How 3 College Friends Turned a WhatsApp Chat Into a $20M Media Empire | Income Tips & Side Hustles
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Harit Pathak and his co-founders, Jaskirat Arora and Suryansh Tibarewal, never imagined the sports activities banter from their WhatsApp group chat would flip into a multimillion-dollar media business sometime. But that’s precisely how BasicallySports was born.
Before it turned a top-10 U.S. sports activities media platform (per Comscore), BasicallySports was just a ardour project run by a group of Indian college college students annoyed by the little coverage their favourite sports activities acquired.
Pathak — a diehard tennis and WWE fan — spent a lot time debating sports activities online that he finally turned those conversations into a public weblog for mates and classmates. As their community grew, the trio leaned into Reddit threads and Facebook fan pages to drive visitors.
“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 had been juggling full-time software and consulting jobs while working BasicallySports on the facet. Engagement had been rising steadily, however issues 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 outline BasicallySports’ editorial strategy: they’re not just chasing game recaps or free company updates. Instead, they dig for inventive, surprising angles — sometimes as granular as an out-of-place strand of hair on a legendary tennis participant’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 BasicallySports was a acquainted one for many corporations: COVID. While most publications considerably lowered their output and workers, BasicallySports seized the alternative. They tapped into the wave of sports activities documentaries led by The Last Dance, treating each episode of the now-iconic collection like a sporting event.
They also leaned into what Pathak calls “entity-based journalism,” the place coverage is constructed round a particular determine fairly 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 via autobiographies, documentaries and previous interviews to seek out nuggets they may flip 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.”
BasicallySports’ NASCAR coverage is a good instance of their strategy in action. When NASCAR was one of the few lively leagues during COVID, the team doubled down — publishing a lot content that, on some days, they even outpaced NASCAR’s official website.
The wager paid off. Fans had been ravenous for around-the-clock coverage, and ES turned 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 visitors didn’t match big leagues like the NBA or NFL, Pathak noticed the worth 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, most control
That hyperfocus has led to hyper-success, with ES reaching topline income of round $20 million yearly with ZERO exterior 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 visitors doubled every quarter for practically eight straight quarters, they needed to start pondering about it in another way.
“We’re very agile,” Pathak says. “So we can make moves our competitors can’t.”
Instead of pitching VC corporations or courting angel traders, the founders began 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, income primarily comes from online promoting, though ES has lately made efforts to diversify, building a sales team in the US to increase syndication income.
“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 a technique BasicallySports stands out. About half of its visitors comes from area of interest sports activities coverage, and less than 30% of its content overlaps with major rivals 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 desires followers to recollect the BasicallySports model — not the platform it lives on or the VC firm behind it. And with the company rising from under 1 million pageviews in 2018 to more than 500 million yearly today, it’s clear they’re right here to remain.
Harit Pathak and his co-founders, Jaskirat Arora and Suryansh Tibarewal, never imagined the sports activities banter from their WhatsApp group chat would flip into a multimillion-dollar media business sometime. But that’s precisely how BasicallySports was born.
Before it turned a top-10 U.S. sports activities media platform (per Comscore), BasicallySports was just a ardour project run by a group of Indian college college students annoyed by the little coverage their favourite sports activities acquired.
Pathak — a diehard tennis and WWE fan — spent a lot time debating sports activities online that he finally turned those conversations into a public weblog for mates and classmates. As their community grew, the trio leaned into Reddit threads and Facebook fan pages to drive visitors.
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