Tom Weingarten, Chief Growth Officer at Overtime
Happy Wednesday,
Tom Weingarten joined Overtime as one of its first five employees when he was a sophomore in college, making $50 a month, learning social media in real time, and posting during the 2015 NBA Finals because he was the only one who volunteered.
Today, he oversees 125 million followers across 85 accounts and a 120-person content team. This week, Jake and I sat down with Tom to talk about how Overtime actually got built, what he looks for when hiring, and where sports media goes from here.
I had one goal: get as many followers as possible. I didn't have to worry about anything else. That freedom did everything.
How They Got Here
2015 (sophomore year of college): Typed "sports internships" into Google, skipped to page 50, found a listing paying $50 a month, and applied to a startup called “Overtime.”
Night one: Volunteered to run Overtime's Twitter during the 2015 NBA Finals, got his friends to retweet everything, one post hit 13 retweets, and he was put in charge of social the next day
2015–2019: Only person hitting publish for the first five to six years, no defined role, just did whatever needed doing
2018–2019: Overtime started as a sports app, pivoted fully to social when it became clear that was the only thing actually working
Strategy Shift: Tested covering high school athletes alongside pros (LaMelo, Zion, Trae Young) and high school content got ten times the engagement, which changed their entire strategy
The infrastructure: Built a network of 1,000 decentralized filmers found through Facebook ads and Instagram geotags, saved every contact in his phone by city name so he could pull up "Zion" and find 20 people in Spartanburg ready to shoot
Today: 125 million followers across 85 accounts, 3.4 billion TikTok views last month, their own sports leagues, and a deal with NBC Sports
The Big Idea: Find the Niche You Already Have Access To
This is the framework underneath everything Overtime has ever done, and Tom articulated it better than I've heard anyone explain it.
When Overtime started, every sports media company was covering LeBron and Kobe. Overtime tested covering the same athletes, and they also tested covering high school players most fans had heard of:
LaMelo Ball
Zion Williamson
Trae Young.
The high school athletes got 10x the engagement.
Not because they were better players, but because they were more interesting to the audience Overtime was actually chasing. A 17-year-old was way more excited to see LaMelo on their feed than LeBron.
That instinct (find the thing people care about that nobody's covering yet) has driven every major Overtime decision since:
High school basketball
Their own sports leagues
Lunchbox, their version of First Take, filmed in actual cafeterias
Reporter Roulette, where strangers in Washington Square Park read the day's sports news like they're Scott Van Pelt
The question Tom asks every time: what's the social version of something people have always loved, and how do you make it feel like it was built for right now?
I think about this constantly with my own content. The best videos I've made aren't the ones covering what everyone else is covering. They're the ones where I find that Goldilocks zone: something people are genuinely interested in, with almost no existing content about it (eg, the hockey jersey strap video, the US Bank Stadium public transit video). Find the niche that you already have access to, but nobody else is bothering to cover.
5 Tactical Takeaways
1. Give people ownership and get out of the way. Overtime's Instagram has 10 million followers; it's run by two people. Their TikTok has 30 million followers; also, two people. Tom doesn't want posts approved; he doesn't want things run by anyone. Instead, he found that the more ownership people had, the better they performed, and the more the account felt like a person rather than a company.
2. The three things Tom hires for (in order).
Grew up with Overtime (already 40% ahead of everyone else on day one)
Energy (it's contagious; he’s watched three new hires with great energy reinvigorate senior employees who'd been there six years)
Can do everything (film, edit, graphic design, publish, talk to fans, interview athletes)
His words: the person who had the best year on his social team grew up loving Overtime, has insane energy, and can do everything.
3. 18 months is roughly the prime for a publisher. Tom has watched this pattern repeat across his entire social team. Someone hits their “prime” around the 18-month mark; then it's worth asking whether a different role or a different company is actually what they need next. He doesn't fight it. He celebrates it. Overtime alumni have gone on to jobs they couldn't have gotten on paper without the experience.
4. Competition makes the whole category bigger. Early Overtime tried to kill every competitor in the high school basketball space. Most of them died on their own, and it made the whole space less interesting. Now, Tom actively wants Strictly B-Ball to blow up, because when they get 10 million views on an Overtime athlete, it grows the pie for everyone. The rising tide is real.
5. Scale your coverage before you can afford to. Overtime had no budget to fly to Spartanburg, South Carolina to film Zion. So they found 20 locals, sent them an Overtime t-shirt, and told them to show up with their phone. One of their best filmers ever started at 18 that way and was hired full-time five years later to run their most important account. Build the infrastructure before the money arrives.
Why It Matters
The thing I keep thinking about after this conversation is the barbell (I actually wrote about it on LinkedIn last week).
On one end, you have Overtime:
3.4 billion TikTok views last month
120-person content team
Their own sports leagues
NBC Sports distribution deal
On the other end: individual creators like me:
Near-zero overhead
High margins on every deal
Direct personal relationship with the audience that a brand like Overtime can never replicate
Tom said it himself: he's working with some of the biggest creators in the world on the Fox One World Cup deal, as well as creators with a few hundred thousand followers. And the smaller ones are making great money and living a great life.
I don't think individual creators need to compete with Overtime. I think we need to push further in the opposite direction; get leaner, get more specific, double down on the things a 120-person team structurally cannot do. Things like our personal relationship with our audience, the niches inside the niche, and a voice that sounds like a real person (because it is one).
That's the lesson from this conversation: know which end of the barbell you're on, then go all the way to the edge of it.
📩 And don’t forget: Bottom of the Ninth is back this Friday with the top three stories in sports and business from the week.
See you then,
Tyler & Jake