A joke app for beard lovers now has 100,000 users and the founder is raising capital to create a fetish empire

JohnKershaw2

(Bristlr)
Bristlr creator John Kershaw has quite a beard himself.

Last October, John Kershaw made a joke about how many silly and cliche startups there are in the tech world.

There should, he laughed, be an app that connects men with beards to people to stroke beards. On the train ride home that day, Kershaw came up with the name Bristlr, and by the time he’d gone to bed, he’d created a signup page.

He wanted to see how far he could take this joke.

Kershaw decided that if 100 people signed up from the splash page, he’d turn the joke into reality. 80 people did, which Kershaw decided was close enough.

This joke was about to be tested in reality.

Kershaw built a prototype in two weeks, and he admits it was terrible. He tried to push it on Reddit and Product Hunt, but it didn’t get much traction. Only a few hundred people checked it out, Kershaw writes.

But then the blogs came: Elite Daily and Daily Mail ran with the story. Later, The Next Web points out, the Washington Post even picked it up.

“And then my life went really weird,” Kershaw writes.

30,000 people had signed up by January, and he was frantically trying to build features to keep them around. Bristlr has become essentially a dating app for men with beards and those who love them. The tag line, hearkening back to the original joke, is “connecting those with beards to those who want to stroke beards.”

After the buzz, Kershaw found himself in the Ignite accelerator program, and is now raising a seed round of funding.

Bristlr now has 100,000 registered users, and Kershaw claims even with the press, 90% heard of the app through word-of-mouth.

And Kershaw isn’t planning to stop at beards. He wants to launch a similar niche dating site aimed at tattoo enthusiasts, according to The Next Web. This joke shows no sign of stopping until he's successfully built a fetish empire.

Sign up for Bristlr here.

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