Harit Pathak and his co-founders, Jaskirat Arora and Suryansh Tibarewal, never imagined the sports banter from their WhatsApp group chat would turn into a multimillion-dollar media business someday. But that’s exactly how EssentiallySports was born.

Before it became a top-10 U.S. sports media platform (per Comscore), EssentiallySports was just a passion project run by a group of Indian college students frustrated by the little coverage their favorite sports received.

Pathak — a diehard tennis and WWE fan — spent so much time debating sports online that he eventually turned those conversations into a public blog for friends and classmates. As their community grew, the trio leaned into Reddit threads and Facebook fan pages to drive traffic.

“For the first five and a half years, it was a passion project,” Pathak says. “It was never even intended to be a business in the first place.”

At one point, the founders were juggling full-time software and consulting jobs while running EssentiallySports on the side. Engagement had been growing steadily, but things kicked into a new gear during the 2019 US Open.

“We saw this huge spike in traffic,” Pathak says. “And we realized it was coming from a story about Rafael Nadal’s hair transplant.”

He calls it the company’s “eureka moment.”

“It showed us there’s real demand for journalism shaped by the fan’s perspective,” Pathak says. “Storytelling that captures what we call ‘the moment behind the moment.'”

That Nadal story would define EssentiallySports’ editorial strategy: they’re not just chasing game recaps or free agency updates. Instead, they dig for creative, unexpected angles — sometimes as granular as an out-of-place strand of hair on a legendary tennis player’s head.

“We try to keep straight reporting to a minimum,” Pathak says. “We focus on unique angles. Every piece of real estate on the site is intentional — we want to cover stories no one else is touching.”

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Big fish in a small pond

The next major turning point for EssentiallySports was a familiar one for many companies: COVID. While most publications significantly reduced their output and staff, EssentiallySports seized the opportunity. They tapped into the wave of sports documentaries led by The Last Dance, treating each episode of the now-iconic series like a sporting event.

They also leaned into what Pathak calls “entity-based journalism,” where coverage is built around a specific figure rather than day-to-day news.

“There might not be big news about Michael Jordan every day, but people always want to read about him,” Pathak says.

Instead of refreshing newswires, the team combed through autobiographies, documentaries and old interviews to find nuggets they could turn into storylines.

“We realized you can go incredibly niche from a fandom standpoint — and that insight shaped our entire operational model,” Pathak says. “From our writers to our content strategists to our editors, everyone is a die-hard fan of something very specific. Instead of trying to cover everything, we double down on those hyper-focused passions.”

EssentiallySports’ NASCAR coverage is a perfect example of their strategy in action. When NASCAR was one of the few active leagues during COVID, the team doubled down — publishing so much content that, on some days, they even outpaced NASCAR’s official site.

The bet paid off. Fans were starving for around-the-clock coverage, and ES became the place to get it.

“There’s real interest in NASCAR and other under-covered sports, but there isn’t much coverage beyond the top teams or star drivers,” Pathak says. “Return readership was significantly higher than in some of the bigger sports we covered because we offered something unique — coverage of women NASCAR drivers and other storylines fans couldn’t find anywhere else. That’s when we started to see a loyal, regular reader base forming.”

While the traffic didn’t match giant leagues like the NBA or NFL, Pathak saw the value in being a big fish in a smaller pond.

“Our NASCAR newsletter was the first one we launched about two years ago,” he says. “And now, we’re at roughly 150,000 to 200,000 subscribers.”

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Zero VC funding, maximum control

That hyperfocus has led to hyper-success, with ES reaching topline revenue of around $20 million annually with ZERO outside investment.

“As a founding team, autonomy was a big deal for us,” Pathak says. “Especially since it wasn’t incepted as a business.”

However, when traffic doubled every quarter for nearly eight straight quarters, they had to start thinking about it differently.

“We’re very agile,” Pathak says. “So we can make moves our competitors can’t.”

Instead of pitching VC firms or courting angel investors, the founders started the business with $100 from their own pockets.

“The first hundred that we made took eight months,” Pathak laughs. “We used it to pay our hosting fees.”

Today, revenue primarily comes from online advertising, though ES has recently made efforts to diversify, building a sales team in the US to increase syndication revenue.

“Bootstrapping has its pros and cons,” Pathak says. “Sometimes, when the three of us go back to the drawing board, we ask ourselves, ‘Do we want to swing big on one of these opportunities or let it pass?'”

Bootstrapping is just one way EssentiallySports stands out. About half of its traffic comes from niche sports coverage, and less than 30% of its content overlaps with major competitors like Fox or ESPN.

“We’ve been doing this for 11 years, and like any business, there have been highs and lows,” Pathak says. “Media is still so platform-driven, and the ongoing challenge is navigating those platforms while growing our own loyal audience through newsletters, social, and everything we control.”

Ultimately, he wants fans to remember the EssentiallySports brand — not the platform it lives on or the VC firm behind it. And with the company growing from under 1 million pageviews in 2018 to more than 500 million annually today, it’s clear they’re here to stay.