How Jiu-Jitsu and Grappling Athletes Make Money From Video

How does a grappler actually make a living?

That's what this piece is about. Partway through, it turns into what SubPro is built to do about it.

01 First, privates and seminars

Before anyone knows your name, the income is private lessons at the gym. Once your name gets around a little, you start getting invited to teach seminars.

Reach world level, and an instructional site like BJJ Fanatics finally calls.

02 An instructional is a business card more than a paycheck

Putting out an instructional on a big site matters a lot. There's money in it, but more than that, it's a business card. People start treating you as someone who is known.

But an instructional is a single product. Each one needs a clear theme. Shooting and editing take real work.

So only a few athletes keep earning from it. People with a huge system. People with an unusually deep bag of techniques. People in very high demand. Most athletes put out two or three and that's the end of it.

03 Next comes Patreon

The next thing those athletes think about is a monthly subscription, usually Patreon.

Patreon is easy, and it's popular. There's a community there too.

The numbers are real. Some well-known athletes have more than 2,000 members on Patreon. Membership starts at $7 a month. Even if every one of them is on the $7 tier, that's $14,000 a month. That is serious money.

Grappling is a world where people will pay to understand how one person's game works, and where fans pay too. Get 2,000 of them together and you have a real income.

04 Patreon wasn't built for grappling

For someone who truly wants to learn technique, though, Patreon is hard to watch on. Search is weak. It's built to work for everyone, which means it doesn't fit grappling.

This is where things have started to shift.

05 Then come video subscription platforms, and people who build on them

The next thing athletes look at is a video subscription platform like Uscreen. There are agencies that will build your site on top of one, and quite a few athletes have launched that way.

I think that's a perfectly good choice.

But some things come out of your pocket.

• The platform fee. It's charged per member, so on a $20 subscription it works out to roughly a tenth.
• What you pay the people who build and run it for you.
• How little you can change. How much you can update yourself, and how far you can bend it.

Looking at it from the athlete's side, these are the places you wish were better. SubPro goes after them one by one. The rest of this piece is about that.

06 Pricing you can read

SubPro's pricing is shaped like Uscreen's. A monthly fee, plus an amount per member once you grow past a certain size. Those numbers, and the features you get, change by plan.

We don't take a cut of your sales. The money goes from your customer straight to you. You pay us a fixed fee and that's it.

There's a one-time fee of $330 to set up your site. I think that's cheap.

07 The only real reason for an app is offline playback

We're adding an app.

Honestly, though, there aren't many moments where you need one right now. Offline playback for when you have no signal. Going full screen a bit more easily. That's about it.

And full screen works without an app. There's a thing called a PWA: add the site to your phone's home screen and it opens full screen, just like an app. SubPro sites support this.

Submeta does the same. No app in the stores. You add it to your home screen and use it from there.

08 What matters to the person watching

What's the most annoying thing about watching grappling video?

Watching someone who stands the opposite way to you. You flip everything in your head the whole time, and it wears you out.

So SubPro has mirror playback. You flip the video left to right and watch it your way.

You don't see this much, do you? If someone ships it as standard, I'd like to hear about it. On a desktop browser you might manage it with some extra tool. On a phone you can't.

A few other things are there from the start.

• A-B repeat. Loop from here to there, as many times as you want.
• Playlists. Collect the videos you want to come back to.
• Notes on each video. Write down the moment you want to see again, and jump back to it from the note.
• Slow motion and fast forward. That one goes without saying.

09 Who are subtitles for?

Now subtitles.

AI runs on a phone these days, so it's common for athletes to transcribe their own video and upload it with the subtitles burned in.

So who are subtitles for? First, the person watching.

Some people watch where they can't turn the sound on. Some people have the sound on and still take it in better when they can read along. That's why subtitles matter.

But subtitles are for the athlete too. They carry you to people who don't speak your language.

When a Japanese athlete teaches in English, people in Japan can't follow. When he teaches in Japanese, the English-speaking world can't follow.

Kenta Iwamoto is bilingual, so he used to put out videos in both English and Japanese. He told me it was a real hassle.

Since moving to SubPro, that work is gone. Whichever language he speaks, it gets translated into the other.

If he speaks English, we transcribe it, translate it with jiu-jitsu in mind, and show Japanese subtitles.

And it isn't only subtitles. We do dubbing too. Where Kenta teaches in Japanese, we can add an English voice track. He understands both, so he can judge the result himself. It's about 90% accurate.

A perfect score is honestly hard. Even when a native English speaker talks in English, and you transcribe and dub that in English, you land at about 90%.

But 90% is plenty for the viewer. They know what's being said.

Subtitles and dubbing are included on every plan from the start.

For any of this to work, the person talking needs a microphone. Some people still record on the phone's own mic, and you can't make out the words, or the room noise drowns them. A decent mic costs about $30. Use one.

10 Cameras, and someone to hold them

A word on cameras.

A phone shoots well enough. If you want to go one step up, a small gimbal camera like the DJI Osmo Pocket is good. Shooting somewhere bright matters too.

A lot of people shoot on a fixed camera. But this is a business, so have someone film you. That may only be realistic if you own the gym, but one person behind the camera makes a big difference.

We think hard about this kind of thing.

11 The athlete never touches an admin screen

The athlete never touches an admin screen. That is the defining thing about SubPro.

Start with uploading.

Normally it goes like this. Open a browser. Type your ID and password to get into the admin. Go to the upload page. Press the upload button. Hunt for the file and select it. Some people move the clip from their phone to a computer first.

That's the hassle. You can do it that way on SubPro too, of course.

But with us, you shoot and drop the file into Dropbox. That's all. This folder means this category, and SubPro pulls the video in from there. Not instantly. It checks at set times.

There's actually an even easier way. I can't write it here, so please ask me.

I think this takes a lot of weight off the athlete.

12 If you're on Patreon now

If you already have members on Patreon, you're probably thinking: if I start my own subscription, will they all follow me?

Don't worry about it. Keep both.

Having one more site of your own doesn't add much work. And while your membership is small the fee is low, so it won't be a burden.

What you get is a home. Not a page inside someone else's platform. Your own place.

• You run it on your own domain. The domain is yours.
• You run it under your own brand.
• You can put your own thinking into it. This is how I learned from video, so this is how I want you to learn. That idea can become the shape of the site.
• You can design how you talk with your fans, in whatever way works best, and we build it.

We don't touch your sales. All we take is the fee for the place.

When you ask for a change, we don't gouge you. We do those for around $50.

So please think about it. You don't have to switch all at once. Open one new channel without harming the Patreon you have. If you decide this one is better, move then. If you don't need to, stay as you are.

You might think uploading to two places is too much.

Kenta still uploads to Patreon. He does exactly what he did before. SubPro picks up those files automatically. His workload hasn't gone up at all.

There is no migration work.

13 Fixes, faster than anyone

When something breaks, we deal with it right away. When you say "I wish this worked like that," I believe we answer faster than any agency. The way search works and the way videos are sorted can be changed whenever you ask.

Take the load off the athlete. Make sure the money reaches the athlete.

14 Not a place to sell technique. A place to show who you are

The design is very flexible.

A film you love, anything. Put the image you have into words and we can build something close to it.

Kenta Iwamoto loves The Matrix. The question it asks, "Is that really your limit?", is the base of how he thinks about grappling. It's the base of his own training. So we made it the biggest message on his site.

That's not something you can usually do.

Your site isn't only a place to sell technique. It's also a place to show how you think. The fans who come along for that are a different kind of fan. Your message starts to land.

Don't build something that is a technique site and nothing more, and treat the viewer as an afterthought. The people who pay are your fans. They want to steal your thinking and your passion. That's what they're paying for.

Holding it back would be strange. But even when you want to put it out, it's hard to express. We design the site so it comes straight through.

Isn't that the healthiest relationship a viewer and an athlete can have?

← Back to Field Notes