Hi and welcome to the Essential Tennis Podcast, your place for free, expert, tennis instruction that can truly help you improve your game. Welcome to this special update version of the Essential Tennis Podcast. I'm not going to give this an episode name because this is not about tennis improvements. It's more so. Just some behind the scenes look at what's been going on with me over the last year or two, what's been going on with Essential Tennis and with the online tennis instruction space.
I'm going to give you a behind the scenes look at that. Let you know where things are headed and what my plans are because if you're listening to this, you've probably been a long time supporter of Essential Tennis. You've also probably noticed that I've hardly uploaded at all recently to the podcast feed. I feel really badly about that. I feel like those of you who are long time supporters are owed a bit of an explanation and maybe you'd be curious to know what's going on.
This podcast started in 2008 in April. So coming up on 16 years ago, which is crazy because that's half of the time that the internet has been a thing for average everyday people, household use. It spans a very long time. I started doing videos in March of 2009 just a year after I started doing the podcast in my blog. For the first six years, I was all by myself. I wore all the hats. I was the person in front of the camera and person in front of the microphone.
I was the person behind the camera and behind the microphone. I was doing all the editing, all the shooting, all the publishing, all the customer service and everything. It took me a while to figure out how to kind of make a business around it. About three and a half, four years of just kind of publishing everything for free before I figured that out. Then nine years ago, a couple years after I quit my on-quart teaching job to do content full-time, I added my first full-time team member, James.
He was the first full-time person that I hired. He's still with me. Predominantly, I hadn't focused on shooting and editing. The reason why I did that was because I wanted to do more content and better content. I wanted to make a bigger impact. As many players in the best way as I could, I knew that I couldn't do the best job possible if I was by myself.
I had to try to check all the boxes and do all the tasks and cover all the bases related to content, production and publishing as well as be a coach and as well as come up with the ideas. I started growing a team around that idea and around my passion for wanting to help like-minded people. I love tennis. It's still one of the biggest things that I'm passionate about in life. Probably the biggest thing, still. Probably it's still number one after all these years.
For five years there, I grew a team around that passion and I tried to find as many other people as possible that had similar level of energy and enthusiasm for improving at the game of tennis. I added more editors and more publishers and more coaches.
It wasn't just me, I wanted other coaches to come alongside me so we could grow our outputs, we could grow our reach and we could grow the influence that we had and grow a fan base so that we could grow the business and help more people and grow it again and help more people. For several years that worked and we continued to scale up more and more.
We brought on people for customer service and for social media and for advertising and for business growth and all kinds of stuff and it was incredibly fun and fulfilling to lead a team of people that we all at the peak, we're all coming to office every day. We had great office space in Milwaukee.
We had private court space where we could do our coaching and do our content creation and it was incredibly fun to come to work and collaborate with other creative, super energetic, passionate people who love the game of tennis and wanted like me to help as many people improve their game as possible and kind of augment their passion with our creativity and content to help them enjoy the game even more.
It was this positive feedback loop of energy and enthusiasm and feedback and more content and more viewers and it was a lot of fun and that all peaked in 2019 and about four years ago all of that positivity started to unwind and the kind of growth phase and the trajectory that we were on started slowing down and then moving in the wrong direction. So why is that?
Well from my perspective working full time in this space online for over a decade and a half, my perspective is in the early days it was super easy to build a business around content because it was still like a novel new thing. People would go online and search for tennis and be like, oh wow somebody's actually making videos, somebody's actually making a podcast around this topic, this idea of getting better at the game of tennis.
And look they made a course and it when it was like the first doubles course that anybody had ever created, we got tons and tons of people signing up for those courses and learning and gaining a lot of insight and gaining a lot of knowledge and getting better because of it.
And so that fed that's what fed the business really predominantly was course sales and the more core sales we made, the more we could produce and publish free content and the more free content we published and produced the more course sales we would make because we would grow our audience and the more of course sales we made, the more free content we could publish and produce and there was a positive feedback loop that happened for many years there. And it was again like incredible.
I'm always going to look back at that period with a lot of warmth and I guess nostalgia now, sadly, looking back on it, it was kind of like a golden era in the online tennis improvement space. And our supporters are why we had those courses, but after a certain period of time when more coaches started jumping in and publishing their free content and their courses and our core group of supporters and enthusiasts online started kind of stacking up those courses
on their digital shelves, they reached a certain point where there was kind of a point of saturation where the supply and demand curve kind of flipped and all of a sudden there was so much supply of free coaching and so much supply of paid coaching and the core group of people who were supporting us had made a certain number of purchases where they're like, you know what, I don't need another one of these.
I have this big kind of catalog of courses that I've bought from all these different coaches and they're all great, they're all fantastic, but I haven't even gotten around to even looking at course number five or six or seven that I bought and so I'm not going to buy another one.
And there were so many options and a lot of sales got made and then they hit a saturation point and now it's falling off year after year, at least for me, and I know for many other people in the space that I talk to and I'm friends with over the last four or five years things have been on the decline. So that negative, that like shrinking of that cycle where previously it was positive feedback loop, right?
Or it was like the more free stuff we published, the more paid stuff we could sell, the more paid stuff we could sell, the more free stuff we could publish and that started reversing where the revenue coming in from courses was becoming less and less and less and so our capacity to pay editors and publishers and production people and customer service and social media and all the rest of it started to shrink.
And so over the last three, four years, there's been kind of an unwinding of that momentum and it's all really kind of come to a head in the last 12 to 18 months, especially. And we're honestly for me, the last several years, the goal hasn't been to grow, but just to survive. And as revenue has shrunk and payroll is kind of in a trailing way also shrunk.
I mean, there were many, many months, I mean, at least the last 18 months, 24 months, were months after months, my goal was just to not run out of money. And now, just recently, I say the last month or two, I've been able to kind of exhale for the first time in a year or two and just be like, like sit back for a moment and say a holy crap.
Like that was a crazy period trying to survive, trying to not run out of money, trying to keep paying people as long as possible, but slowly shrink our expenses, slowly shrink our payroll and we no longer have the office space, we no longer have the private court. Like we've had to drop like each one of those awesome things that we used to be able to use.
And that comes in the form of people and it comes in the form of talent, it comes in the form of tools and resources, comes in the form of access to spaces and so on and so forth. And it's taken time to kind of unwind all of that and get back to the point where now I feel like for the first time in a long time, we're just even and we're just okay.
And now we're basically back where I was nine years ago, where it's me and it's James, the first person that joined me nine years ago and now kind of looking around and saying, all right, so now what? And it feels, it feels in a sense kind of like starting over because I'm back at square one again, but over the last six years while we've been working through, well, I'm sorry, there were five six years of the growth and now four or five years of like shrinkage.
And so over the last four or five years, I've just been kind of an emergency like survival mode. And that's why uploading to YouTube has been sparse and that's why posting to the podcast feed has been sparse. And I'm sorry and I feel badly for that, but it's just when you're in survival mode, you just kind of do the next thing that just has to be done and publishing free content has just been on the back burner for the last 12 to 18 months.
And now finally, I'm sitting back looking around saying now like now what do I want to do? And the answer honestly is I still love tennis and I still love teaching and I still love making videos and I still love making podcasts. And I feel like right, like kind of right now I'm in this pocket where it's time to wipe the slate clean, start back at square one and figure out how to do this successfully with a very minimal team again.
And I'm starting now to put things in place to hopefully start ramping up my efforts again on the free side of things because here's the deal. There has to be two way, this is a two way street, right? Like I publish stuff that I hope is insightful, invaluable and helpful as possible.
And as a result, that builds an audience, it builds fans and builds a group of people that would like more, want more of my time, more access to resources that go even deeper and wider on how to get better at tennis. So it's there's this give and take that goes back and forth. There has to be a two way street if it wasn't a two way street and I was just clicking publish out into a vacuum with no feedback, no support, no encouragement, no, no purchases of it.
Nobody's signing up for coaching, nobody's signing up for any kind of courses of any kind, then everything would stop. And I'm super, super grateful that that has not happened. And we've figured out how to just kind of get by for the last couple of years and just being able to sit where I am right now and contemplate and ponder what do I want to do next is in and of itself a huge blessing.
And I want you to know if you're listening right now, especially if you've made it to this point in this particular upload, you're probably a long time supporter and I want you to know that you literally are the reason why I'm talking into this microphone right now. If there was no inbound, if there was no two way street, if there was no inbound support and encouragement, then there's no way this would still be going. And there's no way I'd be sitting here saying what do I want to do?
Like just being able to ask myself that question is a huge gift. And so in a nutshell, my goal is to start again. And it starts to put aside time on purpose to get back onto a routine, get back into a groove of hitting upload again for videos and for podcasts.
And it means having to rebuild the the business model to either like just not be able to have such a expansive, not that it was huge or anything, but relatively speaking either just get things done without such a big team and just do the best we can and keep it at a smaller scale than we used to and or figure out some new business model that we can maybe get some traction again and start to scale things again.
Because there's always there's always a give and take between like quantity and quality and internet publishing in general. Like you can't have both all the time without a huge support system behind you. I know this from experience. You can do a lot of quantity but with relatively low like production value, especially on the video side, not so much audio, but definitely on the video side.
Or you can do occasional posts with very, very high quality with a handful of creative people and you know, a very small team. But what we were trying to do for years was do the best of both and check both boxes and make it as successful and big of a team as possible. So we could help as many players and as creative of a way and as high quality of a way as possible. And as of right now, those days are are over.
And to be honest, you know, it's taken some time for me to process through that and kind of let that picture in my head die and move on. And I'm grateful, thankful to say that I'm sitting back in a place again where I'm ready to just move forward by myself with the help of one other production person and just do the best that I can. We're not struggling just to, you know, make ends meet anymore month after month after month.
And now I want to hopefully jump, start things and get back into a regular routine again with publishing and then figure it out from there and see what happens. So that's the background in a nutshell. I'm definitely not ready to give up or do anything different. This is still honestly just what I want to do most in life. And I just want you to know that just getting to this point has meant the support of so many people.
And if you're listening right now, you're probably one of them and I appreciate that tremendously. Like more than you can possibly know. It's supported my family, it's supported James's family and moving forwards, we're going to get right back into as hopefully as positive and as regular of a schedule as we can to provide as insightful uploads and posts as we possibly can to help you reach your goals and love the game of tennis that much more. So hopefully this has been a little enlightening.
If you have any feedback or questions or anything to be honest, like I'd love to hear from you. And you can send me any feedback or thoughts you have by sending me an email to Ian at to IAN at essential tennis.com. Hopefully I'll be posting here to the feed again very, very soon and also back on YouTube again very soon as well. Thank you for your patience in the meantime. Thank you for your support. I really appreciate it hugely. I'm looking forward to what's ahead.
Take care and let's talk to you again soon.