Founder's Story - He Built An $8M Sports Empire With $100 And Zero Funding | Ep. 428 with Suryansh Tibarewal Co-Founder of EssentiallySports

Episode Date: August 3, 2026

Daniel opens by framing Suryansh’s story as a rare bootstrapped media journey: three college kids in India, roughly $100 for a domain, and a vision that eventually became a major American sports brand. Suryansh explains that the company did not begin with a polished business plan or a venture-backed strategy. It started with fandom, the internet, and the belief that the web could transcend borders. The episode follows how EssentiallySports grew from fan communities, Reddit, Facebook pages, and hobby-style content into a serious media platform covering U.S. sports at scale. Suryansh talks about why they leaned into American fandom, how COVID created explosive growth, why he once wanted to build a solo founder lifestyle business, and how he accidentally ended up leading a company with more than 400 people. The conversation also focuses heavily on the future of media, including AI disruption, open web monetization, newsletters, creator-led journalism, and the shift from algorithm-driven discovery to owned audience relationships. Key Discussion Points Suryansh says EssentiallySports started from pure fandom, not from a calculated decision to dominate U.S. sports media. He explains that his early belief in the internet came from making money online at 14 while working with people in the U.S. and Europe who did not know where he was located. The company originally explored both U.S. and U.K. sports audiences, but the U.S. fandom proved so large and deep that the team realized building for the U.S. alone was already a massive opportunity. Suryansh says youthful enthusiasm and “ignorance is bliss” helped them start something that might not have made sense if they had overanalyzed it in a traditional business plan. He says they brought a fresh Formula One-style storytelling lens to NASCAR, helping them build what he describes as the biggest newsletter in NASCAR, Lucky Dog on Track. Suryansh explains that EssentiallySports did not make money for the first six years and operated more like a volunteer or hobby organization before becoming a real business. The company’s original editorial gap was that sports coverage felt either too boring and expert-driven or too unstructured and fan-banter-heavy, so EssentiallySports aimed to combine editorial integrity with fan storytelling. Suryansh says he deeply believes in the open web because anyone can start a website, own distribution, and monetize without needing permission from a platform like Google, Facebook, an app store, or a social network. He shares that he originally wanted to be a solo founder or indie hacker, inspired by people building internet businesses from anywhere with small teams and automated systems. COVID changed the company’s trajectory when EssentiallySports grew from roughly half a million to one million pageviews to around 60 million pageviews in just four to five months. That growth forced the team to expand rapidly across content, engineering, editorial systems, and operational processes, eventually becoming a much larger organization than Suryansh originally imagined. Suryansh says he later realized that building something bigger than himself created more meaning than an indie hacking path, because the company created careers, opportunities, and dream moments for other people. He explains that media companies now face major pressure from AI because trust in editorial is lower, algorithms are changing, and anyone can generate massive amounts of content quickly. To protect the company, EssentiallySports began shifting from algorithm dependency to audience ownership, especially through newsletters that give the company a direct relationship with readers. Suryansh shares that EssentiallySports has built more than one million newsletter subscribers, helping strengthen the business against algorithm volatility and AI disruption. He says the company is also diversifying into multimedia by building on-ground networks, podcast studios, creator-first content, and newsroom systems that combine journalism access with creator storytelling. While AI initially felt like a threat to the company’s thesis, Suryansh now sees it as a powerful efficiency layer when used to support research, brainstorming, and operations instead of replacing the final creative product. He gives the example of golf coverage, where the team might publish 20 to 25 topics a day but research 100 to 150 topics, and AI can act as a companion thinker for that research process. Suryansh says meeting Dave Nemetz, co-founder of Bleacher Report, was a life-changing moment because Dave became a mentor and helped them believe they could build a major sports media brand too. He describes his philosophy as playing infinite games with infinite people, meaning building with people who think long-term and are willing to compound together over time. Takeaways EssentiallySports was not built from a perfect business plan. It was built from fandom, experimentation, and a willingness to keep going long before the revenue appeared. The open web still matters because it gives builders more control than closed platforms, apps, or social media channels that can change rules or shut down access. Audience ownership is becoming essential for media companies as algorithms change and AI floods the internet with content. AI may threaten low-trust content, but it can also help strong media brands become more efficient, more creative, and more strategically focused. Building something bigger than yourself can create a deeper form of fulfillment because it creates careers, opportunities, and dream outcomes for other people. Closing Thoughts Suryansh Tibarewal’s Founder’s Story episode is a case study in what happens when fandom, timing, persistence, and the open web collide. EssentiallySports started as a college project with almost no money and no outside funding, but it grew into a serious sports media company by telling stories fans actually wanted to read. Now, as AI reshapes media and algorithms become less predictable, Suryansh is focused on the next reinvention: owning audience relationships, creating internet moments, building a multimedia brand, and using AI as a creative and operational advantage rather than a replacement for journalism. Today's Sponsors:  Start with Upwork, the one-stop platform to find, hire, and pay expert freelancers across marketing, editing, branding, development, operations, and more. Visit https://www.Upwork.com today to post your job for free and get matched with top talent ready to help your business grow. 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When I made my first money online at 14, I was literally working with a bunch of U.S. and European guys who didn't know where I was while doing it right. The first six years, we didn't make any money. But you were three college kids in India, $100 for a domain, and you're building an American sports brand that's done over $8 million a year in revenue. So we grew almost from like a half a million, million pages to 60 million pages in for five months. Sir Yench started essentially sport with no investors. Today, his company has over 400 employees, a million newsletter subscribers, and the biggest newsletter in NASCAR. He built all of it from India covering American sports he had never seen in person.

When you think about the secret sauce to realize what the business model actually was, where did you find the best revenue was coming in from? How do we move from algorithm to ownership of the audience? I think if users trust you, you can... So, Sir, Aash, I love your story. story. It's like one of those rags to riches in college stories. But not only that, you started with basically nothing and bootstrapped. Bootstrapped companies are my favorite. I have this affinity for people that make something that never got funding. But you were three college kids in

India, $100 for a domain, and you're building an American sports brand that's done over $8 million a year in revenue. Why did you choose U.S. sports? I think this is one of those questions. which discovered by itself in a way. Like, the reason we started was pure fandom. It wasn't that, okay, we like this particular thing or this particular sport per se. Like, my, I've always been a big fan of internet. I believe that internet lets you cross and transcend borders. Like when I made my first money online at 14, I was literally working with a bunch of US and

European guys who didn't know where I was while doing it right. When in college, I started with Harit and Jaskiyad. Jaskiyat was a big Formula One fan. And he was probably like one of the three Formula One fans in India. It was not that popular at that time. It's like before drive to survive and everything. Harit was university credit captain, big in tennis. His dad played tennis.

Even first, our initial hires were also tennis. So we started with US and UK, actually. That okay, US and UK seems like the market where we feel excited. We used to do India. but India because India have younger audience like they were not that interested in reading as much like compared to UK, US, etc. where people actually read a lot more than youngsters in India, right? And then over time as we went going deeper and deeper, the US fandom was just so big. Like we just felt like building for US itself for so much work that building something global would have taken like 10x more effort versus like just doing it for US.

So just felt very like the sports fandom, it just called for itself while doing in the U.S. It just happened organically on Reddit communities, Facebook communities, all kinds of internet spaces that we were spending time on. Hey, sometimes it's good to be early. What gave you the courage that you knew I can make this into something? Or did you just think, let's do this, figure out how we can make money later? Yeah, honestly, so there's this, I've quite a lot of life. motors but one big one is ignorance is bliss sometimes or youthful enthusiasm when you start something when you are 18 19 you don't really like think of complexities

if i'm sure if you if i sat down and made a business plan and took it to a vc explaining what you're going to do nobody was going to say yes like and like that like logically it doesn't make sense what we did but and that is why i think it worked like we we just did everything from first principle why it cannot happen like for example NASCAR was very boring at the time when we were covering it but we felt like oh there is so much entertainment in the when we are watching it because we were not following it for 40 years right like but we were just excited when you started watching that sport and you brought a little bit of formula one philosophy to it in the way we were covering NASCAR and that just changed the way like NASCAR was being covered like literally

we are now the biggest newsletter in NASCAR it's called Lucky Dog on track. We have fans reading that newsletters since last three, four years. They have read like 500 plus articles on a website. They just love it because we bring a flavor to the sport that has never happened before, right? But you cannot write that down in a business flat. When you started to realize what the business model actually was, where did you find the best revenue was coming in from? So it took us quite a lot of time actually to figure it out, honestly. And it was more fun than work for us and which is why probably you were able to stand the test of the time. Like for almost seven years or something, we were just, we just created content.

And we did a bunch of stuff online. We were like running social communities from Facebook to Reddit to like, we had like Instagram fan pages, our website, you're producing bunch of content for a really long time. In fact, we were initially like a volunteer organization first couple of years in college until we like stripped it down and became a business. So first six years, we didn't make any money. So that kind of gave us a good flavor of what we wanted to do, what we didn't want to do. You get to learn all the nuts and bolts what it takes to build a business.

Like what does running a website mean? What does monetization mean? What is the flavor of content you want to do is like the reason we started was we didn't find the kind of journalism we wanted to read. Either it was too boring of a content that was happening or it was like, It was like an expert talking with a very statistical analysis way, or it was too much unstructured fan banter. The perspective we brought in the fans' perspective was keeping the editorial integrity,

but still the fandom storytelling in it. That approach nobody was doing. We just kept doing it for a really, really long time. If you've ever been sitting on a business idea, Shopify makes it easy to actually make it happen. Everything you need to start selling is included and ready from day one. I've been selling online with Shopify for over a decade. My first real store was a men's skincare and grooming line,

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It told me the thing worked. And because Shopify handled the setup and the checkout, I got to spend my time on the part that actually grows the business. Same platform powering names like Mattel and Jim Shark was powering me, a guy with one product and an idea. With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business, so go make it one. Start your free trial at Shopify.com slash founders story. That's Shopify.com slash founders story. Shopify.com slash founder's story. It was somewhere in the era sitting in the between,

between of, there were blogs being run which were like hobby blogs. And then there was a boom of publishing that happened, like the bus feed and stuff, but that was also done. So around the time when we started, it was actually very unsexy to do a website in my opinion. Like nobody really thought you could do it. Like most people had shifted to like Instagram or YouTube. Websites seemed like, okay, you can start it.

You can go launch it. Nobody was really thinking you can, like, I know like even when you're making like more than five million plus or something, people thought it's like a hobby project. Because we never really marketed us. Like we were just not talking about it as much. We're just busy running the business. Right. So now we have learned the drill.

We know how to make the business revenue out of it. I'm a big believer of open web by the way. I think with especially like the big tech coming in, all the platforms are trying to control. But the original open web, the pitch of the internet. was that anybody can start a website. You don't need permission from a Google or Facebook to do it. You can monetize via an open web, programmatic dollar.

Every pixel has a value to it without negotiating a sales deal. Nobody can shut it down. You can do what you want. That philosophy I truly, truly believe in, like open web, email is an open protocol, podcast is an open protocol. Apps are not an open protocol. They are gated by app stores and play stores. like running a channel is, it's great,

but it is not an open protocol. There is somebody who controls it and can shut it down whenever they want. So which is why it like naturally just excited me, like doing it via the open web way, because nobody can stop you that. It reminds me of when I used to go buy these CDs like AOL for one month of internet in the beginning.

I know you wanted to be a solo founder. You wanted to be that solo zero employee unicorn founder. But you accidentally ended up with 400 plus people. How did that happen? Well, you have asked a very loaded question about my life. I imagined to me, I, like initially, of course, everybody sees Steve Jobs and an apple and wants to build that. That was like me as a college, 15-year-old student. But as I started to grow up in college, especially when I moved to Amsterdam, I got really tuned in into the indie hacking community.

like there was this guy Peter Levels he's known by Levels.io on Twitter there were a bunch of other digital nomads famous on the internet at that point even Tim Ferriss of course was the original Peter Levels before Peter Levels happened in a way right so I used to read all the books I'd read like four-hour work week I read make book by Peter Leves Peter Letters was a Dutch guy so that also was like a thing okay I was living in Netherlands and I was seeing this whole journey happened that you can be behind a laptop, built from anywhere, your bots run the company in a way, but like you build something that the internet buys and that's like a business in itself. It was super exciting for me. Like that, that thought of like kind of just designing something that runs by itself was my

excitement. And my motivation of continuing with essentially sports always because we kind of did it as a hobby project for like six, seven years, right? this was one place where I could just express myself in a way, like the way I wanted. Like I could create content. I could create code without asking anybody. I like everything used to go online. Like real fans would reply, all those things. And call it like youthful exuberance.

I was like, okay, I just want to do this. I kept doing it, doing it, doing it. And the business got like a like a turn hockey stick growth curve in COVID. And we did not really have time to think. at that moment. Like we did what it took to get the growth. Like if you wanted to expand our engineering team, if you had to get like more content creators,

of course, like more and more journalists. We had to upgrade the way we were running journalism in our company, et cetera, right? So we grew almost from like a half a million, million pages to 60 million pages in for five months around that time during COVID era. Like yeah, you cannot prepare for that, right? It just happens.

Like as anybody was like, did internet companies knows this. Like, there's that internet movement that happens. And when it happens, you just got to ride it. Like, you cannot wait for it. And away, right? So suddenly, like, we became so big without us, like, really thinking about, was it something we wanted as an entrepreneur? Was it something like, like, is this the way we wanted to design the company?

We did not have time to answer that question. Like, the question was, okay, the growth is, yeah. Yeah, yeah, you can't stop. You can't stop. Like, it's happening at like, you'd go to sleep and you would wake up to a number we're not seen. And it's not just a number. Then you have to like every piece like any piece that goes on a website is touched by five people.

It used to be touched by one person at that time. Right. Like I give this training to my team as well that whatever you're writing, you're giving a bigger mic to it because the voice that our platform holds, even if it's a small Twitter ransom, there, if you end up covering it in a certain style, you've given it a bigger mic. That's like you, you need to have protocols when that is happening. Like that is like the editorial integrity we need to carry.

But like, you know, like internet like companies blow up and they're not thinking so much. But they're not just a content creation house. We are a media company. We're a platform like athletes come and give interviews on our platform. There we have like liability with them, etc. Right. So all of this required us to all like, create a huge organization.

I think once we went through the curve, I actually sat with myself in a way to think, like, is this really what I was signing up for? But then I did this thing also, actually not that long ago. I spent some time in digital nomad ecosystems. Like there's a space for network school. You might have heard it was started by Balaji Srinivasin. So I spent a bunch of time doing digital nomadism, like after running the company for a few years, to understand what's going on in that ecosystem and what my life could have been doing that indie hacking style, right?

And the lesson that I got, I think, building something which is way bigger than yourself, has so much meaning and gratitude in it that even if you crack something very good in something that creates revenue in indie hacking, it would not have given me the same fulfillment, even though that's what I started to start with. But in some way or the other, it becomes something you're doing for yourself, but not for something bigger than yourself. Right now, like running essentially sports,

there are people whose careers have been made just doing this. Like these jobs did not exist. These roles did not exist. Like, one of our main guys was a big tennis fan, wanted to be a tennis player. He interviewed like Novab Djokovic. She, like, met him in person, took photos, took interview. Like, those moments, I don't know.

know how you can create an indie hacking easily like just I cannot so that's the conundrum but I think now I've kind of went to the other side that call it whatever but build something that feels bigger than you so that it creates opportunities that is that fulfills dreams of more than one person I'm very concerned about revenues in the future and advertising spends and all there's so many things I think people don't understand that's going on right now with media and basically your media So there's so many components you have to think through. What right now keeps you up in night the most?

I think there's not a single entrepreneur who is like not losing sleeves at this year. It's especially since Cloud came out last December. It's been a monster of a ride. I think we have been tackling this problem statement for almost a year now. But in general, just to like dial back a little bit, right? Like the whole thesis of essentially sports was that there is a market gap, that enough stories are not being told in all the sports which require the attention that it deserves. And we built a media platform around it, which led to millions of fans consuming us.

But the foundational pieces were that, okay, there was the algorithm, which would help an upstrike like us get discovered. There was monetization via open web. And there was an editorial first plan that we were building, which like you rightly said, with AI coming into place, trust in editorial as being the lowest it has. ever been like that markers that people need to create trust in editorial are significantly higher a year or two ago we started this journey of okay how do we use the success we have had to build a brand around it like what does it take to build

a bleacher report and that doesn't happen overnight while you were doing it the core model itself the way algorithms work the way algorithms think changed right and most importantly the way trust needed to be built required a multimedia brand just edit a doesn't serve a multimedia brand. But the way monetization worked, especially for us, we were open web driven monetization. And right now, there is not a lot of monetization available. If you're running a podcast or if you start like an Instagram channel,

the only way you monetize is like by having a sales team or something, which we do. But like to do it sustainably at scale, like you need a lot of sales happening very continuously for all of this to start to make sense. Right. So what we started to start to make sense. to do was how do we move from algorithm to ownership of the audience. So newsletter was a thesis that, okay, if we own the users via newsletter,

the own the relation via the newsletter, then the users are coming for us because the trust that we give the content a certain way. They're not coming because an algorithm helped them discover essentially sports. So we had started to invest in that journey a while ago, which led to like a million plus subscribers that we have, which kind of strengthened our poor business against AI. because I think if users trust you, you can handle like those volatility that algorithms lead to. And the second thing we started to do was diversify ourselves into a multimedia brand, like setting up on-ground networks, setting up our podcast studio recordings,

more creative first content and bringing creators into newsroom. So like just not just like creators can shoot any style of content, but I believe for us a lot of creators want the journalism access to bring in that like access to the game, access to the latest news, etc, and then bring in their storytelling touch to it. While all of this is happening, what AI has done is not just change the trust in the editorial piece, which initially I thought was a negative for our business, right? Like I looked at it as a, okay, it kind of kills our whole thesis.

But now I'm at that stage. I've gone through that cycle where I actually believe in the positive possibility of AI a lot. Like, in my opinion, AI as an efficiency, the conveyor belt approach, right? AI using as an efficiency layer, not as an end product layer, has multitude of benefits. Like it has so many benefits. Like I told you in the start of the podcast, like we have five people touching a piece of content. Now, out of those five, there are maybe two or three, which is where the creative genius has happened. The couple of other people were the efficiency layer in a way, right?

like which just changes in the when you bring in AI a certain way or when you so i give you an example let's say in golf we do 20 25 topics a day but we research at least 100 150 topics a day before we do those 2025 this research was super manual like we had like a whole team spending a lot of time figuring this out we would listen to every podcast that came out we would go to every test conference and Zoom and stuff. There's, of course, some on-ground people that's going on. We would, like, we run polls on our newsletter. There would be a team member who's running through everything.

Like, there was very little tech figuring all of this out. But now with AI, like, you can literally have like a companion thinker that, okay, this expert knows all of these things, but I can like have a companion thinker run through all the polls that we have had, all the pieces that we did, et cetera, and give another, like a brainstorming buddy to our content created that, okay, what's possible? right then another it's just amazing and like i have a strong time it's i think all great things are like it has to be that good that it's scary otherwise it's not good in my opinion that's true in 2024 um you set on a goal to pitch a hundred people athletes brands founders what was the

meeting that changed your life it was meeting dave nimitz Dave Namitz. So he's the co-founder of Leachar Report. He was like, this was the company we used to look up to when we started in 2014. I had read every blog, everything that he had written from Leaking Bucket to Algorithm versus people, all kinds of things. And then I like cold messaged him and he actually responded. We ended up talking.

He ended up mentoring us for a bit. He's still a great mentor. He even consulted with us for a bit and actually helped us build some of the processes of the company, etc. So there is a very big before and after for us. And the biggest thing was, like, you see somebody who has built that genius of a company, but he brings in such calm, pragmatic, normalized take to everything that you do. It makes you believe that you can do it too. Like having a mentor that elevates you that way is just amazing.

You have a model playing infinite games with infinite people. What does that mean? So it was partially picked up from something that Simonson said, but majorly it's my own. It meant something like, I feel like to do anything good, you need to compound forever. If you can build something that compounds forever, then you are setting on like gold mine in a way, right? And if you want to do that, you need to work with people who are thinking the same, who are thinking in forms of infinity, who are also playing the game in form of infinity. Building a startup with like my college buddies almost,

who have been doing it with me forever, kind of just makes me feel that that's the way to do it. That's the theory I bring into my team members as well. If we keep playing the game long enough, with the infinity mindset, I think we'll figure it out. So where do you see here? Where do you see the next year or so going? I think one, I would definitely like us to become efficient,

But more importantly, creating internet movements that become more real for our brand is like the big thesis we are running with. I've kind of even like we're working on like creating this like creative engine machine whose job is to figure out how can we create more and more and more internet moments for our brand every month. The biggest thing that I'm feeling excited about is

I've been coding again, I've been behind my laptop, I have been clotting. I even wrote a song called Summerofclod.com because I just like I fell in love with Claude at the start of April. And I was like, okay, now I'm going to spend my whole summer. I actually was going through a breakup at that time. And then plot happened in my life. So I was like, okay, this is my new love. This summer, I'm going to spend my summer failing in love with God.

So I'm excited for the next year. Like, what are the possibilities AI has in an industry which is kind of getting killed by AI? in this point. So whatever we are going to build is going to be so unique for this industry. And that's keeping me excited. Sports is just becoming bigger and bigger. Like next week, I'm going to an event in France. It's either creators or sports. Between sports is massive. Thank you for sharing. Essentially, sports.com. Love the website. I get all my sports updates there. So I'm really glad to have you on.

Awesome. Thanks, fan. Thanks for having me over.