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My First Million · 2 min instead of 1 h 3 m · Oct 7, 2026

A glitch like early YouTube ads gives you a beachhead

JH

Jeff Harmon

Founder, Angel Studios

  • Shaan PuriHost · Co-host, My First Million

    Sold Bebo to Twitch in 2019; co-founded the crypto newsletter Milk Road.

About this segment

Harmon explains how Orabrush rode YouTube's brand-new ad platform, paying under a penny per view. That early edge gave them data to optimize as costs climbed.

From “Every successful startup starts with this one advantage”, Oct 7, 2026. Watch the full episode

“the glitch allowed us to get what one entrepreneur, Paul Alstrom, who wrote the book Nail It and Scale It, he calls it your beachhead.”
JHJeff Harmonat 9:36 · My First Million9:36

Takeaways

  1. Ads under a penny a view turned $1 of cost into $2-3 of sales
  2. Being first gave the data needed to get efficient before costs rose
  3. A glitch is your beachhead: a small foothold you can expand from
Watch 2:13 from 8:30

In this episode

Full episode

  1. 8:30A glitch like early YouTube ads gives you a beachhead2:13

  2. 21:10Letting viewers skip ads earned the attention to raise $11M3:01Up next

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 8:42

    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. And our glitch was 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 was like the early days of AdSense.

  2. 9:10

    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.

  3. 9:47

    And so the glitch allowed us to get what one entrepreneur, Paul Alstrom, who wrote the book Nail It and Scale It, 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.

  4. 10:14

    So you put 500 bucks into making the ad. So the peak of Aura Brush, you guys did what in revenue? or how many companies did you sell? 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.