The creative genius behind Squatty Potty & Poo-Pourri reveals his marketing playbook

$1M Attention Guide: 15+ ways to get eyeballs on what you're building https://clickhubspot.com/okbv Episode 869: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talks to Angel Studios founder Jeff Harmon ( https://x.com/JeffreyHarmon ) about finding and exploiting glitches. — Show Notes: (0:00) I helped a dentist create one of the greatest marketing campaigns (8:35) How to find the glitch in the system (11:10) Go for your own problems (13:25) Where is the attention going? (16:10) ANGEL (19:15) 19-minute ad experiment (25:30) The genius moment behind Squatty Potty, Poo-Pourri (26:55) Poo-Pourri ad (27:25) How to craft a $100M ad (28:55) Use comedians (35:55) Warm up the algorithm (39:35) Super Bowl stunts (41:10) PG-13 content for the masses (44:45) Base hits vs. home runs (45:10) The economics of the movie business (47:05) “I’ve never met a billionaire who doesn’t want to make movies” (49:55) The brutality of Hollywood (54:10) Having a personal vibe coder (1:00:05) Advice to my younger self — Links: • Angel Studios — angel.com • Poo-Pourri — poopourri.com • Squatty Potty — squattypotty.com • Purple — purple.com • A24 — a24films.com — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton (joinhampton.com): My community for founders. Average member does $25m/year. Many of the guests are members. Get after it...apply: http://joinhampton.com/mfm — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Shaan uses Mercury across all of his companies. you can too: http://mercury.com/ Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N. A., Members FDIC • I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we're giving away $10k to our favorite newsletter, check it out: beehiiv.com/mfm-challenge My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  Here's why I'm excited about this. I've never met you, but I've been a fan of your work because 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.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  Oh, you read Poop to Gold.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, Poop to Gold. On top of that, you know, 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.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  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 around 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, one of the great marketing campaigns? Where were you? What happened? Can you tell that story?

• 1:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was in my last day of my last class at university. And a guy named Dr. Bob came in and was asking the class, he wanted them to tell him how to make his Aura Brush, 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.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Sitting in his garage. Yeah.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  Just 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 and Gamble or Johnson and Johnson or somebody. And, uh, and I interrupted them and said, oh, 8% of people is like 30 million people just in the United States. Why wouldn't you focus on them?

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Oh, so 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.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  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 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 Aura Brush.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Because bad breath, kissing, that was the.

• 3:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was the connection.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  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 all about their product versus the benefit you get if you were to use this product, the happy ending you seek. And this product is just a tool that's going to get you to that happy ending, the better you. And maybe the version of you that can kiss without the shame of bad breath. So you did have that insight. That's pretty good.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so we took the 1.3 million people, we spanned them. And then once we got Aura Brush created as an entity, I changed the name of Kisses page to Aura Brush.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Right. The brand followed by 1.3 million people.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  Yes. And so we had one of the most followed brands on social media. I think Facebook changed their rules after that. And that failed miserably. We didn't sell hardly anything. We tried Google Ads. They weren't working. I think we were spending like three to $5 per dollar that we brought in. In sales, because it's just a little Aura Brush. And then I was watching on YouTube late at night and I, I watched a lot of YouTube. And there was a YouTuber called Ijustine. She's probably still out there, but she was an early YouTuber.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Original vlogger, right?

• 4:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, original vlogger. And in her videos, she would, she would jump cut. She just stood in front of a white background and then she would just cut, cut, cut, cut to get rid of all of the ums and whatever wasn't interesting that she said, she would just cut it all out. And I was like, we could probably make something at that level. And then I got another roommate named Devin Graham. He was a film major and while we were roommates, every single night, he would go out and work on film sets for free. And then I got another roommate, Joel Ackerman, who was a screenwriter and a comedian. And I said, will you take this script I wrote and punch it up and make it a good script? And so I took all the knowledge I had about selling stuff from serving

• 5:19Speaker 00

  a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints or Mormons. I served in Ireland, getting doors slammed in my face for two years. So you, you become a pretty good salesperson, selling the gospel and learn how to take rejection. So I took the skill set I knew from that. When I was younger, as a teenager, I sold Idaho potatoes door to door in Utah to try to earn money. And, and I did pretty well with that. So I took those two skillsets, combined them and built a script that was how to tell if you have bad breath.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  I've talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs on this podcast and I've got a bunch of takeaways, but one of the big ones, one of them that shocks a lot of the people out there who are product nerds, which frankly I am myself, is that oftentimes in order to turn something that's going kind of good into something that's absolutely amazing is to fix the marketing, not the product. And in particular, fix how many people know about the product. That's like the big thing. It's called attention. Say it with me, attention. And so this team at Starter Story, they put together a free guide. They call it the $1 million Attention Guide. It's this pretty amazing 39-page document that's filled with 15 tactics to get eyeballs on what you are building. And so

• 6:31Speaker 01

  there's a, even a 30-minute recording from Pat, who's the founder of Starter Story. He has interviewed hundreds and hundreds of entrepreneurs. So he's able to put this together, do a bunch of research and experience. And so if you're interested in getting more attention, which frankly you should be, everyone should be, then you should click the link below in the description or scan the QR code right here.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  And there was a, a video on YouTube called HowCast. And one of their videos that had like 400,000 views was how to tell if you have bad breath. And you just take a tongue, a spoon, scrape the back of your tongue. And then you smell what's on the spoon. And then you can tell if you have bad breath, because you actually can't tell if you have bad breath if you just blow like that. If you can tell if you have bad breath when you blow, it is horrible breath. But just normal bad breath, you can't tell.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  You need the spoon.

• 7:21Speaker 00

  You need the spoon. And so you scrape your tongue and that's because the tongue is the source of 90% of bad breath, which I found in studies. And so what happens is you're kind of like taking in all this raw data. You're taking in the HowCast video, the Ijustine video, your roommate, your other roommate who's a writer, your, your experience from the last five years of selling potatoes and the gospel and this tongue cleaner and understanding the tongue cleaner. And then you're combining it all into a video that is now, I think even today, it's still considered one of the top 25 campaigns of all time on YouTube.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  And, and making a video that we spent $500 on, which Dr. Bob complained about at the time that we were spending too much money. But the, and it was five or 600 bucks and, and we launched this video and then I got my brother Neil and I asked him to code up a site for it. So we could actually sell these tongue cleaners. And, and then I set it up to where you could get a free one if you just paid shipping. And then we just charged as much for shipping as it costs to buy it.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  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. And our glitch was YouTube launched its ad platform a few weeks before that, or maybe a couple of 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. So it's like the early days of AdSense. And so we were able to spend a dollar and bring in two or $3 now.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  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? One entrepreneur, Paul Allstrom, who wrote the book Nail It and Skell It, he calls it your beachhead.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  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.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  So you go, you put 500 bucks into the, to making the ad. So the peak of Ora Brush, you guys did what in like revenue or how many?

• 10:30Speaker 00

  I think it sold, I don't remember the revenues, but we sold, I think the company sold for about $10 million.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  $10 million. 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 got to find your glitch. 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, different industries, whatever it is. 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? Or what to, what to notice, what to pay attention to? What are the general principles that might apply to somebody who wants to do that?

• 11:13Speaker 00

  First one is go after things that solve a problem for yourself. Dr. Bob was just making a tongue cleaner because he was a, and this is funny. He was a mission president in the Philippines, serving a mission for the LDS church, the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints. And his missionaries had a horrible breath. And so he was trying to figure out how to solve the problem of these missionaries having awful breath. And, but he learned that it came from tongue cleaning. And he remembered from his 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 tongue scraper on it. And that was his prototype.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  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 Schording. And Jeff Schording 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.

• 12:36Speaker 00

  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 and B, Airbnb. And so they paid their rent and that was their thought is we're going to 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 in a glitch in the marketplace, so it can be like, it becomes really obvious. The guy who invented the mouse that worked with Steve Jobs, I met him and he said,

• 13:20Speaker 00

  things that, when he invented the mouse, as soon as they invented it, everybody was like, obviously the mouse makes sense.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Right. Obvious in hindsight.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  In hindsight, it's always obvious. And so you're kind of finding a glitch in and of itself, just with your product. Then the next piece is like, 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, I was searching for a product, but I was using Grok.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Not Google.

• 13:54Speaker 00

  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. 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

• 14:37Speaker 00

  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. They don't want to shop themselves. They don't want to click on Google anymore. That's a huge opportunity and a potential glitch.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  So product, you said, user method, you know, you want to solve a problem that you personally have and understand. Marketing, you said, 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.

• 15:15Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  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 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. But you could put 100, you could change the whole experience to just work in that new channel, to just be optimized for that new channel.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  It's like just getting somebody to use quad design 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.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. It's lowbrow to use the tools for that in Hollywood right now. I want to ask you about, so another find a glitch, we're going to jump ahead now. So we're going to jump ahead to Angel. And 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 almost like scrub that stuff out of an existing movie.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  That was a product we wanted to exist. Yeah.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  It was a, it was a problem you had. So check, you know, thing number one. And, and by the way, if you had asked me, I would have been like, what do you mean? That's not a problem.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  Well, how many kids do you have?

• 16:52Speaker 01

  I got three kids. So now I would agree, but now when I go on YouTube, I'm like, wow, this is, this is Vietnam, this is a danger zone.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's Vietnam. And not just that, if you go back and look at what we were looking at, Game of Thrones was at its peak when we started, it was called VidAngel.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:10Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  And so what we're saying is let's build a legal version of what millions of people are already asking for.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Right. But you're doing the thing again, where I would say you're focused on that 8%. So the way that in your class, everybody said, well, no, I mean, almost everybody would want to 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 are downloading the torrents, I guess million sounds like a big number.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  It's a small number.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  But it's a small number. It's a very small. If you had talked to a hundred 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 have gotten no hands in any average sample that you were looking at.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  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 want to see, the way you want the world to be. And even today, when I looked at the, I was researching your company and you know, you're public. So you have a, you have, your data is published and you guys are doing like 90 million a quarter, right? So we're talking about big numbers, hundreds of millions in revenue. Yet you only have about two, two, two million ish subscribers. It's not that many people, right? 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 makings of a huge business, creating the version of like,

• 19:18Speaker 01

  if you watch with your parents and they put earmuffs on your ears for certain words and certain scenes.

• 19:21Speaker 00

  Like an automatic remote control.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Automatic remote control. Exactly. But you had enough. Conviction or just almost mischievousness to go ahead and do it. And then you found this glitch in the matrix where 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.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  Like a skippable ad. They could have skipped it after whatever, seven seconds or whatever it is.

• 19:49Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  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 data, the signal. And at the end of the 19 minute ad, it's like, hey, if you've been watching this whole thing, crowdfund this and help us bring this to life.

• 20:02Speaker 00

  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 will be able to make a TV series.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Is that just your brain works differently? Or do you ask different questions? Or like, do you have a rule about, I guess, like, I want to get myself and my team to almost think in this kind of naughty way where you're not just playing a default game, trying to knock on the same crowded front door that everybody's doing, and then getting stuck and not making progress. Like, where does that idea come from?

• 20:39Speaker 00

  I had the opportunity when we were doing the ad agency. So we did Poopery, 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 Poopery, when we got ahold of, 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 going to go bankrupt in like three weeks. And I was like, oh, we weren't going to get paid if we were successful. That's what went through my head. He was thinking, you saved us. And I was like, we probably wouldn't have been paid.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Right, we dodged a bullet.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, 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 Aura Brush? And we, and 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 going to 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 interest, let me just keep them.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Well, that's so counterintuitive. You're the advertiser and you're telling the platform, hey, let them skip after five seconds. Right, that would sound, that sounds completely against your interests.

• 22:08Speaker 00

  But it's the only way to get along that. There's, if I had said, let me, let me steal five minutes of their time for a Poopery commercial or a Squatty Potty, pooping unicorn commercial, they would have 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.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  But I've earned it.

• 22:29Speaker 00

  Yes, because I've earned, 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 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 what happens because it's entertainment. And so they watched 20 minutes, they're totally invested. And then we pitch them, come invest in this project and let's make a TV series like the Game of Thrones for the New Testament. That's basically what it was at that time. And 17,000 people invested $11 million into The Chosen.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  And how much ad spend do you think you needed to get to that 11 million?

• 23:15Speaker 00

  $800,000. So it took about, a little less than 8% of the total raise went into advertising it. And I explained to Dallas Jenkins, the director, I said, because he was actually pretty upset about that. He was like, I thought you just do viral ad campaigns and you were just going to raise the money.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  All free.

• 23:36Speaker 00

  True, for free, basically. And I was like, how do you think we built Poopery and Squatty Potty? We spent money. And if you had gone to Wall Street and asked them to raise you money, they would charge you 12%, right? They'd charge you eight to 12%. So we're actually right in that world, but we're just having to buy ads, which is getting you awareness on your project.

• 24:00Speaker 01

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• 24:28Speaker 00

  We used other things, like we had a friend named Daryl Eves. He does, he runs VidSummit and he does the YouTube Formula, that book. And he do a lot about live streaming. So he set up his little switchboard and we ran live streams this time to raise money at the end. So like at the last 24 hours or 48 hours of the fundraising for the, the, the series, Dallas Jenkins got on and did this marathon livestream saying, and we, and then I had my team get together and we made it to where every single time somebody invested, we would pop up and say, this person just invested $100 from Idaho.

• 25:12Speaker 00

  This person invested this much from, and had social proof just showing up on the, on the screen the whole time. And like, we, we cracked the nut and we were able to get our first TV series built for Angel, which was The Chosen. And then the job was, can Dallas make a good enough series? And he did, he crushed it. And the series ended up being, I mean, I think it's, right now, today, it's a top five series in the world for, for television. It's got like 200 million people watching it. It's, it's on the level. Yeah, there's 200 million people worldwide watching that show.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Unbelievable. How, how far, how many seasons is it in?

• 25:56Speaker 00

  See, they just finished filming season seven, seven seasons, and that's the final, when Jesus is resurrected. And it's just the 12 apostles going through and they're going to release the crucifixion at Easter time this next year.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  It's remarkable.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  It's no longer an Angel show, but it's on Amazon. We did the first three seasons.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  You, you mentioned a couple of other brands, Squatty Potty, Poopery. What was the marketing genius moment for each one of those?

• 26:25Speaker 00

  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're like, this is a pretty legit product. And we sold it. Or the Poopery, I went in the bathroom, used Poopery. It's a little spray you put on, I think almost every Airbnb on the planet has Poopery now.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  You, you put it in before you go to the restroom and it traps the smell, right? That's the idea, like.

• 26:48Speaker 00

  It's essential oils that trap the, the smell underneath the water.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Who, who created that? That's kind of a genius invention.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  Suzy Battis. I think it was her brother that thought of it and then she took it to market.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And she, she what, sends it to you cold email? What happened?

• 27:03Speaker 00

  Uh, she was messaging me over email. I was finishing up Aura Brush. She flew us out to Hawaii to meet with her. She was doing 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.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  That's new.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  It's a new experience.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was a new experience. And then we created 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 Poopery ad. And had the concept between us of, we need to get a British girl, we're going to put her on a toilet. We're going to have all these juxtapositions where you've got this British girl that's cute. She's sitting on toilet and she's talking about pooping, which is totally just out of left field.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Right. Okay, 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 the, the trajectory was going one way and then you shifted it.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  And we all want to do that. I, I've so many times have, take the team, we're going to get away, we're going to figure this out. We're going to do, we're going to 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 have no idea how I'm supposed to be doing this kind of three, four day camp to find a breakthrough. What do you do to, to increase the odds of a breakthrough? I'm assuming, you know, you picked the right people, that's a big part of it. But what else? What, what do you do?

• 28:48Speaker 00

  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. And they can't leave until we get a signed contract that says we can go into production. That helps 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.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:19Speaker 00

  Or you could just get in a cabin for two or three days and come out with something everybody's happy with or 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 comedian to be a marketer than it is to train a marketer to be funny.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  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 and pooped 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 you, if you want to be a creative marketer, comedians

• 30:23Speaker 00

  are critical to the infrastructure of a marketing company because they come out of left field. You just have to have somebody who understands well enough the formula. So 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, Poopery, Purple Mattress, every joke brings you a little closer to understanding what that product is and why you want to use it.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  And you, um, do you, 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?

• 31:11Speaker 00

  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. 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

• 31:51Speaker 00

  best elements and putting them into that lead script. And then by the end, you've got yourself, uh, uh, an ad.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  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?

• 32:15Speaker 00

  We still do it to some extent. If you go watch Runner, there's a campaign that I think got a hundred million views for Angel. Runner has Alan Richardson, 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 because Angel's model is if you're an Angel member, if you're a member of the Angel Guild, there's about three

• 32:57Speaker 00

  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. So your date night's covered almost every month.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:07Speaker 00

  And so they're racing through the streets and there's like stuff blowing up around them because 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. This ad campaign, I don't even think we made it a public one. It's just unlisted, but I think it had a hundred million views, somewhere around a hundred million views. So, so we still do that, but then in support around that, because these are totally different than Orbrush. Orbrush, we were just like $500 a day. You hope to get a thousand and eventually you built it up to millions. And then over several year period, we had a $10 million

• 33:47Speaker 00

  business. When you're launching movies and theaters, you're launching a $10 million business from scratch with a new movie every month. And so these are 10 to 50 million dollar businesses, hundred million dollar businesses sometimes. And, and you've got a 90 day period where you launch them. I mean, the Hollywood world and the movie theater world is absolutely bonkers. It's like taking an, just think about this as an entrepreneur because your, your, your group is entrepreneurs.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:17Speaker 00

  Think about taking and, and every single month, launching a 10 to 50 million dollar startup with, with five to 20 million dollars in ads spend in 90 days and they're just running teams year round, launching every four to six weeks. That is the business that we're in now. And it, and 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 to the Angel system is, it's, it's somewhat more complex than just go watch this movie. But then outside

• 35:00Speaker 00

  of that, we're running, like if you go to Solo Meal, 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 Meal is set in Italy and there's 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 stood up at his wedding in Italy. And then it's just super funny how he's dealing with this because 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 Tik Tok? And we're just, I'm

• 35:44Speaker 00

  going to be Matt Taylor. I'm going to go and I'm going to teach art classes on, I'm just going to 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 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 going to 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. 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

• 36:26Speaker 00

  warming up, um, Kevin James's 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 your video is 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 Tik Tok, Instagram, YouTube are going to 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 going to recognize me and say Jeff Harmon's

• 37:11Speaker 00

  face, Jeff Harmon's face, and then put 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's face. So he was getting himself hot in the algorithm. 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 Tik Tok algorithm and the Instagram algorithm and the YouTube algorithm recognize this is

• 37:51Speaker 00

  Kevin James. And this space is trending elsewhere on the system. And so the moment we launched those, they started going viral because people that were, people who had been watching Kevin James videos started getting served Matt Taylor videos.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  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 live stream 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 kind of doing the same thing, sort of warming up?

• 38:33Speaker 00

  They're trying to warm up their faces. Yes. And they're trying to find a viral clip. You kind of 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.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:51Speaker 00

  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, so for example, if you go watch Critical Drinker, you know who Critical Drinker is?

• 39:08Speaker 01

  No.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  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, 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 businesses can't do this as much, right? But he's showing little scenes of all these different movies because he does movie reviews and he's basically hashing all kinds of famous faces into his movie reviews. So he's just clipping all these famous movies and then getting served

• 39:47Speaker 00

  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 everybody picked it up. Everyone was saying, is this art teacher Kevin James or Kevin James is doppelganger? Is this really Kevin? And there's just arguments. 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

• 40:24Speaker 00

  before Valentine's Day, he showed up at the Super Bowl and we bought 12 seats 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 Instagram accounts and TikTok accounts and had them all posting, is that Kevin James?

• 41:04Speaker 01

  What is going on?

• 41:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yes. But 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.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:19Speaker 00

  And the funny thing about the Super Bowl is it 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.

• 41:41Sam Parr?

  So a lot of times people at the podcast, they'll reach out to me and they're wondering, hey, Sam and Sean, how do you meet all these amazing entrepreneurs? How do you find all these stories? Well, I have a hack. You see, I actually have a community called Hampton. It's a community for entrepreneurs doing at least three million revenue, although we do on average, just something like $25 million a year in revenue. We have the founders of DoorDash, of Figure, of BlueChu. All these amazing companies are part of Hampton. And what's interesting is because of the environment in Hampton, which frankly is very similar to My First Million, we have a very unique, high-trust environment. When people apply and go through the vetting process, they're put in groups of like eight or nine other entrepreneurs and they get real about everything that's going on in their life and in their business. And sort of like when people listen to MFM, they get inspired to come up with

• 42:24Sam Parr?

  new solutions for business. That's what happens in real life in Hampton. It's life-changing. And so if you're a founder of a startup that does at least three million in revenue and you just want to go ahead and pull forward five or 10 years worth of success, then check it out. The URL is joinhampton.com. Again, the URL, joinhampton.com.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  We should explain. So Angel, you, the, the, the short version of the story is you felt like there was a need for or desire, you had a desire for a different type of content.

• 42:55Speaker 00

  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. 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? 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 good people in this movie. There's not a single good person.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  It's all darkness.

• 43:24Speaker 00

  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. Then the rest of the year, we're pushing just values-based content. Westerns, action movies like Runner with Alan Richardson and, 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

• 44:08Speaker 00

  no, no strong language in it. Nobody ever commented on this. Like if you go read the reviews, 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 reach?

• 44:27Speaker 01

  I wish there was more, more vulgarity.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  When it first came to us, that movie, we didn't make that movie. 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. We don't call them subscribers. We call them members because they're participating. And what they're doing is as a member of Angel, you get to vote on every movie that comes into 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, if the audience vetoes 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

• 45:10Speaker 00

  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.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  So you get a higher hit rate because you have, and you're not doing focus groups, right? These are people who are members of the community. They're paying

• 45:32Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  to be members of the community. So presumably they're kind of like market participants, more like a prediction market than it is a, a random, you know, a random poll on the internet where people don't really have much skin in the game.

• 45:44Speaker 00

  It's a user method at scale.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  Do you have a higher hit rate? What's a normal hit rate for a studio and what's yours?

• 45:50Speaker 00

  Our average, there, there's one study that's, it's almost a year old, but we hit an average box office, according to that study, that's higher than any independent. The multiples higher. Higher than A24's average, higher than, A24's done really well this year. So it'll be interesting to see if they catch us. But basically, every single independent, Angel hits the most theaters, the most locations for theaters and the highest box 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.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  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 an investing for the one or two runaway successes?

• 46:42Speaker 00

  I think we're a base hits business that gets home runs every once in a while. So we had Sound of Freedom was a home run, did $250 million worldwide. That was a $14 million movie.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  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 costs all in. That's the talent, that's the production, that's everything, the rights to the underlying content, whatever. Includes marketing costs or doesn't include marketing costs?

• 47:09Speaker 00

  No, that doesn't include. We spent $40 million marketing that movie.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Okay. So you spend 14 making it, 40 marketing it, and then it generates, you said 250?

• 47:19Speaker 00

  250 million.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  That's the box office now, but, but the theater takes, assuming a big cut of that.

• 47:25Speaker 00

  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 going to take between 12.5 and 30% of the other half.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  And do you, 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 know what I mean? How does that business work? I don't understand. Is it like MoviePass where you, one thing, is it a lost leader situation? What's going on?

• 47:59Speaker 00

  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 member isn't going to go to every single movie. And so that balances out.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Gotcha. Okay, great. And so you, um, so you, you, 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.

• 48:23Speaker 00

  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 a thousand movies, around a thousand 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, but those are made mostly by very wealthy entrepreneurs. I've never met a billionaire that doesn't want to make movies. And I know a lot of billionaires. They, they, they don't, they all want to get in the movie business. And this is-

• 49:06Speaker 01

  I'm not a billionaire and I'm still trying to make a movie. So I don't, I think you're even underselling it from there.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, we'll think about this. So, so that's where the thousand movies comes from is that they're, they're very wealthy people that are just taking a swing. They want to leave a mark. They want to 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 want to tell stories. Everyone. And so what the Angel Guild allows you to do is join about 3 million other people who are all paying 12 to 20 bucks a month and make movies like billionaires do.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  You're kind of like, you've built this like almost Kickstarter vertical mob, right?

• 49:48Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 49:57Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 50:04Speaker 00

  And, and so far that, that guild, the Angel Guild, those 3 million people have paid out $300 million to filmmakers.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  That's like, that's like their profit share, basically, you mean?

• 50:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, the filmmakers get 50% of the profits of that guild and Angel uses the other half to build up the guild.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  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 us back. Um, and I was looking at this like last year we lost 50 million bucks. Uh, you know, minus 50 million in EBITDA, but you're not paying to produce these movies. And then you have these members who are paying you and you're just taking a profit share. So it must just be a lot of member acquisition or what are you spending all the money on? Or is it the marketing of the movies? Is that what's going on?

• 50:52Speaker 00

  Marketing's a big piece. Yeah. Yeah. The acquiring new members is not cheap.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Is this a good business? And what I mean by that is, uh, is I, 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 the game for almost 20 years as an entrepreneur and I started all kinds of businesses. And I could tell you like some of them are knife fights. You know, I would say a DTC 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 the knife fight. I don't have a knife in the restaurant business. And, uh, and then some businesses are beautiful businesses, recurring revenue, good margins. Once you figure one thing out, you just keep, you know, kind of, you get a flywheel with that advantage. How is the movie business?

• 51:36Speaker 00

  The 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 kind of run by the mob. 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.

• 52:06Speaker 00

  It's a knife fight. This is like, I ask myself every single week, do I really want to be in this business? I'm doing this because, 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. I mean, our strength is the fact that there are about 3 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

• 52:51Speaker 00

  and that's allowing us to just rewrite the rules. And our job as a business is to fix what, 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, 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. 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, it is an excellent business and

• 53:34Speaker 00

  it's growing right now. So while you're growing, you're investing.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  Can you tell me what's going on? Like, uh, I guess, again, 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 Toll, I feel like came into the industry as kind of an outsider and did some interesting things. I guess, tell me who you think has, has done cool or interesting work. Get me inspired as, get the business nerd in me inspired into somebody who did something.

• 54:07Speaker 00

  A24 is really interesting because 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.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  Okay. That's the anime-

• 54:23Speaker 00

  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 and, uh, which is a really, really big niche.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  I mean, 20 million is a massive number. What is, what is that in revenue? 20 million?

• 54:40Speaker 00

  I don't, I don't know what the revenue is because I don't know what the membership cost is.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Even if it's like, 20, you know, whatever, if it's 10 bucks a month, I mean, we're talking about-

• 54:48Speaker 00

  They're, they're, I think they're kind of the top of the tier three streamers. The Crunchyroll, you have like MGM plus, and you've got stars and you've got these groups that are in the tier three. Um, tier four is like Pure Flix, Daily Wire, that kind of a world. And then we've, we've just recently moved into the tier three streamers and you have tier two, which is your bigger streamer.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  Paramount plus.

• 55:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then you move into tier one is Netflix and Disney plus and Apple. 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, and I did a podcast with him, really interesting podcast. And he told me, I've been watching this industry for a very, very long time. And he said, I don't think I've honestly ever seen anything totally different until Angel. So everybody else is some version of the previous stuff. He's like, you guys are different from top to bottom. You're not doing anything the same.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  I heard you have a, a personal vibe coder. Is that right? You have, you have a guy who does vibe codes for you. Is that true? That's amazing. That might be the best luxury item I've ever seen.

• 56:02Speaker 00

  I basically got to the point where I would vibe code products and then I would get stuck because I'd get pulled outside the meetings and the fires and the different things as an executive in the company. 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, we will turn it over to the product team, um, which can build something that will scale and get bigger.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  I kind of think that every executive of a kind of medium to large company should actually do this, right? Like, you know, it's, it's normal to have an assistant, chief of staff, uh, 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. It's your bandwidth, your time, your ability to keep the ball moving forward to, to kind of 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, I think that's absolutely-

• 57:23Speaker 00

  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. And then I tell Claude, like, I get as far as I can and say, run this all night. And then 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.

• 58:06Speaker 00

  And you hook it to the harness and then that harness goes through and does all the checks and make sure that you're not breaking the rules of the system. And so what I do is I end up vibe coding until 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. And so I have it hooked up to my hotspot on my phone.

• 58:48Speaker 00

  And then I'm just like clicking continue, continue while I drive.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  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, could you allow a, do you allow me to open a browser?

• 58:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  Open the browser. What? You've been stuck on that all night?

• 59:03Speaker 00

  Uh huh. So you just switch it on bypass everything and get dangerous with it. But a couple of things you learn is one is these are machines. They're not humans, like the veneer of a human wears off really quickly. And you realize this is definitely a machine. But number two is they kind of blow your mind all the time, just of what they're capable of doing. Similar to any type of engineering feat, you just go, wow, this is, this is very impressive.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  What's something you've had it build that was cool?

• 59:37Speaker 00

  I had it build a system where I can just test trailers and scenes of movies and run them like to where you can just send out links to friends and family and A B tests like trailer A, trailer B, trailer C. And if you send the link, it will just randomly give them the trailer, a different trailer. And then you just gather data and then find out which ones are working.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  That's pretty cool. I like that.

• 1:00:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. So that's, that's one that I think is interesting. You can model out all of your, your attrition rates and you can model out your lifetime values so much faster now, just using AI as long as you have clean data. I mean, people say that they should be, that they are firing people. I don't, I think they're just looking for excuses to fire people because economics work like this. When you get something that's highly, that makes everybody 10 times more effective, you're going to become so much more productive that you need more people. You don't say, I want less people that are 10 times more effective. You say, I want more people that are 10 times more effective. It's so stupid.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  You're multiplying two numbers together. Why would you want one to be smaller?

• 1:00:53Speaker 00

  The ones who are cutting off people, if they're truly cutting it off because AI is, um, is, is coming into play. That's a short-term play where you're just cutting costs. Like, like you're, you're almost like a company that's cutting costs right before an acquisition. You're not building long-term value the same way. If you, if your company is getting to a point where because of AI, you need to hire more people, that's when it's the right time to hire. Because this AI has made us so much more effective when we've broken down so many more walls that we need more people to service what we're doing and to build. That's when it like, that's what's going to be happening all over. I don't, I don't believe for a second that we're going to have a massive unemployment because of AI.

• 1:01:38Speaker 00

  I just, it doesn't make sense on an economics level.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  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. Like nothing in the professional workplace will even compare. That's where my real success comes from is marriage and kids. 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.

• 1:02:31Speaker 00

  And you have all the success. They owe you a significant amount of money. And they don't want to pay you for what you did. And they had, and they're like threatening lawsuits. And a mentor of mine, Steve Oskew, he told me, he said, unless it's worth over $5 million, it's not even worth fighting the battle over. Because you're going to end up fighting for 18 months to three years. You're going to 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 going to make more value than that's worth. And not just that, it's just not a happy life.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:13Speaker 00

  And so after listening to him, I went back to my brother Neil. And it's because 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.

• 1:03:58Speaker 00

  Letting that go and just going after new ideas and having an abundance mentality allowed me to focus on the things that, that helped us build a big ad agency. If you're the golden goose, you're going to 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. As soon as you switch gears and say, there will be more things, you're going to get more things and you're going to have more opportunities and you'll break through.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  I love that. Jeff, thank you for coming on. Thank you for sharing the wisdom. Thank you for sharing the stories. I appreciate you.

• 1:04:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, thank you.

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  All right, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about marketing school. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network and it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Su. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.