Jeff Harmon

Harmon argues Hollywood's troubles stem from costs rather than insufficient revenue.

“the Hollywood industry has a cost problem, not a revenue problem”

My First Million: The creative genius behind Squatty Potty & Poo-Pourri reveals his marketing playbook (Oct 7, 2026) · Listen from 52:07

Harmon says most of the roughly 1,000 independent films each year are financed by wealthy people wanting to make movies.

“I've never met a billionaire that doesn't want to make movies”

My First Million: The creative genius behind Squatty Potty & Poo-Pourri reveals his marketing playbook (Oct 7, 2026) · Listen from 48:57

Harmon explains that the Guild's ticket benefit relies on breakage, similar to MoviePass.

“we rely on some breakage, meaning the average person goes to three to four movies a year”

My First Million: The creative genius behind Squatty Potty & Poo-Pourri reveals his marketing playbook (Oct 7, 2026) · Listen from 48:00

Harmon says Angel takes no distribution cut and instead splits profits with filmmakers.

“We only take profits. So we split with the filmmaker the profits”

My First Million: The creative genius behind Squatty Potty & Poo-Pourri reveals his marketing playbook (Oct 7, 2026) · Listen from 47:25

Harmon claims Angel achieves the widest theatrical releases and highest box office of any independent studio.

“Angel hits the most theaters, the most locations for theaters, and the highest box offices of any independent studio”

My First Million: The creative genius behind Squatty Potty & Poo-Pourri reveals his marketing playbook (Oct 7, 2026) · Listen from 46:10

Harmon describes Angel's content as values-based, with faith content as a subset, in contrast to nihilistic Hollywood fare.

“Ours is values-based. Values-based is what Disney used to be. And a subset of that is the faith audience”

My First Million: The creative genius behind Squatty Potty & Poo-Pourri reveals his marketing playbook (Oct 7, 2026) · Listen from 43:04

Harmon claims Angel is out-innovating Hollywood on distribution because incumbents fear and fight new tools.

“we are outpacing the Hollywood world, because right now we're in the Hollywood space, by leaps and bounds in speed of innovation”

My First Million: The creative genius behind Squatty Potty & Poo-Pourri reveals his marketing playbook (Oct 7, 2026) · Listen from 15:46

Harmon recounts a mentor's advice that disputes under $5 million are not worth fighting, which led him to drop a claim.

“unless it's worth over $5 million, it's not even worth fighting a battle over”

My First Million: The creative genius behind Squatty Potty & Poo-Pourri reveals his marketing playbook (Oct 7, 2026) · Listen from 1:02:43

Harmon advises young professionals to marry and have children earlier and more than they think they should.

“nothing will compare with getting married and having kids and having kids sooner than you think you should”

My First Million: The creative genius behind Squatty Potty & Poo-Pourri reveals his marketing playbook (Oct 7, 2026) · Listen from 1:01:49

Harmon rejects the idea that AI will cause mass unemployment on economic grounds.

“I don't believe for a second that we're gonna have a massive unemployment because of AI”

My First Million: The creative genius behind Squatty Potty & Poo-Pourri reveals his marketing playbook (Oct 7, 2026) · Listen from 1:01:32

Harmon believes companies citing AI for layoffs are making excuses, since productivity gains should drive more hiring.

“I think they're just looking for excuses to fire people because economics work like this”

My First Million: The creative genius behind Squatty Potty & Poo-Pourri reveals his marketing playbook (Oct 7, 2026) · Listen from 1:00:28

Harmon says every joke in an ad must advance the product message or be cut.

“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”

My First Million: The creative genius behind Squatty Potty & Poo-Pourri reveals his marketing playbook (Oct 7, 2026) · Listen from 28:49

Harmon argues comedians are essential to creative marketing because it is easier to teach them marketing than to make marketers funny.

“it's way easier to train a comedian to be a marketer than it is to train a marketer to be funny”

My First Million: The creative genius behind Squatty Potty & Poo-Pourri reveals his marketing playbook (Oct 7, 2026) · Listen from 29:33

Harmon said the crucifixion portion of The Chosen would be released around Easter of the following year.

“they're going to release the crucifixion at Easter time this next year”

My First Million: The creative genius behind Squatty Potty & Poo-Pourri reveals his marketing playbook (Oct 7, 2026) · Listen from 26:03

Harmon reports the 20-minute pilot-as-ad led thousands of people to crowdfund The Chosen.

“And 17,000 people invested $11 million into The Chosen”

My First Million: The creative genius behind Squatty Potty & Poo-Pourri reveals his marketing playbook (Oct 7, 2026) · Listen from 23:06

Harmon contends social platforms classify videos mainly by the faces and images in them rather than by text descriptions.

“what really is mattering what your video is about on social media these days is what images are in the video”

My First Million: The creative genius behind Squatty Potty & Poo-Pourri reveals his marketing playbook (Oct 7, 2026) · Listen from 35:31

Harmon says businesses optimized for AI agent shopping via APIs can tap a rapidly growing, overlooked audience.

“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”

My First Million: The creative genius behind Squatty Potty & Poo-Pourri reveals his marketing playbook (Oct 7, 2026) · Listen from 12:30

Harmon argues every founder must find a glitch, and Orabrush's was being early to YouTube's new ad platform.

“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”

My First Million: The creative genius behind Squatty Potty & Poo-Pourri reveals his marketing playbook (Oct 7, 2026) · Listen from 6:50