Passionate about DIY, Be the “Kaki” of Do IT Yourself

Founder of KakiDIY.com, Johnson Lam had always been a car enthusiasts, extremely passionate about DIY and continuously learning about how things work and deeply in love with gadgets. The best thing about liking and learning about all these gadgets and doing a lot of DIY is to be able to share what he found with people. That’s what energises Johnson like a ‘battery powered bunny’

More than 10 years ago, he started writing DIY contents in forums and sharing with friends. It was mostly automotive related as he was crazy over cars that time. Many known him as “DIY King” in the automotive forums. It ranges from DIY car maintenance to making your own car performance parts from junks. It soon gained popularity and he start writing for a few forums and magazines too.

Then he started thinking about; there are a lot more people out there in the community, those who likes to do things with their hands and those who like to write about things. If he can gather them into a DIY community, it would be a good ecosystem for people to read contents, contribute contents, merchants to look for and purchase contents and writers to be paid for contents.

KakiDIY.com started on 2014. It is an Online DIY Community that has a site to host DIY contents at the same time, the social media platform of KakiDIY’s Facebook actively looks for likeminded DIY enthusiasts to contribute contents. KakiDIY on a one man’s journey, Johnson grew from zero to a community of 6000+ followers and over 100 Makers and DIY enthusiasts in this short period.

How do KakiDIY sustain? There are multiple parts to the business model. However the founder can surely identify that the largest portion of the income comes from Content. Be it content creation to be sold directly to publishing companies, content curation to be made into a series of articles for magazines or TV shows, contents to be used as training materials, events and showcase materials or run classes, all these are priceless contents.

KakiDIY  as a community work together with enthusiastic members, identify key leaders who are good at a certain areas then they will curate contents to be either sold, used as our own training materials or collaborate with others to build a more wholesome solutions to the industry. In the end, its a win win situation to everyone as everyone gets a share in the pie.

In the end of 2014, when Johnson Lam was growing KakiDIY, he found a DIY enthusiast who likes to do DIY just for fun at home. Upon seeing the potential of her work, I helped her by providing her the platform, brought her to Mini MakerFaire to showcase her works and it took off from there. Now she is running her own online shop selling her works and doing countless classes and courses on her work.  Check out : MC Arts&Craft 

In 2015, KakiDIY started to reach out and connect with other fellow Makers, DIY enthusiasts and community builders via events just as Tinker & Invent, Mini Maker Faire, MakerFest, KL Converge, Drone GP, KLESF, Eco-Schools and a few other exhibition and events. Collaborating with other communities made contents even more valuable. We will talk more about this on another article.

After nearly 2 years as an online community, KakiDIY realised that by just being online it’s not enough. In 2016, it will be expanding our community to physical locations. KakiDIY started a partnership with WeMaker in SITEC SDCC’s, who manages and run Maker Studio in Shah Alam on Oct 2015 . After seeing the impact of having a physical space, KakiDIY will be launching our own makerspace, bearing the name MakerLAB in Cyberjaya. It will be a place for Makers, DIY enthusiasts, Entrepreneurs and like minded people to gather, work together and grow together.

MakerLAB is hosting in house Makers in Residence from various fields. One of the newest community to join them is MyCRO Who builds and educate people on robotics and 3d printings.

Stay tuned to KakiDIY Facebook for updated news and projects : https://www.facebook.com/kakidiy