The Voice of Pickleball with The Dink’s Thomas Shields - [Making Media, EP.37]

The Voice of Pickleball with The Dink’s Thomas Shields - [Making Media, EP.37]

Author: Colossus | Investing & Business Podcasts September 21, 2023 Duration: 55:53
Making Media
BusinessEntrepreneurship
This week we cover another niche media business. Our guest, Thomas Shields, launched The Dink in late 2020 and has quickly grown it to become the media authority on the booming sport of Pickleball. Across its newsletter, podcasts, videos, blogs, and more, The Dink offers everything you could want to know about the sport. And we discuss the whole journey and business with Thomas, who started it as a side venture and now has far grander plans for it. Enjoy! For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here. ----- Making Media is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Making Media, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @ReustleMatt | @domcooke | @MakingMediaPod | @JoinColossus  Show Notes (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 celebrities 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

Matt Reustle and Dom Cooke have spent years analyzing companies as investors, but found themselves drawn into a new, messy, and fascinating world: building a media company from the ground up. Their Making Media podcast, from Colossus | Investing & Business Podcasts, is the raw audio journal of that transition. Instead of theory, you get the real-time experiments, stumbles, and occasional breakthroughs of two practitioners who are actively trying to construct something lasting. Each conversation pulls back the curtain with seasoned media operators who have navigated these waters, offering hard-won tactical advice rarely shared publicly. Between these interviews, Matt and Dom hold themselves accountable, documenting the progress of their own ventures and breaking down the books, articles, and interviews that shape their thinking. The underlying mission gives this business and entrepreneurship podcast its pulse: a genuine fight to create substantive, long-form content in an economy increasingly optimized for fleeting clicks. For anyone curious about the operational realities of publishing, audience building, and sustainable creation, this series feels like getting a direct feed from the workshop floor, where ideas are forged into tangible assets.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 65

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