Aditya AhluwaliaCEO of DIKY Published On: Wednesday, April 27, 2016 Views 5407

We want to create a “thug life way” helping people discover new people around them, to pursue their interests and passions, date or simply have an interesting conversation.

We plan to achieve this by building –
1. An authentic and intuitive way to “discover new people around you” (based on what activity you want to do and with what kind of a person)
2. An interesting way to understand what is the personality of a person and what he/she likes to do to “connect better”.

Introducing DIKY (Do I Know You) – a location based people discovery app.
You have, up till now discovered people based on their name, location, school, college or workplace. Now experience discovering and connecting, with new people around you, basis 50+ personality tags like funny, intelligent, foodie, traveller etc.

How do we understand your personality?

Simple, DIKY is built on a proprietary algorithm which asks your personality traits (loving, kind, trustworthy etc) and the activities you like to do (Travel, foodie, Sports etc) from your friends and family in a very unique way – the reverse social network effect.

Then… we just make you discoverable on the personality tags you are known for, and help you discover like minded people, for any activity, basis the same. We currently have 20 types of activities you can connect with people on, ranging from Foodies to Travellers to Fitness to Reading.

We wanted to build a peer to peer evaluation tool and felt that if we can crowd source your personality from your friends, it would be good enough data points to evaluate a peer. When we launched in October, expecting DIKY to go viral… It just did not fly!!

Verdict – “It’s a good product but not engaging enough”, “Why should I crowd source my personality from my friends”…

We went out to our first users to ask them how would they use this data generated, how can we make DIKY more engaging? The response we got was phenomenal. Travellers wanted use it to find people the can share their travel memories with, photographers to share compatible gear with, fitness lovers to find a guy who they could be inspired from and learn new exercises, foodies to find new people to food experiment with and the list goes on. We actually spent 4 months getting such feedbacks and understood that the personality a user crowd sources can be very efficiently used to “Discover new people of your choice for the activities you like to do”.

Thus we have been inspired from three things

1. The feedback we have got from our early adopters
2. DIKY has the potential to revolutionise the people discovery space
3. We are leading the innovation on this end (for a change J)

If you don’t take risks now you won’t have any stories to tell when you are 60.

When dreams are big they take time to complete (ours is still not though) but maintaining the team, their motivation and interest levels over the course of 11 months was the toughest part of the journey

By giving small victories importance, and steadily (even though slowly) moving ahead in thought and execution.

The entire journey up till now has been bootstrapped with the following influx of EQUITY LESS capital

1. A successful crowdfunding campaign of $5000
2. Winning competitions worth $3200
3. Qualifying for FB start bootstrap track and getting $30,000 marketing aresenal

I would want to quote “Mr Hiesenberg from Breaking Bad” here –

We are not scared of the brain drain… We are the brain drain !!

The people who work with us do that because you get three things while working at DIKY –

1. Great Parties and good food.
2. Awesome people to hang out and learn from.
3. The concept of DIKY which gives every team member an intellectual high and satisfaction to push their limits.

We do not spend even a penny on Talent Acquisition or Retention ( the only guy paid is our cook – Mr Subodh”)

Basic Intelligence, Hungry to learn, Motivation to excel

Okay so our expertise is growth hacking using tools – just to name a few we use

1. Free community acquisition – Headtalker (social virality tool)
2. Free image resources – Pexels.com (no copyrights #enjoy)
3. Free video resources – Videos.Pexels.com
4. Free retention software for mobile apps – Clevertap (upto 1 million events)
5. Free easy videos – Biteable.com

Rest if you want our full stack get in touch with me at Aditya@diky.co

I am not scared of asking myself the hard questions, it helps me be prepared for anything and everything that can go wrong with the plan.

I would love to be a good listener.

• One tip to success:

Please do what you “WANT” to do… not what you “CAN” or what you “HAVE” to do !!

• One mistake you believe every individual must avoid:

Impatience… because good things take time !!

• One most important lesson that you have learnt till now:

To be the smartest man in the room you only need to know 3 things – Breaking down a complex problem in to 5 simpler, easily achievable ones, understanding what YOUR consumer wants and common sense.

Discover, Experience and Get inspired – professionally and personally. Rest I don’t believe in exact level planning because at the end of the day “nothing happens according to plan”. I like to keep my ends clear… whatever be the means.

Nothing !! if I changed anything I wouldn’t be the person I am today… and I am really proud of myself.

Amsterdam, Iceland, Budapest

“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job, because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it” by Bill Gates. I love working with #motivated #intelligent #lazy people.