Over the past 15 years, sports and entertainment company Dude Perfect—which started as a YouTube channel where five best friends posted videos of trick shots in different sports—has grown into a media juggernaut with attendant cruises, toy lines, and TV deals. Its content has expanded to include highly produced biweekly videos where they break world records or attempt challenges—sometimes, with the help of famous guests.
In October, after raising more than $100 million from investment firm Highmount Capital, the company hired its first CEO, Andrew Yaffe. Yaffe joined the company after nearly a decade at the NBA where he ran social, digital, and original content. As he told us, “We have 60 million followers. The NBA has the largest following of any of the leagues [with] 20 million followers. If you told me I was going to leave for somewhere with triple the YouTube following, I wouldn’t have believed you.” Yaffe stopped by the Most Innovative Companies podcast to discuss building a family-friendly brand, expanding into new verticals, and delivering a personal connection to fans.
Some creators use YouTube as a stepping stone to make other types of content, like TV shows. That doesn’t seem to be your strategy. How do you view the platform and how to leverage it for growth?
Fifteen years ago the guys really prioritized YouTube, and they’ve done a great job building the largest sports channel on the platform. Every other Saturday, we post a video at 9 a.m.—it’s usually 30 minutes long and takes several weeks to produce and has A-list talent. The brand extensions all come off that YouTube presence. That’s how it’s been for the cruise that we ran, the tours we’ve done, and the toys we’ve launched.
YouTube is still the No. 1 streaming platform in America. At the NBA, 80% of our YouTube consumption was outside the U.S. So while it’s the biggest platform in America, it’s also, by far, the most accessible and biggest platform outside the U.S. I think that’s a huge opportunity for us. We’re doing a tour next summer, and it will be our first world tour. We’re doing 20 stops in the U.S. and five stops in Europe. We’ve sold out more than 50 NBA arenas over the course of our tours.
Besides that tour, what does the next stage for Dude Perfect look like?
Going forward, we’ll really begin to invest more deeply in some off-platform extensions. That might be new content and new formats on other platforms as well. We recently launched our own connected-TV app. We’ve also started bringing in other top creators who we think match the family-friendly vibe and ethos of our content. [Science and engineering YouTuber] Mark Rober is now on our app as well.
We’re looking at a number of new verticals. Our existing guys will likely be a part of it, but there’s likely going to be other talent as well who’s part of those areas. We only have five dudes right now, and there’s only a certain number of hours in their day. As we grow as a scalable media company, we might need other talent. There’s some things that I think are very natural extensions of who Dude Perfect as a brand or company is—the through lines are family, fun, and sports. There are also business opportunities, like our toy business, that might not require talent to operate.
You’ve mentioned going into verticals like gaming. Why?
It starts with our audience. My general sense is that 8- to 15-year-old boys like video games. So we’re just going to be really experimental. We have a channel, Dude Perfect Gaming where our guys play different games and see what resonates with our audience. We’ve heard a lot from our existing brand partners, “Hey, if you guys ever do something in gaming, we’d love to be a part of it because it’s such a natural and authentic fit.” There’s a lot of creators who need to ensure that every initiative is [delivering immediate returns]. But we are well-capitalized, and we get to take a step back and say, alright, over the next three, five, 10 years, how do we really build a big, sustainable media company? That doesn’t need to happen in month one or month two of every initiative.
What did you learn at the NBA that you’re bringing to this job?
Fans love highlights and game action, but they really want to be connected to personalities and quirks. [They want to see] funny moments off the court. Now, I’m living that. That is what we want to produce and deliver. We want to deliver a direct connection to our talent—that’s something we have a lot of control over and can facilitate in a way that was more difficult in a professional sport. We can also make it more predictable and more planned than a live sporting event. One of the great things about live sports is that you don’t know who’s going to win. But now, at the end of the day, I know who we’re going to be in every video. We will always be Dude Perfect.
How do you deliver the kind of personal connection you described?
[The audience wants] to see behind the scenes. They want real access. Over the last year and in the last several videos, we’ve started to share a lot more [content] around our misses. For a long time, people would ask if we were using AI, or if [the trick shots] were real. We had an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary that focused on [us making] the world’s highest basketball shot. It took a long, long time to make that shot. The values of work ethic, perseverance, and authenticity are squarely what we want our fans to feel and see.
There are some creators—Dude Perfect is one of them—who have license to do whatever they want. How do you decide what’s brand-appropriate as you grow?
We’re very focused on being trusted entertainment. I can’t tell you the number of parents I have talked to since I started who said the reason they love Dude Perfect is because they know that if their child or teenager is watching [us], they can trust everything in it. We take that incredibly seriously. We’re probably the only media company that hasn’t had sports-betting advertising over the past 10 years. There’s a whole list of things that we’d say makes sense for someone else, but not for us. We don’t want to violate the trust of those parents.
Why do you think the dudes wanted a CEO?
They’re five really close friends. I think about the fact that if I started a company with my five really close friends, we’d argue about a lot of stuff. To their credit, they realized that one person making a decision is more efficient than five. From day one during our interviews, they would say, “You’re the tiebreaker, you’re the one who makes the calls.”
In the office, do you go by Chief Executive Dude?
No, no I’m just CEO.