The Hidden World of Sports Fan Pages

While leading growth at Bunches, I stumbled into the wild, passionate world of sports fan pages. We were looking for ways to grow Bunches— we targeted these sports fan pages on Instagram and Twitter. These pages were hard to get a hold of but offered a forwya into the internet that I did not know about. What I didn’t expect was how perfectly they’d fit our mission. Sports are a nonstop stream of news and conversation—ideal for fan communities because they don’t need one personality to drive it all.

It began with cold outreach to dozens of fan pages. Most ignored me, but one bit: MemphisGrizz, the biggest Memphis Grizzlies fan page on Instagram, run by a college kid named Asher. One call with him cracked open a hidden universe. Asher had built this page—his pride—from nothing, posting 2-4 times a day with player updates, trade rumors, and game highlights. When he joined Bunches and created a “Bunch,” he pulled in 350+ fans in days—blowing past every big-name creator we’d chased. That’s when it clicked: sports fan pages were different. Unlike smaller creators whose fans demanded daily personal chats, these pages thrived on sports’ relentless churn. They were fungible, reliable, and didn’t need the owner to be the star and posted numerous times because they wanted to get conversions not just generate earned media.

We saw a chance: Could we pay these creators to bring users to Bunches and refer other fan page owners? That’s how the Scouts program started. With Asher’s spark and an incredible team at Bunches—plus a few Head Scouts who became my lifeline—we launched. It blew up faster than we could handle. Thousands joined, built communities, and spread the word. At our peak, we had 2000+ Scouts who managed pages with over 300 million collective followers, generating 2 billion+ impressions monthly—lowball numbers that turned Scouts into a growth engine, even driving revenue.

Scaling that fast was chaos. We tossed Scouts into a group on Bunches—great for bonding, awful when things broke. Payments were a circus: manually sending cash via PayPal, Venmo, and CashApp to 1000+ high school and college kids weekly, knowing one miss meant a DM storm. We also had to deal with trolls you couldn’t win over, people trying to hack the growth system we built and managing 2000+ Scouts which is basically managing 2000+ high school and college students was a nightmare. I would be on the phone at 5 am talking to the largest Liverpool fan page in Italy an I was up at 11pm talking to the college student who runs the largest cowboys fan page.

Through all the struggles, we uncovered some real gems. We discovered that sports fan pages with 10K to 1M followers were being overlooked by brands—often spooked by copyright quirks (since much of the scouts’ content was repurposed) or unsure of who was behind the pages—even though their engagement often surpassed that of official team pages. Recognizing the opportunity, we decided to help these scouts secure brand deals while also generating revenue for ourselves. Our COO, Spencer—a legend with endless connections— and I took the lead and managed to get betting companies, gaming brands, and startups on board. It was a slog, but we landed the deals.

Then we realized we could also acquire these fan pages. We began buying pages ranging from 10K to 100K followers, paying the owners to keep posting while we used the channels to drive user engagement and revenue. I’ll be honest—this wasn’t a resounding success due to the heavy manpower required, but we did see some promising results. As someone who enjoys finance, I found the experience fascinating—it was a sort of PE-style roll-up of undervalued sports fan pages.

I’m incredibly grateful for the scouts—they taught me invaluable lessons. Managing that was challenging, but our dedicated Head Scouts and the outstanding support from the Bunches team made it possible. Even though I was often sending payments at 5am, I truly enjoyed working with them. The experience honed my communication skills, taught me to thrive amidst chaos, and revealed the unparalleled cultural pull of sports.

While Bunches may not have reached the lofty heights we had envisioned, our journey in building the scouts program tapped into something truly special. By discovering and nurturing these overlooked pages, we not only reshaped our approach to brand engagement but also laid the foundation for future innovation and success.

Now, as I shift from operator to investor, the Scouts program shapes how I think about consumer investing. I realize sports is growing and is going to keep growing and sports fans are the best and worst customer. Also showed me the the power of passionate, scrappy communities and how niche communities with creators maybe can be leveraged to build and create companies. I truly am interested in finding these some what undervalued parts of the Internet that have so many passionate and engaged fans.