The way newly named Dude Perfect CEO Andrew Yaffe sees it, he’s traded his job overseeing social media at a global sports league with 30 teams and more than 500 players, for the top job at one team with five core players.
“In a lot of ways I view our business as not too dissimilar from a sports franchise,” Yaffe said in an interview this week in the Front Office Sports studio in New York. “If you look at all the revenue streams a league or a team has, it’s ticket sales, it’s merchandise, it’s social content and licensed content, and it’s sponsorship. And those are really all the same revenue streams I oversee right now. I have five starters, my talent, and it’s a talent business.”
Yaffe spent eight years at the NBA, most recently as EVP of social, digital, and original content. Before that, he worked at McKinsey. Why would he trade in a lofty perch at the league that just secured a new $76 billion rights deal with NBC, ESPN, and Amazon for a social video brand founded by five Texas A&M bros who started out making viral trick shots?
First of all, there’s the eye-popping following: Dude Perfect has 60 million subscribers on YouTube and 100 million followers total across all social platforms. It may be hard to believe, but the NBA, with all its global reach, isn’t close to those numbers. “We had 20 million subscribers on YouTube at the NBA,” Yaffe says. “I did not expect to go to a brand that tripled that when I left.” That following becomes obvious in person, Yaffe says: “You walk through an airport or a sporting event with these guys and they are trailed by kids.”
Then there’s the money. Dude Perfect raised $100 million in April from Highmount Capital, the company’s first-ever fundraiser. In an announcement at the time, the company said it would immediately build out its management team and hire its first CEO. (Check.) Next up: A gargantuan new $3 million headquarters in Frisco, Texas, for offices, sports, video production, live events, visitor entertainment, and a merchandise store; it sounds like a theme park.
Yaffe’s purview, according to a company announcement last month, is to grow the brand “beyond traditional channels” into a “21st-century media company.” But what does that mean? “New content formats, new platforms, new products,” Yaffe says.
Dude Perfect has already expanded into toys, smoothie collabs, and scripted shows (including “Overtime” and “Stereotypes”)—what else is left for the dudes?
The first answer is a world tour. Dude Perfect has done many U.S. tours, but this will be its first international tour: 25 cities in the U.S. and Europe in 2025.
Next, more brand partnerships, much of which will come from Yaffe’s NBA experience. “How do I continue to build on all the things that I saw great NBA teams and other sports franchises do in terms of great brand partnerships that are mutually beneficial for all involved, in terms of live experiences and live events,” he says. “We’ve seen the experiential economy grow massively over the last several years. How do we take advantage of that trend and ensure that we can get all our fans to really experience and touch and feel our brand in person?”
In the era of creator-driven media brands, 15-year-old Dude Perfect is already a veteran. It has an extremely young fan base (70% under age 34 and “really much younger than that,” Yaffe says) that other media companies covet and sponsors would love to reach.
But with “dudes” in the name, can Dude Perfect open its arms to women, especially in the biggest year ever for viewership and investment in women’s sports? Yaffe says he’s watching the rise of women’s sports and youth sports equally closely, and emphasizes repeatedly that Dude Perfect’s target demo is families.
“Whether you’re listening to audio content, or watching a show on YouTube, or experiencing us on another platform, or going to our live event, there’s a through line there that the content itself might look different, but you know exactly what you’re gonna get from us,” he says. “And that’s trusted, family-friendly entertainment.”
