How Science for Sport became a leading resource for elite athletes
Owen Walker launched the site because he noticed a lack of high quality sports science information.
In 2014, Owen Walker faced a predicament. He was a sports scientist at a professional football club, and his manager asked him if they should buy expensive wearable technology that would help with the team’s training. Walker turned to the internet to research whether this kind of technology was effective, but he found there wasn’t much good sports science information online.
That realization eventually led to the launch of Science for Sport, one of the leading information hubs that translates peer-reviewed sports science for a lay audience. The outlet has been embraced as a resource by pro and college teams, and Owen recently sold it to one of the world’s largest sports technology companies.
In our interview, Owen walked me through how he built the site’s audience, his monetization strategies, and why he never focused on building his own personal brand.
To listen to the interview, subscribe to The Business of Content on your favorite podcast player. If you scroll down you’ll also find some transcribed highlights from the interview.
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This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Why he decided to launch a sports science website
Owen got both a bachelors and masters degree in sports science before landing a job as the head of academy sports science for a Wales-based football club. As a student, he’d struggled to find good sports science research outside of his textbooks, and that struggle continued into his early career. “For instance, I wanted to know how long athletes needed to spend in an ice bath in order to recover as fast as possible,” he said. “And just looking around online, there was nothing.” What little information did exist was on bodybuilding websites, which catered to a different demographic.
The idea for Science for Sport started as a Facebook page. Owen used it to aggregate articles and videos he came across, and because this was during a time when Facebook was still heavily promoting pages in the Newsfeed, his page started to catch on. This led to the launch of a Wordpress site where he began writing summaries of peer-reviewed research. He acknowledges now that, in those early days, he didn’t have much of a strategy. “I had absolutely no idea what I was doing in terms of business, in terms of SEO, in terms of marketing, anything like that. I just knew I kind of wanted my own business and thought launching a website was the first step towards getting to that end goal, and so I just wrote a load of random articles and put them on the website.”
But Owen lucked out; there weren’t many sites covering sports science research, so his articles began to rank high on Google search results, and he also benefited from the early success of his Facebook page. The website quickly grew to over 80,000 views per month, and Owen soon launched an account on Instagram. For that platform, he would consolidate information into infographics and also share short training videos. That account eventually grew to over 300,000 followers.
Monetization
Though Science for Sport had no business model to start out with, Owen eventually grew confident enough in the product that he launched a monthly, paid PDF magazine. “My idea was that I can just sell monthly research summaries, because all of the peer reviewed research from the academic journalist is typically behind paywalls, and there's over a thousand studies published every month in the domain of sports science. So I thought, right, why don't we take the best ones, condense them, summarize them, and then just send them to subscribers.” He compiled a beta version and sent it out to a small subset of his readers and asked them how much they’d be willing to pay for such a product. “I got like 300 responses, and they pretty much all said, yeah, we'd pay for it.”
Each guide was about 20 pages in total. “I’d spend 10 hours a month going through all the academic journals and finding studies that I think people would want to read, then wrote summaries for them.” In the early days, he’d charge $7 per issue, but he eventually raised the price to $30 a month. By that point, Science for Sport had built up a sizable following on both social media and email, and so Owen started posting snippets and infographics from each issue of the magazine. He’d offer free issues in exchange for email addresses, and then he’d leverage those email lists to run targeted ads across social media. By the end of the first year, he was generating over $60,000 in revenue. Because his overhead was low, that was just about all profit. It broke six figures within the second year.
Owen’s next product launch was something called Coach Academy. “I always had this idea of having on-demand courses that you could earn certificates of completion on. I wanted to make them about an hour long and break them into 15-minute videos so that they’re very digestible.” He then sold subscriptions to the video course library.
For the most part, Owen didn’t appear in these videos. “I knew from the very beginning that if I wanted to build a genuine business, I couldn’t have my face closely attached to the brand. If you want to sell your company, it has to operate as a separate entity.” He had no desire to become a social media influencer, because then his business would always rely on his personal brand. So he hired outside experts and coaches to put together and record the courses.
Selling the company
From almost the day Owen launched Science for Sport, he knew he’d eventually want to sell the company. In late 2020, it got acquired by Catapult Sports, one of the largest sports performance analytics companies in the world. “They’re already the leading sports tech providers, and so they also want to become the leading education source in sports science.” Since acquiring Science for Sport, Catapult has invested significant resources into scaling it. “When I owned it, I basically only ever had one full-time employee who worked remotely, and they’ve already grown it to where there's six full-time team members.”
Owen now works for the consulting basis, usually for only 15 hours a week. “They pay me to just advise them on the company and help guide stuff. I basically work on the projects that I care about, offering up my advice and my expertise.” That freed up some time to think about what he wants to do next. “I've basically lined out a number of different business ideas that I feel I'd be kind of interested or passionate about doing.” Ideally, he’d like to connect with an early-stage startup with an already-existing product and run its marketing. “If there's anyone in your audience that’s interested in particular projects and getting them off the ground, or they've got something off the ground and they're looking for a co-founder, then feel free to reach out.”
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Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com. For a full bio, go here.