How a few college students bootstrapped one of the largest sports media websites in the world
Suryansh Tibarewala explained how he and his cofounders grew EssentiallySports from a dorm room passion project into a media powerhouse.
In an era when many digital media success stories involve venture capital, blitzscaling, and aggressive audience acquisition on social platforms, EssentiallySports stands out as an anomaly.
Founded in 2014 by a group of college students in India, the site spent its first four to five years earning virtually no revenue. It didn’t raise outside capital. It didn’t chase viral distribution on Instagram or TikTok. And it didn’t benefit from the backing of a legacy media conglomerate or sports league.
Yet today, EssentiallySports ranks among the most-visited sports websites in the world, consistently appearing near the top of Comscore’s sports category—often as the only fully independent publisher in the list.
“From the very beginning we had this common feeling that this project was bigger than us,” co-founder Suryansh Tibarewala told me. “It never felt like this blog that we were simply writing as a hobby during our free time. It was always something we wanted to build into something bigger.”
That conviction—combined with an unusually patient approach to growth—helps explain how EssentiallySports evolved from a WordPress passion project into a 200-person global media company.
A Passion Project, Not a Business Plan
EssentiallySports began the way many media projects do: informally, experimentally, and without a clear commercial goal.
In 2014, Tibarewala and his eventual co-founders—Harit Pathak and Jaskirat Arora—were college students in India, spread across two campuses in different parts of the country. The site started after Pathak bought the domain essentiallysports.com for $10.
“At that time, it was one of those dorm room passion projects,” Tibarewala said. “Something that you do because you find it interesting—not because you had a vision for launching a media company.”
The initial focus was narrow. Pathak was deeply into tennis. Arora followed Formula One at a time when the sport had little mainstream traction in India. Tibarewala, a computer science student, gravitated toward the mechanics of building things online.