“I'll be the weird YouTube Wiffle Ball guy” – How Kyle Schultz grew a niche passion into a thriving internet business–with a serious fanbase
Kyle Schultz, founder of MLW Wiffle (pictured center)
If you wanted to build a YouTube channel with an active subscriber base of more than 360,000 people, and monetize your channel with multiple income streams, what would you create content about? International travel? Makeup and beauty? Hollywood lifestyle vlogs? 23-year old Kyle Schultz has a YouTube channel with all these perks–but he didn’t build it making content on major trends. He built it doing what he loves most: playing Wiffle Ball in the front yard with his neighbors.
If you’re not as suburban as Kyle and me, let me explain. Wiffle Ball is a popular plastic bat and ball set–that classic thin banana-yellow bat you’ve probably seen before. A Wiffle Ball has a circle of skinny holes on one side, which makes throwing ridiculous curveballs and sliders something anyone can do with a little practice. But Wiffle Ball is largely seen as a backyard replica of baseball that won’t break your window. Not anything serious. So how did Kyle turn a kids’ game into MLW Wiffle Ball: a verified YouTube channel, boasting 45 million views, with multiple income streams, dozens of players, interstate travel, and an avid fan base? Well, that’s a longer story involving consistency, opportunity, and a good ol’ fashioned “love of the game.”
Pull up a lawn chair and I’ll tell you.
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It all started when a 10-year old Kyle Schultz had a little Wiffle Ball home run derby in the front yard with his brothers and his next door neighbors. Whoever hits the most home runs wins. But arguments started pretty quickly about whether or not a few close calls were actually home runs. Kyle saw the problem immediately: they didn’t have a fence. After some rummaging in his parents’ garage, Kyle pulled out a gardening fence, propped it up, and MLW Wiffle Ball was born.
“We kept that little makeshift field up for the entire summer,” Kyle told me on a phone call. “Then, in 2010, we thought, ‘Wait, that Wiffle Ball idea was kind of cool. Let's not only put the fence up, but let's put up a backstop. Let's maybe film some of our games, let's put 'em on YouTube.’” Kyle’s current business began as a streak of childhood creativity and curiosity. And this comes across in their original videos. If you scroll back far enough on MLW Wiffle Ball, you’ll see a single shaky camera angle in 720p, driveway chalk art of their official logo, and kids having good, clean fun. Well, not entirely clean–YouTube pulled the audio from their initial videos for using Kanye West’s All of the Lights without a license.
“It was a very gradual incline.” Kyle told me more about the growth of both the league and the YouTube channel. “In terms of just players in the league, it would grow through word of mouth or mutual friends. We'd grow maybe three, four players a year, maybe add a new team every single season. It was definitely a gradual incline with our professionalism too. Every single year I'd take a little bit more time with the editing to try to make the videos look cooler.”
I may have hooked you with the intro, but don’t start thinking this is the coolest thing ever. Kyle Schultz totally is that guy with the Wiffle Ball YouTube channel. Turns out, college kids are still more enamored with football players than Wiffle Ball players. “It's hit or miss when I tell people, especially in college.” Kyle told me. “When I tell my professors about it, or just any of my friends that we have this pro Wiffle Ball league, they're either like, ‘whoa, that's insane’ or they're like, ‘what are you talking about?’ But I don't really care. I’m fine with what people think. If they think it's weird. I'll embrace that. I'll be the weird YouTube Wiffle Ball guy.”
This is what I mean when I say love of the game. Kyle Schultz built this channel within a niche community because he loves it. That’s the only reason. That’s the fuel in the gas tank that took this channel to where it is today. But it hasn’t come without sacrifice.
“Even in the early days, as a kid growing up, I actually had a bunch of stuff to do. I was on a travel baseball team, a travel basketball team. I have school. I can't edit during the day.” Giving up weekends to edit Wiffle Ball videos is one thing. But giving up internships and job opportunities is another thing entirely.
“We started taking it really seriously around 2017 when I got to college. That was kind of a big turning point for the league. Me and Tommy – who has been there with me from the beginning, he was one of my neighbors originally in 2009 – we had a conversation like, ‘We could either double down on this MLW Wiffle Ball idea that we have going, or we can kind of set it aside. We can all do our own things.’” Tommy Coughlin, who was there at the fateful home run derby that started it all eight years before, and who has partnered with Schultz to build the channel and the league every step of the way, had his own sacrifices to make. Schultz said, “I can go into sports media and get some internships. [Tommy] can go into his engineering school, and he can get an engineering job. But we chose to go all in. That next summer, we started doing MLW full-time and we started traveling, started getting sponsors. The merchandise line dropped and it really paid off.”
Kyle described that decision as a once in a lifetime opportunity. A moment he knew he had to take advantage of.
And not long after he took advantage of that moment, MLW Wiffle Ball hit a major milestone. In 2019, nine years after Kyle posted his first video, the channel passed 100,000 subscribers. “It took us like nine years to get the first hundred thousand and then nine months to get the next hundred thousand.” Kyle told me about the big jump his subscriber base took during the initial months of the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. Professional sports had all been canceled, but his videos were something fresh and available for sports fans.
I asked Kyle what it was like to grow a channel for nearly a decade, before seeing any major results. He had a lineup of lessons ready to share. “The importance of patience, the importance of sticking to your content, and not comparing yourself to others. These are all things I thought about in those nine years. I would get frustrated sometimes when people would make two or three videos, and one would pop off, and instantly they have 100,000 subs when we're gradually, slowly rising in subs. We're not rising at the rate that some others are, but the good thing about that is you grow a really fond fan base that actually cares about you.” He went on to explain the dedication it takes to win a niche audience’s trust like this. “We never did any click-baity stuff back in the day. We never did anything that didn't feel like us. We stuck true to what was us, and I think that's why it worked so well.”
And worked well, it has. MLW Wiffle Ball is now a thriving internet business with multiple income streams. They’re pulling in profit on YouTube ad revenue-sharing, merchandise sales, tournament fees, brand sponsorships, and subscriber-exclusive content on Patreon. And fueling it all is a raving fan base of Wiffle-Ball-loving kids. “Right when the video drops, there will be thousands of people live-viewing. So it's almost like a real sporting event. They've been waiting on this video all day, and then they all watch at the same time and the comments are being flooded. I'm in there, in the comments. It really makes for a cool dynamic.”
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These days, Kyle’s day-to-day life doesn’t look so different from that of a high school athletic director. He’s out of school, working a full-time schedule. He builds tournament brackets and plans travel itineraries. He prints jerseys and finds sponsors. He manages a small team of employees, many of them players in MLW Wiffle, to run social accounts and ship products. And he still sets up a tripod behind the backstop before games. The main differences, though? Most athletic directors don’t have tens of thousands of people in their live stream chat. Most athletic directors don’t own a profitable sports league. Most athletic directors don’t get to show former baseball stars like Pedro Martinez how to throw a slider on TBS. Most athletic directors don’t get to host their championship series at SoFi Stadium.
Through his YouTube channel, and a huge love of the game, Kyle has done all that and more.
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