From Selling Potatoes to Scaling VidAngel: The Harmon Brother Nobody Talks About

If you know the Harmon Brothers, you know viral advertising. Squatty Potty. Purple Mattress. Poo-Pourri. You probably know Angel Studios too — the company behind The Chosen, Sound of Freedom, and Tuttle Twins. Neal, Jeffrey, Daniel, and Jordan Harmon built all of that.

But there's another Harmon brother. His name is Dallin, and his story doesn't start in a boardroom or on a film set. It starts with a truck full of potatoes and a family that couldn't afford to eat without selling them.

Less Than $10,000 a Year

Dallin grew up in Idaho with eight siblings. His mom once told him the lowest the family earned in a year was less than $10,000. His dad struggled with employment due to mental health challenges, so the kids worked — not as a character-building exercise, but to survive.

Before Dallin even left for a church mission, he'd been involved in four family businesses. The most memorable was selling Idaho russet potatoes door-to-door in Utah neighborhoods where people knew the Harmon name. The kids had a pitch. They'd knock, introduce themselves as the grandchildren of a well-known BYU professor, explain they were earning money for missions and college, and close with "How many boxes do you want?" It became a game. The record was seven boxes sold at a single door.

That childhood built something in every Harmon sibling — a tolerance for risk that most people never develop. As Dallin puts it: "I came into this world naked. And if I leave naked, it'll be okay." When you've already been poor and survived it, the fear of losing everything loses its grip.

Building What He Didn't Own

Dallin's professional path took him to Cove Security, where he and his brother Jordan co-founded and scaled the company from zero. An investor funded the operation while Dallin and Jordan ran it on salary. When Covid hit, their timing was perfect — demand for home security exploded while competitors couldn't adapt. They went from 9,000 accounts to nearly 40,000 in a single year. Lowe's, Costco, and Walmart came knocking.

But here's where Dallin's story diverges from the typical founder narrative. He and Jordan had a brutally honest conversation one day. They realized they were never going to have a meaningful equity stake in the company they'd built from nothing. They hadn't bootstrapped it. They'd been on salary the whole time. The upside wasn't theirs.

That realization — and the willingness to face it honestly — is what separates Dallin from a lot of founders who stay in situations that look good on paper but don't serve them long term. He got a coach. He opened himself up to leaving. And when the opportunity came to join VidAngel, he took it.

75% Back to the Employees

The VidAngel chapter is where Dallin's values really show up. When Bill Aho bought VidAngel's filtering assets, he did something almost unheard of in business: he kept 25% for himself and gave 75% back to the employees through profit sharing and ownership.

Dallin helped write the contracts and build the culture. He describes it as the middle ground between Netflix's cutthroat performance culture and the nepotism of a family-run shop — high expectations paired with genuine investment in people. They tripled the business in four years and won Best Place to Work in Utah three years running.

His takeaway is simple but hard to execute: good is the enemy of great, and great is the enemy of extraordinary. Every time he left something good for something potentially extraordinary, it paid off.

The Lie Founders Carry

Dallin now runs Scale Me, a coaching practice for founders and entrepreneurs. And in this episode, he flipped the script and coached me live.

He started by asking a simple question about focus — why I struggle to stay on task, why I get pulled into social media when I know I should be doing higher-leverage work. Then he dug deeper. And deeper. Until we landed on something I didn't expect to say out loud: that subconsciously, I believe the only way to be valued and appreciated is to be seen and recognized by the world.

It's not a comfortable thing to admit. But Dallin's framework is straightforward — if a belief generates feelings of sadness, embarrassment, or shame, it's a lie. Every time. No exceptions. And the first step to rewiring it is simply naming it out loud.

I don't know how many founders carry a version of that same lie — the belief that their worth is tied to visibility, to recognition, to being seen as important. But I'd guess it's most of us. And I'd guess it's quietly driving decisions we don't even realize we're making.

The Takeaway

Dallin Harmon didn't build the flashiest Harmon empire. He built something harder — the self-awareness to know when what he was building wasn't serving him, and the courage to walk away toward something that did. Whether it's potatoes, security systems, or the subconscious lies running your decisions, the lesson is the same: face the truth, name it, and then go build what actually matters.

Listen to the full episode: From Selling Potatoes to Scaling VidAngel | Dallin Harmon | Episode 55