By Molly Sanchez
My name is Molly Sanchez and I am a pogonophile. That’s a fancy way of saying “if you have a beard, let’s get weird,” which I think was originally an Eleanor Roosevelt quote. Finally, there’s an app for people like me.
John Kershaw, a software developer based in Manchester, U.K., produced a social networking site that seeks to connect beard owners with the people who want to stroke them.
The beards, not the owners.
Like many of the best ideas, Kershaw says that Bristlr was born out of procrastination. “It started off as a joke,” he admits, adding that he is “forever coming up with truly stupid ideas.”
He turned this joke into a landing page where potential users had to give their name, email, and their beard status. He then “ignored it for a bit” only to come back a week later and find that he had over 200 sign ups. When other people started to take his “joke” seriously, so did Kershaw.
Bristlr’s Facebook page has over 800 likes and the location based site tells me that there are at least 100 users on Bristlr in San Francisco alone. A quick scroll through the site shows a bevy of gorgeous bearded dudes with the occasional woman sprinkled in. You can like someone’s picture, and if they also like yours, you can message them back and forth.
Though this format seems reminiscent of other social networking and dating sites like Tinder or Okcupid, Kershaw sees Bristlr as a more “light hearted” approach.
He says he finds most dating apps “slightly scary” and that Bristlr is different because people can approach connecting in a silly, less serious way. “It doesn’t ask for gender, it doesn’t ask for sexual preference, it just asks the arbitrary, ‘Do you have a beard or not?’” he says, implying that this social network is one where anything goes and without much pressure to hook up.
Kershaw has a fascination with the recent sharing economy trend, and Bristlr isn’t his first attempt to break into the tech world in a whimsical way. He created Battleofeverything.com, a website that pits two random Wikipedia articles against each other and lets users vote on which one is “the best.” He laughs as he says that the idea behind that was “we could finally find definitively the best article on the internet!” His other project is a completely anonymous social network that he calls “a fun little community that ebbs and flows.” All of his ideas seem to in some way to poke fun at our preconceived notions of social media and the internet at large.
In an age where dating apps pop up with whack-a-mole like regularity, Kershaw says he sees three outcomes for Bristlr. “Either it dies next week, or it slowly fizzles overtime, or it becomes hugely popular and it’s going to be the most fun ride,” he says, adding “ I like to say I’m here for a good time and not a long time, but if it does get famous, don’t tell my investors that!”
Top photo courtesy of Flickr user, Mike Mozart.
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