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.
Make sure to follow our dedicated Made in Croatia and business pages for much more.
