What a Top Software Development Company in Poznan Can Teach You About Marketing in IT Outsourcing?

Poznan has unfolded as a remarkable player in the Polish IT Outsourcing, with top software development companies trying to make a statement: STX Next, Netguru and Merixstudio. From Clutch, Financial Times to Deloitte, everybody awards them.

Merixstudio is rising fast to Clutch’s tops, be it Python and Django, Angular or Custom Software development.

What led them here?

Follow me to find out what are the marketing strategies Merixstudio bows to so that it can stay on top of the game.

TABLE OF CONTENT

• Merixstudio: Top Software Development Company - Short Overview
• Merixstudio’s Marketing Strategies Reverse Engineered
• Brand Awareness at Merixstudio
• Merixstudio’s Website and Conversion Rate Optimization
• Merixstudio’s Traffic Acquisition
• Content Marketing
• Summing Up

Merixstudio wants to position itself as being a creative software development house.

As David Ogilvy once said: “If it doesn’t sell; it isn’t creative”, Merixstudio does sell, making around $15M+, as Owler estimates. So, are they living by their slogan?

Let’s figure it out together.

Merixstudio: Top Software Development Company - Short Overview

49 awards in 19 years of doing business? Oh my…

With 150+ clients spread worldwide, it seems that nearshoring works as well as offshoring for Merixstudio.

Merixstudio seems to be diversifying its investments. They seem to want to live by this rule: “Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket”. Pretty wise I might say.

According to this principle, Merixstudio owns two more brands:

• Digital Signage by Merixstudio is focused on creating interactive applications and games for digital signage. Digital signage is a sub-segment of electronic signage.

Digital displays use technologies such as LCD, LED, projection and e-paper to display digital images, video, web pages, weather data and more.

• GoDealla is a leading digital coupon marketplace in Poland

Moving on, let’s see what former clients say the main strengths of Merixstudio are:

• Cost-effective development services
• Consistent delivery beyond expectations, good communication and ethics
• Customer focus, thoroughness and attention to detail
• Smooth project management, flexibility
• In-depth technical knowledge, up-to-date technology and coding

So, what should a top software development company do to shake hands with companies such as Toshiba, HSBC, The Independent, Homes.com, Virgin or Volkswagen?

It’s time to find the sweet spots in Merixstudio’s marketing efforts. Let all secrets aside.

We will learn that:

• An engaged community can strengthen a brand
• The proper content strategy can bring the right quality traffic and leads
• Employer branding is key to developing the right team

This is just a glimpse of what’s coming up next, so stay tuned.

Merixstudio’s Marketing Strategies Reverse Engineered

In the past, differentiation was achieved through a superior product, a fast supply chain, or great customer service.

Nowadays, everybody does it and it’s getting so darn hard to move the needle.

How can you win this game?

Well, it’s time to learn from one of the best, one that almost never misses being ranked as a top software development company by Clutch: Merixstudio.

We’ll put under the microscope Merixstudio’s marketing strategies and study their growth story, so follow me.

Brand Awareness at Merixstudio

One can create the best software solution but if no one knows it exists, you are pitching the idea to an empty room.

For Merixstudio, the 40+ awards are doing just that: filing the room.

Merixstudio’s Awards

Merixstudio always finds its way to Clutch tops:

• Ranks 4 in Top World Angular JS Developers (2018)

• Ranks 1 in Top World Custom Software Developers (2018)

• Ranks 2 Top World Python & Django Developers (2018)

The Manifest made its own top 100 web development companies, and Merixstudio is ranked sixth.

So, Poznan is feeling lucky: make way! STX Next, Merixstudio and Netguru are leading the game.

Merixstudio’s Website and Conversion Rate Optimization

Being ranked 6th best web development company, Merixstudio should have a world-class website, right?

First, let’s ask some questions and see if the answer is close-by:

• What does Merixstudio do?

“We build functional & super-awesome-looking web applications, websites and HTML5 games. We love open source”.

• Can you give me some examples of your work?

There you go: portfolio and case studies by category and technology.

• How can I reach out to you?

See “contact” in the website menu.

With a clear menu and submenus, easy navigation, a chatbot implemented, Merixstudio is providing a good user experience.

Social proof is visible: testimonials, clients, awards.

In the ”Ideas” section of the website features the company’s personal projects, such as games which can be played right away.

Kinda creative I might say?

Speaking of, their weekly digest wants to be a creative wrap up of tech and design insights.

They’ve designed a micro-website where they speak about what they do, how they do it, successful projects, why outsource with them and PR mentions.

Here visitors can also subscribe to a newsletter, an original one. This is new for me: promoting exclusive previews of their software solutions.

Conversion Rate Optimization

So far, I haven’t noticed any personalization while navigating the website.

They seem to be using Hotjar, according to Similartech, so they want to get the hang of conversion rate optimization and A/B testing.

Because Merix is a Hubspot user, they could take advantage of the personalization features it provides.

There are so many other opportunities out there up for grabs, such as:

• Making personalized case studies recommendations depending on the blog post the user is reading
• Landing pages that differ per vertical, country
• Customized drip email campaigns (perhaps they are already doing this, cos it’s easily done within Hubspot)
• Leveraging the chat bot and pop-ups for moving the lead down in the funnel

Speaking of chat bot, Merix is using Hubspot’s chatbot. In the age of artificial intelligence, considering a chatbot is just a small piece of the pie when it comes to conversion rate optimization.

If you want to get in touch with a team member you can schedule a call. Else, you can leave an email and they’ll contact you back.

Merixstudio’s Traffic Acquisition

Direct and search traffic are responsible for more than 85% of Merixstudio’s website traffic.

In terms of direct traffic, I’m assuming it’s accounted for:

• Community events - Meaning that they do all sort of events and promote their website there
• Untagged links - no UTM tracking added to their link,
• Business development reps activities ( at least 4 according to Linkedin ) - This could be email outreach and sales emails mainly

But let’s see some absolute numbers, because percentages can be deceiving:

My guess is, the organic traffic increased 15 times since the beginning of 2017! The data might not be 100% accurate, but still, the results are there.

Further on, our analysis will go even deeper than this. So, blink twice if you’re still with me.

Content Marketing

The design of the blog is not quite as what you’ve been used with. They’re challenging a bit the design.

It takes some time to get used to it, because we’ve been educated by other blogs to have a different kind of listing, but Merixstudio is giving a shot to a different approach.

The main categories are: business & agile, product design, code & tools, people and events, and case studies.

According to Spyfu, Merixstudio has 74 keywords that show up on the first page, and 91 ambitious ones that rank 11 to 16.

Below you can find the keywords that bring in the most traffic.

And here are the top 5 blog post pages:

Do you see a pattern there? Most popular blog posts and keywords talk about different technologies, comparisons.

And the technical blog posts are created by developers.

Take a look at these ones:

It’s great when developers are involved in content creation because tech subjects seem to have lots of traction in this industry and can be the proof of expertise.

Backlinks to Support Content Marketing

I’ve dug a bit through Merixstudio’s backlinks. They’ve got some really good quality stuff linking back to mostly to their homepage (quite unusual for the business, usually the blog posts are getting the backlinks).

I’m talking about do-follow links from domains with a domain rating above 70!

The content linking back comes from tech and design websites and blogs.

So, it’s starting to make sense, right?

Original content + quality backlinks = a lot of Google love.

Social Selling

Hi Michał, nice to meet you. Michał Lisewski is a researcher and business developer at Merixstudio. He deals with editing answers on Quora, he mainly mingles with outsourcing topics.

Quora is a great place to demonstrate expertise on your subject. When done properly, a business can showcase knowledge in its niche, can get new traffic from brand new audiences on the blog and other types of content. As long as you provide real value you can get more followers or subscribers.

Merixstudio’s Social Presence

Building a social media presence is not a stand-alone marketing strategy.

From community engagement, events networking, client and employees interactions everything will end up there: in social media.

It’s not all about some vanity metrics like impressions or likes. It’s more than that: it’s brand awareness and employee branding altogether.

Facebook

The Facebook profile seems to be a tool to build employer branding for Merix.

Regarding Facebook, it seems that images and posts about team members get the most interactions, according to Buzzsumo.

The average engagements rises to 13/post:

Merixstudio is publishing on Facebook consistently, promoting their blog posts, speaking about their team members, events they’ve participated in, awards they’ve received. Just like the neighbor next-door, the software consulting company,Netguru.

Instagram

Same as with Facebook, the Instagram account seems to be a channel where Merixstudio is trying to build employer branding:

Through the content posted on Instagram Merix wants potential employees to have a taste of the company’s culture and see how day-to-day life goes on at the office...and around it.

They also promote events they organize or go to.

The main message is: it’s all about the people.

Twitter

On Twitter the messaging goes two ways: improving employer branding and getting more clients.

At the beginning of 2019 video content seems to be taking over the Twitter account.

Whether it’s about talking about the latest blog post, or events they’ve been to, Merix knows that video content will take over social media.

And because Merix is all over the place: from conferences, meetups to workshops, tweets speaking of their community involvement are everywhere.

LinkedIn

The LinkedIn account is merely about building brand awareness among future clients.

Blog posts, events they organize or attend to, all is there.

Being more client oriented, the focus for the moment seems to be promoting their Django Trench release. It’s their open source application that deals with two-factor authentication for Django REST Framework.

Also, they are building a Hate Speech Detector using machine learning (this sounds awesome!). Not only that machine learning is the new hype, but also “hate speech” is an important issue in media and on the internet in the latest years. And they seem to have the solution for that. This could get a lot of traction if promoted properly!

Dribbble and Behance

The Dribbble account has 115 followers by now, not quite in focus, but it’s pretty darn hard to handle a lot of channels and one needs to prioritize.

Their Behance account is a bit in its infancy, but there’s plenty of room to grow.

These two online communities are helping businesses to showcase designer/web-designer work and more. But it’s not enough to display your art there.

You have to take the bull by the horns and get yourself noticed. Besides engaging in interactions (leaving constructive feedback and questions on other designs, start following other UX designers, web-designer etc), the portfolio should be actively promoted on social media.

Community Building at Merixstudio

As a top software development company, Merixstudio is clearly all-in for building its branding offline though getting involved in the community.

DevCollege is a Merixstudio Project that delivers web and game development workshops, since 2017.

These are whole-day events, held at their office, that combines practical workshops and technical presentations.

Django Hotspot is another community event that’s grown since 2016, gathering Django/Python fans at dedicated meetups.

Another initiative is called front.radar and focuses on the frontend development community.

Employer Branding and Hiring

Peeking at what former employees have to say about Merixstudio on Glassdoor, we’ve found only 3 results, not quite statistically relevant.

They praise the great people working there, the motivation & support, the financial & non-financial perks and the good learning & development environment.

Currently, they are looking to expand their developer, QA, design and project management teams. They are very transparent about the salary and career path, same as Netguru.

Wrap Up

So, what is Merixstudio really good at?

• Exceeding clients’ expectations through stunning coding and project management skills
• Showcasing their front-end and coding skills by building interactive games and apps
• Designing a good content strategy that managed to propel them on the first page of search results
• Mastering events and community engagement
• Employer branding

So, yeah, they should be on your follow list, next to the software consulting company, Netguru and Poznan's software house, STX Next.

We’ve covered their success stories early on.

Here we’re closing our series about the 3 magnificent software houses in Poznan.

It was a journey full of revelations on how inbound marketing is contributing to the business growth, how employer branding is crucial in a very noisy market hungry for the right talent, where a strong social media presence is vital for getting your voice heard.

But, the picture we’re painting goes further than Poznan.

The success stories aren’t over yet, we’ve got some more juice for you, enter Kraków, Wroclaw and Warsaw with their superstar companies.

Next, we deconstruct the IT outsourcing market in Poland, with its trends, opportunities, challenges and successful companies.

And the cherry on top is our Ultimate Guide To IT Outsourcing Companies in Central Eastern Europe. We worked our arses off to bring you a top-notch guide on the CEE outsourcing market so that you can also have the bigger picture, not only micro views.

How Netguru, a Software Consulting Agency In Poland, Became a World Class Marketing Machine

How Netguru, a software consulting agency in Poland wants to prove that there’s nothing fabulous about Silicon Valley?

With the right moves, skills and company culture you can get 3 times awarded by Deloitte in its Tech Fast 50 in CEE. Ranking as we speak for one of the best software consulting agencies in Poland.

That's how they increased their revenue by 644% in the last 3 years.

Today's blog post is about a company that never ceased to amaze Deloitte, Fortune500, Clutch, Financial Times.

I mean, really?

3 times awarded by Deloitte in its Tech Fast 50 in CEE?

We definitely have to find out what triggered this growth.

So, we'll be telling you employer branding and marketing stories.

Stories like this one:

So, amazing organic growth. But is that all?

Follow me in my quest to see how Netguru is fulfilling its own prophecy of becoming the “Internet guru”.

TABLE OF CONTENT

• Netguru Poznan Software Consulting Agency - Short Overview
• Netguru's Marketing Strategies Reversed Engineered
• Netguru's Brand Awareness
• Netguru's Website and Conversion Rate Optimization
• Netguru's Traffic Acquisition
• Marketing Automation
• Summing Up

Netguru has a big mission: building software for world changers. How is Netguru living by its mission? Just follow me.

Netguru Poznan Software Consulting Agency - Short Overview

A glimpse into Netguru's growth and processes

Founded in 2008, Netguru went from 3 to 500 employees in 10 years, making it all the way to Fortune500 companies and Financial Times 1000 list.

Netguru’s clients include major corporations and early stage startups from Western Europe, Asia, North America and across the Middle East.

In 2018 Netguru acquired Bitcraft, a software house in Białystok, Poland, that has completed around 40 projects in 9 different time zones, including projects for more than 40 hospitals in Poland.

Former clients say Netguru's main strengths are:

• professional environment and high-quality deliverables
• smooth project management, delivery ahead of estimates, ability to stay on budget
• in-depth technical knowledge, up-to-date technology and coding
• trustworthiness, transparency and commitment, proactivity
• creative problem-solving

Thumbs up, guys!

Next on Baywatch: how does Netguru grow? Did it manage to find the Holy Grail of Marketing and that’s why they deliver projects to clients on all continents?

In the following section we’ll dig deeper intro Netguru’s marketing approach. I will make you understand:

• How building a great website with stunning visual hierarchy can show off your product design skills and increase your conversion rates
• How a strategic approach for content writing can make you lovable by Google...and potential clients
• How building a community around you, you’ll get access to a pool of talent and future clients
• How using tools, marketing automation and conversion rate optimization can get you good qualified leads and customers

But we don’t want to spoil it all for you, just read and learn.

Netguru’s Marketing Strategies Reverse Engineered

Eat or be eaten. That's how things work in the IT business. Companies rise, others fall, meanwhile, Netguru keeps growing.

If you want to know the secrets behind these numbers:

you'll have to come with me and peep into Netguru's strategic marketing approach and branding.

Brand Awareness at Netguru

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently”: Warren Buffet

For Netguru it's been 10 years of building.

Do you want to find out why Netguru keeps popping up on Deloitte's Tech Fast 50 list?

Let's dissect how Netguru is designing a great brand.

Netguru being awarded by Deloitte. Source: Netguru's Twitter

Netguru’s Awards

Netguru seems to be a constant presence in Clutch’s tops.

Netguru ranks first in the Top NodeJS Development companies in the World (2018).

Also, Netguru holds an honorable 5 rank in the Top Polish App Developers.

Netguru was featured in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 Central Europe, three times already, ranking 46 in 2017.

Netguru’s Website and Conversion Rate Optimization

I am not a designer, not even near to the field. Nevertheless one can spot beauty. With a friendly UI and smart UX, Netguru’s website is simple and sending the right message to the user.

What does Netguru do?

Web and mobile development, product design.

How can I get a quote? - Call to Action with Estimate Project.

As Unbounce Co-Founder Oli Gardner puts it "Have a F***** CTA" .

Need more info about web development?

There you go:

With a clear menu, navigation, whitespace used cleverly, the Netguru website really shows off good design and UX.

Good readability, no clutter, balanced contrast, everything used to highlight what’s important and not to overwhelm the user with too much data.

Social proof is everywhere, from testimonials, PR featuring to awards.

They designed ebooks that tackle programming languages, project management and UX, they are downloadable via form.

Case studies are considered really powerful pieces content and Netguru really understands that and puts this to practice.

They feature lots of case studies per different verticals on their website.

They also have some open source Git projects for sharing and some freebie resources:

Netguru boarded the machine learning hype train so they’re even having a by-weekly newsletter on it, there’s a pop-up that invites you in signing up.

Also they use the chat bot for newsletter signup:

In December they rolled over an IoT only newsletter:

Type caption (optional)

Conversion Rate Optimization

Netguru is going to the next level. According to Similartech, they’ve just made a big move for CRO, with Visual Website Optimizer. Big thumbs up.

On the other hand, they’ve been using Hotjar for a while.

In a few months of using Hotjar and analyzing the users’ path (both leads and potential employees), Netguru managed to:

• Decrease the bounce rate by more than 50%
• Drive up the “services” page traffic by 30%
• Drive up the “career” page traffic by more than 50%
• Increase the number of users going further in the services marketing funnel by 17%

I haven’t found any evidence for A/B testing, but they seem to know the theory, as they prove it in this blog post.

Personalization is another strategy that leads to increasing conversion rates.

What stroke my eyes is that on the blog they have customized sticky CTAs. From the inbound consultant’s point of view, they nailed it!

Another thing that stroke me is that the homepage above the fold slider differs from country to country!

For example, in Poland, the purpose of the homepage is around employer branding and hiring. That makes sense, because the Polish market is not their focus in terms of customers.

When not in Poland, well, the story changes and it looks like this:

Lead generation and client focus all the way.

Smart.

Next, also for the purpose of improving the website conversion rate, and for starting conversation with possible leads, a Drift chat bot is active on the website.

Netguru’s Traffic Acquisition

Direct traffic and links account for more than 90% of Netguru's website traffic.

Just like in the case of Poznan software house STX Next, I'm suspecting direct traffic might be due to:

• branding efforts within offline events
• referral traffic not tagged
• sales reps activities (7+ sales reps found on Linkedin)

So, the sales team is on the move! Make way! Emailing, outreaching, they know the drill.

70%+ search traffic? That requires some investigation.

The growth is phenomenal.

From an estimated 6K organic search visitors per month in January 2017 to 57K/month in January 2019 ( as per Ahrefs )

That is approx 850% increase in 2 years. That is pretty impressive for a software consulting agency in Poland.

Ahrefs might not be 100% accurate, as they explain here, but still, the percentage increase is impressive.

Ahrefs estimated data on search

What I can see is that they rank on a bunch of technical keywords.

In the next chapter, I'll go more in-depth on how they achieved this growth with content marketing.

Content Marketing

The main topics on Netguru's blog are about:

• Guides, strategies and tips for designers and developers
• Best practices in software development, hacks for different technologies and programming languages
• Advice on technology for product owners, startups
• Project management content
• Trends and predictions in the tech scene

Also, Netguru accepts guest posts and has clear guidelines for this.

Now, let’s make a blog posts top 5:

Seems that Python related posts are making a statement here, just like in the case of STX Next.

Many blog posts are technical, making comparisons between different technologies and frameworks.

My “aha moment”: the developers are involved in content creation.

This shouldn’t be in fact surprising, a content writer does not have the knowledge a developer has.

Time to go more granular now, let's analyse some first page ranking keywords.

Seems that keywords relating to technologies/frameworks comparisons are making a statement here. Lots of traffic, great ranking.

Aaand, gotcha: featured snippets! Good work, Netguru.

Looking at Netguru's top pages, there's one lonely page that's not a blog post and it's not the homepage either.

Overlog, who the f**k is overlog? Well, as Netguru puts it: the simplest app debugger for iOS. Here is the overlog story.

Overlog is an open source tool built by the mobile dev team at Netguru and it seems it gets lots of traction.

Revenons à nos moutons, without the blog traffic, there would be almost no traffic on Netguru's website.

So, definitely content marketing is what makes Netguru stand out. And they're really good at it.

Backlinks to Support Content Marketing

What do Neil Patel, Wordpress, The Next Web, Stackoverflow have in common?

They all link to Netguru's blog or website. And we're talking about high domain rating do-follow links!

Do-follow high quality links

Looking at the organic traffic Netguru has right now, SEO and content marketing are at the core of Netguru's marketing strategy.

This means they combine efficiently original content creation with quality link building.

Netguru Paid Traffic Acquisition

In terms of Adwords search ads, they focus on pushing forward the mobile app development and Python outsourcing.

The estimated budget for PPC advertising is $4k+.

This is one landing page example, it’s filled with social proof, project examples, industries.

There are more CTA’s on the page, one for those who are ready to move on in the funnel and get an estimation, others for those who are more in the research mode.

Beside Google search ads, Netguru is experimenting also with Facebook ads.

Netguru Facebook Ads Example

Three topics arise from Netguru’s Facebook ads:

• Product promotion
• Hiring
• Events promotion

The copy tries to be engaging, it often includes social proof.

They are doing also brilliant work with remarketing using Lead Ads to subscribe to their newsletter or direct us to more brand awareness content.

Netguru Facebook Lead Ads Example

Netguru Facebook Messenger Ads

From my assumptions they are having the following remarketing funnel:

Netguru Awareness Stage Funnel Assumption

On Twitter they promote similar content, even though I didn't see any Twitter Ads ( maybe because they don't advertise on Twitter in Poland as it is not very popular here ).

Social Selling

Meet Radek, he’s Netguru’s Head of Growth and he’s active on Quora. He has a total of 53 answers with topics ranging from React Native (a lot of focus here), startup advice, to comparing different programming languages, SaaS talks and more.

Also, their Senior Content Marketing Specialist, Natalia, has a very active presence on Quora, covering topics like: web development, startups, business, marketing, project management and more.

Netguru’s Social Presence

Would you say this is a B2B business?

• 16k+ Facebook followers
• 8k+ Linkedin followers
• 65k+ Dribble followers
• 20k+ Behance followers

Yeah, me neither.

But these are the numbers behind Netguru's social media presence.

These numbers are not the result of only having the right social media strategy.

All of the other marketing efforts are mirrored by the social media accounts.

From offline events, to content marketing, from clients to employees, or employees wanna be, Netguru can acquire followers.

Next we'll take a peek at Netguru's profile on various social media channels.

Netguru's Facebook page

Around 16.000 Facebook followers are updated on a daily basis about the latest events Netguru participated in, their latest blog content, their team members.

The number of engagements varies (with an average of 16), but there are some really popular posts, most of which relate to team members.

This makes me conclude that Facebook is merely used for employer branding, a strategy used also by STX Next.

Main events promoted on Facebook refer to one-day workshops for college students in the Netguru College series. The main topics feature programming languages and project management.

Instagram

The Instagram profile is all about the team spirit, Netguru’s culture, events. Clearly the messages are directed to employer branding.

LinkedIn

The Linkedin posts relate to the latest events Netguru participated in, their latest blog posts, they’re introducing team members and products and projects they’ve designed.

The profile has reached 8k+ followers. Usually this number correlates with the number of employees on Linkedin.

We can see the content is very strategic and posting enterprise, B2B type of content rather than technical,( i.e. digital transformation)

The bigger the company or the brand, the bigger the number of followers, unless you’re some startup unicorn.

Twitter

Besides sharing almost the same content that’s being posted on Facebook, on the Twitter profile Netguru also shares news and interesting facts from the industry.

So, the Twitter feed is merely used as a broadcasting platform, where they push out company messages and promote products.

They have some very good copywriters, as their tweets are top-notch. Here are some of the posts promoting mainly content and not services ( an Inbound approach, rather than Outreach ).

#Chatbots are all the rage right now, and they're not going anywhere. Mateusz, one of our #ML specialists, explains how your business can start implementing #AI chatbots and improve the overall customer of your service.https://t.co/iF7TGhbONy

— Netguru (@netguru) January 2, 2019

More often than not, #Python is the programming language of choice for #MachineLearning projects. See our overview of the most popular frameworks that one can use for #NLP (natural language processing) in the Python environment 👉https://t.co/KKF489vv5y #AI #ML #appdevelopment

— Netguru (@netguru) January 4, 2019

Youtube

The Youtube channel features 21 videos, some of them are part of a webinar series called Digital Forum, some of them are recordings from the events they hosted or participated in.

They publish their videos rarely and the video views range from about 50 to 660.

Dribbble

The Netguru Dribbble profile rocks. 65k+ followers? Hard to beat that. They feature 48 projects: apps they’ve worked on, websites and other designs and concepts.

They are the industry’s benchmarks because they found the way to create an engaging profile, with 50+ members onboard.

Behance

And their Behance profile is top-notch too: 94k+ appreciations. They are really managing to inspire their worldwide followers with their product designs.

Compared to the competition, Netguru clearly has the most engaging Behance account.

Netguru Is Building Communities

Netguru has been coaching Ruby on Rails around Poland for 5 years now. Netguru also offers Level Up workshops for more advanced developers.

Since 2015, Netguru has been hosting hackathons at their Poznan HQ and managers have been organizing regular free project management workshops.

Netguru has also cooperated with universities, through delivering workshops and presentations, involving in academic life and during monthly webinars for technology enthusiasts.

Together with Brinc Accelerator and Indiegogo, they partner with the Poznan Hardware Hub, a hardware house specialized in designing for mass production (industrial design, prototyping), so, innovation all the way for these guys.

Netguru also has a thing for meetups, from regular Dribble Meetups for designers, to meetups for Ruby and Swift developers.

In 2017 Netguru hosted in Poznan the Disruption Forum. Speakers from around the world had talks ranging from strategy and management, to emerging trends in developers’ community.

2018 was a year of celebration for Netguru. Turning 10, they remembered how they grew from a small software shop to an international software consulting agency:

The birthday party was held at Lisbon Web Summit, where they also hosted a panel, named “Building Growth: Industry Leaders on Lessons They Learned”.

A big Happy Birthday from us too!

Employer Branding

Now let’s peep a bit at what former employees have to say about Netguru.

Glassdoor comments reveal that the atmosphere is great, everything is transparent, keeping employees happy is a priority, remote working is definitely a plus, there are lots of career opportunities, experienced teams.

Some reviewers argue that the perks and salaries aren’t good enough, that some projects are really stressful and not handled well by the team leaders, that transparency and feedback are just some buzzwords, because they’re not happening.

For almost all the negative reviews Netguru tries to answer and explain what improvements have been made.

Netguru is looking to expand its developer, QA and product design teams.

On their website they’re really transparent about the employee perks, the correlation between expertise and salary level.

Marketing and Process Automation at Netguru

It seems that implementing Salesforce was the right choice at the right time for Netguru, according to the case study they did and published on Salesforce’s own website.

They're also explaining how Salesforce helped them with project management in this video:

Marek Talarczyk, Netguru's Chief Operations Officer discussing the innovative processes that Netguru introduced into Salesforce to to grow project predictability by 102%.

Using Salesforce, Netguru managed to improve customer satisfaction (with a Net Promoter Score averaging above 9) and to increase predictability, meaning being able to accurately estimate how long it will take to complete a project and the risk involved.

From the marketing automation side, Netguru also uses Hubspot.

So, Netguru doesn't stay away from tools that may increase productivity, planning, projects delivery. They're stubborn about efficiency.

This stubbornness helped Netguru become a benchmark in CEE’s IT Outsourcing market.

Summing Up

Now, what seem to be Netguru’s golden nuggets?

My top 5 would be the following:

• Designing a dream team and a great company culture
• Seamless client delivery through smooth project management
• Building a community, forging partnerships and building awareness around the brand for two main purposes: landing quality projects and hiring the right talent
• Becoming the “guru” of content strategy, being SEO focused and involving developers in content writing

On the other hand, a big picture of the industry wouldn’t hurt also. Care to find out how three ex-soviet union countries are making a statement in IT outsourcing? Check out our Ultimate Guide To IT Outsourcing Companies in Central Eastern Europe.