Maglus co-founder Noel Joyce (pictured) has had more setbacks than most but perseverance and ingenuity have paid off for redoubtable Offaly entrepreneur. Joyce was employed in the army when a devastating bike accident left him confined to a wheelchair. He turned to product design and won the James Dyson Design Award in 2009 after developing a new braking system for wheelchairs.

Joyce (36) then moved on to developing accessories for iPads and tablets, amongst other inventions. He set up Maglus in 2011 with Andy Shaw (27) and its flagship product is a stylishly constructed magnetic stylus for touchscreen devices, which has changeable tips and has garnered praise from reviewers and customers worldwide.

Joyce says that the aluminium stylus and its silicon tip provide a more sensitive and balanced response than the plethora of other tablet styluses. The founders sell their stylus, which is assembled in Taiwan, for €30 through the company website.

Fortunate

According to Joyce, Maglus has shifted 45,000 stylus units in the past two years, mostly to customers outside Ireland, and the range of accessories on offer has also increased. “We have been fortunate enough to have NASA as customers and we even had sales from an address at Infinite Loop, Cupertino, where Apple is headquartered.” Joyce says that Maglus focused on e-sales from the outset to keep costs down, but the retail route is now being considered.

In Association with

Joyce and Shaw tried crowd funding Maglus on Fund It when the startup launched but were unsuccessful in their attempts to raise €15,000. “It was the first of many failures for us,” Joyce concedes. “However, we knew that there were people willing to pay for our product, so we scraped together the €8,000 needed to get the first 1,000 units made. We also hand assembled each one, which helped us to understand how to do re-designs that would lower the cost of assembly.”

When online orders started piling up, Maglus also convinced Bank of Ireland to advance stocking finance. Joyce avoided structured mentoring programmes, although he did get advice from investors Sean O’Sullivan and Bill Liao. “Mentoring programmes, while well-intentioned, are no substitute for doing, failing and doing again,” he says.

Maglus employs three full-time and two part-time staff at the Offaly Design and Innovation Centre in Tullamore. Joyce has battled through all of the usual startup challenges faced by entrepreneurs, but with the added difficulty of being confined to a wheelchair. “That has made everything much harder. Learning about how I could manage things was the biggest challenge. It has been taxing to generate sufficient design work to earn enough money to pay for stock, right the way through to trying to get distributors to look at the products.”

Sketching

Despite mobility challenges, Joyce keeps active. He works with Sean O’Sullivan for a couple of months every year in a tech accelerator in China. O’Sullivan first met Joyce on an episode of Dragons’ Den in 2012, when he gave the Offaly entrepreneur €33,000 for one-third of the equity in a gardening venture that makes a clever plant holder.

Joyce is an iPad fan and he says he uses his Maglus for sketching and designing on the go. “My work needs very power-hungry software, so I run a Macbook Pro for that with software like SolidWorks and Adobe’s Creative Suite. I am currently getting a lot out of an organising app called Trello.”