How a hockey coaching conference grew into a $1.5 million media subscription business
Aaron Wilbur explained how he built the "Netflix for coaches."
When Aaron Wilbur launched The Coaches Site in 2010, he wasn’t trying to build a media company. He was trying to solve an information problem.
As a hockey coach climbing the ranks in Canada, Wilbur had experienced firsthand how freely elite coaches shared knowledge with one another. At the professional level, there was a constant exchange of drills, tactics, philosophies, and ideas. Coaches understood that sharing information didn’t automatically translate into losing a competitive advantage.
“There’s an appreciation that just because I give another coach a drill or tell him about a tactic, that doesn’t mean it’s automatically going to lead to success,” Wilbur said. “There’s a lot of nuance that goes into coaching.”
But when he began mentoring youth hockey coaches in Vancouver, he noticed a major disconnect. While the sport was rapidly evolving at its highest levels, the lessons learned by elite coaches weren’t filtering down to the grassroots. Many volunteer coaches were still running the same practices and teaching the same concepts Wilbur had encountered decades earlier as a player.
“The game had really evolved at the higher levels,” he said. “It hadn’t necessarily evolved at the same rate at the lower levels.”
That gap became the foundation for The Coaches Site, a business that started as a small in-person event and gradually transformed into a subscription content platform serving more than 41,000 hockey coaches across 54 countries. Today, the company generates more than $1.5 million in annual recurring revenue, employs 14 full-time staffers, and is attempting its biggest transformation yet: expanding beyond hockey into a broader creator platform for coaches across multiple sports.
In my interview with Wilbur, we discussed how he turned conference videos into a subscription product, why evergreen content works so well for coaching education, and how he’s building a platform that allows coaches across all sports to share and monetize their expertise.
Let’s jump into it…
Finding an underserved audience
Wilbur didn’t initially set out to become an entrepreneur. His original ambition was to coach hockey at the highest level.
After his playing career ended, he moved behind the bench and began working his way up the coaching ladder. In 2008, he relocated to Vancouver to join the men’s hockey program at the University of British Columbia.
But coaching careers often require constant relocation. Coaches chase opportunities wherever they appear, moving every few years in pursuit of the next job. After settling into Vancouver, Wilbur began questioning whether he wanted that lifestyle forever.
The idea for The Coaches Site emerged while he was still coaching and mentoring.
At the time, the education system for coaches looked much like it had for decades. Someone would volunteer to coach a team, attend an in-person clinic, sit through hours of presentations, receive a binder full of information, and then often go years before receiving another major educational update.
The model had several limitations. The information was static, the experience was infrequent, and much of the best knowledge remained concentrated among coaches who already had access to elite networks.
Wilbur’s first attempt at solving that problem wasn’t a website. It was a conference.
The premise was simple: bring together experienced coaches, put them in front of an audience, and allow them to share what they had learned.
The first event attracted 98 coaches. The second brought in more than 200, largely through word of mouth.
At that point, it was still more passion project than scalable company. The turning point came from a chance conversation.
While attending a retreat with his wife, Wilbur met Dai Manuel, who ran one of Canada’s largest health and fitness blogs. During a conversation about the conference, Manuel asked what Wilbur did with the recordings of all the presentations.
Nothing, Wilbur told him. They were just sitting on hard drives.
“He said, ‘Have you ever thought about starting a membership site?’” Wilbur recalled. “I said, ‘What’s that?’”
Manuel compared the opportunity to Netflix. Instead of hosting one event per year and letting all that knowledge disappear afterward, Wilbur could create an always-accessible library of coaching education.
“He’s like, ‘You should be Netflix for hockey coaches,’” Wilbur said.
A year later, The Coaches Site launched its first membership product.