Dylan Haugen is 5'11" with a 42-inch vertical, and he's the youngest signed athlete in Shaquille O'Neal's DunkMan League. He quit his high school basketball team after his sophomore year at Spring Lake Park to chase dunking full-time — a bet that's since produced six contest wins, a 12+ member team he founded called Minnesota Dunk Squad, and a second career as co-founder of Local Service Spotlight alongside digital-marketing veteran Dennis Yu.
Dylan played basketball growing up, but his real practice was messing around dunking on lowered rims. An early conversation with veteran dunker Jordan Kilganon helped accelerate him from dunking low rims to dunking a regulation 10-foot basket. He quit his high school team at Spring Lake Park after his sophomore year to commit to dunking full-time — a decision that's paid off: six dunk contest wins, over 100 million views across social media, and a signing with Shaquille O'Neal's DunkMan League, the world's first professional dunking league, making him its youngest signed athlete.
In July 2023, fresh off Dunk Camp, he founded Minnesota Dunk Squad — what started as informal training sessions is now a 12+ member team that runs dunk contests, halftime shows, and open training sessions across Minnesota. He also hosts the Dunk Talk podcast, interviewing top dunkers to grow the sport's culture.
The business side started separately, and younger: his first goal was to be a YouTuber. Early channels and social accounts did okay, but by his own account, none of it added up to an actual personal brand — nothing came up if you searched his name. That changed after he connected with Dennis Yu, a 30-plus-year digital marketing veteran (BlitzMetrics) who has run ad campaigns for clients like Nike and the Golden State Warriors, over DMs about trampoline dunking. Dennis helped him build a personal brand and a Google Knowledge Panel for free, and Dylan later joined BlitzMetrics as an employee at 16. In November of the previous year, he became a co-founder of Dennis's new company, Local Service Spotlight, which uses AI and digital marketing to help local service business owners grow.
Why Gateway Growth featured them
Dylan sat down with Gateway Growth at 18, already building a company while competing as a pro dunker — the conversation covers AI, personal branding, and doing both at once.
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