Dan Porter — founder of Overtime Elite, creator of Draw Something, and serial brand builder — joins Shaan to talk about building the “67 Water” brand around a viral TikTok meme and a 17-year-old basketball player named TK. He shares his philosophy of bottoms-up brand building, how Overtime grew to 100 million followers by responding to every single comment, why he’s bullish on chess prodigies, and how paying attention to what other people aren’t paying attention to is the real superpower.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host), Dan Porter (guest, Overtime Elite founder, Draw Something creator)
Introduction [00:00:00]
Shaan: Can I just hype you up like I’m Dana White in the UFC? Because we have here the most entertaining man in business, the guy with the most illustrious career. He started Teach for America. He created the viral hit game Draw Something and sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars. He worked with Ariana Grande in the talent world. Then he built the best amateur basketball league on the planet and affected culture. And now he’s here today telling us about his new ventures, his new brands, and how he builds hit after hit. Dan, welcome.
Dan: You are the reigning defending undefeated most entertaining man in business.
Shaan: I appreciate that. You know, sometimes people go 19-and-0 and then they don’t win the Super Bowl. So I’ve got to keep winning until I’m in the grave, I guess.
Shaan: You’re a professor at NYU, and so is Scott Galloway. Who’s the better professor and who has more street cred on campus?
Dan: He’s richer and more famous and I’m humbler. So I guess that’s how it goes.
NIL and College Sports Money [00:03:00]
Shaan: Dude, I wanted to talk to you because you texted us something and confused me. You’re building a water brand now. You’ve done this crazy water brand thing. You’ve got to tell this story.
Dan: So this is like the unlikely story of the fourth most followed water brand in the world on social media. To take a step back — NIL is name, image, likeness. It’s like a revolution in college sports. For years players could not make any money. Reggie Bush lost his Heisman Trophy, people would lose their eligibility. Then, a year after we started our basketball league and started paying players, the Supreme Court ruled and all of a sudden there was NIL. Every college and many high school players in America can now make money — not to play the sport, but through endorsement deals.
Dan: Think about it: your roommate is a rapper with a song, your other roommate is a YouTuber making money, and you hoop or play football and can’t make a dime. That doesn’t make any sense — especially when the schools are making a lot of money off those sports.
Shaan: Give me a sense of the scale. Top basketball players, top football players — are they making tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?
Dan: Top power-five quarterback, SEC, whatever — $7 to $10 million a year.
Shaan: A year?
Dan: A year. Wide receivers and running backs, best defenders — $1 to $3 million. A guy on the bench — $250K. For context, Caleb Williams in 2024, the number one overall quarterback pick, signed a 4-year $39 million deal — so $10 million a year. And college guys can make that same range while still in college.
Shaan: Does this trickle down? If I’m a women’s lacrosse player somewhere, am I making anything?
Dan: Right now it’s really the top, top players — top basketball and football, one to three million. I have four or five players who played in my league who are making over a million in college. Then it kind of falls off a cliff, because those are the sports on TV generating tremendous money for the schools. Women’s basketball on the college level is actually a much more lucrative opportunity for women than the WNBA, because there are only three rounds to the WNBA draft, and if you’re second or third round you usually don’t make it onto a team. For women, college basketball pays more.
The Story of 67 Water [00:12:00]
Shaan: So how does NIL take us to you building this water brand that became one of the most followed in the world in a couple months?
Dan: A canned water brand, a high school basketball player, and a TikTok meme walk into a bar — and out comes this.
Dan: We have this basketball league, Overtime Elite — the second most followed basketball league in the world behind the NBA, over 12 million followers. There’s a player in this league, Taylor Kenny. They call him TK. He’s a senior this year, being recruited by Louisville, Kentucky, UConn, a bunch of schools. Great player, great kid — levelheaded, funny, works hard, no drama.
Dan: Last year, one of our teams is on a beach somewhere, TK and another player are joking around, and his answer to some question is “six seven” — he says it and does this hand motion. It’s a line from a rap song by Ski Mask the Slump God. About two months later, somebody on our team texts me: “There are millions of views on TikTok where they’ve taken his voice and they’ve put it everywhere.” This one-off comment he made kind of explodes all over TikTok. Paige Bueckers is training, they ask her “how ya training?” — six seven. They ask Cooper Flagg how many hours of sleep he gets — “I don’t know, six seven.” It just kept going.
Dan: Middle schoolers going up to their teachers: “What’s 23 plus 54?” Teacher goes, “67.” And it’s one of those things — you explain it to anyone over 21 and they’re like, “What does it mean?” And you’re like, it doesn’t mean anything. That’s kind of what makes it cool.
Shaan: Hold up the can. I saw you drinking from it.
Dan: So TK was like, “I want to take advantage of this. I should sell t-shirts.” And I’m like, there’s got to be something in life beyond selling t-shirts. We started talking about water. Why water? Because water’s just not that complicated. Five years ago I tried to make protein Rice Krispy treats. Too chewy, not chewy enough, the flavor wasn’t right. Water: you don’t taste it. You don’t need a formulator. Tomorrow you could be making this thing.
Dan: He gets totally jazzed. He says, “It’s got to say ‘you hacking family’ on it.” I’m like, “I don’t know what that means, but that is not hard to do.” We found a water manufacturer. Designers made some stuff. TK says, “I like this, I don’t like this.” Within 8 weeks there’s a water brand — somebody in Michigan pumping out cans. And TK said, “Here’s the plan. We’re going to launch it on June 7th.” June 7th. Six-seven.
Shaan: Right.
Dan: So on 6/7 it just drops. He makes a launch video — just him messing around in Lexington, Kentucky with his friends. They go to basketball tournaments, start giving it away, and it just starts going crazy. Every influencer, every basketball person is picking it up. All of a sudden 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 followers. A dad is offering $100 cash to buy a can, but you can’t even buy it anywhere. He’s just made it.
Dan: We asked TK where people want to buy it, and he said, “At the gas station.” If you’re 16, that’s just where you go buy stuff. So he sneaks into a couple gas stations for the video and puts it on the shelf and pretends he’s found it there. The account just keeps growing. Kids start making their own commercials for it. People start pouring it on each other like it’s holy water. We threw up a website. 25,000 people signed up saying, “I want to buy this.” We’re at almost 150,000 followers now.
Shaan: I looked up some comparisons. Dani Water has 18,000 followers. Aquafina has 7,000. Vitamin Water, which had 50 Cent involved — 81,000. You’re bigger than Vitamin Water in literally less than two months.
Dan: You know what the best part of this is? TK asks Tom, “What’s the marketing plan?” Tom asks me. I said, “Here’s the marketing plan. I’m going on MFM.” And some listener is going to be like, “Yeah, I own 500 gas stations. Call me up.”
The Bottoms-Up Brand Philosophy [00:28:00]
Shaan: You play this game very differently than I do. When I start something, I’m like, “Let me validate the idea, let me sell as much as I can.” You launched this and you can’t even buy it on the website. There’s just a waitlist. You gave it away at gas stations and games. You didn’t run any Facebook ads. Can you describe your approach and why you think it works here?
Dan: I’ve never categorized it, but I’m a very bottoms-up type of person when it comes to creation and marketing. When people were not watching as much sports, a lot of people in the sports industry were like, “We need more stats on the screen. Show their heart rate, show how far they’ve run.” And I always asked: who asked for that?
Dan: My mom was a sociology professor. She was a listener — studying people. I spent a summer in Starkville, Mississippi with her just driving around listening to local people talk about their little businesses. I think there’s some magic in what people are actually saying.
Dan: As a CEO, I’ve always wanted to hear the opinion of every single person who works for the company. Sometimes somebody has an observation they don’t even think is that deep and they say one thing and you’re like, damn, that’s true. I haven’t thought about it that way. My approach is to be in the right place at the right time, to hear what people are saying, and parse through that.
Finding Culture Others Miss [00:36:00]
Shaan: Is there a principle you have for noticing what other people don’t notice? Or is it like asking Steph Curry how he shoots — he just does it?
Dan: A couple things. When I launched Overtime around 2015-16, we started filming players with iPhones in New York and posting. All of a sudden I realized some players were getting tens of thousands of views and they weren’t even top-100 ranked players. I started looking at: who does this person follow? And I’d go through every single account they follow. Culture is culture — it makes things. But if you’re attuned to it and you go in deep, you can observe and find these things.
Dan: Like anime. Most adults in America had no idea what anime was for a long time. Then once you see it, you realize it’s everywhere. You go to Rome and every t-shirt in the stores has an anime character. You sit next to a kid on the plane reading manga. You just weren’t paying attention to it until someone added it to your filter.
Shaan: There’s actually a neuroscience explanation for this — the reticular activating system. Your brain is taking in an insane number of inputs at any moment. There’s a whiteboard, there’s a piano, there’s this light shining in my eyes. Your brain’s saying: filter out 99% of this. But there’s a bouncer at the front checking IDs — this gets in, this doesn’t. And the trick to life is telling the bouncer: add this to the list. Start letting anime in. Suddenly you see it everywhere. That’s why everyone thinks their phone is listening to them when they buy a car and start seeing BMWs everywhere.
Dan: Exactly. I do this in my class at NYU — “Look around the room and find everything that’s blue. I’m going to quiz you on it.” Everybody closes their eyes and I ask, “Name me one thing that’s red.” Nobody can do it. You only see what you look for.
Dan: That’s part of the reason I’ve never been a massive fan of business school or hiring MBAs. Business school trains everyone to look for blue. What you want as an entrepreneur is somebody whose focus isn’t narrowed but who’s incredibly wide. “Oh, there’s yellow, there’s red, there are all these other things.” If your whole process is just seeing blue, you’ll never see the other colors, and your ability to create or add value becomes extremely limited.
PayPal’s Bottoms-Up Discovery [00:44:00]
Shaan: Great story about this in the early PayPal days. You had Elon, who had this company called X — he loved that name long before Twitter. He wanted to build a bank on the internet: your mortgages, loans, checking, business accounts, credit cards, everything. He was right — he was just 25 years too early. That’s happening today with Ramp and Mercury. He had this top-down vision and was trying to make it come to fruition.
Shaan: And then you had PayPal, which was this small thing — hey, you can email money to a friend. Sounded like a game. The key to PayPal’s success was not blindly following the top-down vision. It was somebody — I think it was David Sacks — in the customer service department noticing that all these eBay sellers were asking for a logo they could put as a badge on their listings. Legal was like, “No, they can’t use our logo.” But other people were like, “Wait — why do they want our logo?” They looked at the data and realized all their actual users were eBay sellers. That became their strategy. They changed the name from X to PayPal, and that became the killer app.
Dan: Yeah. The vision is just a premise — an idea of what the company’s going to be. But I don’t really know anything because I haven’t done anything yet. And as soon as I get out there, I start to learn.
Dan: What really annoys me is when people say “you pivoted.” I’m not pivoting. I’m adapting. Like you’re on a track running a race, and all the tracks next to you are what’s happening in the world around you. You start in the gaming business, and whoom — the iPhone goes by. Whoom — Facebook goes by. Xbox. Your job isn’t to be blind to all of that. You have to make tons of micro-changes.
Dan: I remember when we started Overtime, I went into a pitch meeting and some guy asked, “What’s your distribution plan?” We said, “We’re going to LA to film basketball, then Houston, then Oakland.” He passed — “We just don’t think that’s the right distribution strategy.” Two days later we’d already given up on that distribution strategy ourselves. The real strategy was: we’re going to figure it out. We’re going to try a bunch of different stuff.
How Overtime Hit 100 Million Followers [00:52:00]
Shaan: At our hoop group event, you gave a mini TED talk on brand building. The very first thing you said wasn’t about going viral or growing the market or algorithm hacks. You said, “In the first year, we replied to a million comments.” That stuck with me. Three years later I still remember that one line. Can you talk about that?
Dan: Everyone wants awesome growth hacks. The best way to get a lot of views on anything is a list post: “Three secret growth hacks to do this.” But most of those are post-facto and hard to replicate. To build something meaningful, you’ve got to build a real connection.
Dan: I went to a Little Baby concert at State Farm. Everybody had their phones up filming. But I realized — the concert was a backdrop for them to create content. They were filming themselves, not the stage. And that reminded me of something someone said years ago: “Everyone under 30 has a camera pointing at themselves. Everyone over 30 has the camera pointing out.”
Dan: From those insights I crystallized this point of view: sports media is talking to people about sports. Overtime is about listening to people about sports. How do you listen? They’re all talking to you. They’re DMing you. They’re in the comments. What are we going to do that nobody else will do? We’re going to respond to every single one.
Dan: What you see in media is typically 10 people leave a media company, set up a new one, and pump out articles and videos. And I think: who asked for that? Nobody. They just thought it was a good idea.
Dan: A young person told me once: “Once you respond to somebody who has an account over 100K, they become a fan for life.” So I was like — how do we get our first million fans for life? We’re going to respond.
Dan: People used to DM: “Yo.” Just the word “Yo.” And we’d be like, “Yo, what’s up?” And they’d be like, “Oh [bleep], I didn’t think you were going to respond.” We’d take screenshots of those conversations and post them in the story. People started saying, “Does Overtime respond?”
Dan: We had this apex moment early on where I hired this guy who’d been an Uber driver and a hooper. I realized he was just really funny. His job was just to be funny. He’d go on the comments, go to that person’s personal Instagram, find a picture of them, and roast them — “Bro, what’s up with the mom jeans?” To the point where people would comment on Overtime videos and just say, “Roast me.” And he would. You think it’s about the video, about the dunk — but it’s actually about the massive conversation.
Dan: We have community managers now who just talk to fans all day. I’m in a group chat with 250 fans of the City Reapers on Instagram. About once every three weeks, I hop in and answer a question. Everyone’s like, “Whoa, who is this?” And I’m like, “Yeah, that’s not happening.” They go crazy, and I’m like, “Got to bounce, I could get trapped in there for two hours.”
Dan: Your fans aren’t just mindless, faceless numbers. They’re the consumers of your product. Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift — great artists who are so good at being like, “I wouldn’t be anything without you guys.” I’ve always taken inspiration from that.
Chess Prodigies and the Prodigy Cup [01:06:00]
Shaan: You’re also big on chess right now. Give me the pitch.
Dan: My co-founder Zach is a 2200-rated chess player — the Stuyvesant chess champion, the Penn-Ivy chess champion. Chess is one of those things that’s not very accessible. When you watch it, they’re saying A8 to C4. The games are six hours. Everybody’s a mad genius.
Dan: We were always like, if our goal at Overtime is to see things other people can’t see and make things that feel niche go mainstream — what’s the most out-of-the-box thing we could do? And we kept coming back to chess. You look at it and think, I don’t know. Then you start talking to people and they’re like, “Oh, you’re going to do a chess championship and Magnus Carlsen’s going to play.” And you’re just like, yeah, that’s already been done.
Dan: One day Zach comes in. He goes, “You know what the biggest movers in culture for chess are?” I said, “Queen’s Gambit, Searching for Bobby Fischer.” He goes, “What do they have in common?” I said, “They’re movies and TV shows.” He goes, “No. They feature prodigies.”
Dan: Young prodigies. And I’m like, “Oh — prodigies.” Then immediately I think of every 8-year-old I’ve watched on YouTube who plays guitar better than BB King, plays piano like Herbie Hancock at age 8. And I’m like, oh yeah, I see it in my own life. Prodigies are accessible. They’re interesting in and of themselves.
Dan: My son who was a poker player used to say: “I never look at my cards. I watch the other people. Then I look at my cards, because then I know what to do.” Play the players, not the cards.
Dan: So you have all these prodigies. It’s not actually about the chess — it’s about these incredible young people with crazy gifts. 650 million people around the world play chess. I could have a prodigy from India, Argentina, everywhere. So we’re working on something called the Prodigy Cup. It’s a one-night live event. We’ve spent over 100 hours filming chess to make it so easy and fun to watch that if you and I didn’t know the difference between chess and checkers, we could watch it and be completely entertained.
Dan: I’m actually the perfect audience because I don’t like chess and I’m not very good at it. So I watch it and then look at my watch and think, I’m bored. Okay, we’ve got to fix that. I hope in a year you’re watching it on a major streaming service, and in three years there’s a line of a thousand people outside Madison Square Garden. All this IP that came out of something very bottoms-up and organic.
The All-American Rejects and Cross-Industry Learning [01:14:00]
Shaan: Have you seen what the All-American Rejects are doing?
Dan: School me.
Shaan: Band that was popular in the late ’90s, early 2000s. Kind of been off the map. For their comeback, they started crashing actual high school house parties — just showing up and playing a set in someone’s backyard. Their comeback tour is going around America. And if you go look on Instagram, it’s liquid gold. Some high school house party right before prom, they just start playing a song, surprise everybody, it looks cool, it looks nostalgic, it looks fun. They’re not pretending to be super relevant. They’re building back up in this bottoms-up way, reinventing themselves as a band that’s kind of of the people. Amazing from a marketing standpoint.
Dan: I’m going to lock that away and figure out the sports version of that.
Dan: That’s the thing — most people only take inspiration from other companies in their vertical. I take inspiration from gaming. I’m a massive consumer of Korean and Japanese non-scripted television, reality shows, game shows. I always get ideas. Like, how can sports learn from this band?
Shaan: Give me a show recommendation.
Dan: There’s a Japanese one I just watched this summer where they take 10 Japanese people to a town in France, take away their phones, and they just have to find each other and realize they’re on the same show. Some of them fall in love. It’s glacially slow. You’re thinking, it shouldn’t be that hard to find the other Japanese person in this small town. They arrange to meet at a bakery. “Which bakery?” And they can’t look it up. I love those shows because they’re all about game design. Inherent in game design are the principles of marketing, distribution, all of those elements.
Dan: There’s another one called 19 to 20 — Korean kids in their last year of being kids who come together. I learn so much about other cultures, game design, things the US market doesn’t think about. If you’re looking for inspiration from the same place as everyone else, you’re going to do the same thing everyone else does.
Crawling vs. Running [01:22:00]
Shaan: What’s next for 67 Water in the next 90 days?
Dan: TK has created this phenomenon with the water, and everyone’s like, “Well, it’s a trend — have you even sold a million cans?” And we all want to figure out: how do we parlay this massive social media following and this grassroots thing built around a great kid into selling a million cans? Maybe it’s the gas station. Maybe it’s something completely not obvious. Maybe I won’t know and TK won’t know until Monday when we wake up and realize it’s actually selling through ice cream trucks.
Dan: And then doing it again with one or two other athletes who are super genuine and have a massive audience connection — always bottoms-up, always grounded in something that resonates with their actual brand.
Shaan: I love your NIL recruitment idea — if Kentucky wants TK, but UConn wants him more, they buy 10,000 cases of 67 Water in their school colors.
Dan: Show me the love. Who’s most with it? And then they’ve got to create a stunt out of it — speak the language he wants to speak with the brand.
Dan: I was in my 20s running a nonprofit in education, started some of the first charter schools in New York in the ’90s. I had this guy on my board — a ’60s activist who became a successful investment banker. First person I ever heard say no in a board meeting. He said, “They say you’ve got to crawl before you walk and walk before you run. If you do that, you spend your whole life crawling.” And I was like, yeah, I don’t want to spend my whole life crawling. He doesn’t remember saying it, but it changed my life.
Shaan: That’s a great one to end on. Dan, you’re the madman brand builder. If anybody’s in the beverage industry, if anybody’s got gas stations, if anybody who’s listening drinks water —
Dan: Drink up, you hacking family.
Shaan: Thanks for coming on, man.
Dan: I appreciate you, brother.