Beyond the Outsourcing Stereotype: Krakow’s Software Houses

From the fertile ground of Krakow's tech innovation and development, rose Codete, Miquido, and Railsware. They are the 3 Krakow software houses for whom the IT outsourcing business seems like a cakewalk.

Krakow seems like a genuine promise for a better Polish future.

A future built around growth and technology.

That’s why in this blog posts series we’ll analyze Krakow’s resilient software houses, with their digital marketing strategies, and branding efforts.

You’ll find inspiration and realize that your ship hasn’t yet sailed.

Just watch, learn and apply the knowledge to your own business.

Krakow's Software Houses

With the rise of new technologies: robotics, artificial intelligence, big data, blockchain, the outsourcing industry has been shaken at the core.

Big industry leaders are lining up to face the speed and scale of digital transformation.

In Krakow, the digital revolution is at its peak.

Our quest now is to analyze some of the finest game-changers of this revolution.

Lots of software houses thrive in Krakow, from multinationals to local companies.

But, because we are Inbound evangelists, we’ve picked for our research successful companies that leverage content strategy in their marketing stack.

Come out, come out wherever you are: the content marketing, the social media strategies, the branding efforts!

Everything will come to light in the following blog articles. So, stay tuned for more!

But first, let's dig a bit into the Krakow IT success story.

Krakow’s IT Environment

First things first.

Let’s see which are Krakow’s assets in the IT outsourcing market:

• Income tax exemptions: the amount of tax exemption varies according to the value of the investment, its location and the size of the company
• The largest Polish market for BPO, R&D and IT, considering players employing at least 1000 persons

• Top cities of the future: Krakow ranks 9 in FDI’s report European Cities and Regions of the Future 2018/19. FDI is a service developed by the Financial Times, providing industry-leading insight and analysis, mostly investment-related.

• Business-friendliness - Krakow ranks second in FDI’s report European Cities and Regions of the Future 2018/19

• Krakow ranks 6th in Tholon’s Services Globalization Index. The index analyses the performance of a city based on talent skills, business catalyst, cost, quality of life, digital and innovation

Globalization city index

• Local talent pool: the second-highest talent pool in Poland according to McKinsey's report "Poland 2025: Europe’s new growth engine"
• High-quality university education. In the QS EECA University Rankings 2018, the Jagiellonian University came in 14th among 200 of the best universities in Emerging Europe and Central Asia region

• Krakow Technology Park: one of the most innovative R&D centers of its kind. It provides an industrial base for Krakow’s 15 higher education institutions and over 140 research centers. By 2017 the Krakow Technology Park managed to sign up 250 ventures which created 14,700 jobs.
• Incubators and accelerators that bring together startups, mentors and investors: Hub:raum by Deutsche Telekom, KPT Scale Up
• Important tech conferences are held in Krakow:

1. ACE! largest regional conference in Central Europe for building software
2. Digital Dragons, the leading game industry event in Europe
3. Cloud Developer Days
4. Devoxx, a developer community event
5. 100+ tech meetup groups, with more than 100 members

Now that we've got the Krakow IT story covered, we can move on to our software houses.

Codete - IT consulting and software development for digital business

Website: https://codete.com/

No. employees: 120+

Technologies: Java, Scala, AI, Blockchain

Services: DevOps, cloud computing, blockchain, big data, quality assurance, data security

Verticals: e-commerce and retail, travel, health, advertising, automotive, logistics, media, entertainment, fintech, crypto

Key clients: Leonardo Hotels, BMW, Home24.de, Wells Fargo, Total Fyber, KIA Motors, Probooking, Prosieben, Deloitte, Cisco

Offices: Krakow, Lublin, Berlin (HQ)

Managing Director: Artur Olechowski

Based in Berlin, but with Polish roots, it’s no wonder that Codete has among its clients, lots of German companies.

While many software houses in Poland go for North-American, Canadian, Scandinavian contracts, Codete doesn’t shy away from other markets.

With a portfolio with world-renowned clients, a continuously growing website traffic and being the host of a plethora of tech events, Codete can be an inspiration for every Polish software house.

Sharing IT knowledge is at the core of Codete’s existence: from CodeteCON, the tech conference, to meetups and workshop hosting, Codete understands how leadership is born.

It’s all about building trust and a thriving community around you, educating the stakeholders.

But, if you want to find out more, you’ll have to keep an eye on our next blog post.

Miquido - Building AI-powered digital products supported by data science

Website: https://www.miquido.com/

No. employees: 150+

Technologies: Java, Angular, Flutter, Swift, Kotlin, React Native, Angular, Golang, AWS, Kubernetes, Azure, Machine Learning

Services: software development, quality assurance, UX/UI wireframing, product design

Verticals: business, fintech, consumer goods, tourism, healthcare, social media

Key clients: Skyscanner, TUI, Aviva, Nestle, Herbalife, Santander

Offices: Krakow (HQ), London, Berlin

Reviews: 4.7 - Clutch (14 reviews)

CEO: Krzysztof Kogutkiewicz

One of the youngest companies we’ve analyzed so far, Miquido has been on the market since 2011 and has delivered 90+ apps. And to name just a few of their clients: Skyscanner, TUI, Nestle...

Awarded by Deloitte in 2016 in its Top 50 Fast Technology in CEE (2016 edition), Miquido has an inspirational growth story.

To know their story you’ll have to follow us in our next blog post, where we’ll tackle how Miquido does its inbound marketing, how it builds brand awareness and its social media presence.

Railsware - Great Products, Great Code

Website: https://railsware.com/

No. employees: 60+

Technologies: Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Angular

Services: mobile development, web development, AI and machine learning services

Verticals: business, fintech, finance

Key clients: Sendgrid, Calendly, Brightbytes, Quorso, Google

Offices: Krakow (HQ), Kiew, New York, Dubai

Reviews: 4.9 - Clutch (10 reviews), 4.9 - Glassdoor (11 reviews)

CEO: Yaroslav Lazor

12 years, projects for 60+ organizations, in 12 countries, collaborations with big names such as SendGrid, Google and Calendly - meet Railsware.

Nominated by The Manifest as a top player in Ruby on Rails development, Railsware is a software house with an inspiring growth story.

To know their story you’ll have to follow us in our next blog post, where we’ll tackle how Railsware does its inbound marketing, how it builds brand awareness and its social media presence.

Wrap up

This was just a glimpse of our 4 blog post series on the thriving Krakow IT outsourcing market.

This is part of a bigger playground, a playground where the rivalry between software houses in Poznan, Warsaw, Wroclaw, and Krakow gives birth to innovation and a strong tech community. It’s a rivalry that is shaping cities and mentalities.

But, before getting to the core of the subject, let me give you some spoiler alerts from my research. In short, these are some of my findings:

1. On the long-term, trying to find new business models from developing one’s own product, might be the best choice. Simply put, outsourcing does not scale. Companies such as Railsware (see Mailtrap) try to move the outsourcing stereotype having more like a SaaS approach. This comes natural, when you have 5+ years history of product development, right?
2. The power of open-source: you can open up to a whole new audience. Railsware seems to be good at it.
3. Embrace other types of management. Railsware just went for holacracy, a structure where every employee is involved in the decision-making process
4. Be all-in for events: from hackathons (the case for Miquido), meetups and workshops (Codete), conferences (Miquido is organizing Mobiconf), be where your stakeholders are: future employees and clients. Don’t forget that real-life connections are really valuable.
5. Scarce talent pool? Go abroad and hire. As projects come pouring in, why not? (Codete is offering relocation packages for developers from Ukraine)
6. Employer branding - take it to a whole new level when the competition is fierce. Hire an employer branding specialist if need be, like in the Miquido case.

Are you hooked already?

You can find out more software houses stories about it in our ebook: The Growth Marketing Secrets of Top European Software Houses - Poland Edition 2019

How Did a Design Studio in Warsaw Get to Impress Philips and HP?

In the thriving Warsaw IT ecosystem, Polidea, 10Clouds, and SoftwareMill are crafting software solutions for top-notch Western Companies.

Turning 10 this year, the design studio, Polidea, has a lot to be proud of.

“Our ways of building strong business relationships have been created in the course of over 100 international projects” - Polidea

Top-level clients, 60+ employees, Clutch awards - Polidea seems to have it all.

But what forces pushed them here? How can you make strides in a very competitive software development market? How can you push a product/service forward?

Smart-arse marketing I’d say.

To check my assumption I began to deconstruct their marketing and employer branding strategies.

Follow me and see what I found.

Polidea, Warsaw Design Studio - Short Overview

Polidea is a #PositiveTech evangelist. It wants to have a positive impact on people’s lives through technological progress.

They even organized a conference in the name of #PositiveTech - MCE.

Also building open-source solutions complies with their mission. Take RxAndroidBLE for example, a powerful tool for Bluetooth Low Energy coding, that has received 2000+ stars on GitHub. Polidea is also very involved in conversations about their open-source solution on Gitter.

With 100+ international clients and a 10-year history, clients such as Phillips or Dolby, Polidea looks bulletproof.

Speaking of clients, let’s take a look at some of Polidea’s Clutch reviews.

• Strong communication and flexibility
• Technical expertise and thorough testing
• Creative and collaborative
• Delivered quality results at reasonable costs
• Rapid pace, meeting deadlines

So, what’s the formula behind Polidea’s success?

It’s time to uncover their secrets, their marketing secrets. So, follow me in my quest to understand the strategies behind Polidea’s growth.

You’ll find out that:

• Building a community around you is a must
• Going inbound can improve traffic, leads, and customers for your business
• Employer branding is at the core of all branding

These were just small spoilers of what’s coming up next, so stay tuned.

TABLE OF CONTENT

• Polidea’s Marketing Strategies Reverse Engineered
• Brand Awareness at Polidea
• Polidea’s Website
• Polidea’s Traffic Acquisition
• Content Marketing
• Summing Up

Polidea’s Marketing Strategies Reverse Engineered

Modern marketing is a less expensive game than ever before. All sorts of tools, resources are under our noses.

We entered the era of performance marketing where measurement and attribution are not science fiction anymore.

Still, not everyone is doing it right. And, as marketers ourselves, we go “Evrika” whenever we see digital marketing done great.

Now how does Polidea market itself?

Find out next.

Brand Awareness at Polidea

“If Coca-Cola were to lose all of its production-related assets in a disaster, the company would survive. By contrast, if all consumers were to have a sudden lapse of memory and forget everything related to Coca-Cola, the company would go out of business” - a Coca-Cola executive.

This kinda says it all does, it?

This is the power of branding.

Polidea’s Awards

In Top Polish App Developers by Clutch, Polidea ranks 12.

Going worldwide, in the same category, in The Manifest’s top 100 android mobile app development companies, Polidea ranks 66.

Employer Branding and Hiring

A good brand means that not only clients speak of you, but also employees and employee wannabees.

When employee branding is done properly your employees become your ambassadors.

Employees who work in companies with a strong brand are generally more enthusiastic, motivated and productive.

So, are Polidea employees showing any enthusiasm?

As Instagram or other social media channels suggest, people seem to have a very good time @Polidea. But we’ll talk more about this later.

Until then, let’s look a bit at their job offering.

Engineers wanted! - screams the careers section on the website.

But they also want to increase the biz development team.

The perks and salaries are transparent, this is a trend I noticed for other software development companies in Poland too.

On the careers page, the bot communication is specific to hiring, so Polidea is trying to maximize conversion rates with targeted chat messaging.

Polidea’s Website

Polidea claims to be a “design & development studio”, so they should be top-notch in designing their website, isn’t it so?

Let’s find out.

We are not UX designers, but, we are the end-users of a product, and we can provide some feedback, right?

First, let’s see if the buyer persona can easily find answers to its questions on the Polidea website.

• What does Polidea do?

Polidea’s main services refer to engineering, web development, IoT, cloud computing services, product consultancy, and design.

• How does your portfolio look like?

These are some of the Polidea clients.

Dolby, Philips, HP or Allegro: that says a lot about Polidea, right?

And take a look at these case studies (testimonials included):

• How can I reach out to you?

See “contact” in the website menu.

Or, chat with a business development representative via chat.

With a clear menu, easy navigation, a chatbot implemented, Polidea does a good job in proving useful to the user.

In autumn 2019 Polidea launched a micro-website that is dedicated to their design only services: meet https://utilodesign.com/

Polidea’s Traffic Acquisition

Direct and search traffic are responsible for more than 60% of Polidea’s website traffic.

Looking at the next graph we see that the organic traffic doubled since spring 2018 (US market data).

Further on, I’ll dive deeper into this data, so follow me.

Content Marketing

In an inbound strategy, content can be built with the purpose of serving the buyer across the whole journey. In our analysis, we’ll dissect the reach and act phases of the journey.

REACH

When building awareness, Polidea relies a lot on blog posts and non-gated case studies.

The main categories on the Polidea blog are engineering, design, business, news, and resources.

Among the blog posts, Polidea also lists interviews that tackle design, UX, blockchain, machine learning. This is quite a smart strategy and can get them backlinks and a brand new audience.

Some of the case studies are being repurposed for Youtube, because Polidea understands the power of video content, see this Folx example.

The blog articles drive natural organic traffic.

8 out of the top 10 pages by organic pages are blog articles, the other 2 are case studies.

The main subjects that drive organic traffic speak of React development, IoT. These topics go hand in hand with the PPC strategy as you’ll notice further.

Keywords from the react cluster seem to rank well in SERP.

By now, Polidea managed to place 56 keywords on the first page of organic results.

The technical blog posts are created by Polidea engineers. This is no longer a surprise, this is a smart habit we saw for most of the software development companies we’ve analyzed.

Polidea is sharing blog post content on Medium. The idea reposting blog content on Medium means opening up to a new audience. This is the power of Medium: getting a chance to get new traction.

Also, Polidea is quite involved in Medium communication around subjects such as product design, UX, React Native.

ACT

For the act stage of the buyer’s journey, Polidea uses a newsletter and lead magnets in the shape of guides.

In order to move the website visitor further down in the funnel, CTAs are being placed inside blog articles.

call

On their micro-website, Polidea also pushes a design workshop.

Polidea’s Paid Traffic Acquisition

With an estimated budget of around 300$ a month, Polidea is using search ads as well as Google display ads.

The paid strategy focuses on the “web development nyc” cluster.

The previous strategy was also pushing for “react development”, as per the ad below.

Remarketing is also a go-to, these ads are following me:

Polidea’s Social Presence

Social media is here to stay. Your future current and future employees, current and future are there. So, you should be where your stakeholders are and engage in meaningful conversations with them.

Social media allows you to show a different side of your brand.

So, what’s the image Polidea is building for itself on social media?

Let’s find out.

Facebook

3000+ Facebook followers are updated about the latest articles on the Polidea blog, about the events they are hosting or attending to.

The picture painted on Facebook is about a company that gets involved in the community and is really knowledgeable about software development.

Polidea is pushing hiring announcements on Facebook. They are using videos, some of them have a reach above 2k.

According to Buzzsumo most popular posts are people-related.

Instagram

Just like most of the players in the industry, the Instagram account is the channel where Polidea is trying to build employer branding:

From promoting the team spirit, events they go to, team events, everything is trying to point out that Polidea is the place where you will find more than just a job.

Potential clients are not completely left out from the Instagram messaging. Take this post, for example, they are using testimonials as social proof, to underline the way Polidea deals with projects.

And another example speaks of product development at Polidea.

Twitter

The Twitter profile mostly replicates the content promoted on Facebook but also curates content from the industry.

Through the content Polidea shares, it wants to prove their technical knowledge is thorough and that they are building great design and apps. Also, they want to send a message that they value communities, by hosting and going to events.

The focus here is mostly about getting noticed by potential clients.

What’s noticeable is the fact that Gregorz Kapusta, the Polidea CEO is the front-man in the community they are trying to build around the company. A personal brand is shaping here: in social media and community.

What’s interesting is that Polidea marches ahead with the “uniquetech” hashtag. They want to associate their brand with #uniquetech, thus, they are giving potential customers another method to remember them.

LinkedIn

The LinkedIn account features communications that relate to both potential clients and potential employees. Which is understandable, considering these two stakeholders in most of the cases own a LinkedIn account.

Blog posts are being shared to prove the coding skills of Polidea developers.

Events also stand out on the LinkedIn profile.

#uniquetech - the hashtag is emphasized whenever there is an opportunity to pave way for a brand that wants to position itself as delivering unique digital products.

Conferences they attend, meetups they organize, it’s all promoted on LinkedIn. The idea is to support the fact that Polidea is an important member of the community. Also, they used to promote their actions under another hashtag of #positivetech.

LinkedIn is also leveraged for their hiring process. They promote articles speaking about how to be prepared for recruitment. And they post hiring announcements.

Community Building at Polidea

For 5 years Polidea organized the MCE conference, an event designed to inspire the tech enthusiasts.

Under the umbrella of #PositiveTech, the topics were following two tracks: design (obvious, cos Polidea marches as a design studio) and engineering. 400+ creators met at this conference in 2018.

2019 means a well-deserved break for these guys because organizing such an event is not easy-peasy.

But they are still getting involved in the community through lots of meetups.

Summing Up

So, what is Polidea really good at?

• Exceeding clients’ expectations through great technical knowledge, project management skills and design skills (they are a design studio, right?)
• Having a focused content strategy, going beyond blogging and developing long-form content, also repurposing content
• Mastering events and community engagement

Polidea - checked.

What else?

Have you read our piece on the Warsaw software houses?

Polidea is just a piece of a bigger puzzle. In order to solve the puzzle, you should understand how Poland got to compete with big players in the tech market. Read all about it here, in our “Growth Marketing Secrets of Top European Software Houses - Poland Edition 2019” ebook.