Every conversation I have with someone building in combat sports arrives at the same place. Usually about twenty minutes in.

I ask what the product is.

The answers come fast. The fights. The content. The brand. The athletes. Everyone has an answer ready and almost nobody has thought about it for more than a minute.

Here is the better version of the question. Where does the revenue come from?

Not where you hope it comes from eventually. Where it comes from. Then reverse engineer everything else from that answer.

We had this problem ourselves. I raised it in meetings more than once. What are we selling? Are we selling pay-per-view, or are we building IP that we license to a distributor? Are we an event company moving tickets? A tech company chasing downloads and subscriptions? Or are we a media company accumulating attention and selling it to whoever wants access?

Those are five different companies. They hire different people. They spend money in different order. They measure success with different numbers.

Most promotions try to be all five and end up being none of them.

The tell is in your call to action

Here is a diagnostic you can run on any promotion in about thirty seconds. Look at what they ask you to do at the end of a post.

Watch it on DAZN. Buy tickets here. Download the app. Subscribe. Follow for more.

That single line reveals what the business actually is, whether the founder has admitted it or not. And it is usually the moment the contradiction shows up. A promotion that describes itself as a media platform but whose entire CTA is ticket sales is not a media platform. It is an event company with a content team.

That is not a criticism. Event companies can be excellent businesses. But you cannot market like one thing and be capitalised like another.

The UFC in the early years was a pay-per-view business. Ticket revenue mattered and it was real, but it was not the engine. Everything about how they communicated pointed at the buy. That clarity is not a coincidence. It is the reason the model worked.

Brand, genre, or sport

There is a second question underneath the first, and fewer people ask it.

Are you building a brand, or are you building a genre?

Three letters and a logo is a brand. Most new promotions are that. They run the same sport everyone else runs, under a different name, and compete on card quality and marketing spend.

A genre is different. Different ruleset, different platform, different fighting surface, different constraints on how the fight unfolds. Now you own something that cannot be copied by a competitor with a bigger cheque book, because the thing itself is yours.

Genre is harder and slower. It also removes you from a fight you are unlikely to win.

Then pick your altitude

Regional promotion serving a local market. Feeder league that develops talent and passes it up to people who pay more for it. Or the top, chasing the biggest distribution deals in the sport.

All three are legitimate. Only one of them is what most founders say out loud, and it is almost never the one their model supports.

I broke the economics of each tier down in a video last week, including why the middle is where most of the capital in this sport disappears: Why Most UFC Juniors Fail (The 3 Tiers of Fight Promotions)​

Who is this for

Once you know what you sell and at what altitude, you still owe yourself an answer on who is buying.

Age. Gender. Geography. And the one that gets skipped: why would this person care about what you are building when they already have more combat sports content than they can watch.

If the answer is that the fights are good, you have a problem.

Fights matter. Fights are not the lever.

I want to be careful here because this gets misread.

Good fights are important. But if fights were the most important thing, small regional promotions with genuinely excellent cards would be beating funded promotions with worse ones. They are not. It happens rarely enough that you can name the exceptions.

The marketing machine, the brand, the distribution and the content built around the fighting is what compounds. Big names and older names can generate views and buy you early attention, and that is a real tactic. It is just not a business.

The long-term version is a product people show up for regardless of who is on the card. That is the hardest thing to build in this sport and it is the only thing that survives.

Which brings it back to where we started.

You are running an event company, a production company, a media company, a sales operation and a fight promotion at the same time. I am not saying pick one and abandon the rest.

I am saying know which one pays the bills. Everything else is a cost centre until it proves otherwise.

Best,
Adam

P.S. New video is up. The 3 tiers of fight promotion economics and why the middle kills more capital than any other part of the sport. Watch here​

P.P.S. If you are building in the combat sports space and want to think through the business side, reach out or apply at SKOVAX.CO​

P.P.P.S. If you are a fighter looking to attract sponsors, download the framework at getpaidtofight.com​

P.P.P.P.S. Want to catch up on past newsletters? Browse the full archive HERE