People Told Her, 'Why Don't You Make It a Charity? This Isn't a Real Business.' Now Her Women's Sports News Startup Has Raised $13 Million. Haley Rosen founded Just Women's Sports for fans like herself. She was certain that if she created quality content, the audience would come.

When Haley Rosen was forced to retire from pro soccer due to injuries in 2017, she moved back to the Bay area and took up "a real job" in the tech industry. But when she tried to watch women's sports — and continue to follow her friends' careers — she found that she couldn't. Even basic information, such as schedules and game scores, were difficult to find — which confused Rosen. "It didn't match what I was seeing when I was inside the space. I felt like I was seeing that people were excited about this and wanting to follow along. I didn't think I was alone in being a genuine fan of women's sports, and that led to the idea of Just Women's Sports," she said.

In the summer of 2019, Rosen started an Instagram account where she began to publish content that was purely women's sports news, in contrast to publications at the time that tended to focus on the off-the-field accomplishments of female athletes. A one-woman operation, she posted photos, game highlights, interviews, and other major moments in women's sports. Then in January 2020, she received the first check of a $400K investment from Eric Chen, the founder of the venture capital firm Ovo Fund, whom she met while working in Silicon Valley.

"I just kept talking to him about how I was really, really excited about women's sports, and that there was this momentum in the space," Rosen said, explaining that she showed Chen all the engagement and activity her Instagram was generating. "And he actually approached me and said, 'I think this is a business, and we want to fund it.'"

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The initial investment allowed Rosen to quit her job and build a team for Just Women's Sports (JWS). They expanded from only an Instagram account, to other social media sites, a website, a newsletter and a podcast hosted by soccer star Kelley O'Hara. From there, the company grew rapidly; Rosen's bet — her conviction — that there was a real hunger for women's sports news was paying off.

The next year, in 2021, the company raised $3.5 million in seed funding from a group of venture capitalists that included Kevin Durant, in addition to individual star athletes Elena Delle Donne, Hilary Knight, Sam Mewis, Kelley O'Hara and Arike Ogunbowale. JWS expanded their offerings that same year to include more podcasts, a behind-the-scenes YouTube program and a digital weekly highlights show.

In 2022, Rosen was named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 list and brought in an additional $6 million in funding, which included investments from icons like Abby Wambach, Billie Jean King and Michele Kang. JWS's first quarter revenue in 2022 was four times its revenue from the year prior's, and their audience tripled.

This year, Just Women's Sports has added more investors to its roster, and is reaching 80 million people a month through its social media channels. On Instagram alone, JWS has passed 1 million followers and has grown 150% year-over-year the past two years, driving 185 million cross-platform social impressions during March Madness.

The company has continued its women's sports content and offerings, from more original news and media, to festivals and products. All of this made Rosen a finalist on our Entrepreneur of 2024 list of 20 innovative leaders.

You've spoken a lot about the excitement that you saw from the beginning in the women's sports media space, but also about how it was difficult getting people to invest in it. Can you speak to these difficulties and why you think you encountered them?

It felt like the business world — the investors, the brands — was different than the growing audience I was seeing. When we were initially building as a company and telling people we want to cover women's sports as sports, most of the feedback was, "Why don't you make it a charity? This isn't a real business. People have never been interested in women's sports. Why are they now?" It didn't matter that we had data and proof that it was growing and building. These perceptions were locked in. And now you have record-breaking viewership and March Madness numbers that are bigger than the men's, and finally people are getting it.

But I think we've been really fortunate on this journey. Because there were so many no's, and because there were so many naysayers in women's sports, the people that did bet on us, they really got it and they believed in it, and I think that's been a really fun thing about our partners. They bring a huge energy to this, and then they connect with other people that get it and are excited about it, who bring in more energy.

Did you ever have any moments of doubt in your vision? How did you overcome thoughts of quitting?

Of course. There's been a million of those moments. There's been times when it's hard because we're an early-stage company looking for investors, and there's been times when things are hard because we mess up and we create challenges for ourselves. There's been so many moments of, "How can we make this happen?" Doubt is part of the journey, but for me, I am just such a believer in the athletes. I think these women are the best in the world. I think women's sports is peak entertainment. I love, love, love watching the U.S. women's national team play. I love watching NWSL games. I love watching WNBA games — not for any other reason than I just like it. It's just fun. So it's that I believe in the product of women's sports. And so even when I have doubt in myself, I believe in the product so fundamentally. I feel really, really strongly that it needs dedicated media, and that media has to be a real sports conversation.

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What advice would you give someone who has a strong vision and wants to see something play out? What advice should they ignore?

My advice is always to just go for it, and that you gotta be stubborn. In the early days of this company, so many people told me that we need to push it to be more lifestyle-like. I think they were wrong, and I turned down opportunities for that, and I think that was the right thing to do. The main thing that got us from 0 to 100 was that we were relentless, and we believed in this vision. We believed in these athletes, we believed in the product, and it didn't matter how many no's we got. It did not matter the reasons we were given, why they felt this wasn't going to happen. We were going to find a way, period.

And for me, that's still my attitude, even as this space has gotten bigger, heated up, and gotten more competitive, even as we have gotten bigger and there are more eyes on us and the pressure is up. We have made so much progress, but it is just the beginning of what I think this space can be. I really believe the space can be huge, and for it to be huge it needs dedicated digital media, and I think we have to be the ones to do it.

For what to ignore: I do think it's easy when you have a lot of really smart people at the table who have amazing résumés and accolades to want to appease everyone and do everything they say. But as a builder, you have to build first on your principles. I think it's a trap to fall into doing everything an investor says.

You've spoken about the binary that still exists between men and women's sports, and the coverage and excitement around them. So what does "women's" sports in particular mean to you?

Even if you get rid of the titles of men's and women's sports, the legacy media companies have built around the NFL and the NBA. They're just fundamentally not set up from top to bottom to really push WNBA and NWSL content. They've picked their priorities, and their priorities are working for them. They bring in a ton of revenue. They're doing massive deals with these leagues. So for me, you can say that they do men's sports and we do women's sports, but really what we're trying to do is prioritize the women's sports leagues. Because you see all these leagues and then have to ask where you go to follow them holistically. I am a sports fan through and through. I like men's sports, too. There's not this binary. And I just feel like it's kind of as simple as: I get my men's sports content here. I get my NBA content. I get my NFL content. I am not getting my NWSL content. I am not getting my WNBA content. So how do I get that, and then share it with other sports fans?

Going from 4% of coverage of women's sports, which is like basically nothing, to real coverage, there's a lot that we have to learn as an industry. And coverage means covering the fun, the exciting and the wins, and also the good, the bad, the ugly. We've gotta shift the industry to understand that. We want more eyes because we want more resources, more dollars, but with more eyes and attention, it's not always just going to be rainbows and butterflies. You're going to have more people that have opinions, that are good and bad. So I think this is where, for me, we have to be comfortable with that, and we have to actually be excited about that, because that means we're tapping into new audiences and different types of people, who are bringing more people to the table of women's sports. And that's what we want, right? That's the goal.

How do you see Just Women's Sports contributing to that goal?

I think that women's sports is finally breaking through to the mainstream zeitgeist, and I think platforms like Just Women's Sports have been a really big part of making that happen. The time is now. It feels like people are waking up to it. They're getting it. There's dollars and opportunities flowing in. And I'm really proud that we've been a part of making that happen, and also really excited and hungry to be a part of this next phase of women's sports.

In terms of what we're thinking about now, with women's sports being so under-covered, we really had to start from zero, just covering the news cycle and doing the basics of covering the leagues, the teams, and the athletes that people were excited about. At the time, that was doing a lot for the space and really moving the needle. And what we're thinking about now is how, even with all the momentum, there's still these moments where if you look on the men's side, it is a 24/7 conversation, 365 days a year. The offseason can be just as exciting, as people are talking about the trades and everything that's going on.That's the world we want to build on the women's side. And so something we're really thinking about is more original content, working with more creators, getting comfortable starting new conversations in the space, where we're able to have the sports conversations that people are having on their couch and have that in the public forum. Because I think that's what sports are about.

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