Catch, pull, push, breath. Catch, pull, push, breath. In the mind of 23-year-old Niamh Tallon, these steps repeat themselves as she glides her way up and down a 25-metre pool. In just minutes, she’ll be holding a trophy, helping UCD’s women’s swim team take home gold at the 2017 Irish Intervarsity Swimming Championships for the eighth consecutive year.

Tallon has been swimming since she was a girl, but outside of the pool, business was always her plan for success.

“Never would I have thought I would be doing sport for a job,” she said. “I did commerce in my undergrad, digital marketing as my Masters. I’ve always seen sport as an activity, a hobby, not an opportunity to have a career in. It’s typical for a lot of people, it’s typical for women.”

That is, until 2018, when Tallon started a website with her friend as a passion project to write about and bring more attention to women’s sport. That website was Her Sport, now one of the nation’s fastest-growing sports media brands with over 200,000 website views. The company has almost doubled its total online media following since June and has seen its audience grow 15 times larger since the start of 2020. They also just published their first print magazine at the end of October.

The talented swimmer who once thought athletics would remain a relic of her youth, now at 27, is at the helm of a sports company she wants to take big, both in Ireland and perhaps even beyond.

Warm-ups

Growing up, the Kildare woman had what she described as a very unusual upbringing in women’s athletics: she had encouragement, and from female coaches too.

“I had three female [swimming] coaches,” she said. “You never see that, that’s so rare. I was lucky enough to have female sports role models every week.”

Because of her exposure to female athletes, Tallon grew up in a bubble when it came to her perspective on women’s sport.

“In the sports I played, I wouldn’t have noticed much of a disparity [between men and women] when it comes to the exposure and attention,” she said. “In sports like swimming and athletics, there’s a boys’ race and a girls’ race, and both are pretty much on a par in most clubs, so I didn’t notice it so much.”

When Tallon made it to university, her perspective changed.

“In university I saw a major disparity in pitch sports, rugby, GAA, soccer, so I became a bit interested in it,” she said. “Somewhat out of frustration and somewhat out of ambition. I wondered, what could we change to give people the credit they deserve?”

Tallon began to reflect on her experience not just playing sports but also consuming them, noting that “the attention that the local football team got, the local GAA team, the hurling team, would have been all the men’s team”, she said. “I would have gone to watch those matches, but I wouldn’t have gone to see the women play, and people would have seen that as just normal. You weren’t watching women play on TV either, and in some cases, you couldn’t even find women’s matches on TV.”

While doing a Masters in Digital Marketing at UCD, Tallon sunk her teeth deeper into the advertising side of women’s sports and became fascinated with how they are portrayed.

Only six per cent of Irish sports media coverage is focused on women, she found, even though almost half of women in Ireland play sports regularly.

Initially, she wanted to channel her passion for the topic into a final year thesis. The problem, she said, was that a thesis had to be narrow and focused, and she had too many ideas than she could fit in one. So instead, she started a website to write her own content on women’s sports. Thus, Her Sport was born.

Lap one

In the early days, Her Sport wasn’t a company, it was a bare-bones blog with a logo that Tallon herself still cringes at the sight of.

Tallon, along with her co-founder, would write stories and features about women’s sports every week based on who they could get a hold of and what matches or events they were interested in.

Her Sport wasn’t making any money, but the good news was it wasn’t spending any either.

“With technology now, compared to the way it was, say, 30 years ago, you can do these things just at the cost of time,” she said. “A couple things needed to be paid for initially, the website domain, a couple of the branding things, but setting up the socials was free. You can get away with not having to invest that much at the start.”

Tallon kept costs low. She had to, because she had no plans of monetising her platform. It was, after all, just a hobby.

Tallon moved to the US for a Masters programme in August 2018, expecting to keep Her Sport going in the background, but while she was away, she had to change her plans.

With the time difference, juggling school and a job, and not being on the ground in Ireland for interviews or meetings, Tallon found it challenging to manage Her Sport from afar.

She also noticed that her reader base had been growing steadily, and it was clear there was an interest in what she was writing about. If she took it more seriously, she thought, she could grow it into a business.

“I felt like I was missing an opportunity,” she said. “If I didn’t do it, someone else would, and I was quite conscious of that. Clearly I had struck a niche that wasn’t really that much of a niche, and if I didn’t try to make the most of it, I would lose out.”

At the start of 2020, Tallon decided to take a risk and move home, and along with the website’s co-founder, commit to Her Sport full time.

The decision, though risky, is one Tallon knew she wouldn’t be in the position to make again.

“We didn’t really have responsibilities, so it was the right time for both of us to say ‘we can do this,” she said. “Nobody had a mortgage to pay, nobody had children. We had a good circumstance. We said to ourselves, let’s give this X amount of time and see where it goes.”

Kick-off

Her initial deadline was the Tokyo Olympics, which were set to start in early summer 2020. If Tallon and her partner couldn’t monetise and develop Her Sport into a promising business by then, she would cut her losses.

The two hit the ground running and saw their social following grow from under 5,000 in January 2020 to almost 15,000 by June.

Despite the explosion of growth, the company still faced a substantial obstacle: they needed to make money.

“It was challenging at first,” Tallon said. “Especially in early 2020, there were days where we thought ‘we built this audience but what do we do with it, do we have the skills to turn it into a sustainable business.’”

The 27-year-old battled to balance her platform’s cause, which she believed in unwaveringly, and the necessity to have it churn a profit.

“What we started was kind of a social cause, it was a movement, and we learned quickly that it was one people bought into,” she said. “You can put loads of time into cultivating that and that’s great, but it can’t operate for no money, I’m not interested in that.”

After all, Tallon had put her entire life and education on pause to take a chance on her idea.

“I founded Her Sport to promote and support women in sport, but if the platform doesn’t make financial sense, I just couldn’t do that as well as I needed to,” she said. “I’d have to take a step back, do it part-time, something like that, and that doesn’t make sense. The cause deserves more.”

Tallon was so unsure of the business that she wouldn’t tell her friends that she was the founder, even if she knew they read the publication.

“I would have been quite cautious from the start about presenting it as my business,” she said. “I wanted to allow it to stand on its own two feet initially without me flaunting it around.”

Encouragement, Tallon said, was what got her through the precarious beginning.

“We had a lot of positive reviews from consumers and also from people in the industry,” she said. “We had endorsements from top athletes around the country. People don’t say ‘I don’t really care about women’s sport’, people didn’t say ‘this is not gonna work’. They might ask how, but nobody said no.”

Monetisation

Like most online publications, Tallon looked first to advertising as her main revenue stream.

What she quickly noticed, though, was how precarious the advertising model can be. She thanked Covid especially for illustrating the cautions of a business reliant solely on short-term advertising revenue.

“Obviously, with Covid, we saw ad budgets pulled very quickly,” Tallon said. “For some companies, it was the first thing they pulled, which doesn’t really leave us in a great position.”

Tallon said that she’s somewhat glad she began working full time on Her Sport right before the pandemic, as she saw first-hand what’s necessary to maintain a company through not just the good times but the challenging times too.

The company got its big break last June when Her Sport signed a significant long term partnership with Life Style Sports.

The partnership, Tallon said, was a big step in the company’s financial security.

“It was a big confirmation for us when we partnered with Life Style, it was a big financial injection,” she said.

“It gave us confidence that we can attract the largest brands in Ireland, but it also helped settle us financially. That’s a revenue stream we can rely on.”

Life Style’s interest didn’t come out of nowhere, though; Her Sport’s reader base has exploded in the past year. The brand’s total social media following went from 26,000 in January to almost 40,000 in June, when Life Style Sports signed on.

Now averaging 15,000 monthly website viewers, and with a goal for over 60,000 social media followers across all platforms by the end of the year, the young company, along with its young chief executive, is looking to make a push into the big leagues.

Tallon’s vision is to grow Her Sport into one of the largest media organisations in Ireland, hoping to develop its multimedia output as well with more podcast and video-based content. The company has five full-time employees and over a dozen freelancers, which Tallon also hopes to grow in order to produce more content.

To do so, she is beginning to look for investment, a big step for the company, she said, which was bootstrapped since day one.

“We’re looking at the local Enterprise Ireland office, but we’re taking things with caution,” she said.

Tallon has reached out to several other players in the sports media field seeking advice on tackling investment.

“I’ve spoken to people from Pundit Arena, Off The Ball, and been able to ask for advice just to understand from both sides, the investor and investee, what makes sense,” she said.

“From an investment standpoint, we are trying to understand how to position ourselves and find out what an investment looks like for us.”

Having built the company up so far with her personal finance, Tallon said she wants to have her Ts crossed before asking for somebody else’s money.

“We need to be careful about it, there is no point in jumping into something headfirst that we don’t need. I’ve been privileged to speak to influential people in the space that can tell me, don’t do this, you don’t need this, and that has been so helpful.”

Looking ahead, Tallon said the movement to increase visibility for women in sport extends well beyond Ireland’s borders, which may mean Her Sport does too. But if the company were to spread its wings internationally, it would need a financial injection.

“We are looking at international expansion, and the question is where do opportunities lie,” she said.

There are two critical aspects of a foreign market that need to converge to justify Her Sport moving in, Tallon said. The country needs a pliable and penetrable media market, and a culture that supports women’s sports.

“Were looking into Europe, Australia, we are even looking at the Caribbean. There is loads of opportunity everywhere, we just need to make sure we make the right decisions at the right time,” she said.

For now, though, Her Sport is taking what’s in front of it.

“I’ve learned that starting and running a business can be overwhelming, and you have to look at how things are on that day,” Tallon said. “You have to look at yourself and say, this is what we have achieved, the best thing to do is just look at what you have achieved, and that gives you the confidence and motivation to keep going.”

“At the end of the day, I just hope that Her Sport is able to play a part in inspiring young girls to play sports. We’re here to inspire future generations.”