As Novac/Tena Sarcevic writes on the 21st of October, 2019, she isn't even 33 years old, and in just two years, Dragana Lipovac from Zagreb, has managed to get a company on its feet that has attracted around 300,000 euros in investments. Her startup, Hubbig, has succeeded in what she sees as the main point of such companies - "to shake off the established postulates of certain industries."

The industry where Dragana works is the freight forwarding company. She joined the industry at the age of nineteen and gained eleven years of experience in two companies. She realised that there was room for progress and the simplification of complicated procedures in that business, so she came up with the idea of ​​an application (app) that would solve such boring and bureaucratic hassles. She designed Hubbig and reported it to Startup Factory Zagreb, a startup accelerator program run by Zicer, marking just one of many steps taken by the company to date.

''I didn't think Hubbig would become so successful. I had absolutely no expectationsm'' says the founder of the Zagreb-based company, which today, at least judging by the investments it has managed to attract, has an extremely promising future.

Hubbig is actually a web platform that allows small freight forwarders, and larger ones too, to advertise their transportation services. Hubbig then connects carriers with an importer or exporter seeking a service.

''Let's say that a person works in the procurement of a retail chain and his boss tells him to find a transport truck going from Warsaw to Zagreb. Instead of calling several carriers, a person can simply go to Hubbig, enter what he wants to carry, how heavy his cargo is and from which destination he wants to transport it. When the app determines what is needed, Hubbig eliminates the carriers that aren't able to carry the cargo. Along with the carriers, the price they are looking for is automatically calculated,'' Dragana explained.

Otherwise, in a situation like this, several carriers should be called or contacted first, which will take time. This is precisely the area in which Hubbig is solving problems: the app rolls out complete offers, and the user seeking information immediately gets all the information and the specs about potential shipping.

When the user and the carrier connect via Hubbig, the transport is monitored from the moment the goods are picked up until they are delivered.

''The customers are not so alone, we have customer care, we provide all the necessary information and at any time you can send an email or call and ask about whatever you're interested in,'' said Dragana, explaining that the way her company profits from such a business model is very simple: they get a certain commission for every transport carried out.

The users are mostly from Croatia. - People import things. There are electronic components, toys, granites, textiles, furniture... There are various wholesale companies, but also smaller companies that are similar to those in Croatia in the way they function.

As was said before, the impressive Hubbig project, born in Zagreb, has received a lot of attention already at Startup Factory Zagreb, which was the first competition she applied to. She received media attention and came out as one of the winners, that is, her project was one of those that received financial support. At that time, the company was not yet open. In the same period, she entered the Zagreb Connect competition, where she won second place (which also involved a cash prize) and received a certain amount from the CES.

''Overall, this amounted to around 200,000 kuna, which was a great incentive for me to start my own business. That's what I did, and then I started building the platform,'' she stated as she recalls the period of two years ago.

For a person who was just starting out in entrepreneurship, she said, it seemed like a massive sum of money, but she invested all that money in the first five or six months of work alone.

''Of course, we had revenue, so it wasn't too chaotic, but there was still a lot to be invested in development, mostly in the IT dimension of the project. I started looking for extra investments, which I actually got extremely quickly, within three or four months, only to wait longer for it to be done. We got the money from the investments in about a year,'' she explained.

She was helped by her longtime friend Monika Mikac, who is now the co-owner of the company.

''We agreed that I'd give her a share in the company in return for giving me a lot of advice and attracting two investors. Admittedly, it's wrong to say that she attracted investors, they were attracted by the idea and the traffic Hubbig generated in 2018. There were, of course, negotiations with investors, which lasted several months, and due diligence took place. But relatively quickly, we agreed on everything. These are people who invest a lot in startups and aren't worried about their money, and on the other hand, they trust in everyone they invest in,'' said Dragana about Frank Kanayet Yepes, a Colombian who was the first investor in Rimac Automobili, and Ivan Glavaš, who is the founder of blockchain startup Forebit.

''We raised money there, which helped us greatly in our development. In the meantime, we also received a 200,000 kuna loan from Zicer and around 1.3 million kuna from EU funds. In a month, we will be celebrating two years of Hubbig's existence, and I calculated that we raised 300,000 euros in total. We're small, but we've received awards because it is assumed that we will soon become big. We could become competitors to big players. We have the technology that will allow us to do that,'' the Zagreb entrepreneur says.

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Although the Croatian economic situation isn't the most promising one in the world and you’ll encounter and many young people are leaving the country in search of better future, not everything is as bad as the news might suggest.

Croatia is full of young, driven, educated and ambitious individuals who want to create something for themselves in their own country by founding startups.

On a very long list of successful Croatian startups, TalentLyft, is a name you should remember. It was recently recognised as the best Croatian startup by Global Startup Awards. EU-Startups, the leading online publication with a focus on startups in Europe, has also found TalentLyft to be the most promising Croatian startup you should look out for in 2019 and beyond.

Founded in 2015 in Zagreb by two developers, Mario Buntić and Nikola Biondić, TalentLyft is a startup that developed a recruiting software that modernises and simplifies the recruiting process, in other words, it is a recruiting tool that helps companies find, attract and hire the best talent. It offers both recruitment and marketing solutions to attract the best candidates, and an applicant tracking system to solve post-application problems such as effective candidate communication, a database with all the applicants and their profiles, candidate assessment kits and scorecards, and interview scheduling all in one place.

Today, TalentLyft boasts thirteen full time employees and is currently located at Technopark (venue for startups at Velesajam).

In a brief interview with Total Croatia News, they revealed that startup life in Croatia isn't easy. There are many barriers to overcome in order to enter the market and start a business, starting from bureaucratic conundrums to finding capital investors, which is difficult to do in this environment. There is not much support for small firms and startups, so you’re very much on your own. Instead of focusing on new, promising sectors such as IT, the Croatian Government still invests in outdated industries.

Times and job markets are changing, and so should their investments.

‘’There's always a solid chance that your product will fail,'' they say. The startup life is risky, challenging and uncertain and requires a lot of hard work, devotion, persistence and compromise. However, despite, or exactly because of that, working in a startup offers a unique chance for personal and professional skill development and career advancement. When you are a small startup, you need to deliver a game changing solution and product in order to compete with the big guys. The only way to do that is by having all of your employees constantly learn new things, experiment and innovate.

‘’Since TalentLyft is a small group, every employees’ opinion is important; changes are embraced rapidly making us more agile’’, they state.

They are also proud of the fact that they're working with latest technologies in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning, emphasising the fact that their employees’ knowledge needs to be up to date and that you can lose good people if they’re stuck working with old technologies.

‘’Yes it’s the employees’ responsibility to keep learning, but it’s our responsibility to provide them with the tools necessary for that,'' they state from this Croatian startup.

They love the fact that they are a small team because it means there's a better connection: ‘’You know everyone by their name, you work hard together, you share your struggles and the laughs, and you get the chance to build something from the ground up.’’

The startup life is for those who embrace challenges, seek new ways of doing things, and question the status quo.

‘’When you manage to gather together a group of people like that, every day feels like an adventure and there is no challenge you can’t tackle in the end.’’

Let's hope we'll see more examples like this across Croatia in the near future.

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As Bernard Ivezic/Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 14th of March, 2019, the Austrian capital of Vienna boasts as many as 5,830 IT companies currently in operation, which is more than are in operation on the entire territory of Croatia.

The Croatian Chamber of Commerce (HGK) took with them as many as 32 Croatian companies, mostly from the IT sector, to Vienna's fifth international B2B Software Days.

Among them, the conference was participated in by King ICT, Megatrend business solutions, Mediatoolkit and Ekobit. Tajana Kesić Šapić, the director of the Croatian Chamber of Commerce's industry sector, said that the visit was organised in cooperation with the Austrian Chamber of Commerce, Advantage Austria, and the European Entrepreneurship Network who are interested in the Croatian IT sector.

"Over the last five years, IT companies' revenue in Croatia grew by 7.4 percent, and exports rose almost twice as fast, to 11.3 percent per year," stated Kesić Šapić.

Although the startup scene in the Croatian capital of Zagreb has been ''coming to life'' over the last few years, the same sector in Austria's capital city has been growing stronger at double Zagreb's rate. In Vienna alone, there are more IT companies than are in operation in the whole of the Republic of Croatia, an impressive 5,830 of them.

Vienna is investing more than the equivalent of a quarter of a billion kuna per year into the city's startup scene, and just like in Zagreb, the city readily provides all the necessary support for the free establishment of startups, up to half a million euros worth.

Goran Mrvoš, director of Infosite, one of the Croatian IT companies at the fair, said that in Vienna he realised that the overall awareness of digitalisation in Croatia was low, and that it created a market advantage for foreign competition.

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Click here for the original article by Bernard Ivezic for Poslovni Dnevnik

Zagreb Connect is a perfect opportunity for startups from Croatia and abroad to present their business ideas to potential investors, investment institutions and business angels.

Zagreb-based startups Oradian, a core microfinance system, and Madbarz, a bodyweight workout app, reached one million users on Thursday.