Dude Perfect on their path to Billion-Dollar YouTube Brand

28:30Right. Like this is just the honest for us, for Dude Perfect. We used to be able to make a five minute video that was trick shots and it was very hard to do them and it took a lot of time. I remember. But the edit was not as hard, even though we spent a lot of time on it and it didn't take as long to edit it just because it's a five minute video. Sure. with all the changes in YouTube. Like, we get it. We're making longer and longer videos. Also, people are just asking us to make longer and longer videos. Well, obviously, you have a longer video. It's going to take longer to edit it. Then your graphics are going to get better.

29:02Your quality is going to get better. You're going to add more cameras. And so the reality is, yes, we're putting out a little more content than we used to, but you would think if you go from a one-person, then two-person, then three-person team to 10-person team that we're putting out a lot more content, and we're really not yet. The bar is just raising. The bar gets higher, but the issue is taste, right? Because I assume you guys are still the final watch. Totally. Like you're not putting out content without you guys watching it. Yeah. And I even have been with you guys when you're workshopping thumbnails.

29:30So you're still making the thumbnails, right? So it's like, that is one part. Marques Brownlee has a great, he talks about how like running YouTube channel, it's like, think of it as like an octopus. You can like cut off some of the tentacles and give them to other people. But there's like a heart that you just can't let go of. That's like, you have to figure out what makes it. And I feel like a lot of times it's like the ideation and the packaging of the videos are actually really at the center. Even when I think about how you guys scale, I'm sure this term came up, but like key person risk. Did this come up?

30:04Yeah. Right in Raising Capital, where it means like, what happens in the world where you guys aren't doing this? Does this thing still run? And in today's world, I imagine on the content, it's outside of you guys being in front of the camera, Even just coming up with the ideas and operating a YouTube channel is deeply you guys. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. That is an area we've made some improvement on. I mean, we definitely have a creative team who helps, but they've seen that we still care, right? And so you're right. It doesn't run without us. It's gotten better without us, but we're still very involved in that.

30:39And so, yeah, if we weren't present, that would shake it up quite a bit. I was going to say, I think one thing we're very excited about is to bring in other talent that is either homegrown that we're finding when they're younger and helping them develop. Or, okay, this person already exists. Maybe they're doing their own thing that we want to bring them in to help us run Do Perfect Golf, Do Perfect Outdoors, whatever it is. And I think that there's a different mindset. Yes, we have a creative team that is amazing. I think there's a different untapped potential of a creator mindset. y 'all know that's a different creative mindset than than like anything else out there so if we can bring other people in for their channels that we will help oversee and pop in and be a part of it but it's their thing i we all feel really strongly that that can work and i think that is like super scalable you know like there's only so much time that we have that we can film especially for our main channel it's scalable so long as you guys are comfortable that it has a dude perfect brand on it.

31:39You might not watch it all before it goes out. 100%. And you may not like it completely. You have to get comfortable giving feedback after it's already live versus seeing it before, right? Which is a different shift in creators. We've started to taste it with the Do Perfect app where we have people on the team who watch every piece of content from every creator, no matter how trusted they are, before it goes up. Same with the ads. That does get harder and harder the more content you have and we're not the ones watching all that content before it goes up to your point so as long as you have the right people doing it yeah and the right people you know making sure that it's still trusted by the families that we're building this whole thing on then you're right it can work but it's definitely not easy i heard you guys say that you know you don't want to be in your mid 50s doing trick shots or screaming at the camera or doing overtime time but when that moment comes what is the plan who's on the channel we've said we don't want to have to be right like i think it's an important distinction distinction that we've talked about is like we love doing this i mean it's what you said too and we talk about it often like doing this allows us to have some of the coolest experiences on earth right like there there is no setting that aside i mean we've got kobe went to space he wants to say it right now he wants to say, for example, I went to space.

33:00We've had a graphic over his head the whole time. Astronaut. I'll say it for him. He went to space. I was actually thinking that the team got to go to the Olympics. That was a very cool experience. Sure, space. I'm glad you guys were thinking it. But seeing the Earth in its entirety. The experiences that come along with this type of job are unbelievable. We would love to be able to still be involved. We don't want the whole thing to hinge on us being on the treadmill every other week. If we didn't make an incredible video, the whole company and all these employees and people who've moved their families to be here are hinging on that moment.

33:34And I think that matters. What are some of the, like, if we can just dig into the content right now, like thing that I've found really amazing is in the, in the over, you know, over decade that I've known you guys and watch your content, like, you know, I have a eight-year-old nephew who's like all in on DP. And, you know, the amazing thing is you guys also released your videos on Saturdays. I assume that's intentional because it creates this vibe of like, from what I remember was Saturday morning cartoons. There's like a Saturday morning, let's turn on Dude Perfect when it's on. Is the audience aging up with you guys or is it just that more families are discovering Dude Perfect?

34:17And then in line with that, what are the formats you guys are producing and how do you think those have expanded the brand from trick shots? Yeah, for sure. the kind of way that we describe it internally is you know we have obviously the like middle school elementary school boy is like the primo like dude perfect seven eight nine ten year old most diehard that expands to the girls that are more sports oriented or even like with overtime we expanded our female audience a ton that goes now expands to the family things like that but what's crazy is like we had guys that we were at A &M with when we first started making our videos who now have kids that are watching Dude Perfect.

35:02And so we've seen like that one generation turnover of Dude Perfect fan. And I think, you know, as the kids grow up and they go to high school and college, they kind of leave and maybe go to like Barstool or whatever it is for their college years. They start getting married, having kids. And then now they're like, oh, my kid's going to watch Dude Perfect. It's like this cycle that starts over again. and I think each piece of content that we have relates to a little bit different audience. And so like I mentioned, the overtime is a little bit more male-female balanced. Stereotypes skew much older audience because it's very shareable with your friends and like we do new parent stereotypes.

35:37There's obviously not a ton of kids that can relate to that. The battle videos is just personality-based. That wasn't supposed to be a joke. It's just... They're visualizing. Yeah, I just started visualizing. there should be zero kids. Theoretically. My kids are very well versed. That's great. The trick shot videos people still want to see, which is we've kind of phased out of that, but there'll be a trick shot video from here very soon. So I think each piece of content that we come out with tends to lean a little bit to a different audience, and I think we're still very much trying to come up with new content, like the Quest video.

36:19the baseball, the race that Cody's about to do. We've got a few more of those planned. And then I think from there, it's really going to be the branching out to the other channels that we focus on spending time and effort into really turning those into something, at least for the first two years that we're still pretty heavily involved in until we feel like those are in a good enough place to where it either becomes even better without our involvement or it's like, hey, it frees us up to now go try that with something else. What are the new channels and what can we expect to see roll out? Still figuring that out right now.

36:51We had a big meeting yesterday about some of the ones that we feel like are areas to win. We talked about it a little bit earlier, but like the gaming space, I feel like it's just kind of a questionable one for parents. For me, my four and five-year-old love Minecraft. They love watching those videos on YouTube. There's just, if I'm not sitting there with them, I can't let them just watch gaming videos on YouTube. Sure. So if there was a Dude Perfect Gaming channel, I think that'd be awesome. It would immediately give validation to that channel that parents, hey, go let your kids watch it. Not an issue.

37:20Golf, we're all huge golfers. The golf space is something that I don't think when we started off, you really could have been successful 15 years ago with a dedicated golf channel. And now it's just mind blowing how many golf creators are doing very well on YouTube. Really good job. And it's something that we're all very passionate about. And so I just think that would be a fun, that would feel kind of like starting over for us where it's like that excitement of the new videos kind of comes back in that realm. uh outdoor space is something i'm super passionate about um obviously some of these other guys have gotten into it more recently but i think that'd be a lot of fun especially with our kids growing up and being able to introduce them to the outdoors and uh we have kind of a concept of taking out other people so like taking mark rober out on his first hunting or fishing trip yeah and letting him experience the outdoors for the first time and the viewers following along with that i think would be a lot of fun.

38:13Dude Perfect Fitness, one of our buddies that's in a lot of our stereotype videos is hilarious. And he's done a bunch of stuff in that area already. So we've had conversations with him about, man, what would that look like if we kind of gave you free reign over a Dude Perfect Fit app or running like kids camps and stuff like that. So it's still very much in like the brainstorming phase. And we've again, been kind of waiting for Andrew to get in here to help shape. Hey, what if we gave you a list of eight? Prioritization. Yeah, ruthless. Ruthless. Prioritize that. There's two others we got to mention because that list is amazing and these two have to happen as well.

38:54Dude Perfect Star Wars? Dude Perfect Kids. Oh yeah. Has to happen. Dude Perfect Junior, whatever it is, and then Girl Perfect, whatever you want to call it. The amount of times people have asked us for either of those two things over the course of forever so tbd on whether we're selecting all these ourselves we're talking about doing basically a reality show on our main channel to fill out some of these rosters we were talking about that on the way here we were like you could do like a making the band yeah you guys remember that show yeah yeah because i think we've had you know which again huge honor appreciate that anyone would think this but you know a bunch of people comment over the years man i would love to be the sixth dude are they ever going to add another guy that whole vibe of join the team spring Bring Sean back.

39:31Yeah, just bring him in. Come on, Sean. I love it. Leave your doctor's office. Come on back. The fact that we're, like, actually at the point where... The fact that we're at the point where we may actually be adding some extra layers to do perfect, we think that is obviously a fun opportunity for people to, like, literally be a part of do perfect. So we'll see how that pans out, but that's going to be fun. So Andrew's job is to come and be like, hey, guys, this all sounds great. Yep. Why don't we start with one? Yeah. Maybe two. Again, they're going to put a model behind you. They're going to go after it.

40:02That's just content. You always match your notebook to your shirt, by the way? Yeah, I do. You do? And I knew you were going to mention it. Gosh, that is hot. A mustard yellow shoe. That's very common color. Yeah, it's distracting. No, it's not distracting. It's just nice, complimentary. Yeah, that's hard to do. A lot of people go shoes. He goes notebook. I go notebook. Also, I'm not a perfect match here. Oh, but it is in the green family. It's kind of a combo of the two. Your pages are his code. Your pages are yellow. My pages are yellow. Yeah. There's nothing in here. Okay. It's just a problem.

40:31So in DP Kids, is that suggestive of animation? Well, two separate things. Two separate things. We absolutely want to do a Dude Perfect animated series. We would love for our own kids to watch it. We've had a million people ask us for it. Yeah, of course. So we're going to do Dude Perfect Kids books. It's also very expensive. Very expensive. But we're going to do a kids book series that that whole universe is also animated. So that's very real. Both of those are going to happen. I think if I'm ruthlessly prioritizing in the content, if I may, you guys didn't ask, but I will. Right through me, but then I'll tell you.

41:06I'm probably trying to attempt a content format that doesn't require you guys necessarily, and also doesn't have that variability of additional cast, because that's also a massive variable. Additional cast is not a given. You can talk about it and be like, oh yeah, we'll just bring some people in. But like, that's a really challenging thing to do and to incentivize them for a very long time. Because then you're right now, the hit show is you guys and you guys own the company. Yeah. Right. You make another hit show with talent that to solve that incentive structure to me sounds hard. And then do you feel right now with the.

41:45Before you continue, Samir, would you like to accept the offer of president of content for Dude Perfect Man? I would love that. I love you. You got him. Oh, man. And then Colin, what do you want? Is that Ethan Rose? Yeah. All I'll do is kick all day. I'll practice my kicks. I would love to be head of content. That would be a great time. All I want to do now is your journey to the 60-yard kick. I mean, that's all I can see from a content perspective. That's one piece of footage. That's two productions. That's why I got that. I think that would be good. It's like, you remember the MTV show Made?

42:11Oh, yeah. It'd be like that. Can I have it and watch that forever? Yeah, it'd be just like that. Forget about that. Sick. Yeah. So we're on the topic here of scaling versus not scaling. What's scalable? What isn't? Out of your business right now, what do you consider to be the most scalable part where you feel like it's the furthest along that it could live without you guys? Even though we've taken a break from it, I think like Dude Perfect games in the market would be the simplest, most scalable piece that we'd be really excited about. I don't know if we've shared before, our Dude Perfect 2 game, was what it was called, Do Perfect 2 on iPhone and Android.

42:47Is that like the puzzle one? No. That one was... That's the polished one. They were both puzzly, but it was the newer puzzly one. Do Perfect 2 had 50 million downloads. Oh my God. And it was a free game, but you could do in-app purchases and stuff inside. And so it was a big hit. It did really, really well. Great game too. Miniclip developed it. They do 8-Ball Pool and a bunch of other stuff. And I was literally running that project and it was awesome. And then who knows what all we got into, TV show and everything else. And it's just a great example of like. Beans. I remember the beans. Serious bean killing.

43:21We're still in the bean business. We get a bean check. You get a bean check still? My father-in-law was at his ranch. Some of that money is from her. That's for us. That's amazing. We got the jalapeno for that. We don't get all the check now anymore, if you remember. We get some of the check. That's a mailbox one? That's a great example of we can be very involved in the ideas, in everything that's created. But once that thing is polished and shipped off and it's something we're really proud of, I think that absolutely scales. And this is why we need a CEO because I would say experiential is the biggest opportunity.

43:56So now we need somebody to come and ruthlessly prioritize. That's where the financials are. This is where we're headed. It's so good. Explain that, O.T. Yeah, experiential. So obviously we have our live show, our live tour. We'll be coming up on year five of doing that next summer. But we've also talked about a, you know, everybody's watched Dude Perfect do these battles and competitions for the last 15 years. All sports golf battle, like every comment has been, I just wish I could go do that with my friends. Like that looks so fun. So we've, I mean, this is goes into the big destination and all that stuff.

44:29But I think there's even a smaller scale version of this that we have some very specific ideas that could live on in a smaller scale format. but I think the go-to like the Van Gogh experience or we took our kids to the Jurassic Park experience super well done pop-up shop basically in in a city around here and you have those traveling destinations that move around we could get great feedback for the different pieces of the things that we're looking to include in in the big destination and I think we could develop a very very fun for families experiential dude perfect whatever that lives in their market for two months before it moves to Chicago and then moves to New York.

45:08And yeah, we actually have gotten really long and really far along in that process. And that's a perfect example of like Ty specifically has been very involved in coming up with the specific things that would live in that. But once that's done and produced and there's a team in charge of it and it's living in Chicago and about to move to New York on its own, we can be hands-off, right? Like that does not require us to be there, but it would be a really good extension of what people see in the videos for families. So it feels like we have to talk about the big, Dude Perfect World, the image, the mock-up that you guys put out into the world.

45:41I know there's a physical kind of little model here, right? Yeah, yeah. Out of that space. Is that like, how, when will we be able to walk into that? Is that like a real thing that we feel like is good? Well, it depends on if you buy the Apple VR headset.

45:58Ty, you want to speak to that? I'm not even going to give any estimated dates anymore because I feel like moving into this office along with that process is the never-ending journey. Do you know when this was originally scheduled? I don't know when it was originally scheduled. You're saying for with you guys. Yeah, with us. When was it originally scheduled? March. Yeah. That was absurd. No way. That was foolish. I mean, we've been talking about this office for over two years. March. Have you guys been in town since March? Yeah, yeah. You've just been angry with the wind. I'm sorry about that, guys.

46:32This thing's dead in the water. You must have gotten married here. We're usually more accessible than that. I do think, I mean. That's crazy. Just like this space, like it took a while, but it came together fast. Like I think that's going to be how Dude Perfect World is. Like we're still trying to figure out those details that are very important that no one wants to like take time on, but they're necessary. And then once those decisions are made, I think it's going to come together really fast. Do you have enough capital to do that? or you have to get more capital to do that? It's just not a good question for Andrew.

47:02Yeah. It kind of just depends on how you want to, you know, how Andrew and then, you know, investors want to tackle that. Do they want to keep it under the same umbrella? Yeah. Yeah, it looks like I got enough. That's sick, man. Do they want to keep it under the same umbrella or do they want to make it a separate entity? I mean, just all that kind of, you know, legal jargon stuff. But I do think we'll probably, I do think it will probably be separate if I had a guess today. that it'll be a whole separate thing that will live on its own. And I'm not saying more capital-y rate. It could be the same investors that didn't, you know.

47:37Sure, sure. Invest in L.S. just kind of scoots them over. I will say that, like, in the same way we were encouraged with people wanting to invest in the company, when we were shopping that around, like, the amount of encouragement we got from not just cities, but people that would push a real check across the table to be involved in that was pretty insane. Really, really great. Even cities you've never heard of. Yeah. Really? Yeah, cities were throwing out. How would this be successful in Winchesterton, Fieldsville, Iowa? I'm not sure. Cities were throwing millions and millions of dollars at it.

48:09It was also an incredible mock-up. Yeah. It was one of the most beautiful images. The architecture company worked with is absolutely top shelf. Being in an architecture major, you know, it would not look like that structurally. You know, architects have a, you know, a knit. Don't throw a wet blanket on our combo. They love to design things that just can't stand up by themselves. Here's the complete honest truth. We started with our own idea of Do Pervert World in our minds, and it's this big. And then we didn't want to limit ourselves to just whatever we thought. So we brought in this group that does what these groups do, and they make your ideas even bigger.

48:49But we were on board, and we still are on board because these guys have pulled off massive projects. and just like everything, kind of like with the financial side, they see more in us than we necessarily immediately see in ourselves. And so they helped make the idea way bigger and better than it was. We get to the point where we release it to the world. We get a ton of feedback back from groups that would make sense and some that would be a little surprising but still make a lot of sense and crazy money thrown around and all the benefits and tax breaks. It's obviously very complicated. but we got to a point where we had a couple really strong options got it down to about three locations in the country and it was at that point that we decided we needed to raise money not just for that but for all these other things that are happening got it and so then the long the short answer for the long story is we knew we needed to hire a ceo and we really felt like we'd be doing that person a disservice if we chose an answer on this thing that's going to be a massive part of our company without them here.

49:51So we had to wait for that. Now that this person's here, I think you're going to hopefully hear more about this. Andrew's got a lot of decisions to make. Yeah, he does. Every conversation ends with like, well, but Andrew will figure it out. It's an Andrew problem. We're so excited, Mark. We're so excited. CEOs like that, right? Yeah, that's what they do. So you mentioned to me, which I really love, this framework of stadium, show, shelf. Stadium being like the experiential side of the business. The show being digital and the expansion of content. Shelf being the expansion of products. I want to come back to the show part real quick as you expand.

50:29I'm curious your perspective on the landscape of YouTube because you guys are talking now about starting relatively from scratch on some of these channels. Obviously, you have the Dude Perfect brand name. Do you guys feel that as you are launching these new channels, the Dude Perfect brand will carry enough weight to drive viewership and audience into these new channels? Or do you feel like you have the DNA in terms of we can put out a video and we know what's going to work right now on YouTube, even though - It's in a different vertical. Yeah, it's in a different vertical and it's in a different time of YouTube, right?

51:02Yeah. YouTube today is very different from 2009, very different from 2011 and 12. I mean, it's a great question. I think my immediate thought is like, that's why we're hiring really young people here. Yeah. Like we feel young, but we've been doing this for 15 years. And the people that we're hiring right now, we just hired a young social media guy who hasn't even graduated college yet. And like, he's tapped in on all of that stuff. He was two when we started. He was, we discovered that the other day. He was two years old. He's really such a Riz. He's got a lot of Riz. He's got a lot of Riz. So he tells us.

51:35Hired based on Riz. Yes. his risk count. So I'm not going to pretend that we have all the answers of what would work today on a totally new channel. I think we certainly have our own gut. And to Ty's point, the things we're excited about are the ones we'll do first because we want to be passionate about these other wings and things that we want to launch. But yeah, it's... The hope is that the brand name will lend itself to the trust. And then we obviously have the ability to create the quality high-end content with the team that we've built over the last 15 years. And I think with the passion added to the stuff that we naturally care about and want to be a part of or excited about, I think there's an audience out there like the golf realm, for example.

52:14I'm not saying we're going to break into the golf space and be one of the biggest creators out there, but I think there are an overlap of Dude Perfect fans who are also golf fans who can't watch Dude Perfect Golf because it doesn't exist right now. So they watch some other golf creator. And if there was a Dude Perfect Golf option, they would happily jump into Dude Perfect Golf and watch that as well. Yeah. So our goal is not to jump in and be like, well, we're going to be the number one in this, the number one in this, number one in this. But I think if we can create a sustainable model in each of those and then enjoy the process and also add people to the team, then it's a no brainer.

52:47And it would be a ton of fun, too. Yeah. And we do think each of those lends itself to, like you said, the stadium show shelf. Right. Like if you do it right and you have a really good kids channel, then that obviously lends itself. I'm saying kids in this case being animated. If you do it right and you have really good animated content, of course you could build a product line off of that and i mean i have a three-year-old daughter and disney on ice was probably the favorite thing she's ever seen right and like all that is is them taking their content and then doing a real life version of it and then there's toys that live where they've done it better than anybody and that exists in our future if you know we're able to execute on it and that's why we're doing dude perfect on ice next year we're taking skating lessons you think he's been training on the sim dude i can twirl wait till you see my triple sal Cal Cal.

53:31It is. It's to die for. It's good. It's really good. Yeah. I mean, I would come see that. Yeah. I think that would work. Once. You'd come see it once. I'd come see it once. Yeah. That's all you need. That's the tour name for 25. It's a comedy show. Two perfect on ice. It is pretty amazing. You guys are touring in like. Internationally. Yeah. Yeah. There's like a. Yeah, we're excited about that. A Northern Ireland Belfast show. Currently for sale for a year from now. Yeah. Yeah. Come on. Get a lot of time. That's crazy. Yeah. That'll be a fun one. We haven't obviously done a whole lot. A lot of fans in Belfast.

54:02The golf course is over in Belfast. Yeah. Here's golf. A handful of tour decisions may or may not be made with golf. If there's a 50-50 tiebreaker, it always leans better golf. So if your city has terrible golf, it's going to be a tour. It's hard. It's hard. It's hard to do perfect there. And you can double up and film for the Golf Channel. Sure. No, that's true. Of course, the justification of it. Yes. I like where your head's at. That's a CEO mentality. There you go, guys. You can take that one for free. So for the main channel, for a channel of your size, for everything you guys want to launch, obviously it needs to stay consistent, right?

54:34To be able to talk about some of these things, promote these things, keep everything healthy. How many videos do you need to put out in a year? And how much viewership is enough? It's a great question. If you can tell us the answer, that would be awesome. Or at least people will know. We go back and forth on that question is the honest answer. like i think there are times for sure that we wish we could spend even more time on one concept video we're about to release uh called trick shots measured in miles it will be out by the time this video's out but it took us five months the longest ever but like five to six months we had the video idea two years ago we had the video idea for a long time but we have literally been actively filming it in spurts because that's just how it is they're big slices of the video for six months.

55:19And so there are times that we wish that everything could be like that, man, we're really excited about this one specific idea. Let's take as long as it takes to make this a spectacle of a video. The Mark Rober video was similar. It's like, this is a, it's a big idea and it's a big production, but we're really excited about it. So I think there's a world where we wish that we could slow down a little bit right now where two videos a month, I think we would like in a perfect world we'd probably like to do every three weeks or maybe even once a month a little more mark rober cadence i don't know if that's a good or bad idea with the algorithm i don't know i think that that type of freedom would be great and especially as we're pursuing these other things we may need to do that but at the same time like i don't know maybe we go the opposite direction and we're still so in the weeds on everything that that it feels like this is overwhelming right now or it's really hard and we don't have any more margin but maybe if we actually do a good job hiring the team, then we put out more videos.

56:18So I don't think we have the perfect answer for that. But is there a certain amount of viewership per video that you guys are like, that's good for DP video, that's bad for DP video or not? Internally, I mean, it usually just goes off previous launches at this point. Because like, I mean, I wouldn't say it's a secret. 2016, 2017, we couldn't put out a video that got less than 30 million views, like in a year's time. Like I remember if we woke up the next morning and it had 10 million that was like man that was a good video and that was like that was heyday like that was every single video we put out those are the videos that have 500 million now yeah and those are also videos that are three four or five minutes which is crazy now to think like about putting out a three minute video and seeing how that would yeah absolutely just thank your channel ronaldo is he's breaking the mold oh yeah i mean good point yeah he obviously knows more about youtube than we need to be opening the door for us um it wasn't it's i think at this point it's it's very it's really we how proud are we internally before it ever even launches like that's our bar like did we enjoy doing it would we do another one yeah and is the team internally like man that was an awesome video and we've we're probably very opposite of the analytical like yeah oh we should have done this and change this title and done this different but you 15 years in you kind of create your own scale for how proud you are of your content and that's kind of where we're at.

57:42Can't control the result. I liked the basketballs out of an airplane. Yeah, I was a fun one. I liked that video a lot and the thumbnail was very different. Yeah. That was not... That was very new age, dude, perfect. That was our team, you know. That was a full AI thumbnail and we tried to create our own better than that thumbnail with our graphic designer and even reached out to some other people. Couldn't beat it. Launched it. Video did really well but we also got a lot of what the heck this is an ai thumbnail comments and so we're like okay let's try again to beat it with the regular we couldn't beat it and that's interesting because it's such an out there idea that like weirdly ai just did a good job making it feel compelling so i think you know maybe you'll see a little bit of that here and there we think our style of thumbnail is very real we just we're trying to convey like what you're looking at happens in the video like that obviously is where we started right trick shot video you're going to see this this is a screenshot from the video you know of a water bottle flip or whatever it is it's harder to do that when it's just a big idea concept video like drop a thousand basketballs from an airplane or whatever it is but yeah as long as the video pays off what you clicked on yeah that's that's the authenticity i was actually surprised that it paid off that exact thing yeah you know what i mean like that is what you guys did but yeah it was shocking when it happened there's a round two coming we had and i talked about it yesterday there you were not there's a round two that's gonna be it's gonna be fun Did you like driving the Aztec?

59:06It was great. You know, it's out back. Yeah, it's out there. That's pretty cool that you won that. I'm very proud of myself. Does the content on YouTube and the performance there match the performance of the content on the DP app? Or is that a different... You're saying, like, if one's good on one place, is it good on the other? Yeah. I think that the... I mean, we have millions of people watching on the app, which is incredible. Wow. I don't think... What I was going to say, they're a little more, even more hardcore, right? Like, they're watching it all, you know? So I don't know how exactly mirrored they are because they're dialed.

59:42And there's not, the algorithm isn't present in the same way. If they're served it, they'd probably watch it. I know, isn't it kind of refreshing? We could post our three-minute pickleball video and they would all watch it. They would all watch it. Yeah, yeah. And so, like, this is sick! That's so true. So that's pretty awesome. Cody doing his laundry. But, I mean, we think about it the same way. I was so proud of that video, and so I was so proud for it to launch. early on the app and on YouTube. I was excited for everybody who was going to see it because I was like, man, we're really happy with that one.

1:00:10How many people have the app? I want to give you a real answer. So do it. Well, I'm saying I would be making up the specific answer. Can you find out how many downloads we have on the Do Perfect app across all platforms? Across 2 million? Okay, okay. Over 2 million people have the Do Perfect app. That's crazy. Which is pretty insane. Just over 2 million. not like on the high end of 2 million. Is 2.2? Is that just over? I'm going to say it's close. Okay. That's close. Okay. And then 2.9. We'll keep it real. Keep it real. It's good to keep it real. Yeah. Keep it a buck. I mean, that's crazy though.

1:00:50Like millions of people are watching. Yeah. And conceptually the DP app is, hey, I got a text from my sister-in-law who was like, my kids want to watch YouTube, but I need an approved list from you of who they can watch. And I thought that was an interesting question. And I was like, oh, the Dude Perfect app solves that problem. Yeah. Right? Like when I got that text, I was like, oh, there's a real problem that needs to be solved. I think the real problem that we see for families is, hey, I have a ninth grader, a fourth grader, and a kindergartner in my house. And I have no idea what they can watch.

1:01:29Right? Like that happens all the time. and, you know, maybe you can find stuff. That's a pretty big spread. That's not an incredibly realistic scenario. That's like, I took a big gap. Let's try again. I took a big yes. That's pretty insane. You know, I didn't question the spread. Just to be clear, I didn't question the spread. Yeah, I know. I accepted the spread. I don't have any kids. I also accepted the concept of the spread. It's much more common to have a two-year gap. Are you okay with a seventh grader down to a kindergartner? It's a more appropriate example. But if we're pretending to be semi-experts in families.

1:02:00One in diapers, and then the kid in college has a granddaughter. Keep going. I think you were about to say something good, so I don't want to cut it off. What I was getting at is there can be a pretty big spread, depending on how big you think it should be, of the age of your kids and your family. Yeah. And to have something that the oldest kid and the youngest kid can both enjoy and that the parents are comfortable with is really hard. Well said, Kobe. I agree with that. We're so enjoyable for all ages. Thanks, guys. Yeah, that's what he's trying to say. And so obviously we have... I'm so thankful for Andrew.

1:02:32I hope he doesn't give us long answers. We've tried to do that ourselves, but finding other creators that fit that mold that we can add in, that when you respond to your aunt, it's not just your perfect. Sister-in-law. Yeah. You're terrible as fuck. When you respond to your sister-in-law. Maybe yes or no questions now for the twins would be good. Ours fits that mold. Yeah. How do you get the creators to say yes? Like what's the incentive right now for like Mark Rovers? have reached out to us and wanting to be on the app i also think it's like what you just said like at the end of the day creators you know this is a real problem on youtube like this is a i think more and more people are understanding is a real problem creators want to differentiate themselves to that side of the equation they don't want to be on the side of oh you're the minecraft guy that no kid can watch yeah yep so like i think you know being associated with the dude perfect app is like a good step to that.

1:03:27It's a good step in approval for a bunch of family. Like, hey, look, not only are we on the Dude Perfect app, so you can watch this stuff on our YouTube, you can watch our YouTube channel because they allowed us on the app. So I do think there's part of that that some YouTube creators want to have, like that I think is just a good thing. We're also trying to make it a really good situation for the creators that say yes. Like they get a great revenue split with us. We also allow them to run their own ads. So like that's something that is expensive on YouTube if you do it, very few people pay the money to buy out their own channel and run their own ads, but you can have ads.

1:04:02It's totally up to them. So they want to put QR codes within their ads and make it really easy. And this is like, this is the leaned in, dialed in audience, right? You know, that's what all the brands and people want. They don't want the casual, I'm barely looking. They want the sitting in the living room, watch the big screen, completely 100 % focused. And like, that's the audience that's on our app. So it's pretty cool. Like Marcus struggling with Crunch It's kind of this new thing. This tiny little company. He should run some ads. He only does like 40 million a month. My last question is, what does the revenue mix of Dude Perfect look like today?

1:04:41And what do you hope it looks like in the future? Like the categories? I think our revenue model is, we've done a really good job of having brands attached to our videos. so like sponsorships yeah um kind of the lifeblood of Dude Perfect I think even in that area we've gotten better at doing the longer term yeah yeah partnerships so it's not just a one off video but it's the bigger bigger partners experiential is a big part the live tour live tour uh and then you know you can throw in all the other like royalty and merchandise and e-commerce stuff in the one little bucket don't sleep on beans I'm not sleeping on them man I'm eating them

1:05:26I think obviously those three buckets will remain a key component. We're going to add to those and we're going to really squeeze those more tightly. I mean, I think the e-commerce side alone is such a low-hanging piece of fruit that we've kind of dabbled in, but we've never given it any thought. Our merch is a joke. And so I do think those will always be part, but I think there's going to be more buckets added to it. Hopefully. Again, don't want to throw this on Andrew, but he's going to really help us prioritize which ones we focus on and make those key components the lifeblood of Dude Perfect, and we'll go from there.

1:06:07Well, guys, thanks so much for having us. Thanks for coming. Appreciate it. It's been really cool to see HQ1, and then we kind of skipped over HQ2. We came right to HQ3. But you guys came to the spotter party, right, at HQ? Or were you not there last year? Oh, no, we were there last year. Did you literally never come to HQ2? No, we never came to HQ2. Whoa. You can go see it now. There's nothing in it, but you can see those shades. Perfect. We'll go swing by. Yeah. Oh, that's sad that you guys weren't there. Sorry for the March debacle. Yeah. You know, six months off. I mean, again, I'm very familiar with construction.

1:06:34Still not done, by the way. I think it would only be right to end this with a chance at redemption, a web redemption. Yeah, feel good. We'll scoot it up. We'll go to the 10. I mean, that's what the people want to see for sure. Yeah. Let's just call it what it is. Let's do it. It's time. I'm not the holder. Oh, you're okay. I'm not scared. Come on. If you think it's a dead end. Okay. Thank you, guys. Thank you, guys. We don't even have to move the light. All right. First of all, I just always love spending time with these guys. Like, any opportunity we get, whether it's on camera or off camera, I love spending time with them.

1:07:04They are so, like, naturally funny and witty. Totally. Considering there are five of them, they have so much chemistry. Like on the studio tour, which I'm excited for everyone to see eventually, it's just moving so quick. Everyone's throwing out jokes. Like they are just naturally these guys you see in the video. Like they are high energy. They're also friends. And I know that sounds, you know, funny to say, but it's been a long time that they've been doing this. But, you know, in the beginning, we talk a lot about their decision to not sell DP fully. And I thought a lot about that. And we talked about it a bit, but there's a lifestyle consideration there that if they did do that, sure, they would have this life-changing exit, but they wouldn't meet up every day and like play sports together and laugh together.

1:07:48And I think that's a real consideration when you build a fun lifestyle brand around your friendships. If you sell Dude Perfect and you sell your channel and walk away, you also risk watching it fall. Ooh, yeah. Yeah. And fall maybe even a little bit, right? It wouldn't be like catastrophic, but just sitting on the sidelines and watching the brand that you built that means so much to you. Yeah. Turn into something that you don't want it to be. And you know, you're still capable. That's like being, you know, the star quarterback on an NFL team and you're in your prime, but you just decide to walk away.

1:08:28Right. And then the team starts like not performing. So we ended the conversation talking about ruthless prioritization that their new CEO is going to have to implement. And we talked about that throughout the conversation. But I wanted to have us talk a little bit about what would we prioritize if we were the CEO of Dude Perfect? I would prioritize long-form content, whether it's on their main channel or on new channels, right? Whether it's on Dude Perfect Golf, which sounds like it's coming. DP Gaming, which already exists. Long form, almost live style content, similar to Rhett and Link's Good Mythical Morning.

1:09:11What can you make that is very low lift and has a low barrier to entry, but still gives fans of Dude Perfect that same feeling? Yeah, I mean, they've done a great job with their desk show over time. Right? Like adding a desk show was pretty experimental to think about the guys who do trick shots. Yeah. to go into a desk show. But they are naturally comedic and funny. Yeah, you could do some even actual live content. And they do that in partnership with Amazon with Thursday Night Football. But I like that of going longer and longer form and looking at time spent as a metric. Like how much time can people spend with Dude Perfect?

1:09:49I think the reason for that is so that you build out places where you can develop new talent. I don't think it's actually easy to build new talent. It's true. And new faces of Dude Perfect, if your videos are only 7 minutes or 15 minutes or even 20 minutes, I think you need outlets for people to get really comfortable with these new people. And, you know, if you look at Dude Perfect Gaming, Sparky is one of the new faces for Dude Perfect. And his face is actually the biggest on the channel banner. Right. And gaming, the videos on the channel are pretty short right now. But I think if they started to make those longer and even maybe go live, that's an opportunity to really get connected to a new face.

1:10:29And that's going to be the next chapter of Dude Perfect is priming the audience and getting people ready for the new faces that may be there once these guys pull back a little bit. I would say Mythical is probably the best at this when you look at Rhett and Link and then you look at Mythical Chef Josh, right? Like he's a real, like significant creator now and host that when he came out at their live show that we went to, people went nuts, right? Like he has a deep diehard fan base now. And that transition has been really executed well. And I think it is because of really long content that Josh can integrate into Good Mythical Morning.

1:11:04But yeah, that's not an easy thing to do to get audiences connected to new talent. It's also a risky move when you're Dude Perfect and you're so deeply based and rooted in trust, trust from families. Yeah. Adding more talent is complicated. So I think for me, like the one thing that I just don't know that people are talking about in our industry as such a big deal is the Dude Perfect app. The TV app that they've launched. First of all, it looks incredible. It's like so premium, but it solves a major problem that's going to continue to happen over the next couple of years on YouTube, which is that parents can't trust their kids navigating YouTube.

1:11:47You look at the deals they've struck with Ryan Trahan, Mark Rober, Zach King. Like, to me, this is representative of the future of the creator economy, which is similar to the past of entertainment. Dude Perfect goes from being a channel and a show to a network, right? They are curators of family friendly. Like this is essentially a new, a modern version of Nickelodeon. And we talk about it a little bit in the episode, but the creators in the Dude Perfect app also have a lot of flexibility in terms of the ads that they can run. So if they have a, you know, if you're Ryan Trahan and you're Joyride, you can probably have some flexibility to run Joyride ads.

1:12:28Yeah. Right. Whereas it's not really the case. It's not as easy on YouTube. Yeah. So that to me is a pretty big deal. And again, another place they could launch new talent because they have 2 million people who have downloaded that app. You look at by this time next year, could that be 5 million? Could it be somewhere in that range? And now you're introducing, you can introduce a new show into that environment that doesn't have public view counts, which I think is a real consideration when you're building a big media company. You can't have content that doesn't perform on YouTube. But if you have your own environment, you can experiment.

1:13:03Yeah. It's okay to let content take a little bit of time to build characters to build. You just can't take that risk on YouTube. Like the dude perfect brand can't have videos that are doing 10 ,000 views, but you might be able to slowly build talent in the dude perfect app. So I really like this environment to control that environment for them. I think is a really big priority for the next chapter for everything they want to do. That is going to be the most captive audience. They're going on tour. You run ads in the dude. Perfect app. Yeah. Do a deal. If you have the dude. Perfect app, you get X dollars off the ticket.

1:13:37Like that to me is an owned and operated platform that can play into all of the things they want to do and scale beyond them significantly. The next 20 years, you could be adding creators to that platform that match the dude. Perfect values. The most interesting thing to me about the Dude Perfect app is that it encroaches on YouTube's turf. Yeah. The fact that like YouTube Kids Turf, that like YouTube's business is advertising. And when it comes to YouTube Kids, it's, you know, their goal is to ensure that it's like a safe space for people to watch. But the fact that the Dude Perfect app exists and that it's taking off proves that there is a problem there.

1:14:18Yeah. You know, and it's just so interesting to me because I would never think that there are like creators who are big enough to create some sort of rival market for advertising because advertising requires high, high viewership to strike deals. So it's just interesting. Curation matters, right? Curation of audience, curation of content, curation of trust. Like that is something that they can do. They can go from becoming, being creators to becoming curators. It makes me wonder if that's like a trend that will continue similar to how blogs back in the day, I think about, I always told you about this freestyle skiing blog called New Schoolers, right?

1:14:57And you could like make an account similar to like Facebook. And the ads on that blog were so niche. You could tell they were working directly with companies in the industry. It would have been great for the lacrosse network too to probably have some sort of app and specific place where it's like, we just work with lacrosse companies, so here are the ads. and I wonder if that will start happening in other niches and industries across YouTube. Because obviously Dude Perfect is this like massive behemoth, right? Like it's surprising, but also not that they can create their own app and get millions of people and create big brand activations, right?

1:15:32Like bring other brands in. But I just wonder, will this be something that we see in other spaces too? Do you think? I think so. I think there's going to be too much content for it not to happen. Like I think the the oversaturation of content over the next three and five years is going to Push to create curated environments. Like is there like a creator economy app? Probably And and it might even just be like a skinned app that is just curating essentially playlisting content or You look at like how youtube's tv app is is moving like it just could be curation Um increased curation I will say there was two aha moments for me in this interview The first one was actually more of a shock moment when cody was describing that in the middle of an overtime shoot One of their employees came up to him with a breakdown of how he wanted to raise It's both surprising and not surprising But I think it's it's important for our industry to recognize that this is how these companies work like we are sitting here on camera, but we're also very in the weeds of the operational admin of our day-to-day companies.

1:16:41And there's still an operator problem in the world of the creator economy when you recognize almost, you know, 20 years into DoPerfect, they have hired their first CEO. You know, like the first time there's really a CEO at the helm of this company. You know, that's a really interesting point and really interesting note to go, creators, the assumption that all creators are like excellent entrepreneurs or excellent operators is just like a misguided assumption. Like we are creators. I think we are much more similar to bands than we are to tech founders or entrepreneurs. Like we just make a thing and we're groups of people who make things.

1:17:23We're not necessarily thinking about the organizational infrastructure of everything. So that's like incredibly apparent at every scale of creators. Yeah. It's incredible how many times throughout the episode, they would just say, Oh, well, Andrew will deal with that. They say that, but they are so invested in every detail of that brand. Even from the day we spent with them, it was hard to pull them away from their things to get them to sit down together. And the things that they're doing are like tweaking a graphic design for their tour, you know, or like looking at - I mean, we are at very different scales, but like even just getting you and I to get to this table, I'm working on like an After Effects animation, right?

1:18:06And you're working on all sorts of stuff. Like we need to pry ourselves away to come down and do this. And the second kind of aha moment was when they talked about the multi-generational fan base. Yeah. Now there's parents who have kids and they have their kids watch Dude Perfect and the parents watch Dude Perfect. I've never really heard of that on YouTube before. But we're obviously moving into that space. We're approaching territory where you can have multi-generational fan bases, which are, that's a multiplier. That's a significant multiplier, right? Because if you go, here's a guy who used to watch Dude Perfect.

1:18:42And now he has a kid. And maybe he has two kids. When they go on tour, you're selling tickets to mom, dad, and two kids. You're going from one fan to four. That, as a multiplier, is no joke. Yeah. I mean, it's what ends up creating massive global brands, global icons. Like we've seen this in music, right? Where, you know, my dad's a massive Bruce Springsteen fan. My brothers and I now all love Bruce Springsteen and we'll all go to the concerts together. We'll buy the merch. That is a multiplier. And when you've been in the industry for decades, which now we're moving into the space where creators will have been around for decades, you get people who truly shape culture and are not just really seen as like creators, definitely not seen as like influencers, but icons and just like global entertainers.

1:19:35Yeah. And being a family friendly, trusted brand is the multiplier there because you just grow older and you're like, I don't know how to, how to be a parent and have my kids watch YouTube. But you know, I spent years watching Dude Perfect. I trust those guys. I can have my kid watch Dude Perfect. That is a, that is such an X factor for these guys to build this brand. I would imagine the new channels are also in an effort to reach the slightly older Dude Perfect audiences, right? If they do Dude Perfect outdoors about camping and hunting, even Dude Perfect golf, right? Like little, little kids aren't necessarily golfing, eight to 15 year olds.

1:20:12Um, so I'm really curious to see how some of those new channels allow them to span, uh, the age of their audience. My final takeaway from this is people always ask us like, Hey, you've sat down with some of the top creators on YouTube. What's the common thread? The, the absolute common thread and these guys embody it is that they really like making videos together. It's like a, it's an answer that people maybe don't want to hear, but it is the truth that whether it's Marquez Brownlee, it's these guys, it's like any of the top creators on YouTube really like making videos. I actually think a step below videos is just, they like playing sports together and they're really competitive because from all the time that we've spent with them, if there's ever a dull moment, a second, there is a basketball in their hand.

1:21:01There's a football in their hand and they're doing something competitive and they just actually love it yeah and it's similar like marquez being like you know if you want to be he likens like being a creator to being in like the nba right and he's like you have to love shooting free throws and shooting like not everyone who shoots hoops thinks they're going to go to the nba but they might shoot hoops for the rest of their life yeah right and they though they are those guys there was moments where it was like oh we just need to tweak the audio real quick and they'd be like oh okay cool they'd hop to the basketball court and start playing basketball.

1:21:31And you're like, wow, that any second that they aren't shooting, they're competing with each other. Yeah. Yeah. So I think Dude Perfect is going to be around for a very long time. And I think we're all going to be pretty amazed at this next chapter of Dude Perfect. I have a question for everybody in the audience right now, everyone who's still with us. If you were the CEO of Dude Perfect, what would be your first move? Put that in the comments. I would build the Dude Perfect world exactly like the rendering and be like, see, I told you it was going to look like this. All right. Let us know what you would do if you were the CEO of Dude Perfect.

1:22:05And we'll see you next week.