EE502 - How He Turned 173 Salon Conversations Into a Startup That Raised €4.9M | Conor Moules

I think all the good startups can be described as this. I say it when I'm interviewing people, like, understand what you're walking into. Like, this is a cult. This feels like a cult. This feels like a family meets a sports team, and it's people that are all obsessed about the problem, and looking after the people that we service at the end of the day, who are essentially all of our bosses, right?

Connor, welcome to the pod.

Thanks for having me.

A pleasure. I feel like we've done a mini pod. You had to sit and watch me eat my lunch. [laughs]

Yeah, getting to know each other.

Yeah. Well, welcome to the studio. This is the new, the new setup. Uh, it's great to have you in. What do you do?

I am the founder and CEO of a company called BareSpace. We started BareSpace with the simple mission to build a true operating system for hair and beauty salons, a system that once put into the company would allow the salon owner to almost run the company on autopilot with a system that was actually supporting the growth. I think it's really interesting when people look at hair and beauty salons. They're one of the only kind of verticals where the business owner, generally smaller businesses as well, right? So the business owner is expected to work on the floor every day. Like, if you go into Bear Market Coffee today, you're not expecting Stephen En route to make your coffee.

That's a good point, actually, yeah.

But if, if you go into the hair salon, that salon owner is generally the MVP of the salon floor. So we took the view that what was on the market at the minute, you either had a marketplace, which we believe is really corrosive to hair and beauty, or you had a management system that was almost like a system of record that was there to be used by the salon owner to run the business, and what we've done is we've built the first true vertical operating system that's helping run the business on their behalf.

How does a lad from Wexford end up doing that?

It's crazy, right? Um, bit of a story, where I left school at 16 to become a hairdresser. So I left school and got an apprenticeship in Peter Mark. Interesting, like, you go home and you tell your mam, "This is it, I'm done with school." Like, I was never great with school, to be honest with you. Um, and you go home and you have that conversation around a table like this, like, "I'm kinda done," and broke my mam's heart, naturally. Um, and she was like, "Well, you need an apprenticeship." And her best friend was, I think she was area manager at the time for Peter Mark in Leinster.

And that's how it came about?

That's how it happened, yeah.

Had you any desire or a goal or...?

I had the desire to leave school-

[laughs]

... and I would've done an apprenticeship for just about anything at that point.

So you didn't really care?

I didn't really care. I thought interesting, and like, you could be on a building site breaking your back laboring all day, which I'd done a good bit of in my pre-teens.

Okay.

So I thought, "Let's give this a spin."

Okay, 'cause that would've been the logical, kind of natural route. You're kind of going, "Oh, yeah, I'll get a carpenter or plumber." So you'd already tried a bit of that and you're like,