What started as five friends filming trick shot videos 16 years ago has become a new media empire. Dude Perfect has more than 61 million followers on YouTube alone. CEO Andrew Yaffe talks with host Jeff Berman about how he and the dudes are leveraging the Disney playbook to build a vertically integrated business that spans content, products, events and maybe someday … their own theme park.
Table of Contents:
- Turning trick shots into a media empire
- How the NBA outperforms other sports leagues digitally
- Becoming the CEO of Dude Perfect
- Lessons from Disney
- How Dude Perfect decides who to collab with
- Protecting company culture while hyperscaling
- Dude Perfect CEO on how to create intensely loyal fans
- What's next for Dude Perfect
Transcript:
Is Dude Perfect the next Disney?
Andrew Yaffe: What are the types of deals that you would and wouldn’t do? Is this something that would be over the line for you?
Jeff Berman: As with most of summer in Frisco, Texas, it was a sweltering August day. Andrew Yaffe was peppering the creators of the wildly popular YouTube channel Dude Perfect with as many tough questions as he could think of.
YAFFE: If I’m here to grow the business, we might have to do things that a year ago we might not have wanted to do. How would we think through this? Five years from now, what do you guys want to be doing?
BERMAN: This was the final stage of his job interviews, and Andrew had to ask himself, would he really leave his role as a top executive at the NBA to become the first CEO of Dude Perfect? The YouTubers are best known for funny trick shot videos.
Dude Perfect video:
How did you catch that? I was making sure not to miss.
Today, it’s every man for himself, and each dude has three lives. Last man standing wins.
Nice job, Caitlin. Welcome to “50 Ways to Make a Three-Pointer.”
We built a 1,000 mile an hour baseball cannon, and today we’re going to see if we can hit the world’s fastest pitch.
BERMAN: Dude Perfect is growing an incredible media empire. They have more than 60 million subscribers on YouTube alone, but working for the NBA had been Andrew’s dream.
YAFFE: We were the first sports league on YouTube, the first sports league on Instagram, the first sports league on Snap. Pick your platform.
BERMAN: And it’s a challenger’s mindset, right?
YAFFE: Yes.
BERMAN: It’s an insurgent mindset.
YAFFE: It is.
[THEME MUSIC]
BERMAN: I’m Jeff Berman, your host.
This week on Masters of Scale, Dude Perfect CEO Andrew Yaffe reveals how five friends shooting trick shot videos has turned into the very model of a modern major media empire.
Andrew, welcome to Masters of Scale.
YAFFE: Thanks so much for having me.
Turning trick shots into a media empire
BERMAN: I have been really looking forward to this conversation. For the handful of folks in our audience who do not know what Dude Perfect is, what is Dude Perfect?
YAFFE: Dude Perfect was originally five friends in their backyard at Texas A&M who started making funny videos, usually something to do with sports and trick shots. Now, 16 years later, we’re the largest sports count on YouTube. We have 61 million subscribers.
BERMAN: It’s not a small number.
YAFFE: No. It’s funny. Before this, I was at the NBA, and we had about 20 million YouTube subscribers when I was there.
BERMAN: Which is by far the biggest of the American sports leagues, right?
YAFFE: And everywhere I would go, I’d say I have the biggest sports account on YouTube, and now turns out I was lying.
BERMAN: Right, right, right.
YAFFE: And have one much larger.
BERMAN: 3X bigger.
YAFFE: But what the guys have built is really something much larger than that account. We now have close to 150 million followers across all our platforms. We have really meaningful products business.
BERMAN: Consumer products.
YAFFE: Consumer products, and experiences business as well where people get to really come and experience the brand. We do a tour every summer, so we’re about to go on tour.
BERMAN: And what size venues are you doing in this tour?
YAFFE: We’re NBA and NHL arenas.
BERMAN: These are not small.
YAFFE: 20,000 seat venues. And over the course of this tour, we’re going to sell close to a quarter of a million tickets throughout the U.S. at very, very meaningful ticket prices, average ticket prices that rival an NBA or an NHL game. And it’s a really meaningful business driver for us, but it’s also an amazing way for us to engage our fans and our audience. It’s amazing that they started as five friends in their backyard as a YouTube channel, and now they’ve taken this step, and it’s something so much bigger than that.
BERMAN: Yeah. And I think when most people think about YouTube creators, there’s like MrBeast and everyone else. This is really a new version of a big media company, right, with all the different elements of what you might find in a media company?
YAFFE: We hope to think so. The guys raised a very meaningful amount of money.
BERMAN: They reported $100 million.
YAFFE: Nine figures of capital last year. They brought me in to run the company. I’ve hired now an executive team and a leadership team, and we’ve really started to staff the team up. I employed 25. Six months later, we’re at over 40, and the goal is to get to close to 70 by the end of 2025. We can do nearly everything that a big media company can do, and we’re vertically integrated. We’ve got our own production team. We’ve got our own editing team. We’ve got talent. We’ve got sales. We’ve got marketing all in-house, whether it’s studios, whether it’s experiences, whether it’s consumer products, whether it’s TV. Those are all things that little old us in Frisco, Texas, we’re able to do and able to do it at scale.
BERMAN: How do you become CEO of Dude Perfect. How does that happen?
YAFFE: So probably started about 10 years ago, I was the head of strategy for the NBA. And one of the areas that I saw there was just immense growth and immense opportunity was in the content around the game. I took over as our head of content about five years ago and oversaw all of our social media, our app and streaming service programming, and our documentaries, films business. And it really gave me insight into how the next generation in particular is consuming content and sports content specifically. And subsequently I also saw that Dude Perfect raised quite a bit of money, and it piqued my interest and I’d actually met the guys at a YouTube brand cast.
BERMAN: Which is the equivalent of Upfronts where YouTube presents its advertiser pitch for the year ahead.
YAFFE: I had spoken and they had spoken and Venus Williams had spoken in the green room, had gotten to chat with them and really understood that they had a vision to build something really big and meaningful and were really serious about the business and just really interesting great guys.
How the NBA outperforms other sports leagues digitally
BERMAN: Before we get to you actually coming aboard as CEO, I want to just drill into the NBA for a minute because I led digital at the National Football League. I think popularly, people think of the NFL as much bigger than the NBA, but on the digital platforms or the social-first digital platforms certainly and globally, the NBA is a whole other deal when compared to the NFL because you just talk about the mindset at the NBA and what you were doing there that built the NBA so much bigger than the NFL on these platforms.
YAFFE: Yeah. And I can take very little credit for it, but the first thing was an insight that reaching these international audiences and global audiences matters a lot. And the commissioner many years ago decided to open the aperture a little bit on what rights were available to other creators, what we were going to post ourselves on social, and really empowered us to be the first on every platform. We were the first sports league on YouTube, the first sports league on Instagram, the first sports league on Snap. Pick your platform.
BERMAN: It’s a challenger’s mindset, right?
YAFFE: Yes.
BERMAN: It’s an insurgent mindset.
YAFFE: It is. And I think the other thing is we recognize how popular basketball is globally, and that this is an amazing way when games are on in the middle of the night in Europe to reach our audience there and to provide alternatives to the live game which otherwise that audience might not have and they might gravitate towards soccer or another sport that is in primetime. By the time I left, 80% of NBA consumption on YouTube happened outside the U.S. It is a massive rapidly growing audience.
And then domestically, I think what we saw was it’s a totally different audience, and there isn’t a lot of evidence to suggest that social was cannibalizing. In reality, the trends were what the trends were, and you were seeing Major League Baseball took a very different approach in the middle of the last decade and didn’t allow nearly as much content on social. And you weren’t seeing youth viewership increase for them. You were actually seeing youth viewership decrease at a faster rate than you were for the NBA. And so my consistent argument was we’re actually engaging that audience, and we don’t think they’re substituting for the live game, but it’s making them feel connected to our sport. And if you look at the average audience age of the NBA, which is a decade younger than the NFL in the U.S., it’s hard to draw a direct line between those two things. But I have to think there’s a pretty strong connection that the availability and the willingness to engage with the next generation of fans where they are, where they’re naturally consuming content, has a lot to do with that.
Becoming the CEO of Dude Perfect
BERMAN: All right, so you have these experiences and then you meet the Dude Perfect guys at Brandcast. What happens? Because you’re in one of the very best jobs in all of sport in America.
YAFFE: Yes.
BERMAN: Most people might say, “I got it pretty good. I’m not even going to think about leaving this thing.”
YAFFE: Yup.
BERMAN: Why’d you go to Dude Perfect?
YAFFE: I can confirm, I did have it pretty good. I was in a very fortunate position where there was a lot of interest in NBA content and so people would reach out about opportunities. And usually they would be something big and really established or early stage and very risky.
Just on a pure first principles level, there are not a lot of opportunities that are really well established, 16 years of history, consistent growth that are really in day 1 of their business journey. And from the first conversation, it was very clear that the things required to make this successful are top-notch brand, top-notch talent, capital, and expertise. They had the first three. And if I could provide the fourth, there’s really a lot of opportunity for us to build what Dude Perfect is and can be. And so there were very, very few things I was going to leave my role for, but this was one where it had the global brand presence, the amazing track record of success, but just so much opportunity to, as I saw how creators were going to grow, how YouTube is growing and the untapped potential that we have that I just think that the sky’s the limit for what we’re going to be able to build.
BERMAN: The one real risk factor that I would see in making this jump is these guys have been at it a long time.
YAFFE: Yep.
BERMAN: They’ve been doing it their way. I’m going to come in here and I don’t want to be the suit who’s telling them what to do and how to do what they’re doing. How did you get comfortable that this was the right fit and that was a risk worth taking?
YAFFE: You’re spot on, and it was something I spent a lot of time thinking about and talking to the guys about. We spent days together just talking through how would you think about this situation? What are your real goals and aspirations to ensure that we’re completely aligned in what we’re trying to build? And I came away from that incredibly convinced that these guys are committed. They’re committed for the long term, and they want to build a long-term company for the right reasons.
BERMAN: I want to dive in one level deeper here. Dude Perfect’s based in Frisco, Texas. They have an unbelievable facility campus.
YAFFE: Yup.
BERMAN: Right? Was there a point where you went down there and had the come to Jesus conversation, the ‘let’s ask the hard questions?’
YAFFE: Yeah. I went down, it was early in August. If you know anything about Frisco, Texas, it was 108 and 100% humidity. So I wanted to make the conditions as difficult as possible to ensure we were aligned. One, I went to a shoot day with them because it’s easy to say you’re going to behave a certain way or you treat your staff a certain way. Having been around this business for a long time, it’s very different. People, especially on 108 degree days, we were shooting outside, behave very differently when the lights are on. And I wanted to see how they walk their talk when dealing with their production staff, when coming up with creative ideas.
And so I spent three or four hours just observing, hanging out, watching how they shoot content, how they tweak ideas when something goes wrong, how they adjust on the fly, how they get other staff members involved and came away just floored at how innovative their approach is in the sense that they take the best of the creative world, but it’s really professionalized in that we have a full on production team and a dedicated art team and really full scale support. And so it’s not the five of them and one person with a phone. This is real production, and they treat it in a really serious and professional way. So I came away very impressed by that, and afterwards sat down with them over a meal, and I asked really hard questions.
BERMAN: What are some of the questions you asked?
YAFFE: What are the types of deals that you would and wouldn’t do? Is this something that would be over the line for you? And tell me why. And if I’m here to grow the business, we might have to do things that a year ago we might not have wanted to do. How would we think through this? How would we assess that problem? The brand is really important. What does that truly mean? Give me more words for what the brand is. Five years from now, what do you guys want to be doing? Do you still want to be doing a tour? How much do you want to be in front of the camera? Do you want to be behind the camera? How involved in the business? Which pieces of the business?
We probably spent three or four hours just talking through that. And they asked me a lot of questions, I asked them a lot of questions. We talked a lot about life more broadly because this is really making a bet on them as people as much as I am them as creators, and so I wanted them to really know me and who I am and what I stand for. I wanted to know who they are and what they stand for. And I can say now it’s almost a year since that sweaty day in August, and they’ve lived up to everything, and I hope I have as well.
BERMAN: What’s the question they asked that you had the hardest time answering?
YAFFE: There was a lot of conversation around what type of business we want to build, and the guys are very clear-eyed and motivated that they want to build something sustainable and long-term, and so they asked me a lot of questions around if a great opportunity comes along in two or three years and we can multiply the business, how do you want to handle that?
BERMAN: Meaning someone wants to buy Dude Perfect?
YAFFE: Something along those lines.
BERMAN: Right. Netflix, ESPN, someone says, “We just want to own the whole thing.”
YAFFE: And so we, I think, spent a lot of time just really aligning on what we want to do here is build something that has content and products and experiences that our kids and grandkids can enjoy. And from our investors, to me, to them, I think there’s total alignment that long-term is the focus. And they press me on that, I press them on that. And it’s really important for me as a first-time CEO, I didn’t want to take a role where I was going to come in and spend the first 18 months scrambling to raise funds or looking to gussy up the company to flip it. That’s not interesting to me as a leader. I want to build, and I wanted to build something that will be sustainable, that is a real company. We’re significantly increasing our revenue year over year. We’re highly profitable. We are a real company, and that’s the type of business I wanted to lead. Clearly they were happy with how I answered the questions, but we went deep on truly what motivates us and how do we want to align for the long term.
BERMAN: More with Andrew Yaffe on how to build on the Disney playbook to develop the most intensely loyal fans, expand your brand, and maybe, just maybe, someday launch your own theme park.
[AD BREAK]
Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel. We don’t have 61 million subscribers like Dude Perfect, but maybe if you go subscribe and perhaps tell a friend, you’ll help us get just a little bit closer.
Lessons from Disney
YAFFE: I call our main channel on YouTube the beating heart of the business. That needs to stay healthy. That needs to stay growing. That is where people find us. But from there, we really spend a lot of time thinking about how do we create businesses that reinforce each other, and that’s ultimately what I think Walt, if we’re on a first-name basis, naturally would say, and what differentiated it is the 2020s term is the flywheel, but that’s really what he had drawn, right?
BERMAN: It’s a virtuous cycle.
YAFFE: Yes.
BERMAN: Everything feeds everything else.
YAFFE: That a kid who visits Disney World is much more likely to watch a film or watch a TV show and certainly buy an article of clothing. And that’s how we think about entering new businesses is not, hey, there’s a pot of money over here. It’s how do we do something that is truly authentic to our brand that’s going to reinforce the love that that 12-year-old boy has for Dude Perfect as a brand. And so we’re not going to go chase dollars. We’re going to say what are long-term sustainable businesses that we can invest in to grow the overall cycle of our business? And that’s how we approached it.
BERMAN: What are you learning from Disney about what they’re doing digitally, and what should Disney be learning from you?
YAFFE: I think about it as if you asked Walt now what he would’ve wished for in 1957, I think he would’ve said, “I’d love to know who is watching this stuff and who is visiting my parks and who is buying my stuff.” It’s way easier to build that at the beginning than it is at the end. And I think you’ve seen Disney invest a lot. And they’ve done a pretty good job in terms of all their data infrastructure and capturing data at the parks and the streaming service and the cruise lines and content and try to integrate how are people who consume Disney Plus, how do we get them to visit the parks? And if someone loves Lilo and Stitch, get them to the Lilo and Stitch experience.
But it’s really hard to do that on top of 50 years, 70 years of analog infrastructure. So as we build new initiatives, we’re in a very fortunate place that we’re starting from scratch and can embed an understanding of who is our audience, what do they want, what experience are they having, into the process. And so that’s something we’re spending a lot of time in some of the capital we raised to do, which is really understand who our audience is and what they want. We learn from, I think, some of the things they’re doing now and some of the things they probably wish they would’ve done 50 years ago when it probably wasn’t quite feasible.
How Dude Perfect decides who to collab with
BERMAN: If I were Rob Manfred who I think is still the commissioner of Major League Baseball, I think I’d be reaching out to you and saying, “How do we work together so you can make baseball more popular?” Are you fielding these kinds of calls? What do these conversations look like with the big established leagues and the insurgent leagues that need to speak differently to these audiences to generate more popularity?
YAFFE: We are. We’re having a lot of conversations with leagues and teams and athletes. I know this from my last role that there’s a lot of stress and questions around how do people under 25 consume sports? Do they not like sports? If you look at the data at a very surface level, your interpretation would be kids don’t like sports anymore.
BERMAN: Because when you go dive into the ratings for live sports, it’s in a decline.
YAFFE: Live game consumption under the age of 25 has fallen off a cliff.
BERMAN: They’d rather watch a favorite creator do commentary on the sport than watch the sport itself.
YAFFE: Yes. And so we get a lot of interest from leagues, teams, athletes to help them reach that audience. So we’ve worked with Steph Curry. We worked with Caitlin Clark.
BERMAN: Sweet.
YAFFE: We’re always happy to have the conversation and take the call and find something cool to do, but our bar is pretty high, and we have to keep it that high because that’s what our audience expects of us. So we worked with Major League Baseball and Sony to help launch MLB The Show, their video game. And for that video we wanted to put our flair on it, so we built a machine that gets you a baseball at 1,000 miles an hour, which actually broke the sound barrier. We didn’t do that in the video because it was dangerous.
But Tyler, one of our guys, tried to get a hit off a 200 mile an hour fastball, and he did. And it was an amazing relationship because MLB and Sony had so much fun with it that they ended up putting Paul Skenes’ 200 mile an hour fastball into the game. And I thought it was just an amazing example of really awesome partnerships that aren’t like brand deals where we’re doing an ad read. It’s how do we mutually benefit our audiences and do something really fun that is uniquely us, that nobody else would make sense to build a cannon that can fire a baseball 1,000 miles an hour. And seeing the audience reaction to incorporating it back into the game as IP. It’s a really cool example of ways that properties, and in that case, a video game, wanted to work with us to help promote and reach a new audience.
Protecting company culture while hyperscaling
BERMAN: The team is more than doubling, almost tripling in size, when you came on, to where you’re going. How do you think about maintaining culture where the 22-year-old who you just hired, who has that wildly creative next-level idea feels as empowered to share it and contribute as one of the guys?
YAFFE: Yeah, it’s a critical piece for us. I think it honestly starts primarily with recruiting. We work on it every day, but it’s hard to build culture. It is easier to recruit behaviors and recruit values. And so we spend a lot of time in the interviewing and evaluation process, looking at, hey, why do you want to come work here and what is it that motivates you? Even though we’re a small corporate company, I came in and defined our values and they spell out “PERFECT.”
BERMAN: What are they?
YAFFE: Passion, excitement, resilience, faith and family, excellence, competition, and trust.
BERMAN: Wow, awesome.
YAFFE: That’s why I use it in my mind, because it’s to remember it.
BERMAN: That’s strong, and fun is not the F.
YAFFE: No.
BERMAN: I was always going to guess that.
YAFFE: No, we left that with excitement. And this is new. It’s new. We’re a small company that’s never really had that corporate flair before and so we’re learning as we go and seeing what works for us, but it is something that we spend an inordinate amount of time talking about, especially as our founders had a conversation with one of them about it this morning that for 16 years, he’s interviewed every single person who joined the company, and that’s not true anymore. And I’ve interviewed every single person who’s joined the company for the last six months. That’s not going to be true over the next 18 months. And how do we scale the culture?
This is when it gets hard. They’ve built an amazing culture, and we want to make sure we maintain and evolve it to where it needs to continue to grow and what would make sense for a 70 or a 100-person company that might not for a 25-person company. And it’s so critical for us too because we don’t have a playbook. So I’m very open with my team that I’ve never done this before. I’m a first-time CEO. And no, I haven’t built a creator brand into a media powerhouse because it’s never happened. We are the first company going through this. So just because I sit up here and say something, it doesn’t mean I’m right. Definitely doesn’t mean I’m right because we’re all figuring this out together. I would hope that we’ve hired a team that has more experience than me in a lot of those areas. Otherwise, I’ve hired poorly. So you tell me when I’m wrong. I want that.
Dude Perfect CEO on how to create intensely loyal fans
BERMAN: Yeah. Andrew, when I was at the NFL, like you at the NBA, it’s such a privileged place to work because you can call almost anyone, and they want to talk to you just because of where you work. And so when I was at the NFL, I sought out some anthropologists and ethnographers trying to understand fandom. And I’ll never forget, one of them drew a set of concentric circles and said at the center are the people who at the NFL literally engage in face painting rituals, chanting rituals, indoctrination rituals, feeding rituals truly. And at the outer circle, the people who just barely see you as they’re thumbing by on Instagram or TikTok, whatever it might be. And the key is to super serve that core while you’re identifying the funnels that move people most efficiently from those outer circles toward the inner circles. I’m curious, when you look at Dude Perfect, is that how you think about it? And what are you trying to move people from those outer circles into your most avid fan base?
YAFFE: That’s a great question. I should have called you 10 years ago at the NBA. You would’ve saved me some work. We did some work at the NBA when I was trying to understand our international fan base when I was running strategy, and we did a focus group of teenagers in Mexico, and we asked them to bring their most treasured sports item, their most treasured sports product. And so I was expecting soccer jerseys of their favorite team and soccer ball or baseball bat from their little league. Four of the kids brought a Space Jam stuffy or doll or a piece of Space Jam memorabilia, and it was this eye-opening moment for me how influential other content is in driving fandom. And it was the exact same question of how do you get people into that outer ring, and it was like, “Oh, Space Jam.”
These are Mexican teenagers who weren’t alive when Space Jam came out, and yet that is their biggest cultural connection still to sports, is an American movie starring Michael Jordan that was made in the mid ’90s. It was this eye-opening moment of like, wow, we really just need to get people to connect with the sport broadly. That’s how you get people in the outer ring. And you’re never going to get someone to watch a Tuesday night regular season game if you don’t start there.
For us, I do think about it very similarly, and YouTube is an amazing tool for this approach where we do a video with Steph Curry. You’re going to reach a whole different audience, and we can see it in the data. That demographic is different. The geography is different. Their interests are different. And that is immensely powerful for us to get into the consideration set of, oh wow, these guys create cool stuff. We then have a hardcore fan base who watches both on YouTube, our app, comes to our shows, that is the bottom of the funnel for us, in particular the shows. And so we are trying to migrate people from social to YouTube, YouTube to show, get them into a higher LTV area. But we’re also trying to grow top of the funnel, and that’s where I think we do some of the splashier stuff. We’re very mindful about balancing both those things and trying to keep the top of the funnel vibrant.
The last thing I would say is for a family business, it can be more challenging, and this was something I pressed on a lot when I started, which is our audience by definition ages out. And one of the founders said to me, “Yeah, we have eight to 14.” And then often the kids go on and they are fans of Barstool or Overtime. And what’s funny is now a lot of those people become parents and they’re back. And they have kids again and they come to the shows and they come up to the guys or to me and say, “I started following these guys when I was in college.” And it’s an amazing circle.
We’re very intentional about that, and I actually view it as an asset that we’re not for mass. We’re not going to undermine our brand or the trust that comes along with that just to get 25 to 34 year olds. We have a big, very, very sizable, especially on YouTube, audience that is in the 14 to 34. They’re probably a little bit more casual. They’re not necessarily coming to our show as frequently, but we’re not going to become edgy. We don’t think that’s natural and authentic to us, which is ultimately what our audience loves about us.
What’s next for Dude Perfect
BERMAN: I want you to imagine we are back here five years from now. And while the intraday intraweek may have felt like a rollercoaster, the trend line has been really strong up into the right. What’s different about the Dude Perfect business that you’re telling me about five years down the road?
YAFFE: Five years from now, I think Dude Perfect will be associated with the brand rather than the founders. You’ll see other IP underneath the Dude Perfect umbrella, you’ll see other talent underneath the Dude Perfect Umbrella, and you’ll see a number of other products and experiences that don’t look like what we’re creating today.
BERMAN: Not a small thing to go beyond your original talent, the original dudes, the OGs. What does that look like? How do you make decisions, and how do you avoid misstepping with your audience? Is that bringing talent on and trying them out first? Is that curating them on the app and seeing what the response is? What does that look like?
YAFFE: That’s something we spend a lot of time debating. I think the first answer is one of the beauties of digital content is you can test a lot of things. Somebody started as a social media intern, and now runs their social media, has become a stand-in in a number of videos, and the audience loves him. And to have that, he’s 21 or 22, juxtaposed against their older guys and have him be the Gen Z representative is just hilarious, especially given who our audience is. And so we’re testing a number of folks like that.
I also think as we launch new verticals: gaming, and we’ve talked about launching an outdoors channel. You’ll see people who are native to those categories, and that’s how we’ll expand the content umbrella too so that it’s natural. And then there’ll still always be people who are, again, of our values and our ethos, but our real experts and our representatives of us in those new areas. And we know that we’re not going to bat 1,000, we’re not going to be perfect, but we want to try it and assess, but we’re getting regular feedback on what’s working. And we have so many canvases, whether it’s social media or other channels to test on, that we can pretty rapidly get a sense of who might work out well for us. It always starts with sports. It always starts with competition. It starts with fun. That starts with bigger and more exciting, but it might look different in terms of what sport that is or actually allowing our audience to participate. Right now, our show is still you sit in the audience and watch. We think there’s a lot of interest in actually experiencing the brand.
BERMAN: Does that mean I’m coming to a Dude Perfect theme park?
YAFFE: I describe the theme park as our North Star. I think there’re a lot of steps on the experiential journey to a theme park, but it’s very possible. So those are the sorts of things that I think five years from now we will have delivered for our fans, which is very exciting.
BERMAN: Thank you for being with us.
YAFFE: Thank you for having me.
BERMAN: Dude Perfect is such an exceptional example of excelling in extremes. Their ideas are goofy, but the production quality is anything but. It is seriously good and their work is wildly creative, and increasingly, it’s data-driven. Sixteen years in and it feels like they’re just getting started. Andrew Yaffe and the team at Dude Perfect are rewriting the rules of the game and it’s very much worth keeping a close eye on all that’s coming next. I’m Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening.