Making Media
Episode 37 The Voice of Pickleball
Making Media

Episode 37: The Voice of Pickleball

Making Media

Episode 37

The Voice of Pickleball

Thomas Shields is the founder of The Dink. We cover his journey of building The Dink, the decision to focus exclusively on Pickleball, and monetization.

(00:02:00) - (First question) - Thomas’ experience with content creation prior to starting The Dink

(00:03:49) - How the first ever newsletter looked and its contents

(00:04:59) - When the Dink started creating new content as well as curating existing news

(00:06:20) - The point when The Dink started breaking news stories

(00:07:21) - Family connections with Fromuth and the inception of Fromuth Pickleball 

(00:09:49) - The reason why The Dink and Fromuth needed to separate their businesses

(00:11:01) - How The Dink made its first big steps as an industry leader in Pickleball news

(00:12:32) - How The Dink separated themselves from competitors

(00:13:11) - Thomas’ influences from other sports when creating content for The Dink

(00:14:00) - The evolution of the frequency of the newsletter

(00:14:52) - A breakdown of The Dink’s audience 

(00:15:57) - Profiling the avid Pickleball fan

(00:16:48) - The timeline from getting started as a side hustle to Thomas making the leap into working on The Dink full-time

(00:19:00) - Thomas’ strategy for the business moving forward

(00:23:13) - The Dink’s plan for content, diversification into other sports or delving deeper into Pickleball  

(00:25:59) - How Thomas plans to become more independent and less reliant on Pickleball’s economy

(00:27:05) - Harnessing media to grow Major League Pickleball and The Dink’s relationship with the league

(00:29:12) - What Thomas has learned about the value of each of The Dink’s media outlets

(00:31:26) - Bundling for cross-media advertising

(00:33:08) - The influence of celebrity's involvement in Pickleball

(00:35:48) - The challenge of bringing supply and demand together as Pickleball grows

(00:36:59) - The differences between Platform Tennis, Padel, and Pickleball

(00:38:26) - Where Thomas would like to strengthen his team with investment

(00:40:26) - Thomas’ opinion on the biggest opportunity within the Pickleball ecosystem right now

(00:43:03) - The sport that Thomas would choose were The Dink to create another newsletter

(00:45:24) - Debrief

 

 

The Voice of Pickleball

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.

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