CrazyEngineers is a global online community of engineering professionals & students.
Kaustubh Katdare is the founder & administrator of CrazyEngineers. Kaustubh graduated in 2003 with a degree in Electrical Engineering. Kaustubh founded CrazyEngineers on 26 November 2005 in with the sole purpose of interacting with engineers who are working on greatest engineering projects. CrazyEngineers soon became popular among engineering students & working professionals through word of mouth.
CrazyEngineers started as a hobby project back in 2005. He was employed with a leading IT company. His company provided online newsgroup for employees in different offices to interact with each other. He would remain active on them during the 10 minute breaks he took every two hours. He loved the idea of interacting with other employees, sharing ideas, technical knowledge and awesome jokes. He would occasionally receive mails from other employees appreciating his posts and how they loved reading what he contributed to the newsgroups.
He always loved watching two shows on Discovery Channel; “Extreme Engineering” and “Mega Structures”. He has always wanted to be a part of a huge, mega project or work on an extreme-engineering project. Out of curiosity, he began searching for an online place where all these engineers who work on big projects came together to discuss problems they faced. However, even after 10 minutes of intensive search he couldn’t find any such place. He was shocked and surprised. For him, it was something ‘obvious’ that should exist. He decided to create a place where engineers from various parts of the world would come together and interact with each other to solve problems, exchange ideas and share knowledge.
Searching for available domain names, he found that CrazyEngineers was available. He asked his mother if the name sounded cool. She said ‘yes’ and CrazyEngineers was registered. It was November 24, 2005. He worked hard for next two days to set up an online forum system and launched CrazyEngineers on 26 November 2005.
CrazyEngineers remained a hobby site for a long time (almost 2.5 years). Kaustubh never invested any money in advertising or promoting it. The site mostly grew through word of mouth and referrals from existing members.Though it was a hobby site, Kaustubh was always serious about it.
One of the biggest challenges in the initial days was to make the site known to the engineers. Kaustubh asked most of his friends to join, but they preferred spending more time on social networking sites. Lots of people told him the site would never work because there are so many similar sites around, but he did not listen to any of them. Because there was so much to learn, Kaustubh had to stay awake late in the night, making it very difficult for him to balance his life between his job and this venture. Eventually, the site began demanding so much more time that it became almost impossible for him to continue to dedicate time at the office and to the site. So, he decided to quit his job. Everyone in his family supported his decision. He quit his job and began working on CrazyEngineers full time.
At the moment, CrazyEngineers is an online media site that boasts of its unique audience consisting of engineers around the world. The site makes money by selling advertising space on the forums. Different teams handle various responsibilities on the site.
