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.
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.
Well, you read Poop to Gold.
Yeah, Poop to Gold. On top of that, you know, now what you're doing now is fascinating. I had never, I'd honestly never heard of Angel Studios. And here you are. You've built maybe one of the top 10 TV movie studios in the world. Um, you're doing almost 500 million in revenue. And I would guess that I'm not alone. I would guess that 98% of our audience has also never heard about this. And the cool thing is you did it with, I mean, pretty much no experience or background in the industry, which I always like. I like somebody who, you know, doesn't kind of self-limit 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?
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 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.
Yeah. I just said 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 I interrupted them and said 8% of people is like 30 million people just in the United States. Why wouldn't you focus on them?
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.'
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 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. And so we took it and we bought it and then I started spamming them with Aura Brush because bad breath, kissing, that was the connection.
You did get one thing 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 they can kiss without the shame of bad breath.
So you did have that insight. That's pretty good.
Yeah. And so we took the 1.3 million people, we spammed them and then once we got Aura Brush created as an entity, I changed the name of Kisses' page to Aura Brush.
Right? The brand followed by 1.3 million people.
Yes. And so we had one of the most followed brands on social media. I think Facebook both 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 $3 to $5 per dollar that we brought in in sales because it's just a little tongue brush. And then I was watching on YouTube late at night and 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.
Yeah, original vlogger. And in her videos, she would jump cut. She just stood in front of a white background and then she would just cut, cut to get rid of all of the ums and whatever wasn't interesting that she said, she just cut it all out. And I was like, we could probably make something at that level. And then I got another roommate named Evan 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 Ari, 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 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 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 I did pretty well with that. So I took those two skill sets, combined them and built a script that was how to tell if you have bad breath.
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 there's 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.
And there was a video on YouTube called Howcast. One of their videos that had like 400,000 views was how to tell if you have bad breath. And you just take 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.
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 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. 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 it was five or six hundred bucks 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 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 the Aura Brush. 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.
YouTube launched its ad platform a few weeks before that or maybe a couple months. That's where the idea came and we got on YouTube and we started buying ads and those ads cost less than a penny per view.
So it's like the early days of AdSense.
And so we were able to spend a dollar and bring in two or three dollars. Now a dollar in total costs both the ads, the shipping and the brush itself. And so that glitch of being the very first on YouTube is what allowed us to find enough data to take action to be able to optimize and then become more efficient. And then as the cost of advertising on YouTube started to climb, we were able to just get more and more efficient because we had the traffic coming in now to be able to make those changes. And so the glitch allowed us to get what one entrepreneur, Paul Olstrom, who wrote the book, he calls it your beachhead. 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.
So you put 500 bucks into making the ad. So the peak of Aura Brush, you guys did what in like revenue or how many sold?
I don't remember the revenues, but we sold, I think the company sold for about $10 million.
$10 million. And so 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 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, what to notice, what to pay attention to. What are the general principles that might apply to somebody who wants to do that?
First one is go after things that solve a problem for yourself. Dr. Bob was just making a tongue cleaner because he was a, this is funny, he was a mission president in the Philippines serving a mission for the LDS church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And his missionaries had horrible breath. And so he was trying to figure out how to solve the problem of these missionaries having awful breath. 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. 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 Schwarting and Jeff Schwarting goes through and explains that out of the top businesses, the vast majority of them were made by founders who were just solving a problem for themselves. The Airbnb founders were just trying to pay rent in San Francisco. One of them was a graphic designer. The graphic designer knew that there was a convention coming into town and they knew that there would need to be rooms rented. So they went to Walmart, bought some air mattresses, blew up the air mattresses and sold their floor space and you end up with air mattress B&B, 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 is 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 things that when he invented the mouse, as soon as they invented it, everybody was like obviously the mouse makes sense.
Right? Obvious in hindsight.
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.
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 Grokbot 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 Grokbot and say, 'Can you get me groceries on the way home?' And if you're a business that has an agentic shopping system where the AI bot doesn't have to go and scrape everything, it just talks to your API, then you can plug into this huge growing, rapidly growing group of people that are wanting to shop through their bots.
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.
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 traditional players who are already doing this are not paying as much attention. Maybe because in 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. You could put a hundred. You could change the whole experience to just work in that new channel to just be optimized for that new channel.
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 because right now we're in the Hollywood space by leaps and bounds in speed of innovation, especially 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.
Right? Yeah. It's lowbrow to use the tools for them 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.
That was a product we wanted to exist. Yeah.
It was a problem you had. So check, you know, thing number one. And by the way, if you had asked me, I would have been like, 'What do you mean that's not a problem?'
Well, how many kids do you have?
I got three kids. So now I would agree. But and then now when I go on YouTube, I'm like, 'Wow, this is Vietnam. This is a danger zone.'
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.
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 torrent an episode uploaded without the sex, the nudity, the rape scenes. It was completely scrubbed. And there would be millions of people worldwide downloading the version without those. And so we're looking at that and saying, not only do we want something like this for our kids, but what about the millions of people who are just saying, 'My teenager wants to watch this. I want them to be able to participate in the cultural conversation, but I don't want them to see rape scenes, and I'm going to use this torrent version, but that's completely illegal.' And so what we're saying is, let's build a legal version of what millions of people are already asking for.
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 this thing going. So you know today when you say millions of people have downloaded the torrent, I guess million sounds like a big number.
But it's a small number. It's a very small number. 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 got no hands in any average sample that you were looking at.
But you do a good job, it sounds like, of paying attention to the 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 your data is published and you know 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 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 an Elon Musk business plan, right? It doesn't sound like the makings of a huge business, creating the version of like if you watch with your parents and they put earmuffs on your ears for certain words and certain things.
Automatic remote control.
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.
Like a skippable ad. They could have skipped it after whatever 7 seconds or whatever it is. 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.'
That's exactly right. I remember somebody saying, 'Why would you upload a 19-minute ad?' And I said, 'Even if only 3% of people make it to the end, if they're the ones that want it to exist, they're going to invest and we'll be able to make a TV series.'
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?
I had the opportunity when we were doing the ad agency. So we did PooPourri, we did Squatty Potty, we did Purple Mattress, Lumi deodorant. These billion-dollar brands. These are billion-dollar brands that we built from four million. Like PooPourri when we got a hold of it, I think it was doing $4 million a year. And Purple Mattress, they were almost bankrupt. Like one of the founders of Purple Mattress called me two weeks after we launched the campaign and said, '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.'
Right? We dodged a bullet.
Yeah. We dodged a bullet. The point is 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 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 5 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.'
Well, that's so counterintuitive. You're the advertiser and you're telling the platform, 'Hey, let them skip after 5 seconds.' Right? That sounds completely against your interest.
But it's the only way to get a long ad. If I had said, 'Let me steal 5 minutes of their time for a PooPourri 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 5 seconds and then I get 5 minutes.' They're okay with that.
Yes. Because 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 watch 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.
And how much ad spend do you think you needed to get to that 11 million?
$800,000. So it took 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.'
Through for free basically. And I was like, 'How do you think we built PooPourri 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 8 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. We used other things like we had a friend named Derral Eves. He runs VidSummit and he does the YouTube Formula, that book.
And he knew 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 series, Dallas Jenkins got on and did this marathon live stream saying 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. This person invested this much from...' and had social proof just showing up on the screen the whole time. And 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 television. It's got like 200 million people watching it. It's on the level.
Yeah. There's 200 million people worldwide watching that show.
Unbelievable. How many seasons is it in?
They just finished filming season 7. Seven seasons and that's the final when Jesus is resurrected and it's just the twelve apostles going through and they're going to release the crucifixion at Easter time this next year. It's remarkable. It's no longer an Angel show, but it's on Amazon. We did the first three seasons.
You mentioned a couple of the other brands, Squatty Potty, PooPourri. What was the marketing genius moment for each one of those?
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 PooPourri. I went in the bathroom, used PooPourri. It's a little spray you put on. I think almost every Airbnb on the planet has PooPourri now.
You put it in before you go to the restroom and it traps the smell, right? That's the idea.
It's essential oils that trap the smell underneath the water.
Who created that? That's kind of a genius invention.
Susie Batiz. I think it was her brother that thought of it and then she took it to market. Yeah.
And she sends it to you? Cold email. What happened?
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.'
That's a new experience for us.
Yeah, that's a new experience.
And then we created 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 PooPourri 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, and she's sitting on a toilet and she's talking about pooping, which is totally just out of left field.
Right? Hey, can I ask you? You go for 3 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 trajectory was going one way and then you shifted it.
And we all want to do that. I've so many times taken the team, we're going to get away. We're going to figure this out. 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 3, 4-day camp to find a breakthrough.
What do you do to increase the odds of a breakthrough? I'm assuming you know you pick the right people. That's a big part of it. But what else? What do you do?
Well, I think getting up in a cabin and locking everybody in with the attorneys, the business leaders, 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 put 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.
