Dude Perfect—a sports-focused brand with 60.8 million YouTube subscribers—has spent the last 16 years building a family audience online. Now the goal is to grow beyond YouTube. 

The IP features a group of five friends who make sports and comedy videos, pulling off different trick shots and stunts (such as going up against NBA legend Stephen Curry in a basketball game—a friendly match that drew more than 15 million views on YouTube). 

The Dudes have joined an upfront-style presentation that’s happening on March 27 called Spotter Showcase, which will give advertisers a chance to connect with major YouTube creators (also including MrBeast). But that’s just the tip-off for the Dudes. The brand is especially well-positioned to take off because of its intersection with both kids’ love of sports and the rise in lucrative deals for sports streaming rights. 

Dude Perfect’s chief brand officer Chad Coleman spoke to Kidscreen about the big ambitions the sports-focused group has for expanding into live experiences, partnerships with streamers, and even an animated series for preschoolers who haven’t yet started watching on YouTube. Here are some excerpts from that interview. 

Ryan Tuchow: Congrats on all the growth! What are the plans to grow Dude Perfect in the kids and family market? 

Chad Coleman: We’re just as excited as ever about the future of Dude Perfect. The past 15 years have been primarily focused on building our platform and building the trust we have with our audience, which is kids and parents. We really see ourselves as bringing families together and providing clean content that parents know they can let their kids watch and trust. That trustworthiness is the number-one thing to us. 

The last 15 years have been really focused on that from a content perspective. And now we are doubling down and thinking through new ways to engage our fans and provide experiences, products and services that feel like Dude Perfect outside of the YouTube space. 

YouTube and the videos aren’t going anywhere, that’s going to get bigger. But we’re thinking bigger picture. How can we bring some disruption to the toys and games space? A couple years ago we launched seven products at the front of every Walmart, including the Dude Perfect board game and a couple other games that we invented. They did really well. It was the number-one selling toy at Walmart in the holiday season of 2023. Now we understand that the appetite is out there for products. 

RT: What does this expansion into new areas look like? 

CC: There are a few things that we’re considering, including an experience. It could be a Trick Shot Town [an area where kids can try and make different trick shots, like throwing a baseball through a moving window or bowling with 100 pins]. And we’re in talks with potential partners to figure out how that comes to life. How big is it? How many locations are there? 

It feels like a gap, because you have arcades and then you have the Disney World theme parks. There’s not a ton in between these spaces where families can go and do things they can’t do anywhere else.

RT:  Why is now a good time for the industry to be looking at Dude Perfect as a potential partner?

CC: Across the board, we’re in a valuation process on a lot of things. We don’t quite know which ones we’re going to do yet. An animated show is another example of something that we’re considering—a Little Dudes animated show for the crowd that’s just [a bit] younger than [kids typically are] when they start getting into Dude Perfect’s YouTube Live action content [seven to eight years old].

What can we provide to the three- to six-year-olds? We think an animated show makes a lot of sense. 

The Dudes have wanted to do this for a long time. They’ve even written out scripts and themes for the show and we have a million ideas. But it’s just never gotten off the ground because we didn’t have anyone with the bandwidth to say, “I’m going to go and make this happen”—until now. 

RT: What changed? 

CC: There are a few opportunities, like [an animated series], that we are finally in the position to pursue, and that’s the reason I say that it feels like we’re a startup right now, even though we’re 16 years in. That’s because we made a conscious decision to actually invest and do this full bore. 

Over the past six or eight months, we’ve made this decision to go all-in on Dude Perfect 2.0—that’s what we’re calling it. We’re up to 35 people now and plan to be up near 60 by the end of the year. 

We just hired a CEO [NBA exec Andrew Yaffe came on board in October], a CFO [former Fanatics VP Rick Eddy joined in December] and a consumer products guy. And the dominoes are starting to fall now that we’re building out these teams that can actually go and execute these things with the time and attention that they need to be given.

RT: There has been industry speculation that streamers could start turning to major YouTubers like Dude Perfect for new deals. What is Dude Perfect looking for in any potential streaming partner? 

CC: When we look at whether to do something with a streaming platform that’s not our own app [The Dude Perfect streaming service], we want to do a really big concept that we feel is totally unique and wouldn’t work on YouTube.

We need to be confident that the partner is going to help us do this, because we have some big goals and ambitions and we like to do things on a big scale. And so, any project is going to require a lot of buy-in from that platform. We have a couple of really awesome ideas that are differentiated from anything that’s out there right now on any of these platforms, that we think would make for an awesome show. And so it’s now just trying to figure out who’s the right partner to do that with.

This applies across everything we do, whether it’s the animated show or our live tour coming up this summer, which we are super excited about. It’s our fifth tour, and we are selling out NBA arenas throughout the country—more than 250,000 people over 20 shows.

If someone comes out to our tour show, if they buy our board game at Walmart, or if they watch our animated show, we want them to have an above-average experience. We want them to feel like there was definitely value delivered there.

The Dude Perfect streaming service. A Parent Media Co. launched it in October 2023.

RT: You have your own Dude Perfect streaming platform as well. How are you growing that? 

The Kidoodle.TV team [A Parent Media Co., which owns Kidoodle.TV launched the Dude Perfect free ad-supported streaming service in October 2023], and has been awesome in helping us create the Dude Perfect streaming service. It’s our home base—our platform that we own—and we’re not beholden to YouTube algorithm changes or TikTok going away.

We’ve recently added other creators and licensed their content as well. We’ve done it slowly, because we want to make sure to maintain that integrity. Those are: Mark Rober [DIY gadget and science vids]; Ryan Trahan [financial literacy]; How Ridiculous [big stunts]; and Zach King [magic]. 

We’re looking to license more, but we’re not in a huge rush to go and add a hundred creators. We’re trying to be really purposeful about who we add, and why and how it appears. But we will certainly be continuing to build on that.

RT: Are the doors open for the kids industry to have conversations with Dude Perfect? 

CC: Not only are they open—now is the perfect time. We’re talking to animators, we’re talking to people who can help come up with our experience, and we’re talking to book publishers for kids books. We’re talking to anyone and everyone right now.