The Rise of EssentiallySports: How to Build a Media Powerhouse with $100

When Harit Pathak (MBA ’23) started blogging about tennis a decade ago, he had no clue that his passion project would scale into a sports media powerhouse with more than 30 million readers a month.

A die-hard sports fan, Pathak relished lively debates about his favorite teams and players in Facebook groups. In 2014, he and his friends Jaskirat Arora and Suryansh Tibarewal launched EssentiallySports.com from their college dorm room in India. They scraped together $100 to get the website off the ground. “It was never meant to be a business,” Pathak recalled. “We were engineering students with a passion for sports. We started posting the kind of stories we wanted to read—told from a fan’s perspective.”

Today, EssentiallySports is one of the top ten sports publishers in the United States, competing with legacy media giants like ESPN, CBS and NBC. Under Pathak’s leadership as CEO, EssentiallySports has experienced a five-fold growth since 2020. In the last three years the company reached more than 2 billion total page views and attracted a million newsletter subscribers.

Remarkably, the founders still haven’t taken a dime of outside capital.

Leading A Voluntary Organization

Pathak, Arora, and Tibarewal kept writing through college, each driven by their own interests. “I was a tennis fan,” Pathak recalled. “One of my co-founders was crazy about Formula 1, and the other loved covering cricket.”

More students pitched in, writing, editing and responding to fans between classes. Over time, EssentiallySports began drawing readers who shared article links with their friends on Facebook and Reddit. The audience grew.

After graduation, the founders took regular jobs—Pathak at Deloitte Consulting. However, in their spare time, they continued to write and experiment with new ideas.

For nearly five years, EssentiallySports operated as a “voluntary organization.” The founders and a growing network of sports fans from different universities in India wrote purely out of love for the game.

According to Pathak, what differentiated EssentiallySports was the “moment behind the moment,” philosophy. Rather than providing generic match reports, EssentiallySports focused on human interest stories, diving deep into what key players were doing behind the scenes.

The Hair-Transplant Moment

In 2019, EssentiallySports published an offbeat piece about Rafael Nadal that became the most-read article about him on the internet that day.

“It was the U.S. Open, and everybody was writing about Nadal’s relationship with his coach and his future plans,” Pathak recalled. “But on social media fans were buzzing about Nadal’s unusually thick hair. We posted a story about his hair transplant, and within minutes we had 700 concurrent readers. That’s when it hit us: fans craved stories beyond the standard match reports and mainstream narratives.”

Digging for Gold in Overlooked Corners

The founders also recognized that writing about the most-watched sports in the U.S. was a dead end—those spaces were already crowded. “We knew we couldn’t drive much traffic covering the NFL or NBA,” Pathak said. Instead, EssentiallySports leaned into overlooked fandoms and underserved sports such as NASCAR, UFC, the WNBA, women’s golf, tennis and gymnastics.

“Our most-read athlete is Simone Biles,” Pathak said.

Unlike competitors, EssentiallySports covered Biles year-round, highlighting her advocacy for mental health as much as her gymnastics. Similarly, they covered WNBA before the Caitlin Clark effect, building loyal followings long before mainstream media paid attention. When Conor McGregor returned to the UFC after a long hiatus, EssentiallySports took notice. “We started covering the UFC, and we started seeing traffic,” Pathak said.

The Last Dance Breakthrough

Another growth catalyst came from an unexpected source: sports documentaries. In January 2020, Netflix released The Last Dance, a miniseries about the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s. EssentiallySports dove in with comprehensive coverage of each episode. “We wrote about the show, the nostalgia, the culture around it,” said Pathak. “The most loyal NBA fans started reading us, because they wanted to know stories about Steve Kerr and Michael Jordan from 25 years ago.”

In June 2020, EssentiallySports surpassed 75 million page views—a milestone that also marked the launch of its NBA coverage, which soon grew into one of the platform’s largest verticals.

Taking the Plunge during the Pandemic

By 2020, EssentiallySports had grown from a side hustle to the founders’ full-time pursuit. Pathak left Deloitte to focus on scaling the platform.

The timing was serendipitous: while COVID-19 shuttered traditional newsrooms, EssentiallySports thrived. Virtual press conferences enabled the young team to secure interviews with athletes like Novak Djokovic without having to board a plane.

“A lot of publishers started scaling down their operations, laying people off,” said Pathak. “We started scaling up.” With writers in India who were passionate about the NBA, UFC and tennis, and a clear edge in cost and agility, EssentiallySports was able to scale quickly and effectively, filling key gaps in the sports media landscape.

Building a Learning Organization

To ramp up content production, EssentiallySports needed a dedicated team of full-time writers. That’s when Pathak drew on his experience as captain of his college cricket team. “I led my team to several state championships,” he said. “That’s where I learned about capability building.”

Instead of hiring experienced sports writers, EssentiallySports recruited passionate fans and trained them. “We created an entire training mechanism,” Pathak said. “I used to have 10 people on a call, and I would talk about our business, talk about U.S. sports. I’d identify who was interested in a lot of these sports. The idea was to coach them, not to get somebody for 3 or 6 months.”

As advertising revenue increased, the company hired editorial mentors, including former managing editors for Microsoft News and Bleacher Report.

EssentiallySports grew from a hobby blog to a sports media powerhouse with 30 million monthly readers.

By 2021, Pathak was leading a fast-growing team that published over a hundred articles a day. Still, he struggled with challenges such as training young writers for a demanding U.S. audience, building networks in the U.S., and determining monetization strategies. “I was a young entrepreneur,” Pathak said. “You’re writing something on a blog, but how do you make a business out of it?”

Encouraged by his father, who had an MBA, Pathak explored business schools. In 2021, he enrolled at UVA Darden, where Professor Damon DeVito’s “Venture Velocity” course played a pivotal role in shaping his development as an entrepreneur.

Bootstrap Philosophy in Action

What makes EssentiallySports remarkable is its bootstrapped model. Aside from a brief moment when the founders dipped into personal funds to pay a couple of early hires, the business has been sustained by cash flow. “Personal funds weren’t even 1% overall,” Pathak notes. “And we never scaled till cash flow started reaching a certain point. As viewership scaled, ads scaled, our revenue scaled, and we put that back into the business.” That discipline meant the company avoided the pressures of external investors.

Monetization and Business Model

EssentiallySports makes money mostly through advertising. “The primary thing is ads,” said Pathak. “We write content on the website, and we sell display ads against it.” But the revenue streams have since diversified: newsletters with more than a million subscribers, direct brand partnerships, event activations, and original IP such as the ES Think Tank podcast featuring CMOs and brand leaders.

This diversified model has helped the company avoid the volatility of platform algorithms. By collecting first-party data, they learned which fandoms were underserved and doubled down strategically. The results speak for themselves. For example, their NASCAR coverage began outperforming NASCAR.com by 2021.

The Vision Forward

EssentiallySports is a thriving digital brand, powered by exclusive content partnerships with superstar athletes such as NFL quarterback Jayden Daniels and Australian tennis player Nick Kyrgios. The platform produces branded content for Fortune 500 companies and leading marketers from American Eagle, BetMGM and DoorDash, among others. It operates multiple arms—publishing, brand marketing, social media, and newsletters—each growing independently while serving the core mission of authentic sports storytelling.

Rather than seeking an exit, Pathak and his co-founders are building “a generational business,” as Pathak put it. “We want to be that standout sports media publisher, and make decisions that some bigger organizations cannot make,” Pathak said. “We want to build our audience, grow revenue, and find new avenues, especially with everything that’s happening in AI.”