Case Study: DIY Drones achieves a thriving, innovation-driven UAV community and spawns startups with NING

DIY Drones - Customer Case Study

DIY Drones, founded by Chris Anderson, needed a social, collaborative home for amateur UAV enthusiasts to share projects, recruit contributors, and move beyond a one-way blog. Anderson chose NING's social networking platform to host DIY Drones, using its community features to encourage member interaction, private messaging, groups and moderation so people could join, contribute and lead projects without always going through him.

Using NING’s tools, DIY Drones grew into a thriving community of 34,000 members and more than 2 million pageviews a month, mobilizing 100+ developers to create the world’s first universal autopilot and the largest Arduino program of its kind. NING enabled volunteer collaboration that spawned new businesses—most notably 3D Robotics (co-founded by Jordi Muñoz), which raised $5 million, grew to ~50 employees with multiple offices and factories—and allowed Anderson to leave his job to run the community full time.

DIY Drones

Chris Anderson

Founder