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

Shaan Puri introduces Jeff Harmon as the creative force behind campaigns for Poo-Pourri, Squatty Potty, Purple Mattress, and other major brands, and as the founder of Angel Studios. Harmon begins with Dr. Bob, who visited his university class seeking help selling AuraBrush, a tongue cleaner. The class said only 8% of people would buy it online and recommended partnering with Procter & Gamble or Johnson & Johnson. Harmon countered that 8% still represented roughly 30 million Americans—more than enough people to clear a garage full of inventory. Harmon convinced Dr. Bob to spend $5,000 buying a Facebook page called “Kisses,” which had 1.3 million followers. The bad-breath/kissing connection seemed logical, but spamming the followers with AuraBrush failed, Google Ads cost $3–$5 for every dollar in sales, and the large audience did not convert. Harmon then recruited roommates Evan Graham, a film major, and Joel Ackerman, a screenwriter and comedian. Drawing on YouTube videos, his experience selling potatoes door-to-door, and two years as a Mormon missionary in Ireland, he created a video explaining how to detect bad breath by scraping the back of the tongue with a spoon. The team spent about $500–$600 making it. They offered a free brush for the cost of shipping and used YouTube’s newly launched ad platform, where views cost less than a penny. That early advertising “glitch” let them spend roughly $1 in total costs to generate $2–$3 in revenue. AuraBrush ultimately sold for about $10 million.

Harmon says every business needs to find its “glitch”: an overlooked opening where attention, distribution, or customer demand is available before competitors notice it. For AuraBrush, the glitch was being among the first advertisers on YouTube. That gave the team enough inexpensive traffic and data to test and optimize while the channel was still cheap. He compares this to Paul Alstrom’s “beachhead” idea from Nail It and Scale It: a company does not need to conquer an entire market immediately; it needs a defensible foothold from which to expand. Shaan points out that YouTube ads no longer cost a penny per view, so Harmon separates the enduring principle from the particular opportunity. Harmon’s first recommendation is the “user method”: solve a problem you personally understand. Dr. Bob invented AuraBrush after seeing missionaries with bad breath while serving as an LDS mission president in the Philippines. His first prototype combined a toothbrush handle, a surgical scrub brush, and a scraper held together with super glue. Harmon cites Airbnb as another example: its founders were trying to pay rent, bought air mattresses from Walmart, and rented floor space to people attending a San Francisco convention. The second principle is to look for neglected attention. Harmon says entrepreneurs should find channels or behaviors established players are ignoring. He gives agentic shopping as a current example: consumers may ask Grok or another AI agent to buy groceries through an API rather than search Google and click through websites. A business optimized for that channel could capture demand before conventional retailers adapt.

Harmon explains that VidAngel came from a personal problem: he wanted children and teenagers to participate in cultural conversations without being exposed to sex, nudity, rape scenes, or strong language. When Game of Thrones was at its peak, millions of people worldwide were downloading illegal torrent versions that had been scrubbed of those scenes. Harmon’s idea was to build a legal product for the same demand, even though most people would not publicly say they wanted a cleaned version. That same willingness to serve a small but committed audience led to Angel Studios and The Chosen. Harmon and his team uploaded a complete 19-minute short film as a skippable YouTube ad. He was asked why anyone would run an ad that long, but his logic was that even if only 3% watched to the end, those viewers might be exactly the people willing to fund the project. At the end, viewers were asked to invest in turning the film into a series. Seventeen thousand people invested $11 million, with approximately $800,000 spent on advertising—less than 8% of the raise. Harmon also used live streams organized by Daryl Eves, with Dallas Jenkins appearing during the final 24–48 hours. Each investment triggered an on-screen message showing the amount and location, creating continuous social proof. The resulting series, The Chosen, eventually reached about 200 million viewers worldwide, ran for seven seasons, and was set to conclude with Jesus’s resurrection. Harmon says the project worked because a small, values-aligned audience supplied the initial beachhead.

Harmon says he first has to believe in the product. His team tested Squatty Potty and found it legitimate; he personally used Poo-Pourri and asked his wife to check the bathroom afterward. The product’s promise was that essential oils trap odor beneath the water, preventing the smell from spreading. Founder Susie Batiz had been selling about $4 million a year through QVC when she contacted Harmon and later flew the team to Hawaii. For the Poo-Pourri campaign, Harmon and Joel Ackerman spent three or four days developing a concept around a cute British woman sitting on a toilet and speaking frankly about defecation. The humor came from the juxtaposition, but every joke still communicated what the product did. Harmon describes the same discipline behind Squatty Potty and Purple Mattress: comedy must move the viewer toward understanding the product and wanting to use it, rather than merely being an unrelated joke. He says the most effective creative retreats include every stakeholder—attorneys, business leaders, and decision-makers—in one cabin. Email exchanges can “neuter” a script over months; face-to-face work can produce an approved production-ready concept in two or three days. Before the retreat, three or four trained writer-comedians receive and use the product and prepare rough scripts. Each presents a vision on the first morning. The group chooses one script’s basic idea, then spends the next several days cannibalizing the others for their strongest elements. Harmon’s key staffing lesson is that comedians are easier to train in marketing than marketers are to train to be funny.

Harmon describes Angel’s content as the antithesis of nihilism—the kind of storytelling where every character is corrupt and life has no purpose. Angel makes values-based entertainment, including Westerns and action movies, and emphasizes faith content around Easter and Christmas. The company acquired Runner as an R-rated film and required it to become PG-13 and pass the Angel Guild before accepting it. The resulting film, starring Alan Ritchson and Owen Wilson, received a 90% audience score and 76% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, without viewers complaining that the sex, profanity, and other material common in comparable shows had been removed. The Angel Guild has roughly 3 million members. Members pay approximately $12–$20 per month, vote on movies, can veto projects, receive two tickets to Angel movies, and provide feedback on rough cuts. Harmon says this is not a random focus group: members pay, participate, and have real incentives to choose films they will watch. The guild has paid about $300 million to filmmakers, with filmmakers receiving half of the profits and Angel using the other half to grow the guild. Harmon characterizes Angel as a base-hits business that occasionally produces a home run. Sound of Freedom cost $14 million to make, received approximately $40 million in marketing, and generated $250 million worldwide at the box office. Angel does not generally fund every movie itself; like Lionsgate, which Harmon says acquires many of its films, it can acquire projects from the roughly 1,000 independent movies made each year. Angel has been among the top 10 U.S. studios for three years and has achieved higher average box office and theater reach than other independent studios in the study he cites.

Harmon says Angel’s marketing changed as it moved from selling a small product to launching a $10–$50 million movie every four to six weeks. A campaign may require $5–$20 million in advertising over a 90-day launch, making the movie business far more intense than the AuraBrush model. Long scripted ads still help when the product or membership system is complicated, but Angel also builds social-native campaigns around characters. For Kevin James’s film Solo, Harmon’s team created the fictional art teacher Matt Taylor as an active social-media personality. James recorded painting lessons and spoke as the character in a Bob Ross-like style. A team lived near James on Long Island to produce the content. Before launching the Matt Taylor accounts, James reposted older material to “warm up” his face in TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube’s recommendation systems. Harmon says the algorithms recognize faces as well as text, so the new account benefited from the existing interest in Kevin James. The campaign eventually generated more than a billion views. The team extended the stunt to the Super Bowl by placing James in a tuxedo with flowers among 12 seats, surrounded by influencers who posted questions such as “Is that Kevin James?” He even appeared on the stadium’s Megatron, while the campaign initially said little about the movie. Harmon compares this with clip armies used by large streamers and influencers: they produce thousands of pieces, hoping a few catch an existing trend. He also points to Critical Drinker, a major movie-review channel whose use of recognizable film scenes and faces helps its content connect to broader algorithmic interest.

Shaan asks whether Angel is economically attractive, since the company reported roughly $50 million of negative EBITDA while not producing every film itself. Harmon says marketing is a major cost, both for movies and for acquiring members. The ticket model depends partly on breakage: members receive two tickets each month, but the average person attends only three or four movies per year, so not everyone uses the full benefit. Angel takes profits rather than the filmmaker’s entire share, and the guild model gives members a reason to keep participating. Harmon calls Hollywood a “knife fight.” He repeats a story about a retired executive who had worked in Las Vegas casinos and Hollywood; when asked what he missed, the executive said his best friend in Hollywood was worse than his worst enemy in Las Vegas. Harmon nevertheless believes Angel can be an excellent business because Hollywood has a cost problem rather than a revenue problem. Angel’s purpose, in his view, is to lower costs, improve distribution, and let a large audience rewrite the rules. He also describes having a personal “vibe coder.” Harmon prototypes products himself with AI, then hands promising minimum viable products to his product team for scalable implementation. Angel has built harnesses containing brand guidelines and technical checks so Claude, GPT, Grok, or another model can work within company rules. One tool Harmon had AI build lets the company send different movie trailers or scenes to different viewers and collect A/B-test data. He rejects the idea that AI will necessarily create mass unemployment: if each person becomes 10 times more effective, he argues, companies may need more people to handle the larger amount of work and opportunity rather than fewer people.

Asked what he would tell his younger self, Harmon says professional success is not comparable to marriage and children. He recommends having children sooner and having more of them than one might initially think, arguing that family is where his real success comes from. He also warns against treating any single business idea as too precious to lose; an abundance mentality makes it easier to move toward the next opportunity. Harmon recalls a dispute in which clients allegedly owed his agency a significant amount of money and threatened litigation. His mentor Steve Oskui advised that unless the dispute was worth more than $5 million, it was probably not worth spending 18 months to three years fighting it. Harmon then asked his brother Neil about the decision, and Neil opened the Bible to a passage saying that if someone sues for your cloak, you should give him your coat as well. Harmon chose to let the money go, even though it may have been worth several million dollars. He says that decision changed his trajectory: instead of draining his time and energy in a lawsuit, he focused on new ideas and helped build a large ad agency. His metaphor is that if you are the golden goose, your job is to keep laying eggs. Continuing to create is more valuable than winning every argument or assuming one opportunity is the only opportunity you will ever have.