Promoting Irish green innovation with SustainabilityExamples, Andrew Sheehan explains more

In this interview we catch up with serial innovator Andrew Sheehan, to learn more about his latest interesting venture SustainabilityExamples, see more about it here.

Who are we talking to? Is it a logical journey to what you are working on now?

My name is Andrew Sheehan, and my background spans accounting, marketing, and product. I originally trained and qualified as an accountant in 2013, but moved into marketing early in my career and have since spent nearly 20 years in marketing leadership roles across Ireland, the US, and the UK.

More recently, I worked as a fractional CMO and product marketing consultant for scaling technology companies through my (now dormant) consultancy, ProductMarketing.ie. Through that work, I found myself increasingly drawn to purpose-driven and climate-focused businesses – seeing both the ambition they had and the challenges they faced in communicating and executing on that ambition.

SustainabilityExamples with Andrew Sheehan

The idea for SustainabilityExamples.com started back in 2021, when I kept coming back to the same question: why is it so hard for companies to see what good looks like in practice…and which solutions can actually help them get there?

After several years of hands-on experience implementing a sustainability strategy with a previous employer, combined with working closely with GreenTech and other purpose-driven companies, that question turned into a clear opportunity.

What are you working on now?

I launched SustainabilityExamples.com in 2025 to help close that gap – making real-world climate action more visible, accessible, and easier to adopt and learn from. Since launching, we’ve already helped over 100 companies share their sustainability journey (progress, not perfection) while also showcasing the solutions enabling that progress. That’s been incredibly rewarding and reinforces that this is a problem worth solving.

As a qualified accountant in addition to 20 years of marketing experience, I recently went back to the classroom to study corporate sustainability before leaving my job and pivoting fully into the world of climate entrepreneurship to bring a rare blend of marketing strategy and storytelling to drive progress in this space through SustainabilityExamples.com.

What is SustainabilityExamples.com?

SustainabilityExamples.com is a corporate sustainability engagement platform – think of it as the “Product Hunt for Sustainability”. The place to launch and discover examples of solutions and initiatives driving real progress, every day. At it’s core, it’s about making sustainability action visible, adoptable, and commercially rewarding.

We’re primarily speaking to founders and operators building GreenTech and CleanTech companies, as well as sustainability leaders driving the sustainability strategy inside mid-to-large organisations. They’re all trying to answer the same questions: “What are other companies doing, who are they doing it with…and is it working?”
The journey to building SustainabilityExamples.com came from seeing how fragmented and siloed that process is. Companies don’t lack intent…they lack visibility into credible, verified and real-world examples they can trust and act on.

We also recognise how terrifying it is for companies to openly talk about their progress out of fear of greenwashing and beyond. Companies can communicate with confidence among like-minded peers and stakeholders who value progress over perfection while instilling trust on the platform through built in verification and accountability tools.

What are you currently working on now?

Right now, we’re focused on growing the platforms ecosystem – one companies solution is another companies initiative: Increasing the volume of high-quality corporate initiatives and case studies of solutions being shared for business leaders to learn from, champion, and adopt. Improving discovery features so business leaders can quickly find relevant, actionable examples of initiatives and case studies to implement in their own sustainability strategies.

Building lightweight recognition mechanisms that commercially rewards companies for taking action
Constantly improving the performance dashboard companies use when logged in to show them the correlation between doing good and making a profit with key performance indicators. At the same time, we’re refining the business model. We want to make it easy for companies taking action to gain visibility and recognition while keeping the core learning experience free and accessible for those visiting the platform across the globe on a daily basis.

Tell us about the action gap?

The action gap is the space between intention and execution.

Most companies today, particularly SMEs, want to take climate action for various reasons, but they get stuck at the starting line – unsure what initiatives are credible, what credentials are worthwhile getting, what solutions actually work, or how others in their industry have done it.

In addition, the ESG topic is enormous and intimidating – not to mention the many abbreviations, 100 page reports, and the fear of greenwashing. The result is delay, over-research, or inaction. SustainabilityExamples.com closes that gap by showing what’s already been done so companies can move from ambition to implementation much faster. Busy professionals just want examples of what works.

What is the commercial gap?

Being sustainable needs to make commercial sense. SustainabilityExamples.com was designed to accelerate the commercial gains for companies taking action. The commercial gap is the disconnect between companies taking real sustainability action and the immediate recognition or business value they receive for it. By making these actions visible and solutions discoverable, we help turn sustainability into a competitive advantage – driving more sales, brand equity, and customer trust. Customer trust will form the evolution of SustainabilityExamples.com 2.0

How are you flipping the Sustainability Strategy Model?

Traditionally, companies start with a strategy and then spend months searching for solutions to execute it.
We flip that model. By giving companies access to a curated set of real-world initiatives and solutions upfront, they can start with what’s already working and build their strategy around proven approaches. This reduces the time spent on research, decision-making, and procurement by an estimate 60% while increasing confidence in the outcomes and reducing the fears associated with greenwashing.

How do you link real-world action to UN SDGs?

Each example of an initiative or case study of a solution in action on the platform is mapped to relevant UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), making it easy to connect real-world actions to global frameworks.
This allows companies to align their efforts with widely recognised standards while also improving the user experience for those that want to search for examples of initiatives and solutions by SDG.

Tell us about the growth of the platform in year 1

In our first year, we’ve seen strong organic growth internationally. The platform has about 7k active users championing and adopting progress from the 110+ companies sharing real-world examples of their impact. This has generated nearly 200 leads and collaborations to-date in addition to brand exposure where the conversation is being had.

Companies like Croke Park, The Guinness Enterprise Centre, and Levy Ireland are increasingly using the platform to share their progress while innovative solutions like Positive Carbon, Greentally.ai, and KINTO join are using to showcase their solutions. What’s been most encouraging is that we have companies from all over the world sharing examples, most notably in Ireland, UK, Netherlands, France and Germany. These companies are getting global exposure from users in nearly every continent in the world.

We’ve also made really exciting strategic partnerships with great networks and membership bodies like Business for Biodiversity Ireland, The Sustainable Tourism Network, The Climate Cocktail Club, and more. The company has been making money since month 2 with a strong MRR, ARR and adoption of our upselling mechanisms.

How do you plan to get funding?

We’re currently focused on building a strong foundation through our early revenue streams, and organic growth through our inbuilt networking effects, referrals, and dominance on search platforms and Large Language Models. As the platform scales, we see funding as a way to further develop the gamification features we already have in place to encourage more companies to share their progress and users to engage with this progress.
The long-term vision is to become the go-to discovery layer for corporate sustainability, and we’ll explore funding options that help us because the Trip Advisor for Sustainability while maintaining the integrity of the platform.

How can people learn more?

You can explore real-world initiatives and solutions, or launch your own, at SustainabilityExamples.com.
We’re always looking for companies to share what they’re doing and for leaders who want to learn from others.

What are your sources of information and inspiration?

A lot of our inspiration comes directly from observing how companies currently approach sustainability – where they get stuck, how they research, and what slows them down. We also draw from the broader startup and product ecosystem, particularly platforms that have successfully made complex / siloed information personal, discoverable and actionable like Intercom, Product Hunt, Trustpilot to name a few.

Anything else we should have asked?

One important question is: “Why now?” The urgency around sustainability has never been higher, but the processes for taking action are still fragmented, inefficient and not yielding fast enough returns.
We believe the next phase is about visible impact and smarter execution. And that starts with making real-world examples visible, verified, accessible, and easy to act on.

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