Neuralab is an award-winning team from Zagreb that works with domestic and international clients on delivering state of the art web and mobile solutions. Today, we’re talking with Krešimir Končić, founder and CEO of Neuralab, to get a glimpse into their everyday process. Krešimir will also host a workshop (in Croatian) about Managing WordPress projects.
It is good to have you with us Krešimir, and it is good to have Neuralab with us as a gold sponsor, second year in a row. Could you introduce Neuralab?
In short, we are a diverse team of designers and engineers, building web & mobile applications.
Our main production focus are complex (large) web applications on top of a full LAMP stack. While we are technology agnostic and have worked with all sorts of technologies, we tend to stick with WordPress and WooCommerce for current projects and applications.
Neuralab team likes to experiment. We produce a lot of integrations and internal projects on WordPress and tend to push them into areas they were not intended to reside in – ERP, CRM, client dashboards, data management platforms, microsites and single page applications (SPAs) – everything that breaks typical WP use cases.
High expectations from WordCamp Split
What are your expectations of WordCamp Split?
Expectations are high. We just got back from two major WordCamps, Europe and New York city. Every one of them had its own great experiences. Europe (at Vienna) was HUGE for community and you could easily get a grasp on where the whole WordPress movement is heading. The New York event was somewhat smaller (around 600 people), but it provided a more business oriented approach to talks, networking and workshops.
Needles to say, these two events pumped us to meet new people, share knowledge in our workshop and talk with potential teammates. This year we’ll be having an open stand for all junior developers that want to try out real production in Neuralab. Nine people from the company are going to WordCamp Split so attendees can really get to know us and ask any type of career or tech question.
As you already said, Neuralab is focused on eCommerce solutions like WooCommerce for example. How strong is eCommerce with WordPress?
Typical eCommerce is objectively strong, both in the general online market and in the WordPress ecosystem. WooCommerce has a 37% market share in all eCommerce platforms, so these numbers are speaking for themselves. Having that in mind, WooCommerce has better market penetration than WordPress itself.
But there is a catch, eCommerce implementation largely depends on your approach with the client and end-user. Digital team should pay attention to users’ needs and model the whole interactive experience for “eCommerce” in mind. WordPress has a lot of content modeling power and developers could build eCommerce experience just with forms, custom post types, even with advanced custom fields on your regular posts. It merely depends on your creativity with native platform. On the other hand, it’s a wasted process when developers and designers don’t think about connectivity between post types and user experience. WordPress has a great content building system that everyone working on the platform should be aware of and utilize it to its maximum potential.
As for the Croatian market, implementing eCommerce on WordPress is more challenging here than abroad. There are external problems with payment gateways and fiscalization process, which is essentially an overhead that US clients don’t need to pay for. For instance, in the United States, Stripe integration with WooCommerce solves your billing/invoicing problem 100% and you can charge users for any type of product, automated subscriptions, virtual downloads, monthly billing and whatnot. These business processes are simply not possible in the Croatian market.
We are constantly searching for new people
You are constantly searching for new people. Can people get in touch with you and how?
People looking to advance their careers with us should first look up at our website, scan what we produce, look at the team and contact us through one of our forms. We’re constantly hiring eager junior developers or designers and this is the fastest way to catch Neuralab team.
If you’re a young person that learns new technologies and have an engineering mind, you will have real chances of getting a job at Neuralab. Especially if you want to work on longer (6-month) projects that take multiple approaches from different colleagues.
An alternative answer is obvious – grab a ticket for WordCamp Split and have a talk with us at our stand! There will be couple of designers and developers from our team there so you will get a glimpse of the full production scope that we produce in Neuralab.
What are the plans for the future?
Plans are revolving around future projects that take new technologies into account. I probably sound “LinkedIn cheesy”, but there are A LOT of things that this industry has not solved yet! Contextual eCommerce, Chat bots in messengers, WP as a service, WP as a backend, WP as a platform, Connect WP, RESTful themes to name a few. Also, designers are using probably 10% of browser possibilities and modern user interactions are only beginning to catch on. We covered these topics in our WordPress development trends series so i suggest that everyone interested in these topics catch a break and read full series articles from Vienna [Future of WP] and New York [REST API overview].
Selling WordPress project to government is easier today
How do you see the current status of WordPress in Croatia?
I would say it’s going one step above the expectations. For instance, Neuralab had a hard time selling OpenSource solutions to government agencies back in the early days (2008, 2009 etc. were “Microsoft” and .NET years in Croatia). Same case for corporations.
Now in 2016, we completed 3 major projects for Croatian government on pure LAMP/WordPress platform. More projects are in the works with solutions being bigger and complex. WooCommerce is also gaining a lot of momentum. I would say that every new webshop in Croatia is seriously considering using WordPress/Woo as their platform. The level of inquiries is growing really fast and i see that there are some teams that label themselves as WordPress agency. While I don’t agree with this specific marketing approach (technology choice should come from the solution for specific problem) it is a sign of good things to come.
What do you think about the Croatian WordPress community?
As with all communities gathered around mutual interest, it’s a perfect opportunity to meet people behind projects and exchange ideas, in any form necessary.
I see a couple of potential obstacles in the growing Croatian WordPress community. First is that most of the local companies working with WordPress do so with the majority of abroad clients, from US or Western Europe. Most of their marketing and sales efforts are focused on these markets and normally, they talk with developers, project managers and clients from these communities only. This is especially true for remote teams.
Secondly, being a digital team, IT company or a freelancer in Croatia is damn hard. Most of the teams we worked with are producing projects with negative margin so continuous community support from their part (both with time and money) is really troublesome.
WP Croatia is perfect platform to overcome these two obstacles. Exchanging ideas, avoiding typical pitfalls and communication about our industry is the first place every professional should look when sailing through troublesome projects. For Neuralab, WordPress is integrated into our “core” so it’s natural to support the whole community and sponsor events like WordCamp.
I think that every individual or team should find some niche tasks that they can “kill it” and help the community in every way possible. Personally, I would like to see more people contributing to WordPress core or making premium plugins. This area is somewhat left behind, and it seems like most of the folks are afraid to jump into waters of more robust WordPress projects. But hey, every penny counts!
Get your ticket today!
We have released 200 tickets with a price of $20 (around 130 kn) and you can buy them at the Tickets page. The ticket gets you the entrance on the conference day, lunch, goodies from our sponsors, WordCamp Split t-shirt and the entrance to the afterparty with free drinks included.
Neuralab is hiring an interactive designer!
Neuralab is always searching for new people, and now they have an open position for interactive designer.