One year ago my wife and I both had strong feelings that 2013 was going to be a year of transition. Our feelings were right. Beyond moving and having baby number two, here is my 2013 professional life rolled up into one post:
JANUARY:
The PR team at Orabrush somehow convinced Utah Business Magazine to put my mug on the cover. This cover is very valuable to me… and my grandparents show their copies to everyone.
FEBRUARY – ORAPUP LAUNCHES
We sold over $1 million dollars of Orapups using a hairbrush with an OXO handle and a bunch of Orabrush bristles glued to it (look closely at the video below):
Orapup gave us two record breaking quarters in the first quarter of this year!
APRIL TO PRESENT – #BITCOIN
My oldest brother Theron approached me about a great idea. He was recruiting a team for a documentary film about bitcoin. That same day Austin Craig said he would be interested. Lucky for us Beccy, his bride-to-be, was also down. I wrote and directed the Kickstarter video. We raised the funds on Kickstarter. Beccy and Austin were the world”s first couple to live on bitcoin for 101 days and they literally traveled around the globe. The film “Life On Bitcoin” will be completed in 2014. It is going to be fantastic.
AUGUST – THE HARMON BROTHERS LEAVE ORABRUSH
It seemed like just yesterday Neal and I were in Bob Wagstaff’s house forming Orabrush Inc. That first year I was “CEO” (really Neal and I were running the company together). Neal had been the backbone of Orabrush but I had always had the opportunity to be the face. 3.5 years later it was time to move on to another opportunity. We were going from tongue gunk to poop.
SEPTEMBER – WE REBRAND POO~POURRI
- 21,000,000+ views (closer to 30 million views if you count the unlisted views on other videos we tested).
- 12,000%+ increase in web traffic over the same period in 2012 (thanks to Neal we had a site that could easily handle the growth).
- Sold out of product (this is unfortunate because the video could have been well over 40 million views if we had been allowed to keep the path we were on).
- 1,300,000 Social Media shares of the video
- 200,000 social media shares of PooPourri.com
- Mashable: #2 most shared ad world-wide in Sept.
- Mashable: #2 most shared ad world-wide in Oct.
- Mashable: #13 most shared ad world-wide in 2013.
- Adweek: #5 most viewed ad world-wide in 2013.
- Google Trends gives you an idea of what happened to the Poo~Pourri brand awareness.
- Our Poo~Pourri ad exceeded and continues to exceed all of my expectations.
DECEMBER – ANNOUNCING VIDANGEL
VidAngel is founded by 4 Harmon brothers: Neal, Daniel, Jordan, and myself (there are 6 Harmon brothers in case you were wondering). After spending 3 years working on YouTube we were CRAVING a way to control our experience better. I get so tired of cleavage thumbnails and rampant profanity and vulgarity on YouTube. Not just that, but YouTube now allows nudity and sex in some circumstances. In 2012 we started working on VidAngel at nights.
There is ClearPlay, their DVD player filters out sex, profanity, and violence on DVDs. I am a customer. But they have been around for 15 years and they are like a dinosaur with technology. After all these years they were acting like a monopoly and they need some good healthy competition. Also we needed a solution for streaming, so that is the problem we set out to solve with VidAngel.
After over a year of stealth mode we should be launching in early 2014. Our goal is to not only give people control over their movie streaming experience, but also over ALL of YouTube. Imagine being able to let your kids get on YouTube without ever needing to worry about them stumbling across an F-word?
INTERESTED IN HIRING HARMON BROTHERS?
I just went into my blog comments and I had over 250 comments asking me for help on their businesses. We don’t do a lot of service agreements or consulting, but we take them on when we have extra time. After plowing through the comments we decided to create HarmonBrothers.com. Just go to HarmonBrothers.com/contact to let us know you are interested in work!