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

Jeff Harmon (0:00)

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.

Shaan Puri (0:20)

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 the Internet. I read your book back in the day.

Jeff Harmon (0:35)

Oh, you read Poop to Gold.

Shaan Puri (0:36)

Yeah, Poop to Gold. On top of that, what you're doing now is fascinating. I had honestly never heard of Angel Studios, and here you are. You've built maybe one of the top 10 TV movie studios in the world.

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 pretty much no experience or background in the industry, which I always like. I like somebody who 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 the great marketing campaigns? Where were you? What happened? Can you tell that story?

Jeff Harmon (1:28)

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, because he had vented it, he had got, he had, I don't know, thousands of units of it, just boxes and boxes of them at his house.

Shaan Puri (1:58)

Sitting in his garage.

Jeff Harmon (1:59)

Yeah, 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 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?

Shaan Puri (2:29)

Oh, so the smart kid answer was over 90% of people don't want to buy this online, and you said, wait a minute, if 8% said yes, that's still millions, that's enough to clear out the garage.

Jeff Harmon (2:41)

That's right.

What happened 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 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. So we took it and we bought it, and then I started spamming them with Orabrush.

Shaan Puri (3:17)

Because bad breath kissing, that was the connection. You did get one thing right. 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 they can kiss without the shame of bad breath.

You did have that insight, that's pretty good.

Jeff Harmon (3:43)

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

Shaan Puri (3:56)

Right. The brand followed by 1.3 million people.

Jeff Harmon (3:59)

Yes, and so we had one of the most followed brands on social media. I think Facebook changed their rules after that.

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 five dollars per dollar that we brought in, in sales because it's just a little orrbrush. Then I was watching on YouTube late at night, and I watched a lot of YouTube. There was a YouTuber called iJustine. She's probably still out there, but she was an early YouTuber.