Transcript
Introduction
Matt
Welcome back to Making Media. This week, we cover another niche media business. This niche just happens to be the sport taking the world by storm, a good niche to pick. Our guest Thomas Shields launched The Dink, a newsletter around Pickleball in late 2020. And since then, he's really established The Dink as the authority on the sport of pickleball. So now they operate a platform of media properties with the newsletter, podcasts and video content, and they've expanded in terms of having investments into various other pieces of the pickleball ecosystem.
We talked a lot about the early days, day one of launch, and it was surprising to hear some of the pivots that they've taken since those early days. One of the more interesting things is that The Dink was actually a content to commerce business at day one. So we get into all of that with Thomas. There's a lot to digest here with this story, and it's exciting because it's still very early days. So please enjoy this conversation with Thomas Shields.