M14; Going into detail on all the less publicly known near-misses and actual minor disasters.

‘John Kershaw from M14 Industries: His journey from Bristlr, to M14, to Dragon’s Den and beyond. Going into detail on all the less publicly known near-misses and actual minor disasters’

The final presentation at the launch of the new Enterprise City was by John Kershaw of M14 Industries. Now, I will be honest, we stumbled upon this presentation by accident, and boy did we love it.

Kershaw explored a range of ideas and the development of M14 Industries starting from the creation of Bristlr, a dating app which puts people who love beards and people who have beards together. A truly genius bit of jest.

John went on to tell us about his experience on Dragon’s Den, and discussed how his initial fear of the dragons lead him to massively over prepare and able to answer all of their questions. Much, i’m sure, to the production teams annoyance.

Walking away with two dragons, and a great bit of investment, M14 ended up going with a different investor and flourishing. (Don’t worry, the Dragon’s weren’t angry they told him to go for it)

So, how do you go from a beard based dating app to being a big player in the digital dating industry? Well, you branch out and create a service which allows a subscription based solution for the development of dating apps and sites. Who doesn’t want to get involved in one of the most lucrative ideas around?

John went on to tell the audience of how they have had a plethora of mad ideas of apps, and even tipped us off for a few crazy ideas which are currently in development. I wholeheartedly recommend keeping an eye out for some of these.

A final part of the presentation which stuck in my mind? John’s lesson that burnout can be a real actual thing. Which he discovered when he had a sudden bought of illness and stress which doctors likened to a heart attack. Duly, noted that a break isn’t a bad thing every now and again.

We spoke to some of the M14 team after the presentation and had a really great chat, my favourite take away from this and the presentation is that at M14, they keep Friday’s free to do whatever they fancy and come up with some great innovative ideas. We definitely love this idea at Wool and are going to, for sure, introduce some creative, wild time for our team to make what they want to make!

If you want to talk cool ideas, or just fancy a free coffee, get in touch, we are all places social, Wool Digital.