Fancy a phone you can just put together yourself?
As Bernard Ivezic/Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 6th of September, 2018, after managing to gain 100,000 dollars a month last year for the very first Croatian gaming console ”MAKERbuino”, the young Karlovac-based entrepreneur Albert Gajšak is moving into a new, large group financing campaign over the next month and a half, this time for no less than the very first Croatian DIY (Do It Yourself) mobile phone.
For now, all that is known is that it will be called ”MAKERphone” and will be not only very simple and easy to build, but it will also be easy to program, likely through the means of a graphical interface. Albert Gajšak, the founder and CEO of CircuitMess, says they want to expand their market with mobile phones.
“So far, we’ve sold 6000 MAKERbuino pieces, which is, for the [likes of] Samsung, a small series, but for a start up from Karlovac, which I founded at age 18 and from which still more than 95 percent of everything produced is exported, I think this is an excellent result, of which I’m very proud,” said Gajšak.
He added that MAKERbuino is now being sold on Amazon, eBay and other large, well known online stores. Four months ago, he says, they started selling it on the Indiegogo Marketplace. CircuitMess expanded its list of distributors. For Croatia and the wider region, their exclusive representative is Sancta Domenica. Gajšak claims to have twenty distributors in more than twenty countries. Among them, they have distributors in the USA, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and Austria.
“From a company that has lived on the initial hype which created a successful Kickstarter campaign, we’ve become a self-sustaining company,” says Gajšak. CircuitMess was otherwise invested in by Tomislav Car, co-founder and director of the largest Croatian Infinity mobile production company. The number of employees increased to seven permanent employees, and Gajšak says they also have further big plans.
They want their DIY devices to create technology that can be used simply as Lego can be.
“For that, I’ll need more people, and because of that I’m unfortunately having to think about moving the company to Zagreb. After graduation, a lot of young people from Karlovac move away and only one employee has come to us,” Gajšak stated.
Click here for the original article by Bernard Ivezic for Poslovni Dnevnik
