The latest and greatest startup is ‘THIS’ - now a market-leading plant-based food brand in the UK. I’ve also founded a climbing centre business, a recruitment firm and a delivery focussed restaurant business. They were varying degrees of I-want-my-life-back hard, but I’m finding founding an animal welfare not-profit even harder.
My not-profit is called ‘A Bit Weird’. I called it that because some of the stuff we do to animals is a bit weird. To stop us from being totally rudderless and to stop me from being found rocking back and forth in the corner of a room in 10 years - we’ve got three clear objectives, in amongst a quite broad church of animal suffering. In no particular order, those are -
- To end chick culling in the egg industry. Chick culling involves 40 million male chicks being suffocated in gas chambers every year in the UK, for the crime of being male and consequently unable to lay eggs.
- To end lamb castration via rubber band. It hurts. A lot. And it’s unnecessary.
- To challenge businesses which sell animal products off the back of joyful, happy-clappy animal brands, when in reality their supply-chains involve lots of animal suffering and death.
I’d gently suggest (cos everyone will have their own view on this) (and VCs will have like 10 each), that the fate of one’s startup is predominantly determined by the quality of their products vs the competition, and the quality of their sales/marketing efforts. Achieving excellence in both areas might be a grind and cost you your 20s/30s, but at least you can map out a clear path and you almost always know what ‘good’ looks like, from market comps.
But my product at A Bit Weird is trash - it’s inconvenient, disruptive, (in the literal sense to farmers, consumers and lawmakers - not like how Spotify was disruptive in the music business) and my product takes the courage to admit that what you previously condoned is actually unacceptable. You don’t need to admit anything at all when you buy a new bluetooth speaker or a pack of salted peanuts.
My customers will enjoy zero personal benefits from their purchases and the actual beneficiaries will never thank them. If you went to a VC with this, you’d get laughed out of the room quicker than they could buy a new gilet.
Ok so the product sucks. But what about the sales/marketing? Surely that’s how we reach Successville Tennessee? Well I’m not sure. Right now, it feels like that Squid Game episode where they have to carve shapes out of a piece of brittle honeycomb - one wrong move and you get smoked. Telling the world about the animal abuse that they essentially sponsor, by buying eggs, meat, dairy etc, is an absolute minefield. If you pull at heart-strings too hard, you get conflated with what the public views as traditional vegan fundamentalism. ‘Dairy cows are there to be milked and fish are there to be caught, and that’s how the food-chain works thanks very much.’. I.e. it gets perceived as sanctimonious, and they get defensive realllll fast.
But if you sanitise the suffering too much, and just give a slight nod to the fact that ‘male chicks in the egg industry don’t have BEST time - sometimes - maybe, ish’, you’ll never jolt people into buying your extremely inconvenient, thankless and admission-of-guilt-laden product.
On top of all of that, I think most of your potential customers feel like in one way or another, they’re already doing their bit for the world and their quota’s being met. Very few people seem to be rocking around with an unsatisfied gap in their bank balance and schedule, to help farm animals. Maybe they give £3 a month to Children In Need or work a shift or two for the Samaritans.
This won’t be applicable to all not-profits, but a particularly undesirable quirk of garnering attention or money for A Bit Weird, is that you essentially have to and seek consensus on farm animals’ suffering being a higher priority than whatever other human cause they could support instead. Toddlers with cancer or orphaned babies in warzones. That’s a tough gig.
BUT - on the off-chance that this will be published in America, I shall provide a happy ending. You see, the high you get from little wins (I haven’t had a big one yet), are nothing like the ones you get for your startup. Incomparable, in my experience. Over 17 years in start-ups, I think the most animated I got off the back of a big sales win or a multi-million pound investment was a smirk and a gentle high-five. But the other day, I persuaded a global law firm to do a piece of work for A Bit Weird pro-bono. When the call ended, I screamed ‘COME THE F*CK ON BABY YESS.’ and nearly broke my hand slapping the desk repeatedly.
The fact is - what I’m doing now matters multiples more to me than any business ever could, and I feel like I’ve won the lottery - finding a side-hustle which could help the most vulnerable and exploited individuals on earth. Basically - ignore the title and ⅘ of this article - go start a non-profit.
Follow A Bit Weird on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/its.
