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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.'”
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