Good morning. In one of the internet’s most “please say sike” moments ever, “Christian Girl Autumn” creator Caitlin Covington broke down in tears on her TikTok telling the world she’d be unable to make fall content this year.

Thankfully, she was joking: The queen is back with plenty of time ’til peak fall foliage.

— Hannah Doyle & Syd Cohen

Digital media company Almost Friday is joining forces with Weapons production company BoulderLight Pictures to pitch a new series to streaming companies—and they’re expecting offers from the likes of HBO Max, Peacock, FX, and Netflix.

Let’s back up: 

“What we’re trying to do is take our style from the YouTube space and make a natural extension into TV,” Billy Langdon, a writer for Almost Friday, told us. 

The biggest difference between this series and YouTube? Patience, Langdon said. This is the second pilot Almost Friday has pitched, so they’re accustomed to the slower pace of traditional media. While many creators can conceptualize, shoot, and edit a video over the course of a week, TV development can take years to accomplish as much.

If Almost Friday’s series is picked up, the five writers will take a hiatus from their normal routine to write the show. The channel will publish saved sketches or pull in outside writers to keep content fresh. 

Big picture: Comedy creator groups are carving out a reputation for diversity when it comes to getting their long-form ideas into the world—from golf sitcom Shanked self-releasing episodes on YouTube to American High’s first-look deal with Hulu.

Just one year after launch, lifestyle and business creators Cherie Brooke and Jean Luo’s Tiger Sisters recently hit the top of Spotify’s business charts, surpassing big names like The Diary of a CEO and The Ramsey Show. 

Quick snapshot: The Luo sisters are Stanford and Harvard business grads who’ve worked in product development at companies like LinkedIn and Snap. 

Tiger Sisters has over 1 million monthly streams and downloads across episodes covering money, power, and love (some sample titles: Everything We Learned at Stanford Business School in 19 Minutes and Reset Your Life With These 3 Proven Frameworks). 

Jean told us about the strategy that got Tiger Sisters to the top of the charts. →

Experimenting is key. “We very much applied our product management way of building to this podcast,” Jean said. They start each season with a hypothesis (on formats, episode length, or title and thumbnail variations) and put it to the test. For example, season three episodes were all interviews. Season four has featured explainer videos. 

Personal POV and analysis are a winning combination. Their highest-performing episodes (like “Everything We Learned in 29 Minutes at Harvard Business School”) have been scripted with research, case studies, and personal anecdotes. 

“We talk a lot about our own experiences and that makes it kind of relatable and not just this pie in the sky idea,” Jean said. “This is actually what we learned, this is how I applied it at Snapchat, and then examples and case studies of how other companies have done it.”

It’s okay to be picky on partners. The Luo sisters recently brought on their first sponsor, Read AI. Jean said it was important that the brands they talked about on the show (including their own matcha brand, Sisters Matcha) fit naturally within the episodes. “[Read AI] was started by my friend David Shim, who I used to work with at Snapchat and we interviewed in season three. I’ve known him for a long time so it made the ad read super organic and helped establish trust,” Jean said.

Challenge Accepted creator Michelle Khare has trained to get a black belt and become a professional cyclist. Now? She’s an official Red Bull athlete.

Between the lines: Red Bull athletes typically get access to events, products, and financial support in exchange for promotional content. Red Bull will support Khare’s Challenge Accepted, which means bigger budgets for videos.

“Our episodes are about to get a whole lot bigger, and even more epic in ways that I didn’t know were possible,” Khare said in the announcement.

Big picture: As challenge creators continue to grow on YouTube, from Michelle Khare to Sickos, Red Bull has been a niche-wide supporter. Extreme athletes used to be limited to big names like Shaun White and Tony Hawk—but now, more creators in the challenge genre are proving they have the athleticism (and audience) to join the ranks.

The content we’re looking forward to reading, watching, and listening to this weekend.