Meet Lisa Fox, Co-Founder at Online Business Community: Vegan Business Tribe

Vegan Business Tribe is an online community for vegan business owners. We have over two-thousand people registered through our platform at www.veganbusinesstribe.com and a community of paying members who get further access to our courses, online networking meet-ups and support from myself and David through our Community Hub.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
Deciding to turn vegan is a deeply personal decision and one that comes from a place of passion. At some point that starts to have an effect not just on what you eat but how you spend your time.

Many of our members see having a vegan business as their form of activism, their way of contributing to the vegan scene – but if you’ve built a career working as a web developer (for example!) then if you launched a vegan business around making food you are going back to square one, you are losing all that ‘career capital’ you have built up over the years.

And that’s exactly what happened to David and I – we were working as marketing and business growth consultants so we decided to ‘veganise’ those skills sets we already had to help people who wanted to bring together their ethics with how they made a living.
 

 

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

 
People make the mistake of building what they want to build and then trying to go out and find customers for it. Instead, we found our audience first and then asked them what their problems were and what they would pay to be part of, before trying to monetise it.

We found it was ethics rather than geography that bound our members together, and they wanted to be able to interact with others who share those ethics. So although we’re still very content-based in what we produce, we know that the ‘content’ is just what brings people to us, that’s our marketing in many ways. It’s the community that makes people sign-up and stay long-term so we’ve really pursued that.
 

What can we hope to see from Vegan Business Tribe in the future?

 
The first two and a half years of Vegan Business Tribe have been proving the model, now we’re focused on really making our members / customers our best friends and letting them guide us on where we go next. We’re running our biggest ever event in November for example, Vegan Business Tribe Live over two days at the London Olympia.

We also have a discussion whenever we get an email from someone asking about something we don’t do, to see if there is a product or service idea in that request. For example, we get a lot of non-vegan businesses who have a vegan-friendly product asking for advice. Although they are not a fit for the community, we still have a lot of knowledge that is valuable to them.