Gurgaon-based DIKY brings a twist to social networking, lets your friends tell you what they love about you
Whenever I want to know about a person, the easiest thing to do is run a Google search. Search results throw up some relevant social profiles, and I figure out more about the person by going through them and forming an opinion about the person. The gaps we see here is that all the information you get about a person is what he has posted about himself or what he wants the world to see.
What if we could change the game? What if all this information and a lot more could be crowdsourced from his friends and family? What if the crowdsourcing process becomes a fun, anonymous and authentic activity? There would be an avalanche of feedback given to people by people to tell them why they are special to them. This is what DIKY (pronounced as dai-key) does. It is a reverse social network that tells you how popular you are, how similar you are to the person you are checking out, and the reasons you are special (qualities like confidence, kind, optimism and intelligence, that define you).
Whenever you are vouched by any of your friends, it affects your rankings and scores on the basis of a host of factors.
The team behind DIKY
Aditya takes care of marketing and happiness so that his team stays motivated at all times.
Niyaz Siddiqui is doctor and an MBA from ISB who formulates the questions and brings in the 'intelligence' in the questions being asked on DIKY. He makes sure that all the questions end up bringing out the true personality of every person as seen from his peers' eyes. Users can have fun while telling their friends why they are special anonymously.
Sharmeen Sahibole is a mechanical engineer who went from being a professor to a 3D modeller, before finally landing up at DIKY. She is creating the product.
A child prodigy, Shubham is only 19 years old and just passed out of DTU, He develops algorithms to ensure the feed is interesting and the vouches are authentic.
Although still in his fourth year at DTU, Himanshu is already drenched fully in the startup culture. He is the brains behind the entire architecture of DIKY.
Making of DIKY:
Aditya shut down his previous startup and was planning to take a trip to Ladakh to retrospect. He was searching for possible job options, but could not find any exciting job so he looked up the best startups that got funded in 2014. He found Knozen, a concept very similar to DIKY but launched in the US for corporates only. "I spent two sleepless nights contemplating how this can be applied to a social network; 48 hours later I was convinced that this was an idea worth sacrificing my Ladakh trip for", recalls Aditya. Next day, he called up everyone who could join his new team.
Now they are a team of 15 people working out of Gurgaon.
DIKY has started with crowdsourcing qualities. The next step would be crowd sourcing activity tags like adventure junkie, blogger, entrepreneur, foodie, shopaholic etc.
Aditya says user feedback, organic acquisition of customers, proactive feature design and testing will contribute to the success of his startup.