Top 3 Croatian Start-Ups
Why This Topic?
I got the inspiration to write this blog from my personal experiences and extensive research as well from some of the most recent books that I have read, including Hug Your Haters and Growth Hacker Marketing .
Also, this blog’s audience could be anyone from young professionals looking for interesting jobs and workplaces, young enthusiasts looking for ideas and inspiring stories about start-ups as well as companies looking for help to improve their businesses and communicate in a richer and more engaging way with their customers.
I currently work as a Director of Marketing and a Business Analyst in a healthcare company in New Orleans, Louisiana. I love my job, but I believe that many of my tasks and daily duties could be simplified and automized. This is why I started looking into companies such as Salesforce and HubSpot. Their products and services are made to make Marketers’ lives easier, to deliver better quality products and services and to enable companies to engage their consumers into product and service delivery.
A few months back, I started thinking about doing my PhD in Marketing, specifically in the area called Transformative Service Research. This area of Marketing in the world of academia is becoming very big, and what it basically says is that companies (employees) as well as customers are value co-creators. Customers truly are involved in the process of value co-creation, and if there is a company that hasn’t make an effort to engage their customers yet, they better hurry up!
So while searching for companies that could help me automize patient satisfaction surveys, online reviews, patient communication efforts and some of my other daily duties, I came across a company that I had no idea was founded in Croatia. The company made it to the top of my list:
Infobip was founded in 2006 by 2 young professionals with a great idea, great sense of business and an accurate predication about where the world of business was heading towards. Today, they have over 1000 employees, around 50 offices around the world and they are nowhere close to stop growing. In fact, their growth has been exponential, and looking at the market and its needs, I see nothing but a hug potential for growth.
Infobip’s services include SMS messaging, voice, push notifications, email, chat apps messaging and carrier billing with the same mission that it had back in 2006- mission to create seamless mobile interactions between businesses and people. Today, their platform is used by over 60% of the population, making it the largest network of its kind and the only full-stack cPaaS globally.
The way I track our patients’ satisfaction right now is complicated, time consuming, and it involves multiple steps. For that reason, I don’t have the time to send surveys daily but weekly. Imagine getting a survey a week after you received a service! Would you respond? Would you even remember it anymore? Maybe only if you didn’t like it! Yes, people are more likely to memorize and comment on bad experiences.
Infobip has the ability to streamline this process, and help companies get not only better response rate, but also get better reviews and more satisfied customers. My last read, Hug Your Haters by Jay Bear, taught me about how important fast and efficient communications with customers is. If you are looking to delight your customers, and give them more than they expect, this book gives some great advice, and if you are a marketer, you should read it! If you already know this and are looking for a good strategy and implementation advice, Infobip can help you!
Even thought people say that technology will eventually replace human forces, humans are still the ones that make that technology. I believe that people with IT skills are the most in-demand type of workforce everywhere in the world.
Founders of Adopto were smart enough to realized that companies that are in need for people with these skills, may need some help finding them. Adopto claims that time is too precious to be wasted, and they are so right about that! Their goal is to save companies’ and HR Managers’ time in recruiting highly qualified professionals for their open job positions.
Adopto is a fairly new start-up, and some of their big clients include Poliklinika Bagatin and Rimac Automobil, both based in Croatia. Adopto is great because it leads its clients through the whole hiring process. First, it helps with employer branding on many different platforms such as Monster, LinkedIn, Indeed.com, Glassdoor and others.
Then it helps sourcing and finding candidates with the best match for the open position. They are also great in finding passive candidates. Once they are found, Adopto enables you to extract candidates’ info directly to your talent pool. You can also just ask your teammates for referral and easily distribute job post to free or premium job boards.
Application tracking is another great Adopto’s feature. With this feature, your entire team has an ability to see the complete overview of the whole hiring process. All the communication goes through a dashboard, so it’s visible to every team member. Notes, scores, updates, interviews etc. are easily traceable and your team can be as effective as possible.
After all, there is an analytical tool as well. Have you ever heard of a saying: “In God we trust, all others must bring data”? Well I am a huge fan of the saying, and I believe that there are only a few things that can’t be measured in the world of business today. If you are doing something that you can’t measure, you are probably doing something wrong!
And after all…I was also impressed with their website (see below). There was Mario to help me immediately, you can do a free trial, they are very clear about their product, and also very transparent about their pricing.
Being a Marketer who is result driven and data oriented, it is not surprising that this type of a start-up made it to my list.
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Mediatoolkit is a neat media monitoring & analytics tool that gathers information from millions of internet sources and notifies you in real time whenever your company, your competitors or your industry are being talked about. It is a simple tool anyone can use, and especially executives, marketing managers and PR professionals.
Thus, if you want to know immediately when you are mentioned anywhere online, create detailed reports, measure your online media activities, your reputation and discover meaningful insights behind every mention, get yourself Mediatoolkit!
So this is a Croatian top 3 Start-Ups list developed by Me. I know that many of you may disagree, so please feel free to comment and tell us about your preferences.