We asked the founder of Neuralab, Krešimir Končić a few questions about the company and eCommerce, their future plans and the importance of helping local events like WordCamp Zagreb expand and grow. Neuralab has been sponsoring WordCamp in Croatia since the first WordCamp Croatia in Rijeka, and this year they stepped up as a production partner.
It is good to have you with us Krešimir, and it is good to have Neuralab with us as a production partner. Could you introduce Neuralab?
It’s good to have you Lucijan 🙂 Neuralab team is a diverse company of designers, content makers and developers. Our expertise lies in building large web applications on top of OpenSource technologies, WordPress included.
We mostly work with larger companies and projects that require the development of highly custom WP implementations. Our clients trust us in building their web platforms, hosting on LEMP stack and maintaining systems on an everyday basis. We received official WooCommerce, Google and Mailchimp partnerships and most of our projects include in-house UX / UI work that is tightly connected to full stack development. People interested in finding out more can see our case studies on Behance and on Clutch where you can read reviews from clients like HBO, GREY, Vipnet, Philips, Procter & Gamble.
Neuralab has been a gold sponsor for two years in a row. What made you step up as a production partner?
Neuralab is connected to most of the IT events in the region as our Transmeet.Tv team produced a lot of live streamings for practically all of them – WinDays, Weekend Media Festival, Dani Komunikacija, OMG Commerce… getting into production of WordCamp Zagreb with the rest of the organizing crew was a normal step in helping out the entire WordPress community.The thing is… we use WP a lot, publish custom plugins (themes, content, blog posts…) and have visited or sponsored other WordCamps on both EU and US soil. We can give back huge amounts of these experiences into #WCHR. Maybe it will sound strange, but I would personally feel pretty stupid if we didn’t step up to give 100% of our time to make WordCamp Zagreb happen. This city is our base.
On a more practical note, we are seeing more need to educate designers, clients and content people about WP and inner workings of web business. #WCHR is an ideal conference to invite them all to participate and connect with us. Involvement in this type of event is a glue that will get developers talk with designers, clients and content folks – ideally, they will all get to exchange thoughts and ideas about our online world.
What are your expectations of WordCamp Zagreb?
I really hope we will get all of our community involved. At least to come at main day (Saturday) as the program is really special and people will get to talk with all sorts of interesting colleagues during lunch or after party.
You know, teammates and other companies from our field are somewhat blind to this need. We are essentially in the knowledge and communication business and I think that all people involved in web production should activate themselves on attending, speaking or writing about conferences. This is a straightforward way to grow on a personal or on a team level.
Also, to see younger developers activating on all community actions would really make me happy – organizing meetups, writing blog posts, giving talks or simply doing the extra effort is something we need to foster in younger teammates. WCHR is ideal to spark this wish into reality and I hope to see it there at MSU.
Neuralab is focused on eCommerce solutions and it was selected among top 5 eCommerce developers according to Clutch. What does that mean for you?
Clutch has a no-bullshit method of auditing your projects, team and company – they asked our clients 🙂
Neuralab got audits on our 15 projects and we received an average grade of 4.8 out of 5.0 which placed us in the third spot of the global list of eCommerce developers ( https://clutch.co/developers/ecommerce/research ) It’s a pretty big thing for us having in mind that Clutch audits around 7000 worldwide agencies. You can see by their reviews process that they are really thorough in auditing companies – https://clutch.co/profile/neuralab#reviews
But honestly, I am jumped up to even go to number one place (which will require a lot of high-quality work – there is no alternative to that).
You are constantly searching for new people. What kind of projects can they expect to work on? Can people get in touch with you and how?
We currently have open positions for PHP developers and this is an ongoing effort to get the most enthusiastic developers working at Neuralab
Our projects are always full scope projects that include, ideation, architecture, UX, UI, detailed design, animations, client side and server side programming. Developers also have a chance to work on DevOps tasks as we handle all project layers for clients – from servers to pixels.
As I wrote earlier, the team is diverse and we are organized in a triangle of Content – Design – Development teams. Most of our production is handled in Zagreb location and there are around 16 people working full time on online projects, while 4 or 5 people drop in from time to time to work on content or specific design projects.
We have a strong DNA about visiting events, conferences and workshops ( which you can see on our Instagram ) i.e. all developers can expect to travel to these sorts of events and get additional education from top experts in the field. For instance, 4 of us visited Smashing Conference in New York where we talked with people who worked on Google Maps or Microsoft Azure platform.
But I think the most precious thing for young developers who come to work in Neuralab is our mentorship program – each individual gets a mentor (who has around 10 years of experience) and this mentor will guide them through stormy waters of ever-evolving web development.
Send us your CV and link to Github at lejob@neuralab.net if you’re interested.
What are the plans for the future?
We plan to further boost our production and marketing efforts into US East Coast market. Our plan includes a visit to a couple of US based conferences and continuous effort to give talks and content back to the community. We are also preparing services and products that are aligned with our eCommerce focus. This includes building commerce chatbots, plugins, experimental projects and custom hosting solutions to accommodate our need to build highly available large WP projects.
Technology wise, plans are revolving around future projects that take new Progressive tech into account – Contextual eCommerce, Chat bots in messengers, WP as a service, WP as a backend, WP as a platform, Connect WP, RESTful themes or PWA 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 themes catch a break and read full series articles from Vienna [Future of WP] and New York [REST API overview].