, you have to find your glitch. Look for things, for areas where you have attention from people that nobody else is paying attention to. [upbeat music]
- SPShaan Puri
Here's why I'm excited about this. I've never met you, but I've been a fan of your work 'cause you're kind of the creative genius behind the scenes of some of the coolest marketing campaigns that I remember. I kind of grew up on on the internet. I read your book back in the day.
- JHJeff Harmon
Oh, you read Poop to Gold.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, Poop to Gold. On top of that, you know, now, what you're doing now is fascinating. I had never... I'd honestly never heard of Angel Studios, and here you are, you've built maybe one of the top 10 TV movie studios in the, in the world. Um, you're doing almost 500 million in revenue, and I would guess that I'm not alone. I would guess that 98% of our audience has also never heard about this. And the cool thing is you did it with, I mean, pretty much no experience or background in the industry, which I always like. I like somebody who, you know, doesn't kind of self-limit on what they can and can't do based on their own track record, and you went in and you did something really remarkable. And so I want to talk about all that, but I think we should start with the marketing because that was my intro to you. Can you take us back to Dr. Bob and how you helped a dentist create one of the, one of the great marketing campaigns? Where were you? What, what happened? Can you tell that story?
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah. I was, um, in my last day of my last class at university, and, uh, a guy named Dr. Bob came in and was asking the class, he wanted them to tell him how to make his OraBrush, which was a tongue cleaner that scrapes your tongue and cleans off bad breath, how to make that thing actually sell. 'Cause he'd invented it. He had got... He had, I don't know, thousands of units of it, just boxes and boxes of them at his house.
- SPShaan Puri
Sitting in his garage. [laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah, just sit- it was... His garage was full of them. And the group got up and just said, "You can't really sell these, and nobody wants to buy these online. Like 8% of people want to buy them on the internet, and you need to go do a partnership with Procter & Gamble or Johnson & Johnson or somebody." And, uh, and I interrupted them and said, "8% of people is like 30 million people just in the United States. Why wouldn't you focus on them?"
- SPShaan Puri
Oh, so the, the, the smart kid answer was 90, over 90% of people don't want to buy this online. And you said, "Wait a minute, if, if 8% said yes, that's still millions. That's, that's enough to clear out the garage."
- JHJeff Harmon
That's right. What happened is, is I didn't think much of it until Dr. Bob came up to me after class and said, "I liked your comments. Can I work with you?" The first thing I did is I bought... I convinced Dr. Bob to spend $5,000 buying a web- a Facebook page called Kisses. There was just this some guy somewhere in the country who had built this page called Kisses. I think it had 1.3 million followers. And so we took it, and we bought it, and then I started spamming them with OraBrush. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] Because bad breath, kissing, that was the... [laughs] You-
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah. That was the connection
- SPShaan Puri
... Well, well, you, you did get one thing right, right? Like, I think one of the easy mistakes most people make is they think about their product, and they just want to tell you a- all about their product versus-
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... the benefit you get if you were to use this product.
- JHJeff Harmon
Yes.
- SPShaan Puri
The happy ending you seek, and this product is just a tool that's gonna get you to that happy ending, the better you, and maybe the-
- JHJeff Harmon
Yes
- SPShaan Puri
... the version of you that can kiss without the shame of bad breath.
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
Uh, so you did have that insight. That's pretty good.
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah. And so we took the 1.3 million people, we spammed them, and then once we got OraBrush, uh, created as an entity, I changed the name of Kisses page to OraBrush. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
Right. The brand followed by 1.3 million people.
- JHJeff Harmon
Um, yes. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
And so we had one of the most followed brands on social media. I think Facebook changed their rules after that.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- JHJeff Harmon
And that failed miserably. We didn't sell hardly anything.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
We tried Google Ads. They weren't working. I think we were spending, like, $3 to $5 per dollar that we brought in in sales 'cause it's just a little toot- OraBrush. And then I was watching on YouTube late at night, and I, I watched a lot of, um, YouTube, and there was a, a YouTuber called iJustine. She's probably-
- SPShaan Puri
Oh, yeah
- 8:35 – 11:10
How to find the glitch in the system
- JHJeff Harmon
OraBrush. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
And, and it worked. Partially, like, going back in time, I found a glitch in the system. And everybody who starts a business, you have to find your glitch.
- SPShaan Puri
Mm.
- JHJeff Harmon
And our glitch was YouTube launched its ad platform a few weeks before that, or maybe a couple months. That's where the idea came. And we got on YouTube, and we started buying ads, and those ads cost less than a penny per view.
- SPShaan Puri
Mm.
- JHJeff Harmon
So it's like the early days of AdSense. And so we were able to spend a dollar and bring in two or three dollars now, a dollar in total costs, both the ads, the shipping, and the brush itself. And so that glitch of being the very first on YouTube is what allowed us to find enough data to take action to be able to optimize and then become more efficient. And then as the cost of advertising on YouTube started to climb, we were able to just get more and more efficient because we had the traffic coming in now to be able to make those changes. And so the glitch allowed us to get what, what... One entrepreneur, Paul Ahlstrom, who wrote the book Nail it and Scale it, he calls it your beachhead.
- SPShaan Puri
Mm-hmm.
- JHJeff Harmon
So when you land on Normandy, the first group has to go up and establish a beachhead where they have a foothold that they can just hold that spot. They don't have to take the whole beach, just that one little spot, and then you can expand from that beachhead.
- SPShaan Puri
So you go, you put 500 bucks into the, to making the, the ad. So the peak of OraBrush, you guys did what in like revenue or how many of these sold?
- JHJeff Harmon
I think it sold... I don't remember the revenues, but we sold, I think the company sold for about $10 million.
- SPShaan Puri
$10 million.
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
And so you, you're, and you know, you're just sort of stitching this whole thing together. Now, I love the framework of you gotta find your glitch.
- JHJeff Harmon
Mm-hmm.
- SPShaan Puri
The hard part, I think, if you're listening to that is, well, that's great. YouTube ads are not a penny anymore. So that specific glitch is always changing, right? For, for different people at different times-
- JHJeff Harmon
Yep
- SPShaan Puri
... different industries, whatever it is.
- JHJeff Harmon
Mm-hmm.
- SPShaan Puri
Do you think you could kind of generalize any of the principles or behaviors, what to be looking for or what to do to increase your odds of finding the glitch-
- JHJeff Harmon
Mm-hmm
- SPShaan Puri
... or what to, what to notice, what to pay attention to?
- JHJeff Harmon
Mm-hmm.
- SPShaan Puri
What are the general principles that might apply to somebody who wants to do that?
- 11:10 – 13:25
Go for your own problems
- JHJeff Harmon
First one is go after things that solve a problem for yourself. Dr. Bob was just making a tongue cleaner 'cause he was a, this is funny, he was a mission president in the Philippines serving a mission for the LDS Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and his missionaries had horrible breath. And so he was trying to figure out how to solve the problem of these missionaries having awful breath and-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
... but he learned that it came from tongue cleaning, and he remembered from his pr- professional life that they would take these surgical scrub brushes and wash their hands off to get their hands clean. So he took a surgical brush and put a t- tongue scraper on it, and that was his prototype. He had super glued together like a toothbrush handle, a surgical brush, and a scraper, and that was his first prototype. So he was solving a problem for himself, and it happened to be something that many, many other people wanted to solve. There's a book called The User Method By Jeff Swarting. And Jeff Swarting goes through and explains that out of the top businesses, the vast majority of them were made by founders who were just solving a problem for themselves. The Airbnb founders were just trying to pay rent in San Francisco. One of them was a graphic designer. The graphic designer knew that there was a convention coming into town, and they knew that it would be, there would need to be rooms rented. So they went to Walmart, bought some air mattresses, blew up the air mattresses, and sold their floor space, and you end up with Air Mattress B&B.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- JHJeff Harmon
Airbnb. And so they paid their rent, and that was their thought, is we're gonna make a business around people paying their rent, and it becomes bigger than any hotel chain. So I would say that's the first thing, is finding a product that can work would be user method. Stick with the user method. The second thing, and a glitch in the marketplace... So it can be like, it becomes really obvious, um, the guy who invented the mouse that worked with Steve Jobs, I met him and he said things that when he invented the mouse, as soon as they invented it, everybody was like, "Obviously, the mouse makes sense."
- 13:25 – 16:10
Where is the attention going?
- SPShaan Puri
Right. Obvious in hindsight. [laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
In hindsight, it's always obvious. And so, um, you're kind of finding the glitch in and of itself just with your product. Then the next piece is like, on, on a marketing front, is look for things, for areas where you have attention from people that nobody else is paying attention to. A really good example, w- I was searching for a product, but I was using Grok.
- SPShaan Puri
Not Google.
- JHJeff Harmon
Not Google, and that's a very different thing. I haven't used Google for search in quite some time. And then not just that, if you do headless shopping or agentic shopping, I think is what they call it right now, is if you go and just optimize for agent shopping where they don't have to leave their AI agent, they just buy through the agent.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- JHJeff Harmon
Tons of people are using Grok Bot to just go do their shopping for them. Like, you can be driving home in your Tesla right now, and you just push a button, turn on Grok Bot, and say, "Can you get me groceries on the way home?" And if you're a business that has an agentic shopping system where the AI bot doesn't have to go and scrape everything, it just talks to your API, then you can plug into this huge growing, rapidly growing group of people that are wanting to shop through their bots.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- JHJeff Harmon
They don't wanna shop themselves. They don't wanna click on Google anymore. That's a huge opportunity and a potential glitch.
- SPShaan Puri
So product, you said user method. You know, you wanna solve a problem that you p- you personally have and understand.
- JHJeff Harmon
Yep.
- SPShaan Puri
Marketing, you said, uh, pay attention to where other people are not paying attention or where the, the traditional players who are already doing this are paying, not paying as much attention.
- JHJeff Harmon
Yep.
- SPShaan Puri
Um, maybe because in some, some ways it's a little bit of the innovator's dilemma. Maybe they're doing well or they've built their business and their team and their skills-
- JHJeff Harmon
Yep
- SPShaan Puri
... all around one channel that has been working for 10 years, and they might put 1% of their attention or 10% of their attention on this new thing.
- JHJeff Harmon
Exactly.
- SPShaan Puri
But you could put 100.
- JHJeff Harmon
Yep.
- SPShaan Puri
You could change the whole experience to just work in that new channel, to just be optimized for that new channel.
- JHJeff Harmon
It's like just getting somebody to use Claude Design-
- SPShaan Puri
Right
- JHJeff Harmon
... at work can be really hard. And because of that, we are outpacing the Hollywood world, 'cause right now we're in the Hollywood space, by leaps and bounds in speed of innovation, especially on a, on a distribution level. Because we know how to use all these tools, and they're not only scared of the tools, they're actively fighting the tools.
- SPShaan Puri
Right. [laughs] Yeah, it's lowbrow to use the tools, uh, for them, for, in Hollywood right now. Um-
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... I wanna ask you about... So another find
- 16:10 – 19:15
ANGEL
- SPShaan Puri
a glitch, we're gonna jump ahead now. So we're gonna jump ahead to Angel. And I, I guess this is a little bit of a deep cut. So when I'm doing the research, I was talking to Ben, and I was like, "You know what blows me away? You did a project where you were tired of the way YouTube worked or Hollywood movies, they were using sort of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, you know, vulgar language, and so you created something that would, [laughs] you know, almost like scrub that stuff out of an existing movie."
- JHJeff Harmon
That was a product we wanted to exist, yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
It was a pro- it was a problem you had. So check, you know, thing number one. And, and-
- JHJeff Harmon
Yep
- SPShaan Puri
... by the way, if you had asked me, I would've been like, "Uh, what do you mean? That's not a problem."
- JHJeff Harmon
Well, how many kids do you have?
- SPShaan Puri
I got three kids, so now I would agree. But [both laughing] -
- JHJeff Harmon
That's right
- SPShaan Puri
... and then now when I go on YouTube, I'm like, "Wow, this is, uh-"
- JHJeff Harmon
This is-
- SPShaan Puri
I'm like-
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah. Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... "This is Vietnam. This is a danger zone."
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah, it's Vietnam. And, and not just that. If you go back and look at what we were looking at, Game of Thrones would, was at its peak. When we started, it was called VidAngel.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah.
- JHJeff Harmon
And it's at its peak, and every single day when Game of Thrones would come out with a new episode, there would be, within 24 hours on the torrents, an, a version of the episode uploaded without the sex, the nudity, the rape scenes. It was completely scrubbed. And there would be millions of people worldwide download the version without those. And so we're looking at that and saying, not only do we want something like this for our kids, but what about the millions of people who are just saying, "My teenager wants to watch this. I want them to be able to participate in the cultural conversation, but I don't want them to see rape scenes, and I'm going to use this torrent version." But that's completely illegal, and so what we're saying is, "Let's build a legal version of what millions of people are already asking for."
- SPShaan Puri
Right. And but you, you're doing the thing again where I would say you're focused on that 8%. So the way that-
- JHJeff Harmon
Yep
- SPShaan Puri
... in, in your class, everybody said, "Well, no. I mean, almost everybody would wanna go buy this at Target." And you said, "Well, as long as there's enough people, that's the beachhead. We can get, we can get this thing going." So, you know, today when you say millions of people have downloaded the torrents, I guess million sounds like a big number.
- JHJeff Harmon
It's a small number
- SPShaan Puri
But it's a small number. It's a very small... If you had talked to 100 people you knew about Game of Thrones, how many of those people would say, "Yeah, I watched the clean torrent version"? You know, you almost would've gotten no hands in, in any average sample that you were looking at.
- JHJeff Harmon
That's right.
- SPShaan Puri
But you, you do a good job, it sounds like, of paying attention to those signals, especially when it lines up with your values or, you know, the product that you wanna see, the way you want the world to be. And even today, when I looked at the, uh... I was researching your company, and y- you know, you're public, so you, you have a, you have... Your, your data's published, and, you know, you guys are doing, like, 90 million a quarter, right? So we're talking about big numbers.
- JHJeff Harmon
Mm-hmm.
- SPShaan Puri
Hundreds of millions in revenue, yet you only have about two, two, two million-ish subscribers.
- JHJeff Harmon
Mm-hmm.
- SPShaan Puri
It's not that many people, right?
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
It's not that many humans compared to most things, and it's the power of a small number of people paying you, you know, 13 bucks a month. That stuff adds up. And so that doesn't sound like a Elon Musk business plan, right? It doesn't sound like the s- the makings of a huge business, creating the version of, like,
- 19:15 – 25:30
19-minute ad experiment
- SPShaan Puri
if you watch with your parents and they put earmuffs on your ears for certain words and certain scenes that come up.
- JHJeff Harmon
It's like an automatic remote control.
- SPShaan Puri
Automatic remote control, exactly.
- JHJeff Harmon
Yep.
- SPShaan Puri
But you had enough conviction or just almost mischievousness to, to go ahead and do it, and then you found this glitch in the matrix where [laughs] fast-forward, you find this short film that you're interested in. And the thing I loved was to test it, you guys realized that you could just upload the whole 19-minute thing as a YouTube ad. [laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
Exactly.
- SPShaan Puri
Like a skippable ad.
- JHJeff Harmon
Yep.
- SPShaan Puri
They could have skipped it after, whatever, seven seconds or whatever it is.
- JHJeff Harmon
Yep.
- SPShaan Puri
But you just said, "Well, let's just put it on there. Maybe it's entertaining enough that people will watch it, and that'll give us the, the data, the signal."
- JHJeff Harmon
Mm-hmm.
- SPShaan Puri
And at the end of the 19-minute ad, [laughs] it's like, "Hey, if you've been watching this whole thing, crowdfund this and help us bring this to life."
- JHJeff Harmon
That's exactly right. I remember, I remember somebody saying, "Why would you upload a 19-minute ad?" And I said, "Even if only 3% of people make it to the end, if they're the ones that want it to exist, they're going to invest, and we'll be able to make a TV series."
- SPShaan Puri
Is that just your brain works differently, or do you ask different questions, or, like, do you have a rule about... I, I guess, like, I wanna get myself and my team to almost think in this kinda naughty way, where you're, you're not just playing a default game, trying to knock on the same crowded front door that everybody's doing-
- JHJeff Harmon
Mm-hmm
- SPShaan Puri
... and then getting stuck and not making progress. Like, where does that idea come from?
- JHJeff Harmon
I had the opportunity when we were doing the ad agency... So we did Poo-Pourri, we did Squatty Potty, we did Purple Mattress, Lume Deodorant, these billion-dollar brands. These are billion-dollar brands that we built from four million... Like, Poo-Pourri, when we got ahold of it, I think it was doing $4 million a year. And Purple Mattress, they were almost bankrupt. Like, one of the founders of Purple Mattress called me two weeks after we launched the campaign and say, "Wow, you saved our business. We were gonna go bankrupt in, like, three weeks."
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
And I was like, "Oh, we weren't gonna get paid if we weren't successful." [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah. [laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
That's what went through my head. He was thinking, "You saved us," and I was like, "We probably wouldn't have been paid." Um-
- SPShaan Puri
Right, we dodged a bullet. [laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah. [laughs] Yeah, we dodged a bullet. But the, the point is, is as, as we did that, YouTube came out and talked to us, and they said, "How can we get more people to do things like Orabrush?" And we... And, uh, we came... They sat, I think, for three or four days, they sat with our team in Provo, Utah, and we came up with this idea of a skip ad button, where you could, after five seconds, you click skip if you're not interested in the ad. And that concept, originally, they were gonna make it, like, a 15-second ad or a 30-second ad, and I said, "No, don't put a time limit on it. If I can maintain your, um, interest, let me just keep them."
- SPShaan Puri
Mm. Well, that's so counterintuitive. You're the advertiser, and you're telling the platform, "Hey, let 'em skip after five seconds," right?
- JHJeff Harmon
That's right.
- SPShaan Puri
That would sound... That sounds completely against your interests.
- JHJeff Harmon
But it's the only way to get a long ad. There's... If I had said, "Let me, let me steal five minutes of their time for a Poo-Pourri commercial or a Squatty Potty Pooping Unicorn commercial," they would've been like, "No, we don't want you getting in front of the content." Give me five seconds, and then I get five minutes, they, they're okay with that.
- SPShaan Puri
But I've earned it.
- JHJeff Harmon
Yes, 'cause I've earned the, I've earned the attention. And so when we get to The Chosen TV series and we have this pilot episode, it was a short film, I called it a pilot. We, we renamed it a pilot. We could just take the same concept that we built for these two three-minute ads and just go 20 minutes. Let's just do 20 minutes and see-
- 25:30 – 26:55
The genius moment behind Squatty Potty, Poo-Pourri
- JHJeff Harmon
Jesus is resurrected, and it's just the 12 apostles going through, and they're gonna release the crucifixion at Easter time this next year. It's, it's-
- SPShaan Puri
That's remarkable. You-
- JHJeff Harmon
It's no longer an Angel show, but it's on Amazon. We did the first three seasons.
- SPShaan Puri
You, um, you mentioned a couple of the other brands, Squatty Potty, Poo-Pourri. What was the marketing genius moment for each one of those?
- JHJeff Harmon
Well, the first thing was just I had to like the product. So I'd give the team the Squatty Potty. We went and tried it, tested it out. We were like, "This is a pretty legit product." And we sold it. Or the Poo-Pourri, I went in the bathroom, used Poo-Pourri. It's a little spray you put on... I think almost every Airbnb on the planet has Poo-Pourri now.
- SPShaan Puri
You, you put it in before you go to the restroom-
- JHJeff Harmon
Mm-hmm
- SPShaan Puri
... and it traps the smell, right?
- JHJeff Harmon
Yep.
- SPShaan Puri
That's the idea? Like, prevents it that way?
- JHJeff Harmon
It's essential oils that trap the, the smell underneath the water.
- SPShaan Puri
And who, who created that? That's kind of a genius invention.
- JHJeff Harmon
Suzy Batiz. I think it was her brother that thought of it, and then she took it to market. Yeah. And so-
- SPShaan Puri
And she, she what? Sends it to you? Cold email? What happened?
- JHJeff Harmon
Uh, she was messaging me over email. I was finishing up OraBrush. She flew us out to Hawaii to meet with her. She was doing, um, QVC ads, and they were doing, like, $4 million a year in this poop spray. And then I used it, and I came out and asked my wife, "Go in after me. Can you smell anything?" And she's like, "It smells good in there."
- 26:55 – 27:25
Poo-Pourri ad
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] That's new. [laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
Um... [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
That's a new experience for us.
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah, that was a new experience. Um, and then we created, uh, the, the, the concept with her, as I said, "I think we can build something." So I brought back in Joel, the same guy who wrote on the other one, and we sat there for three or four days and wrote out the Poo-Pourri ad and had the concept between us of we need to get a British girl. We're gonna put her on a toilet. We're gonna have all these juxtapositions
- 27:25 – 28:55
How to craft a $100M ad
- JHJeff Harmon
where you've got this British girl that's cute, and she's sitting on toilet, and she's talking about pooping, which is totally just out of left field.
- SPShaan Puri
Right. Hey, can I ask you, you go for three days, and you come out with this incredible ad that transforms the trajectory of the business. Basically, you make the brand. The brand happens. You know, that was a fork-in-the-road moment, I think. You know, the, the trajectory was going one way, and then you shifted it.
- JHJeff Harmon
Yep.
- SPShaan Puri
And we all wanna do that. I w- I've so many times have take the team, we're gonna get away, we're gonna figure this out, we're gonna do... we're gonna make some magic happen. And sometimes you do, and sometimes you don't. But I'm always winging it when I go in there. I'm, I have no idea how I'm supposed to be doing-
- JHJeff Harmon
Yep
- SPShaan Puri
... this kind of three, four-day camp-
- JHJeff Harmon
Mm-hmm
- SPShaan Puri
... to find a breakthrough.
- JHJeff Harmon
Yep.
- SPShaan Puri
What do you do to, to increase the odds of a breakthrough? Uh, I'm assuming, you know, you pick the right people. That's a big part of it. But what, what else? What, what do you do?
- JHJeff Harmon
Well, I think getting up in a cabin and locking everybody in with the attorneys, the business leaders, the... everybody who has to sign off, every stakeholder is inside that room-
- SPShaan Puri
Hmm
- JHJeff Harmon
... and they can't leave until we get a signed contract that says we can go pr- into production. That helps.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
Because one is if they can be with the creatives, then the creatives can pitch them, and they know that they're on the same team because you're talking face to face. You can go back and forth for months and neuter a script by email.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- JHJeff Harmon
Or you can just get in a cabin for two or three days and come out with something everybody's happy with or
- 28:55 – 35:55
Use comedians
- JHJeff Harmon
excited about. In the marketing world, I learned very quickly when we were building the Harmon Brothers ad agency that it's way easier to train a c- comedian to be a marketer than it is to train a marketer to be funny.
- SPShaan Puri
Right. [laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
And so we would build the structure of an ad, and you have to have your problem, your solution, your, your three elements, and your credibility, et cetera, and your calls to action. You have to have this formula, which we lay out... I think we laid it out pretty, pretty well in Poop to Gold. And then at the end of that process of getting the structure there, then the comedians come in, and they build out the humor and the premise. And so getting comedians is always... Like, as a marketer, I think if, if you wanna be a creative marketer, comedians are critical to the infrastructure of a marketing company 'cause they come out of left field. You just have to have somebody who understands well enough the formula. So an, uh, for example, I would always tell comedians, "If your joke doesn't add to the message," which is way harder to do, and if it just comes out of left field, you just have to kill it. It either adds to the message or it doesn't work. And so if you notice in Squatty Potty, Poo-Pourri, Purple Mattress, every joke brings you a little closer to understanding what that product is and why you want to use it.
- SPShaan Puri
And you, um, do you s- do you come in with a pretty solid idea? Or you just, you start off with, you know, a bunch of sticky notes on the wall? Do you have a process that you learned how to kind of, like, facilitate the creative flow of a bunch of creative people?
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah. Weeks, weeks before the retreat, we'll have three to four writers, comedians that are trained. We send them all the product, and they get to use it, and they get to play with it, and then they show up to the retreat with their ideas, their, their rough scripts.
- SPShaan Puri
Hmm.
- JHJeff Harmon
Then each one of them on the first day or the first morning is basically doing a script read of what their vision is- And then by the evening or the afternoon or evening of the first day, you are picking the winner, the bones of the ad out of those scripts. And then for the next three days, you're cannibalizing all the other scripts for their best elements-
- SPShaan Puri
Mm
- JHJeff Harmon
... and putting them into that lead script, and then by the end, you've got yourself, uh, uh, an ad.
- SPShaan Puri
And do you think this is still the way you would do things now or was this kind of there was an era where these kind of funny scripted YouTube ads of a certain length was a great way to sell product? Would you still be doing that or would you be doing something completely different now?
- JHJeff Harmon
We still do it to some extent. If you go watch Runner-
- SPShaan Puri
Mm
- JHJeff Harmon
... there's a campaign that I think got 100 million views for Angel. Runner has Alan Ritchson, Owen Wilson, and we, and our team built a campaign with comedians, very similar process to Harmon Brothers, where it's a couple, this married couple that just keep coming back on Angel and they're trying to figure out what to do for date night. And they're driving in their minivan racing down the street to get to the movie and they got their kids at home with a babysitter and they have their two movie tickets 'cause Angel's model is if you're an Angel member, if you're a member of the Angel Guild, there's thr- about 3 million members of the Angel Guild, you're paying 20 bucks a month and you get two movie tickets to every movie that Angel releases.
- SPShaan Puri
Mm.
- JHJeff Harmon
So your date night's covered almost every month.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- JHJeff Harmon
And so they're racing through the streets and there's like stuff blowing up around them 'cause the wife's driving and, and they're talking about the movie and the program, and then they walk in to the movie and Owen Wilson's sitting in front of them. And this ad campaign, I don't even think we made it a public one, it's just unlisted, but I think it had 100 million views.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
Somewhere around 100 million views. So, so we still do that, but then in support around that, because these are totally different than Orb Brush. Orb Brush we were just like $500 a day, you hope to get a thousand, and eventually you built it up to millions, and then over a several-year period we had a $10 million business. When you're launching movies in theaters, you're launching a $10 million business from scratch with a new movie every month. And so these are 10 to $50 million businesses, $100 million businesses sometimes. And, and you got a 90-day period where you launch a m- I mean, the, the Hollywood world and the movie theater world is absolutely bonkers. It's like taking an ent- Just think about this as an entrepreneur, 'cause your, your, your group is entrepreneurs.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah.
- JHJeff Harmon
Think about taking an, an every single month launching a 10 to $50 million startup with, with five to $20 million in ads spend in 90 days and then just running teams year-round launching every m- four to six weeks. That is the business that we're in now and it, and it's, it's just bonkers, but, but those ad campaigns still work when we have something complex to share. Meaning the concept of two movie tickets, uh, to the Angel system is, is it's somewhat more complex than just go watch this movie. But then outside of that we're running... Like, if you go to Solo Mio, it came out in February of last year with Kevin James. It's a rom-com. Did about $25 million in the box office. Um, Solo Mio's set in, in Italy and there's a, an art teacher named Matt Taylor and he teaches kids how to paint. He teaches art. And he gets engaged, he's going to Italy to get married, and he's stood up at his wedding in Italy, and then it's just super funny how he's dealing with this 'cause it's Kevin James. Kevin came up with this idea where he said, "Why don't we just make Matt Taylor a personality on Instagram and TikTok and we're just, I'm gonna be Matt Taylor. I'm gonna go and I'm gonna teach art classes on, I'm just gonna do Instagram videos where you watch me paint something for a few minutes and then I'll talk in the background like a Bob Ross type pr- character." And he said, "What if we do that and I'll push the movie by being the character in real life?" First we said to Kevin, "This is a great idea but it's gonna take an enormous amount of work. Can we have a team come live on Long Island with you and that's all they do is produce this Matt Taylor character?"
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
So we send out a team to Long Island and they're living with Kevin essentially just cranking out social media posts. And then we started
- 35:55 – 39:35
Warm up the algorithm
- JHJeff Harmon
warming up, um, Kevin James' face. So what a lot of people don't realize is what you type into a video is trying to give the algorithm some direction on where your video, what me- what your video's about. But what really is mattering what your video is about on social media these days is what images are in the video. So right now if our video, if our faces end up on social media, it's going to recognize TikTok, Instagram, YouTube are gonna hash our faces into the algorithm and say, "This face is now a part of this video and if I have any other videos with my face it's gonna recognize me and say, 'Jeff Harmon's face, Jeff Harmon's face,' and then put-"
- SPShaan Puri
Right
- JHJeff Harmon
... related videos. It doesn't need to have my name in the video. And so Kevin went and warmed up his face by taking older things he had done and he was reposting them and doing some things to warm up Kevin James' face. So he was getting himself hot in the algorithm.
- SPShaan Puri
Hmm. [laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
And, and then he's trending And what we do is we took and said, "Okay, Matt Taylor launches. Fresh channel, nothing on it." But the TikTok algorithm and the Instagram algorithm and the YouTube algorithm recognize this is Kevin James, and this face is trending elsewhere on the system. And so the moment we launched those, they started going viral because people that were f- people who had been watching Kevin James videos started getting served Matt Taylor videos.
- SPShaan Puri
Is this also somewhat of the mechanism for the Andrew Tates and the streamers, Clavicular and others, where they pay these mass armies of clippers to chop up their livestream content, so they're getting, you know, thousands and thousands of pieces of content. They're paying, like, a million dollars a month to these kids to clip their videos and put them online. Are they kinda doing the same thing, sorta warming up?
- JHJeff Harmon
They're trying to warm up their faces, yes, and they're trying to find a viral clip. You kinda... Like, today, one of the main strategies you can do is you're taking swings at bat. For Kevin James, we probably cut thousands of videos to try to get a few of them to go off.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- JHJeff Harmon
Right? And so that's what, that's what those guys are doing, is they're just cutting. They're just taking swings. They're just taking tons of swings and doing everything they can to try to ride waves that already exist. And if you, if y- So for example, if you go watch Critical Drinker. You know who Critical Drinker is?
- SPShaan Puri
No. Who's that?
- JHJeff Harmon
He's a big YouTube, uh, a review site. So he is a Scottish guy who always reviews movies, and he sounds drunk, and he just re- He's, like... I think he's the second biggest movie reviewer in the world. But if you watch his reviews, he is constantly showing little scenes, and, and businesses can't do this as much, right? But he's showing little scenes of all these different movies, 'cause he does movie reviews, and he's basically hashing all kinds of famous faces into his movie reviews.
- SPShaan Puri
Hmm.
- JHJeff Harmon
So he's just clipping to all these famous movies-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
... and then getting served up in more places because he's hashing his videos into the algorithm. And so in the case with Kevin, Kevin already is an A-list celebrity. He's huge. Gets millions of views. So it's easy to hash our way into it, and then it goes crazy, and
- 39:35 – 41:10
Super Bowl stunts
- JHJeff Harmon
everybody picked it up. Everyone was saying, "Is this art teacher Kevin James? Uh, uh, or Kevin James' doppelganger? Is this really Kevin?"
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
And there's just arguments.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- JHJeff Harmon
And I think that campaign got over a billion views. And then at the end of the campaign, on Super Bowl Sunday, which is the weekend before, uh, Valentine's Day, he showed up at the Super Bowl, and we bought 12 seats at the Su- at the Super Bowl, and we put Kevin in the center of 12 empty seats, and he was in a tux with his flowers in the exact costume he is in the movie, his exact wardrobe. And we didn't say anything, but we did buy seats all over the Super Bowl area around him and put influential people around him that had, uh, Instagram accounts and TikTok accounts and had them all posting, "Is that Kevin James? Is that-"
- SPShaan Puri
"What is going on?" Yeah. [laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
Yes. But the, the concept here is, is you take and you use the algorithm, and this takes an enormous amount of creative juice. It is not easy to have something break out organically.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- JHJeff Harmon
And the funny thing about the Super Bowl is literally he got on the, he got on the Megatron. Like, he ended up on the Megatron, and that campaign never talked about anything commercial. It's literally just Kevin James with flowers. And so people had to figure out what the heck it meant while it was getting hundreds of millions of views.
- 41:10 – 44:45
PG-13 content for the masses
- SPShaan Puri
Which, which adds to the appeal for a lot of people.
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
So you... We should explain. So Angel, you had a desire for a different type of content.
- JHJeff Harmon
Our content is the antithesis of nihilism. Nihilism is basically like you get to the end of Game of Thrones, and everybody's a bad guy.
- SPShaan Puri
Hmm.
- JHJeff Harmon
There are no redeeming characters. Everybody's bad. Even the one you thought was good, she ends up just being a bad... She just turns into Hitler or whatever, right?
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
And then, and then you get to the end of almost any major HBO movie, and at the end it's like, oh, there's no g- good people in this movie. There's not a single-
- SPShaan Puri
Right
- JHJeff Harmon
... good person.
- SPShaan Puri
It's all darkness.
- JHJeff Harmon
It's all darkness. That's nihilism. Nihilism is just there's no purpose to life. Everything's terrible. It's all we're just gonna end in the cold heat death of the universe, and there's nothing after that. Ours is values-based. Values-based is what Disney used to be, and a subset of that is the faith audience. They're people who believe, that want faith content, that has faith in it. And we do, twice a year, at Easter and Christmas, we push faith content pretty hard.
- SPShaan Puri
Okay.
- JHJeff Harmon
Then the rest of the year, we're pushing just values-based content. Wef- westerns, action movies like Runner with Alan Ritchson and, and, uh, and Owen Wilson. If you watch it, it's packed full of action and explosions and everything, but then when you actually think about it, you realize there's no sex in it. There's no, uh, no strong language in it. Nobody ever commented on this. Like, if you go read the reviews, it's, it's certified hot on Rotten Tomatoes, 90% from the audience, 76% from critics. Not a single comment that says, "Where did all the F words go that used to be, that are in Reacher?"
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] Right. "I wish there was more, more vulgarity."
- JHJeff Harmon
When it first came to us, that movie, we didn't make that movie.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- JHJeff Harmon
It came to us. It was R-rated movie, and then we said, "We'll take it if you can make it PG-13 and get it to pass what we call the Angel Guild." So our three million members, we actually don't call... At the beginning, you call them subscribers.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- JHJeff Harmon
We don't call them subscribers. We call them members because they're participating.
- SPShaan Puri
Okay.
- JHJeff Harmon
And what they're doing Is as a member of Angel, you get to vote on every movie that comes onto Angel that goes to theaters. So you get the chance, if you want to, you can go and you vote. And if you veto, if y- if the audience vetos a film, we can't take it. We can't send it to theaters. We can't do anything. So you get a vote on it. You get two movie tickets to the movie. So you're supporting filmmakers at every step. You're supporting them in their rough cuts and giving them feedback and helping them improve them. You're voting and turning them down if they're not working for the platform, and you're showing up to the movies.
- SPShaan Puri
So you get a higher hit rate because you have... A- and you're not doing focus groups, right? These are, uh, people who are members of the community. They're paying-
- JHJeff Harmon
Yep
- SPShaan Puri
... to be members of the community.
- JHJeff Harmon
Yep.
- SPShaan Puri
So presumably, they're kind of like market participants, more like a prediction market than it is a, a random-
- JHJeff Harmon
Yep
- SPShaan Puri
... you know, a random poll on the internet-
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah
- 44:45 – 45:10
Base hits vs. home runs
- JHJeff Harmon
offices of any independent studio, and we're top 10 in the US. For the last three years we've been the top 10, in the top 10 studios.
- SPShaan Puri
Is your business a batting average business or a slugging percentage business? Meaning, is it more important to just not have flops, or are you really just looking, like in investing, for the one or two runaway successes?
- JHJeff Harmon
I think we're a base hits business that gets home runs every once in a while. So we had Sound
- 45:10 – 47:05
The economics of the movie business
- JHJeff Harmon
of Freedom was a home run, did $250 million worldwide.
- SPShaan Puri
Mm.
- JHJeff Harmon
That was a $14 million movie.
- SPShaan Puri
Can, can you just explain the movie business? I don't really know the movie business. So let's take one of these. So you say $14 million. That's what it cost all in. That's the talent. That's the production. That's everything, the rights to the underlying content, whatever. Uh, includes marketing costs or doesn't include marketing costs?
- JHJeff Harmon
No, that doesn't include... We spent $40 million marketing that movie.
- SPShaan Puri
Okay, so you spend 14 making it, 40 marketing it-
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... and then it generates, you said 250, and that's just-
- JHJeff Harmon
250 million.
- SPShaan Puri
That's the box office. Now the... but, but the theater takes half-
- JHJeff Harmon
The-
- SPShaan Puri
... I'm assuming, a big cut of that.
- JHJeff Harmon
If you have a good distributor, they'll take half. If you don't have a good distributor, they'll take more. In our case, we don't take part of the other half. We take the bottom. We only take profits, so we split with the filmmaker the profits. Every other distributor is gonna take between 12.5 and 30% of the other half.
- SPShaan Puri
And do you, um... And you, but you send your member, right? So let's say a member's paying 20 bucks, but you're sending them once a month to the movies. So is that, like, do you... Is that what it costs you? You know what I mean? How does that business work? I don't understand. Is it like MoviePass where you're, uh, uh... One thing, is it a loss leader situation? What's going on?
- JHJeff Harmon
It's, it's more like MoviePass in that we rely on some breakage, meaning the average person goes to three to four movies a year. So we just assume our average-
- SPShaan Puri
Right
- JHJeff Harmon
... member isn't gonna go to every single movie, and so it balances out.
- SPShaan Puri
Gotcha. Okay, great. And so you, um, so you, you m- you make that money. Now, you said you don't, uh, fund all these movies. You're not taking a bunch of balance sheet risk.
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah, this is something people don't understand about the movie business. Uh, Lionsgate only acquires, I think, 35% of their movie, or they, they only make 35% of their movies, and then most of their movies they acquire. So every year there's 1,000 movies,
- 47:05 – 49:55
“I’ve never met a billionaire who doesn’t want to make movies”
- JHJeff Harmon
around 1,000 movies made by independent movie makers, every single year. Most of those never find a home, the vast majority. Like, it's, it's an un- crazy number.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
But those are made mostly by very wealthy entrepreneurs. I've never met a billionaire that doesn't wanna make movies.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
And I know a lot of billionaires. They, they, they, they don't, they all wanna get in the movie business, and this isn't-
- SPShaan Puri
I'm not a billionaire, and I'm still trying to make a movie, so don't-
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
I think you're even underselling it from there. [laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah. Well, well, think about this. So, so that- that's where the 1,000 movies comes from is that-
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah
- JHJeff Harmon
... they're, they're very wealthy people that are just taking a swing. They wanna leave a mark. They wanna make a movie, and they're not really as worried about making money on it at this point. They just... It's like art for them. Everybody has this in them. They wanna tell stories, everyone. And so what the Angel Guild allows you to do is join about three million other people who are all paying 12 to 20 bucks a month and make movies like billionaires do.
- SPShaan Puri
You're kind of like you've built this, like, almost Kickstarter vertical mob, right-
- JHJeff Harmon
That's right
- SPShaan Puri
... of people who, who just like the idea of getting to have their say, getting to have an influence, maybe getting to, to put some money behind something.
- JHJeff Harmon
That's right.
- SPShaan Puri
Kind of like fantasy football, but you're, you're not doing what the billionaires are doing who actually own the teams, but you get to, you get to play.
- JHJeff Harmon
And, and so far that, that guild, the Angel Guild, those three million people have paid out $300 million to filmmakers.
- SPShaan Puri
That's like, that's like their profit share, basically, you mean?
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah. The filmmakers get 50% of the profits of that guild, and Angel uses the other half to build up the guild.
- SPShaan Puri
So what I didn't understand, uh, and maybe it's as simple as we're just spending a lot of money on marketing. You guys are public. You guys did a SPAC. Um, and I was looking. It's like last year we lost 50 million bucks.
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
Uh, you know, m- minus 50 million in EBITDA, but you're not paying to produce these movies, and then you have these members who are paying you. You... And you're just taking a profit share, so it must just be a lot of member acquisition, or what, what are you spending all the money on? Or is it the marketing of the movies? Is that what's going on?
- JHJeff Harmon
Marketing's a big piece, yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah.
- JHJeff Harmon
The acquiring new members is not cheap.
- SPShaan Puri
Is this a good business? And what I mean by that is, uh, is I, I s- that's a silly sounding question, but here's what I mean. Uh, you're an entrepreneur. You've been in, in the game. I've been in, in the game for almost 20 years as an entrepreneur, and I started all kinds of businesses. And I can tell you, like some of them are knife fights. You know? I would say a D-
- JHJeff Harmon
Mm-hmm
- SPShaan Puri
... D2C brand felt more like a knife fight. It's like, ah, terrible margins. A restaurant felt very much worse than a knife fight. I'm in a knife fight. I don't have a knife in the restaurant business. And, um, and then some businesses are beautiful businesses. Recurring revenue, good margins. Once you figure one thing out, you just keep, you know,
- 49:55 – 54:10
The brutality of Hollywood
- SPShaan Puri
kind of, you get a, a flywheel with that advantage. How is the movie business?
- JHJeff Harmon
A good story is, and I won't, I won't name the executive or where they worked, but they, they had retired, and they had worked in both the Las Vegas area doing casinos, you know, the Las Vegas is kinda run by the mob.
- SPShaan Puri
Right. [laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
And then they had worked in Hollywood. And when they retired, they were asked, "Do you miss it?" And they said, "My best friend in Hollywood was worse than my worst enemy in Las Vegas."
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
It's a knife fight. This is like [laughs] I ask myself every single week, "Do I really wanna be in this business?" [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
Um, I'm doing this bec- I mean, we're doing this because our kids, like we, we want an alternative system for our kids. We want our kids to be able to watch stuff that instills our values and what we've, the values we've had for generations that make society run. We want those instilled in our kids through good entertainment, excellent entertainment. W- I mean, our strength is the fact that there are about three million other people right now joining in with us and saying, "Let's do this. Let's just make this happen." That is our strength, and that's allowing us to just rewrite the rules. And our job as a business is to fix what Hol- what's broken in Hollywood because Hollywood hasn't been a good business. It has a... It's not that they don't have enough revenues. They have plenty of re- I mean, there's more revenues coming into Hollywood than ever, and it historically has been America's biggest export is media, is movies. That's our number one export.
- SPShaan Puri
Mm.
- JHJeff Harmon
But this industry, the Hollywood industry, has a cost problem, not a revenue problem. Our job is just to do a better job on all fronts, Angel's job is, and I believe it will be an e- i, it is an excellent business, and it's growing right now, so while you're growing, you're investing.
- SPShaan Puri
Can you tell me what's going on? Like, uh, I guess, again, I'm a, I'm a bit of an outsider. I'm a business guy, I'm a tech guy, but I'm not, so I'm not closely following Hollywood. But teach me a little bit about what's going on. So what is A24 doing that you think is maybe smart or interesting or what their approach was, why they seem to be having a different result? I've seen also, like Thomas Tull, I feel like, came into the industry as kind of an outsider and-
- JHJeff Harmon
Mm-hmm
- SPShaan Puri
... did some interesting things. I guess tell me who you think has, has done cool or interesting work. Get me inspired for as, get the business nerd in me inspired into somebody who did something.
- JHJeff Harmon
A24 is really interesting 'cause they've built a strong community. You have the AAA membership where you can sign up, and then they followed us and actually started giving tickets to people who are AAA members. I think the most interesting group probably is Crunchyroll.
- SPShaan Puri
Okay.
- JHJeff Harmon
They're-
- SPShaan Puri
That's the anime, uh, subscription.
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah, they have 20 million subscribers, and they're just focused on their niche. Like we're focused on values audience, they're focused on anime.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- JHJeff Harmon
And, uh, which is a really, really big niche.
- SPShaan Puri
I mean, 20 million is a massive number. What is, what is that in revenue? 20 million customers.
- JHJeff Harmon
I don't, I don't know what the revenue is 'cause I don't know what the membership cost is, or if it's-
- SPShaan Puri
Like even if it's like 20, you know, whatever, even if it's 10 bucks a month, I mean, we're talking about two, two billion?
- JHJeff Harmon
They're, they're, they, I think they're kind of the top of the tier three streamers. The Crunchyroll, you have like MGM+ and you've got Stars and you've got these groups that are in the tier three.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
Um, tier four is like Pure Flix, Daily Wire, that kind of a world.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- JHJeff Harmon
And then we've, we've just recently moved into the tier three streamers, and then you have tier two, which is your bigger streamers.
- SPShaan Puri
Like Paramount Plus type of thing?
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah. And then you move into tier one is Netflix and Disney+ and Apple. A- Apple might still be in tier two, but I think Crunchyroll is super interesting. Um, I do know, so I went, I went on an interview with Rick Rubin, the producer, the music producer.
- 54:10 – 1:00:05
Having a personal vibe coder
- JHJeff Harmon
some version of the previous stuff."
- SPShaan Puri
Mm-hmm.
- JHJeff Harmon
He's like, "You guys are different from top to bottom. You're not doing anything the same."
- SPShaan Puri
I heard you have a, uh, a personal vibe coder. Is that right? You have a, you have a guy who does vibe codes for you.
- JHJeff Harmon
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
Is that true? That's amazing.
- JHJeff Harmon
That's right.
- SPShaan Puri
That might be the best luxury item I've ever seen.
- JHJeff Harmon
I vibe code too. I basically got to the point where I would vibe code products, and then I would get stuck because I'd get pulled outside to meetings and to fires and to different things as a, an executive in the company.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- JHJeff Harmon
And, but I love building out the prototypes of the products, and I just asked, I was like, "I need a person who just can take it from there and just go to the next step," and then eventually, once we get something like a little experiment that we've been thinking about to product market fit, like an MVP, minimum viable product, then we c- we will turn it over to the product team-
- SPShaan Puri
Right
- JHJeff Harmon
... um, which can build something that will scale and get bigger. Um-
- SPShaan Puri
I kinda think that every executive, uh, of a kind of medium to large company should actually do this, right? Like a-
- JHJeff Harmon
I agree. Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... you know, it's just normal to have an assistant, chief of staff, um, maybe, you know, maybe you have, uh, you know, somebody that helps you out on the personal side. But AI is so fast-moving and can do so much, but is- the bottleneck is you. It's not the technology.
- JHJeff Harmon
Yep.
- SPShaan Puri
It's your bandwidth, your time, your ability to keep the ball moving forward to, to kind of w- work through any obstacles or keep playing with the latest and greatest. I actually think that what you're doing, having a personal kind of vibe coder with you, is the move. I think that- [laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
I think that's absolutely the move. I have an AI tutor.
- JHJeff Harmon
And it's, it's been super helpful. I've been able to get things prototyped that I never would imagine, tools. Because what I was doing before that is I was, I would stay up late and I would get a plan made for Claude, build out a plan.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- JHJeff Harmon
And then I tell Claude, like, I get as far as I can and say, "Run this all night." And then-
- SPShaan Puri
Right
- JHJeff Harmon
... we- our team has built harnesses for every single person in the company so that, so that there's a harness. There's both a brand guide harness for Angel that sits inside of our code systems, so that you can take any, any, any model, whether it's Claude or GPT or Grok or whatever, and you hook it to the harness, and then that harness goes through and does all the checks and makes sure that you're not breaking the rules of the system. And so what I do is I end up vibe coding till I break something, and then the engineering team builds a new harness to fix what I broke. But I, at night, I get to the end of the evening and I have a plan, and then I just launch the agents at that plan and just leave my computer running. And then I find myself even, like, in the Tesla just having it self-driving, and then I'm over watching it code while I'm driving, 'cause if I shut the laptop, it will stop. [laughs] And so I have it hooked up to my hotspot on my phone, and then I'm just, like, clicking Continue-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] Right
- JHJeff Harmon
... Continue while I drive.
- SPShaan Puri
Well, that's the worst. I set it up before I sleep. I wake up ready to see it, and it's like, the very first thing is like, "Can, d- could you allow a, do you allow me to open a browser?"
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah, exactly. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
It's like, "Yes, yes, open the browser. What? Did you get me stuck on that all night? Ugh."
- 1:00:05 – 1:03:15
Advice to my younger self
- SPShaan Puri
If you were going back to talk to a room full of people like you, so younger you, what message would you be trying to get across?
- JHJeff Harmon
Well, the first thing I'd say is, like, no matter what you do in the workplace, nothing will compare with getting married and having kids and having kids sooner than you think you should and having more of them than you think you should.
- SPShaan Puri
Mm.
- JHJeff Harmon
Like, nothing in the professional workplace will even compare. That's where m- my real success comes from is marriage and kids.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- JHJeff Harmon
And you can do both. I think that that's critical. I think that there's no idea that's so precious to get in huge fights over. An example would be where we had some really big campaigns at the agency where clients said, "I'm not paying you." And you have all the success, they owe you a significant amount of money, and they don't wanna pay you for what you did, and they ha- and they're, like, threatening la- lawsuits. And a mentor of mine, Steve Osguie, told me, he said, "Unless it's worth over $5 million, it's not even worth fighting a battle over, because you're gonna end up fighting for 18 months to three years. You're gonna drain the life out of yourself, and you may win, probably win, but then where did you get?" He's like, "But in that period of time, somebody who's innovative is gonna make more value than that's worth."
- SPShaan Puri
Mm-hmm.
- JHJeff Harmon
And not just that. It's just not a happy life.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- JHJeff Harmon
And so after listening to him, I went back to my brother Neil and s- 'cause we were thinking about whether or not we should sue for this, this amount that was owed to us, and it was significant to us because we didn't have any money. And Neil had been in the Bible. He flipped it open, and it landed on the verse that says, "If a man sues you for your cloak, give him your coat also." And so between my mentor saying what he said and then my brother seeing that, I was like, "Okay, let's just let it go." And letting that go changed the trajectory of my life. Just letting go what was worth probably a couple million, a few million dollars, letting that go and just going after new ideas and having an abundance mentality allowed me to focus on the things that allo- that w- helped us build a big ad agency. If you're the golden goose, you're gonna lay more eggs, and you can be... And so you just keep pushing and don't, don't take the idea that, oh, this will be my only thing.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- JHJeff Harmon
As soon as you switch gears and say there will be more things, you're gonna get more things, and you're gonna have more opportunities, and you'll break through.
- SPShaan Puri
I love that. Jeff, thank you for coming on. Thank you for sharing the wisdom. Thank you for sharing the stories. I appreciate you.
- JHJeff Harmon
Yeah. Thank you. [upbeat music]
Episode duration: 1:03:15
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Transcript of episode 1mZ8Cu8F54Y
