Hello, friends.

We are back in a big way.

I am thrilled today to bring you the first-ever Creating Sports Spotlight. Say hello to Megan Rembielak, known online as MegRem Softball.

Whether you follow softball content or not, you’ll find her journey equally impressive and inspiring. She built a giant following, and sustainable business, in less than four years by tapping into a niche within a niche. How did Rembielak pull this off? She’ll explain!

You can follow/subscribe to MegRem Softball on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and Twitter.

Let’s dig in.

The Beginning

Today, Megan Rembielak – known by the internet as “MegRem Softball – is perhaps the internet’s top softball instruction creator. 

Rembielak is teetering on 500K followers combined across all channels, including 100K+ on three each (YouTube, Instagram & TikTok). She has a booming clinic business, boasts several long-term brand partnerships, and debuted a popular training membership in January. However, she never intended to be an online creator.

“I never in my wildest dreams thought this would be my full-time job, literally,” Rembielak tells me.

The Journey

Rembielak began creating content in September 2020 for the same reason many others did – the pandemic had forced everybody inside.

Since graduating from Appalachian State in 2012 after a standout softball career, she spent some time as a volunteer high school assistant coach. Then in 2018, she began teaching a couple of lessons per week at a local facility. Yet by the time the pandemic arrived, she had still never uploaded anything to her own social media channels.

“By 2020, obviously COVID happened,” Rembielak says. “My now-husband at the time was like, why don't you start a YouTube channel? The facility I was working at wanted us to post once a week to their social media. I was doing that on Thursdays, and every time I post it was doing really well. So my husband's like, why don't you start a YouTube channel just to make a couple extra bucks? Everyone's at home because it's COVID.”

As she says, it “kind of just took off.” 

Inside the MegRem Softball Business

It didn’t take long for Rembielak to find the “couple extra bucks” her husband wondered about. And it happened, she says, because she found a softball instruction niche that she felt was unfilled.

“I think my content is great, but in my opinion there really at the time wasn't anything in the softball world,” Rembielak says. “There's a lot of baseball, which we know is the same, but it's different.”

By the beginning of 2021, she had enough demand to go full-time teaching lessons. Later that year, a follower sent her a message: Would you be willing to come teach a clinic for my organization in Boston? Sure, Rembielak, said. She would bring her friend and they could catch a Red Sox game. But when Rembielak posted about the clinic on social media, other followers perked up, wondering whether she would teach clinics in their area.

Quickly, Rembielak began traveling all over the country for clinics. The demand got so intense that by 2022 she was able to stop the lessons and go full-time with clinics.

Currently, the majority of Rembielak’s revenue comes from in-person clinics – where about 100% of either the players or parents know of her via social media. She taught 100+ clinics in 2023, and they typically sell out within about an hour (even though her only marketing is posting on social media). But clinics, which require significant travel, are a grind – especially as a new mother (her 3-month-old daughter, Quinn, was born in March). She plans to only teach clinics about once a month this year after traveling for them nearly every weekend last year. 

The long-term goal? Continue to create content while ramping up other revenue sources now that she won’t host as many clinics.

To begin this year, Rembielak took a big step toward achieving that goal by launching online membership practice plans starting at $225. By the beginning of 2023, she had noticed plenty of softball drills on social media but had a steady flow of DMs from new softball coaches asking for tips on how best to run practices. So, she set out to create a solution, writing the practice plans while on plane rides to and from clinics and filming accompanying videos in her limited spare time.

The process took nearly a year, but upon this January’s release, the demand exceeded her expectations so much that she had to invest in a new website.

“I've never charged for anything before,” Rembielak said. “I was like, I'm spending all of this time and money. I was super nervous, but I was like, if I could just break even, then to me it's worth it. A lot, a lot of people bought it. That's when I was like, oh crap, I need a better website because I can't support the volume. It definitely exceeded my expectations.”

Long-Term Brand Partners

Some content creators live and die by brand deals. Rembielak, because of her clinic business, has not needed to act that way. Instead, she has several long-term partnerships with brands she believes in.

• Valle Sporting Goods (since Nov. 2021)

• BRUCE BOLT (since March 2022)

• Tanner Tees (since Feb. 2023)

“I knew going into teaming up with someone is I don't want to be that influencer where every new week it's new product, and you just know they're making money,” Rembielak says. “Do they like the product? No. Are they getting money from it? Yeah, which, respect. But I wanted to build a reputation where if I post about a brand, my followers are going to know that's legit because she doesn't team up with anyone and everyone.”

And she wasn’t just looking for a one-way partnership. Rembielak wanted somebody who would help promote her, too.

BRUCE BOLT did exactly that when it dropped official MegRem Softball batting gloves in May. They sold out in four(!) minutes. Valle followed suit with a custom glove.

You can expect to see more of these kinds of partnerships. Rembielak says she has a couple of upcoming deals with companies where they're creating something for the softball world that doesn't exist. In this case, she brought the idea to them.

Up to this point, Rembielak has done everything but create YouTube thumbnails – her sister can take credit for those – by herself. Eventually, that could change. She is strongly considering bringing somebody onto her team to be proactive about seeking mutually beneficial brand partnerships.

A Niche Within a Niche

Softball isn’t one of the country’s largest sports. Softball instruction is even more niche. Yet Rembielak has found immense success. 

Here are her three keys to success:

1. Be yourself. She previously thought about uploading a “Get Ready With Me” or branching out to attract new audiences. Ultimately, she decided to stay true to herself and avoid comparing herself to others.

2. Keep it simple. She wants 7-year-olds and 50-year-olds to understand her videos equally. They are quick, informative and edited straightforwardly with no frills. Her followers have told her they’re easy to consume.

3. Consistency. Maintaining consistency is so important to her that you could have followed her and not realized she gave birth to her first kid in March!

Thanks to Megan for sharing her story for the debut Creating Sports Spotlight! She was gracious enough to spend a little over 30 minutes of her time as her 3-month-old daughter slept (valuable time, I know).

Let me know whose story and insights you’d like to hear next!

Colin