The Exchanges

Q to Texas A&M, you, I didn't even know this was a major. I didn't even know you could major. I mean, it is, Texas A&M was founded as an agricultural school, but I didn't know you could major in hunting and fishery. That was your focus. Is that what you thought you would do, something in, like, Commercial fishing or ranching? Like, what did you think you were gonna do?

A Yeah, so it was wildlife and fisheries. Hunting and fishing would have been an even better major, but that one wasn't offered, unfortunately. Um, but no, so I started off, I was gonna go be a dentist. My uncle, uh, my dad's oldest brother is a dentist, and, uh, I was like, man, that'll be cool. I'll go do that, and started, uh, on that path and got to a little class called Organic Chemistry and decided, like, yeah, maybe... I should go do something else that, you know, I enjoy a little bit more, and then I figured out, okay, well, there's a duck identification lab that's, uh, part of this wildlife and fisheries major, and, uh, I was like, man, I'm all in on that, and it was a whole lot less math and English classes, and a whole lot more, uh, wildlife and ecosystems, and I didn't really know what I was gonna go do with that. I kind of thought maybe, like, game warden or something along those lines, or ranch management, or Something like that, but I just knew that I enjoyed that a lot more than being a dentist.

AI assessment note: “I kind of thought maybe, like, game warden or something along those lines”

Q I guess eventually, like, what, you, you had a friend of yours, Sean, actually, like, do a proper film of, like, like, really actually try to make cool films of this?

A No, so Sean was, so originally DP had six members, so Sean was one of the other guys that lived with us at the house, and me and him were in the backyard originally when we decided, like, hey, we need, like, a beginning to this video of these trick shots, and so we had two chairs set up, like, lawn chairs in the backyard that were sitting in the middle of the yard. He put the camera on the railing because obviously we didn't have a cameraman or Anything like that. And when he set it up, he went around and looked, you know, on the backside of the camera on the little, through the little viewfinder, and he said, oh, dude, perfect. It's already in frame. Like, everything's good to go. Like, it's centered up. Nice. And so, we went around, and it was already recording at that point, so he came around and sat down next to me, and we recorded a terrible intro where we named it, like, Backyard Stuntman. And when we went back and listened to the original audio of We just thought it was funny the way that he said Dude Perfect, and so we ended up, like, I guess kind of adopting that as the title of the video.

AI assessment note: “No, so Sean was, so originally DP had six members”

Q And when you decided to go all in, how did you do, because you got to do business development, you got to get sponsors in, you got to get revenue in. So how did that happen? How did you, how did you start to bring more of those people in?

A I don't know, maybe a month after going full time, we got an email from Nerf, Um, who has been one of our, our longest partner that we've had, uh, they have been since then, and so we had signed our first big Nerf deal to come out with Dude Perfect Nerf products and do videos for them, and that was, like, our first big partnership, and that, for us, just kind of confirmed, like, ok, like, this is what we're supposed to be doing, like, this is a great first step in the right direction, going full time. We still didn't think that we needed an office, so For the first year, we pretty much just met at, like, Panera or Corner Bakery or whatever coffee shop we could sit in and not order anything until they kicked us out, and we got away with that for a while, but after some time, obviously, had to start, like, making more real business decisions, I guess, and financial expenses, like, okay, we do need an office if we're gonna hire somebody to edit our videos so they can have a place to sit there and work, and yeah, It was kind of a slow transition rolling into all that stuff and just kind of a learn along the way process of what that looks like.

AI assessment note: “we got an email from Nerf... signed our first big Nerf deal”