Pete Kriebel (@PeteTakes)
Happy Wednesday,
This week I sat down with Pete, better known online as Pete Takes (@petetakes), the creator behind "Cooper Dejean Is Not a Safety" and other parody-songs/NFL recaps that have made him one of my favorite people making content right now.
This conversation sits at the center of two things I think about constantly:
How a creator actually turns an audience into a business
How far you should go chasing brand money before it costs you the thing that made people follow you in the first place.
Let’s dig in!
The reason you're getting paid in the first place is because you love what you're talking about. And as soon as people get a whiff that you're doing this as a business, you lose your secret sauce.
How He Got Here
Growing up: Pete's creative streak started way before football; family movie projects with cousins and making elaborate videos just because it was fun. In eighth grade, a drama class assignment had him spending five hours on a video project nobody made him care about.
Junior year of high school: With college on the horizon and sports media on his mind, Pete starts posting TikToks consistently. He hasn't taken more than a couple of weeks off since.
Two years in: Pete hits 20,000 followers; steady growth, but nothing that felt like a real business yet. He's still stacking internships alongside it, treating the account as a side project.
Summer after freshman year of college: His game-recap format takes off; throwback breakdowns built around a hook, like his now-famous "remember when the lights went out at the Super Bowl" video. The videos start consistently pulling six-figure view counts.
Sophomore year at U Virginia: Pete crosses 100,000 followers, about two and a half years after starting the account. His first paid deal comes in around the same window: $50 from an obscure fantasy football app, for a video that, by his own math, paid him less than minimum wage once he counted the hours.
Pete borrowed a line from Shark Tank to describe his own account: the parody songs are the highest-selling product he makes, but they're not the business. The business is the "bread and butter,” the consistent, less flashy recap format that people come back to whether or not a song goes viral that week.
@petetakes Told my mom she can quit her job 😮💨🔥 #nfl #nfldraft #cooperdejean #nflviral
That distinction matters because of what he calls the over-justification effect: the moment you start getting paid for something you love, the temptation is to start reverse-engineering what to make in order to get paid, instead of making what you actually care about.
Pete's read is blunt: creators who start social media purely chasing money almost never make it, because audiences can tell. The people who succeed are the ones building from genuine interest first, with monetization as something that eventually follows, not something they're optimizing for from day one.
5 Tactical Takeaways
Expect a multi-year runway.
Pete didn't hit real traction until two and a half years into building his account, and he's clear that he couldn't have promised anyone that timeline in advance. If you're building something new, don't benchmark your first six months against someone else's third year.
Separate your viral hits from your actual business.
A song, a clip, a single format that pops — that's a product, not a strategy. The sustainable version of any creative business is the thing you can make reliably, not the thing you're hoping goes viral again.
Draw your own line on brand deals before you need one.
Pete's test for any sponsorship: does it provide real value to the people watching, and is it something he's personally comfortable standing behind? He'll take a deal in his own niche but turns down prediction-market sponsorships specifically because of well-documented insider-trading concerns that, in his view, mean some of his audience is guaranteed to lose money.
Watch for the influencer cliff.
The point where every post looks like a brand deal is the point audiences stop finding you relatable. And once that trust is gone, the sponsorships that got you there stop being worth as much anyway.
Take the "beneath you" opportunity if it teaches you something real.
Pete turned down a full-time run at content creation last summer for an unrelated internship that paid less than what he could've made online, and walked away with skills (camera work, color grading) he couldn't have picked up otherwise.
Why It Matters
Pete's story doesn't have a shortcut in it; two and a half years of unglamorous, inconsistent growth before anything clicked, a pay cut last summer for an internship that had nothing to do with sports, and a refusal to take the easy money that a lot of creators in his position wouldn't turn down.
But the throughline is the same one we keep coming back to on this show: build the thing you actually care about first, let the business model catch up, and be willing to say no to money that would cost you the trust that got you paid in the first place.
📩 Jake is back next week, and don’t forget: Bottom of the Ninth is back this Friday with the top three stories in sports and business from the week.
See you then,
Tyler