As Poslovni Dnevnik/Lucija Spiljak writes, Antonio Peric-Mazar and Marko Maljkovic both had a vision which was to create a company where they’d like to work themselves if they hadn’t instead chosen to enter the world of entrepreneurship way back in 2011.
”After 10 years, we still share the same vision,” say Antonio and Marko, colleagues and friends from their student days who recently celebrated the passing of a decade since the founding of the Split digital agency Locastic, which deals with software development. Since then, they have reached 25 team members. Although most of them work from their headquarters in Split, two years ago they started hiring people from outside Croatia, so there are also people working for them from Austria, France, Tunisia and India.
“Our goal is to continuously create interdisciplinary teams that can develop a top quality product or project from start to finish. From time to time, we also hire talented, less experienced people with the aim of developing them into top professionals. We make sure that the employee has a quality mentor and an adequate project on which to work, develop their knowledge and further their experience because quality is more important to us than quantity. There’s a perception that only programmers are missing in our industry, but the truth is the opposite. Almost every year, new positions and technologies are opened, which were created due to the need for specialisation in a certain field. Today, in addition to developers, designers and marketers, there’s a great lack of system administrators, data analysts, project managers, experts in artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as testers,” explained Peric-Mazar.
Today, the Split digital agency Locastic is primarily engaged in the development of web and mobile applications (apps), but this area has expanded and they now also develop products on web technologies used on various platforms – eg cars, watches, and even refrigerators.
“We like to say that we help our clients in their digital transformation, meaning that we hope to solve their business problems by making digital products,” said the director of the Split digital agency Locastic. So far, about 65 percent of their revenue comes from foreign markets, which is their primary focus. Peric-Mazar says that before, their exports accounted for about 80 percent of their revenue, but over time, Croatian clients have approached the budgets and requirements of foreign countries, so today they work a lot right here in Croatia. Some of their clients are Tommy, PBZ, A1, HPB and Cedevita, and when it comes to foreign names, FNY, Daikin, Splice and Willow are just a few.
Peric-Mazar claims that 2020 was the best year financially for the Split digital agency Locastic so far, the fact that that they’d practiced remote work before helped them out a lot, so they already had organised processes. This year, they predict growth of 20-30 percent. They are most proud, he says, of the projects they engage in that help people live better and easier. One is iSchool Zambia, which introduced digitalisation into schooling in that African country. They also recently worked on the Omogur – Dyslexia Friendly Reader app that makes reading easier for people with disabilities, primarily those with dyslexia.
“Omogur was a pretty demanding project because we needed to develop technology that didn’t exist, but the satisfaction you get when you see it helping the youngest among us is indescribable. This project has already picked up a number of awards, including the Digital Takeover Award for Best Socially Responsible Project. We’re also proud of the projects we work with with other partners where we develop complex solutions for foreign and the Croatian market. We can single out the GFNY platform for organising bicycle races. Here on the Croatian market, we’d single out Tommy.
In less than two years, we’ve built an advanced eCommerce solution that is already competing well with the largest retail chains. The complexity of this solution is that for the end user, things must be as simple as possible and that in a few clicks their order comes to their door. There are a lot of complex real-time integrations going on in the background: order synchronisation, notification sending, price and delivery synchronisation within Tommy and Glovo, warehouses, etc. It all has to work flawlessly and nothing should bother the user, and judging by the two awards at the last SoMo Fighter competition – we succeeded in that,” said the director of the Split digital agency Locastic.
They’re just finishing TheGepek project, which we’ve written about before and which is the first package delivery platform to implement blockchain technology and become unique in the world. They aren’t ruling out the option of opening an office outside Split one day, and they are sure of one goal – further expansion.
“We used to think it might be better to stay on the smaller side, but given that the market is growing at an unprecedented rate, we need to follow those trends. We like to grow organically and naturally, we’ll certainly hire a few more colleagues by the end of the year and continue growing,” concluded Antonio Peric-Mazar.
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