How we created Typeqast, a company of 50+ amazing people, at lightning speed

In the summer of 2017 we started drafting layouts of the company that we will later name Typeqast, a company that will turn out to be the fastest growing IT company in Split, Croatia and one of the best places to work for IT professionals in town. Over the course of slightly more than a year, Typeqast grew into a respectable IT development agency, with 2 amazing offices in Split and Zagreb, at present date employing 54 amazing people, serving 10+ customers and setting new standards for workplace culture and work processes efficiency. And all of that at lightning speed, thanks to hard efforts of many people involved.

The idea behind Typeqast from day one was to become the place where people enjoy working in. Given the cultural norms and very high standards of office work in IT industry nowadays, it was not an easy task however. After all, almost all other companies have cool offices, interesting projects, free coffees, work-from-homes, you name it. Pretty basic parts of any IT office culture, right? Yet, we wanted to be different. Different in the way we hire people, different in the way we work and serve our customers. From the very beginnings, it was never about getting new customers and new projects on board, we never had problems with that. Current demand for near-shore development in the Dutch IT market, which is our main sales market, is quite high at the moment. Our main challenge was to follow that demand with having good people on board and to grow the company to become the one that is able to serve the needs of the market.

And we have achieved nothing short of extraordinary. I am going to list the challenges we came across over the course of our first year of existence. Most of these are typical challenges one will face if trying to build a successful fast-growing IT company in Croatia today. So let’s get it on.

Registering a business in Croatia

It’s a well known fact that Croatia is not business and investment friendly country. At all. It all goes back to socialism-poisoned mindset that we inherited 25 years ago when the country as we know today came to be. Engraved in most people minds is a total mistrust in privately owned companies and belief that every capital is a bad capital. Average Joe on Croatian streets believes he has to fight the capital before it exploits him for its profits. Such mindset can be seen on every step along the way when running a company here.

It took us more than a month to complete the registration of the company, sending papers back and forth between Croatia and Netherlands to be stamped (yes, I know), translating it (and only by official court interpreters), then sending it back and forth because only stamped original is a valid document and so on and so forth. At times it felt like we are trapped inside a never-ending Kafkaesque nightmare with conclusion nowhere in sight.

To illustrate further, we could not even register a company under the name of Typeqast Croatia since to use the name of the country in your business’ name you are required to obtain a consent from the government itself. Which meant even more paperwork and inevitable prolongation of the whole registration process.

So be prepared for a lot of sudden surprises and delayed when you embark on this journey.

Finding an office space in Split

Although it’s the second largest city in Croatia, Split is by no means a business city. The best illustration of this is an absolute lack of proper office buildings. You know: glass on the outside, carpeted cubicles on the inside. Well, not in Split though, those do not exist here. But you can find plenty of living spaces converted into offices, ex wedding halls converted into open plan offices (with kitchen still standing), spaces to house 50 people with zero parking spots, etc. Business property market is a mess.

We had to see every office space in Split before we finally managed to convince management board of the local bank to rent us one of the office floors in their headquarters, the best and the newest office building in town. And even that place is not up to a level you would expect from the proper office building, but let’s not complain too much and appreciate the fact that we have an office at all.

Now that you have the work space, which is essentially one huge empty room, how do you make it your office? With limited budget we had, I soon became an expert in interior design and psychology of seating arrangements. In this phase, IKEA is your best friend with its predictability of delivery and low costs.

We choose to create colourful and cool, but still professional office space. So that it can be pleasing to the eye to a wide range of customers, from startup owners and tech geeks to corporate c-level managers.

Hiring people into a company that doesn’t exist yet

If you think recruiting in IT is hard, try doing it for a company that’s not even registered. What do you tell people? How do you make them cross the decision point and come join you?

In a highly competitive market such as IT, it is almost impossible to convince highly skilled professionals to join your team at all. Competition is fierce and only the best companies are able to attract the best talent. And we needed the very best talent from day one. Even before we registered the company we had several customers already lined up in the pipeline. So for us, not to fail on those first projects was a top-most priority and a paramount task. There was no other choice than to hire only good and experienced engineers as first employees.

Was it my recruitment skills or something else, I’m still not sure, but I don’t remember this part as a very difficult one to be honest, it all went smooth for us. We started on Oct 1st 2017 with 9 employees in a co-working space where we worked for several weeks until our office was ready to move in.

Delivering first projects with the team you’ve just met

So now you have your office, you have your people and you are working on your first projects. How do you deliver on time and with the highest quality with the team that is not a team at all? None of us worked together before, most of us came from very different backgrounds and the team dynamics is not what you would like it to be.

In those first few months all us worked hard to establish good work culture, something that will pay off later when we start growing. Some mind-blowing new ideas were being tried out for the first time, constant experimenting with the process and adapting to each other was the norm at that time. Very agile, one might say (pun intended). It’s a valuable place to be in and a wonderful thing to experience first hand. The birth of a company.

Defining and implementing the culture

In those early days it is very important to have a clear vision of what you want to be and how do you get there. I had quite clear idea what our culture should be and it perfectly aligned with our Dutch team. So we were on the right path, but the tricky part comes when you have to enforce such culture in your daily life in the office. What definitely helps is the seniority of those early employees. Most of them valued good culture and have seen a lot of bad processes that they wanted to steer away from. So to define and then implement a good work culture is a joint effort of everyone. Everyone needs to buy in or you won’t succeed.

At some point, after several iterations, we summarised our culture in a document that now every new joiner gets in their welcome box on their first day of work.

Note the v1.0 in the document footer. We are very open to the idea that the culture is a living body that changes and adapts to the time and circumstances we are operating in. That is why we defined this as the very first version of our values and we expect it to change and be amended with time.

Making the office a fun place

No one likes to work in a dull and non-motivating workplace. We all know that and we’ve all experienced such workplaces. And that’s why we wanted to create a workplace everyone enjoys going to in the morning with the smile on their face.

From the comfy office layout with plenty of creative, as well as relaxing areas, to having enough meeting rooms, whiteboards and other office necessities. Great office starts with the great layout. In our case, having 360 degree view of the world around the building and the floor-to-ceiling windows with plenty of natural light was a good place to start. Few of us with an eye for nice things were constantly designing and redesigning the space, layout of desks, colours on the walls and everything else until it settled at the state that meets everyone’s criteria for a good workplace. In the end we created an office with a good balance of professional needs and fun/relaxing areas that most of us enjoy spending time in.

The most used room in end became our kitchen, despite having a lot cooler areas around the office floor. This is mainly because of its location in the very middle of the office. Because of this natural flow of people through that space it became the place where people organically meet and start talking, so there is always someone around.

Making the direction transparent so that everyone pulls together

What most of us have seen in our previous companies is the problem of lack of transparency and absence of clear communication. Typeqast was going to be different, we all wanted that. Only when everyone knows where we are and where we’re going, only then can everyone help pull in the same direction. That’s the only way to build a successful company with happy people.

To make our position as transparent as possible, we are doing a monthly All Hands meeting across all offices, every month with no exceptions. This is the place where everyone can catch up on what’s been going on last month, what’s happening on other projects and other teams, new initiatives that are being introduced, etc. This format worked for us. In Typeqast, there is no managers and workers, we’re all in this together and everyone knows where that is.

On top of this, every employee has a by-weekly chat with their direct manager to discuss everything that they might have on their mind. And also to receive feedback from their manager. Transparency and open communication is the key here.

Breaking team barriers and making people socialise

In an agency type of work, people are usually closed inside project teams. At this point in time, we have 10 of such teams. But to create good vibe inside the office, people need to break outside the barriers of their team and socialize with others in the office. It creates a family-like feeling that “we’re all here together” and makes people feel comfortable around the office.

At Typeqast, we enforce this by having all kinds of fun (and also serious) events, across all teams. Once a week we have breakfast together. On Fridays we all have beers together to celebrate a successful week. We enforce praising of colleagues where praise needs to be given and then make everyone aware of those colleagues during All Hands meetings. We celebrate failures by making people talk about them to everyone. We measure happiness level. We do all kinds of things, all with the goal of having open communication and a friendly relationship among colleagues.

And from what we have seen so far, we’ve created the best culture among IT companies in Split.

Further expansion

At some point, you start to grow so fast that you can barely follow it with recruitment. That’s the place where all managers wants to find themselves. Recruitment is not a problem per se, but maintaining the culture we all worked hard to create with every newcomer is the difficult part. To not loose the culture, you are forced to slow down the recruitment since you have to carefully choose new people you want to bring on board.

Because of that we started to move a bit too slow, so we figured out it would make sense to start the second office in Zagreb. This sounds counterintuitive — you want to preserve the culture, so you open a new office with no culture at all. But for us this worked because we could build the same culture once again in a greenfield way. No legacy whatsoever. Every new office is a story being written from scratch.

For us the new office happened mid-2018, half year after we started in Split. Zagreb proved to be a good decision due to the fact that it is the largest city in the country with the biggest talent pool in the job market.

To create the same type of office, aligned culturally and professionally with the first office, it takes more effort than in the first run. Luckily for us we had our amazing colleague Anthony who is running our Zagreb office to help us achieve there what we have already achieved in Split.

The future

So where is Typeqast heading from this point on? We never wanted to be a small agency. Our goals are set way higher. We want to become one of the largest development agencies on Croatia’s IT scene, delivering software solutions of high complexity for a vast range of clients coming from many industries. The demand is definitely out there.

In 2019, we are probably looking at doubling in size, expanding our teams with even more skilled professionals, while keeping and further improving our work culture and processes. And if the last year has thought us anything, it is that with clear focus and a lot of hard work we can get there.

Stay tuned for a post similar to this one next year, to see if we got there. The first year was an amazing one for us, next one can only get better.