As Novac/Boris Vlasic writes on the 23rd of April, 2020, the Zagreb-New York mobile app developer agency Five has received prestigious recognition, and is now ranked among the top three agencies on the respectable Clutch business platform by a competition of 480 agencies. This is yet another testament to the talent of Croatian developers.
Clutch is a platform that evaluates the quality of mobile applications based solely on reviews left by clients, and not the agencies themselves. This isn’t some simple appraisal that comes with almost every application, but rather a serious review, which people from Clutch then check, further interview those same agency clients, and analyse a series of responses to avoid any subjectivism from the appraisal.
Five has been in New York for a decade now, ever since Viktor Marohnic went there, along with Luka Abrus and Sven Marusic, one of the co-owners of a company which boasts about 150 employees, and applied to Clutch three years ago, thinking that the references they would gain would be good recommendation for their further business development.
“We were never interested in the awards, we didn’t spend our time doing that,” says Viktor, who, like most people at Five, has been working out of the office, more precisely from home, for the past few weeks.
”What interested us at Clutch is that they were the only ones who offered a realistic assessment of our quality. It’s especially different that they don’t do the rating, but instead the clients for whom the work was done do it. Our rating comes directly from the clients themselves and this can’t be adjusted. Clutch makes sure that every review is authentic. That prize is impossible to fake,” says Viktor, adding that virtually every agency that has a profile on Clutch actively competes for the best possible position among other agencies.
Marriott International, a multinational hotel company with more than 200,000 employees, asked the Five team for an application to raise employee satisfaction, boast an employment chatbot, and other things.
”Five provided a level of engagement that is invaluable. Their team understood how people use technology, especially those targeted at the global level,” wrote the director of the wellbeing sector at Marriott about the Five agency in a review on Clutch.
”The West Coast, or the Silicon Valley, is the centre of the world when it comes to VC funds and the Hi-Tec startup industry. On the other hand, the East Coast, or NY, is the epicentre of events in the agency business,” says one of the Croatian developers, Sven Marusic.
”What used to be agencies on Madison Avenue are now slowly moving into the digital world, and therefore the mobile app world. The competition is huge, so this recognition certainly means that we’ve become a relevant player globally, now recognised by an independent service such as Clutch as one of the leading ones,” says Marusic, describing how crucial to their acceptance in the US market was in terms of their decision to become an American company .
At that point, they stopped being a Croatian company with clients in America, and instead became an American company whose main people for sales, design, product definition, consulting and other jobs are Americans.
”In Croatia, we’re an IT company with a strong focus on design and clients in America. In America, we’re a New York-based agency with a strong development and design team in Croatia. We believe that our key to success was precisely in that step forward and in building a team based in New York. It was also a big risk that’s now slowly paying off,” says Marusic between two zoom meetings.
That’s how everyone works, the coronavirus pandemic just changed their location, but it had no effect on the business of these talented Croatian developers and the company Five. Clients expect the realisation of commissioned projects, this is one of the evaluation items at Clutch, and five received five out of a possible five stars for each criterion.
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