DIY Geeks, Plan9′s graduating startup, is a facilitation platform for creating technological solutions to resolve issues faced in daily lives. It is a startup that aims at initiating maker movement in Pakistan.
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What led to the formation of DIY Geeks?
The founders of the startup, Usama Abid and Hina Tariq, came up with this idea when they saw a huge untapped market of Do-It-Yourself culture in our country.
Without a doubt Pakistan is producing a ton of engineers and techies each year but when it comes to resolving petty daily life issues, hardly anyone has access to simple technical know-how that can help them easily create solutions to eradicate those problems.
Given the fact Pakistan has few design engineers there are no customer-centric tech products being developed at a large scale. Moreover, since students at school level are not encouraged to think out of the box when they go to universities instead of innovating they end up outsourcing their engineering projects.
This is where DIY Geeks comes in. Its mission is to make programmable electronics easy for any layman with no or poor technical background that empowers them to make whatever they want to for themselves.
The Story
What does the company offer and to whom?
The company offers a one-stop solution to people of any age group. Having an online presence is what makes them so accessible. The website has easy-to-follow tutorials delivered in the form of recipes.
Tutorials are designed in a way that provides all the required components needed to build those products. The best part is that DIY Geeks, unlike any other inaccessible company, has a very connected community. The team conducts workshops with their tribe at a frequent basis that allows people to work synergistically and learn making things like never before.
DIY Geeks aims at targeting two types of audiences. One, engineering students to whom they sell components with different USP’s, even those components that are currently unavailable or redundant in the market.
Second, any person who would love to come up with gadgets to solve their day-to-day problems. This part of the target market is cleverly catered by introducing fun-to-do activities such as drone racing, drone making, 3D printing, and drag and drop electronics builder.
Achievements
As of now, the team has developed a successful community-based model startup with three successful community meetups:
GEEKS Hangout – Community meetup for like-minded engineers and makers.
DIY for Her – A women empowerment program to encourage women to get independent by making their own stuff.
DIY Nest – A program for young kids in partnership with WhizKids-(a project of Plan9) to promote robotic education and maker culture.
To date the company has successfully acquired more than three hundred customers (who happen to be engineering students primarily) through their website across twenty different universities from all over Pakistan. They have an active community of five thousand plus makers.
The company has achieved so much in a short time block of six months since they first got incubated at Plan9, Pakistan’s pioneer and to-date largest technology incubator.
The startup got selected for Rajeev Circle Fellowship which is a huge milestone for any startup. The achievements are listed in the infographic below.
Their future aspirations are to leave an impact so big that a day comes that even children start making their own toys, engineering students start innovating instead of plagiarizing and common people start automating their lives.
“The day we see these things happening, we would know that we have achieved what we were aiming for.”
– Usama Abid, Co-founder DIY Geeks
You must have fallen in love with them right? Don’t forget to share their story and let us know in the comments below what is that one thing that you would like to DIY?
Happy DIY Geeking!