This story is part of our 1,000 stories campaign. What’s your story?
Name: Tanya Maslach
Company: GOTRIbal, an online fitness community for women
Industry: Health
Location: San Diego, Calif., U.S.
Reason for Starting: My questions were “Why are there so many women like me and no place to go to get personalized recommendations, connections and mentorship about health and fitness?” “How is it that millions of women drive the purchasing decisions around health, fitness, healthcare, and nutrition, yet there is not one place that brings all these smart social connections together so we can measure just how influential they are on our health?” GOTRIbal was born to answer these questions and demonstrate that it is the personal, and meaningful, social connection to someone who shares our health and fitness goals and abilities that drives our healthy lifestyle choices – more so than the wearable, quantified-self technologies.
How do you define success?: The grand vision is to reverse the rate of obesity in the US by 2020. The milestones to get there are to provide meaningful, valuable connections at least 80% of the time to women, and through those, demonstrate measurable impact to their healthy lifestyle choices over 1, 3, and 5 years.
Biggest Success: Reaching and serving women with a safe, trustworthy and valuable community of experts and others like them, in 23 countries. Secondarily, building a mobile tool (Activebudz) to gift women with a discovery portal to their very own, personalized connections – and Tribes – so they can lead active, healthy lifestyles with others they trust.
What is your top challenge and how have you addressed it?: Reaching millions of women with little capital and a small team. I have addressed this by building an amazing GOTRIbal Ambassador Squad of women who reflect our membership’s every day woman, and been lucky to receive the support of women – world champion athletes, moms, and more – who have volunteered their skills and time to grow and serve more women around the world.
Who is your most important role model?: My role models are all the entrepreneurs who build something to answer a difficult problem that helps make millions of people’s lives better, easier and happier through the product the entrepreneur has devised.
Read about another fitness entrepreneur here.
Edited by The Story Exchange