When Disney, Warner Bros., and Fox sued Neil and Jeff Harmon for $120 million over their content-filtering service, VidAngel, most entrepreneurs would have seen it as the end. The brothers saw it as a beginning.
In a revealing conversation with Mike Rowe, which you can watch below, the Harmon Brothers share how a devastating legal battle became the foundation for Angel Studios—a revolutionary entertainment company that’s disrupting Hollywood by putting audiences in control.
The story begins on an Idaho potato farm where nine siblings learned entrepreneurship out of necessity. Selling potatoes door-to-door to pay for private school taught the Harmons a crucial lesson: when resources are limited, creativity becomes essential. That mindset would serve them well decades later.
After building the Harmon Brothers advertising agency around viral marketing—you might remember their Squatty Potty ad featuring a unicorn—they launched VidAngel to help families filter movie content. Their loss of the lawsuit that followed ended VidAngel as it had existed, but they immediately pivoted to creating Angel Studios, using crowdfunding to finance content production.
What makes their approach particularly relevant for today’s entrepreneurs is how they turned the traditional studio model upside down. Rather than executives deciding which projects to greenlight, Angel Studios created a ‘Guild’ of over 250,000 members from 155+ countries who vote on and help fund projects. Their first major success, The Chosen, became a phenomenon by letting the audience drive decisions.
The results speak for themselves. While traditional studios struggle with expensive failures, Angel’s crowd-sourced approach has achieved a higher success rate by testing ideas with real audiences before committing major resources. It’s a model that prioritizes serving your market over impressing industry gatekeepers—a principle that applies whether you’re making movies or running a local business.
For entrepreneurs facing their own setbacks in today’s challenging climate, the Harmons offer a powerful reminder: sometimes the path forward isn’t around the obstacle, but through it. When you’re forced to rebuild, you have the freedom to reimagine everything.
