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5.0
2 reviews

Kodius provides services of web & software development, design, and augmentation. We pride ourselves on our proven record of satisfied clients whom we have helped design and build products. We strive for a balance between performance and perfection.

 

One comment of our current clients perfectly encapsulates this: "They thought two steps ahead when we only thought one step ahead."

 

Since creating a profile on Clutch in Spring of 2019, by July of 2019 we were already featured by July on lists of top 15 best developers in the country and top 100 web developers in the world. We shoot for the stars and we have proven we have the ability to reach them.

 

Our technologies of special interest are Vue.js, Ruby on Rails, React, Node.js and Elixir. 

 

Kodius highly values authenticity and progress, be it personal, financial or technological. We are known for our professional attitude and friendly environment that values trust, passion, and openness.

 

People make the company, and our people are extraordinary.

 

We are an open-minded team of specialists who support each other and encourage professional growth. Together we complete challenges, improve our skills and provide top notch service. 

 

We look forward to working with you.

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$5,000+
 
$50 - $99 / hr
 
2 - 9
 Founded
2016
Show all +
Zagreb, Croatia
headquarters

Portfolio

FlexCareers

FlexCareers launched in 2016 with the express aim of tapping into an underused talent pool - qualified women returning to the job market. We've helped them engineer and launch a database and laid the digital infrastructure. Our work enabled them to quintuple their growth.

Our partnership continues to this

…
day. We are proud FlexCareers grew to the status of national job provider in Australia and New Zealand, with a six-digit number of clients and prospect for further growth and expansion. We continue to provide support and anticipate future issues for them.

Services provided:

  • full stack development
  • migration to AWS stack
  • UI and UX design
  • payment system implementation
  • custom API integration
  • support and upgrades

 

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Reviews

5.0
2 reviews
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Server Migration and Web Solutions Management for HR Database

"Our values are aligned from a commercial sense, and this only helps us to grow together."

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5.0

Quality: 
5.0
Schedule: 
5.0
Cost: 
5.0
Willing to refer: 
5.0
The Project
 
$50,000 to $199,999
 
Oct. 2017 - Ongoing
Project summary: 

Kodius migrated a server to AWS and managed an application stack. They supported a web product, a database, and API feeds for a black box search feature. Other services included code fixes and security.

The Reviewer
 
11-50 Employees
 
Sydney, Australia
Brett Pozniak
CTO, FlexCareers Pty Ltd
 
Verified
The Review
Feedback summary: 

Their support for the black box search feature boosted sales capability and uptake by 227% for a year following its release. Kodius quadrupled development outputs. They worked with Jira to optimize project tracking and established reliable communication strategies.

The client submitted this review online.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am CTO of FlexCareers. FlexCareers is a niche player in the Human Resource technology space to help our candidate database find careers/jobs that are flexible in nature to suit their lifestyle. I joined the organisation in August 2016, and have helped them implement some world class technology solutions that keep the business doors open.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Kodius?

When I arrived on the scene, I found that the current development team [out-sourced] had a rather fixed mindset on a few areas that were a concern to me. They included a restrictive hosting platform solution; the ability to reject an agile process to building and deploying features; inconsistency of language when defining scope; and mixed expectations in terms of service levels and the capability to meet them with confidence.

We were looking to address those four major concerns, and by searching for players who were based in Europe, I knew we could find a partner who was a) willing to help us to get to a new level of consistency and predictability in our development cycle; and b) be paranoid about security and capability to recommend the right hosting platform to ensure we always keep our lights on.

What were your goals for this project?

Our goals were:

  • change hosting platform with scale and elasticity; and capability to fail-over between alternate geographical zones
  • takeover management of our current application stack
  • upgrade our core technology to the latest feature set from our 3rd party vendor
  • deliver in an agile framework so we could track the velocity of our releases
  • take over the day to day backlog of activity to distinguish between maintenance, devops, and new feature build teams
  • establish a relationship with a partner that provides sound, commercial advice and expertise based on industry best practice
SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We did some searching around the top talent sites that catered for our application base stack and found our friends at Kodius. We reached out to them directly via LinkedIn. Fortunately we got a connection within a day, and asked them a series of questions to help us determine what their capabilities were.

Their responses seemed to be natural, and so we decided to give them a small piece of work as a trial, that blew us away in terms of speed to completion and ability to understand the job requirements that we provided. We decided to give them a few smaller jobs, and were very excited about the possibilities. We then planned the transition window from the incumbent to Kodius over a 3 month window, and have never looked back.

Describe the project in detail.

The Kodius team recommended AWS at the platform stack. We migrated off of 1 virtual server in Singapore, to a multi-front end and application server farm with load balancing, backed with the AWS native RDS platform for the database stack. The platform was configured to replicate data from the Sydney to Singapore zones; with the anticipation we could fail-over between these two time zones seamlessly. We have performed fail-over testing between both zones twice a year now, and have resided our production environments in the secondary zone [Singapore] with the same customer experience.

Our application stack consisted of web front end, ruby application back end, PostGres database, and API feeds from our 3rd party black-box tool set. We needed a team to take over management; code releases and fixes; security management and oversight; monitoring and alerting; and break fix. We set a goal of 3 months to transition, which we achieved in that time frame.

The 3rd party vendor had a product feature that would help us drive a far greater customer experience. The problem was the vendor's application wasn't familiar to Kodius. Despite some learning time, we decided that we needed a partner who was willing to learn, but at the same time ramp up and train it's own team so that all resources could manage any client side changes from our 3rd party vendor without a hitch going forward. We got there after plugging away at it over an 8 month window. We believe as a result it has contributed to a major part of our sales growth since release.

The one measure of success is to track how efficient is the team at delivering both New Features and Maintaining the platform. There's no better way than to form an agile framework in Scrum to deliver a consistent message for both tasks. After requesting the team operate in sprint cycles, we developed a 2 week cycle, with release to occur once a month. To turn on this method of operational practice was rather quick too.

We wanted to be able to track in the jobs that get tasked to the team according to the effort individually for maintenance, devops, and new feature builds. This would help us predict our budget forecasts which is critical for our cash flow in a start up business.

What was the team composition?

The team from our side included a Product owner, and Quality Assurance owner. The backlog was provided by our Product Owner; and the jobs completed for testing were managed by our QA test lead.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Some of our key business metrics included Sales Growth specifically for our subscriptions based product. As we released our black box search feature, the sales capability and uptake increased by 227% over a 12 month period thereafter. Our cost of development was consistent to our incumbent development team, but the output was 4 fold to what were able to achieve with Kodius over our incumbent team.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Kodius helped us to integrate our JIRA instances so all of our jobs could be referenced in our version, and synchronised to that their team could comply to the tasks to be done. This made job tracking and updates easy. At first our language gap was not that wide, but we wanted to close it further, so we helped to create new terms and definitions that we both stuck to, which would make it easy to determine the outputs. Initially we scheduled weekly phone calls to help sure we remain on top of the work and delivery. But as we became more comfortable, we changed the velocity to an as needs basis. Our Product Owners and QA team members are able to communicate directly with the Kodius developers.

The main aim was to establish consistency in language from our business requirements, to then be delivered. As we formed this, we found that the ability to understand, adapt, build, test with quality, and deliver was improving every month. With this comes trust and reliability. With these foundations, we noticed that having regular check-ins with the Kodius management team helped us to talk at both a business level, and assist us to make decisions that are both commercial and practical. We've found that our values are aligned from a commercial sense, and this only helps us to grow together.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Aside from their technology capability, they appear to be a team always willing to invest in the Customer Experience and best possible outcome. They also have a strong sense of knowing when to be practical and commercial to make the relationship work. But the major thing for us is they deliver.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Everything can always be done more efficiency, but in the end, they deliver, and we know they will continue to invest in themselves to ensure they improve all the time.

5.0
Overall Score Really solid business relationship built on trust
  • 5.0 Scheduling
    ON TIME / DEADLINES
    Very consistent
  • 5.0 Cost
    Value / within estimates
    Very reasonable
  • 5.0 Quality
    Service & deliverables
    Quality with accountability
  • 5.0 NPS
    Willing to refer
    Very likely, in fact i have in the past already

AWS Migration, Infrastructure & Database Ruby on Rails Dev

"They thought two steps ahead when we only thought one step ahead."

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5.0

Quality: 
4.5
Schedule: 
4.5
Cost: 
5.0
Willing to refer: 
5.0
The Project
 
$200,000 to $999,999
 
Oct. 2016 - Ongoing
Project summary: 

Kodius migrated a server to AWS and launched a database as part of an ongoing development partnership. Other services included UI/UX design and integration of APIs with the database.

The Reviewer
 
11- 50 Employees
 
Sydney, Australia
Co-Founder, FlexCareers
 
Verified
The Review
Feedback summary: 

The successful migration to AWS has supported the rapid growth of the platform, with a user base that’s more than quadrupled. Kodius is an accountable partner who works proactively to envision and offer consultation on the best business strategies.

A Clutch analyst personally interviewed this client over the phone. Below is an edited transcript.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a co-founder of FlexCareers. We offer a career employment site focused on women returning to work as well as anyone who’d like to work flexibly. We connect job seekers with progressive employers who are happy to offer flexible work arrangements. We work with a slew of Australian companies, as well as with multinationals operating in Australia and New Zealand.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Kodius?

We’re in our fourth year and we’ve hit a stage where we want to grow a bit more rapidly, so we needed a new digital agency.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We worked with Kodius on a large migration before we started the official collaboration with them. We went from a single server in Singapore to the AWS platform, across two different geographic locations. That was one of our first challenges.

We’ve accumulated two years’ worth of sprints in Jira since then. We’ve done a lot of UI/UX work with them, especially in terms of mobile optimization.

Another large project was launching a large searchable database, where employers can search for potential job candidates. That was a challenging project involving a bunch of external APIs, a Ruby on Rails backend, and a lot of testing.

What is the team composition?

We had a five-person team when we started, and I believe the current team has between five and ten people.

How did you come to work with Kodius?

Ruby on Rails is a relatively specialized skillset, and it’s not easy to find quality developers. As I was going through some due diligence, I saw an interesting blog by Kresimir (CEO, Kodius) on the benefits of Ruby on Rails. Something I noticed was that, despite it being a niche topic, it had over 1,000 social reactions. For a technical article to have that kind of buy-in from other developers showed me that these people must be pretty good at Ruby.

I engaged them and got them in touch with our CTO, who put them through a real evaluation process to see if they could be our long-term partner. We decided they could handle all of our development as we scaled out our platform.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $300,000–$350,000 with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Kodius in October 2016 and the engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Security is an important consideration for us, and we’re working with a US-based company that scans entire code structures for vulnerabilities. Data breaches are a concern for any company, and we’ve been fortunate to not experience any. I put it on their expertise and diligence.

They succeeded in getting us onto AWS, a platform that could handle our rapid growth. We took a small site with a small number of users and employers and put it into a world-class infrastructure that’s helped us scale. I believe we’ve quadrupled in size in terms of employers since we started working with Kodius.

Our database had 18,000 job seekers in 2016, and we have since grown to a database of 110,000 candidates. Kodius has built a platform that’s allowed us to scale up our job seekers by a factor of five. We’ve monetized our searchable database.

How did Kodius perform from a project management standpoint?

We run scrum projects with them, with sprints every two weeks. We use Jira to track stories, which give Kodius the full brief. We touch base with them daily, as part of our development cycle, to get updates on releases and other matters.

From my perspective, no sprint has been significantly delayed, the story points attributed to each ticket have been done accurately, and the execution has always been within budget. They make accurate estimates of time and cost.

We’re communicating through an extreme time difference. They’ve made it work well and smoothly. Kodius can work easily with anyone, without having to be in physical proximity. We didn’t know if we’d truly be able to understand each other, but that’s ultimately been fantastic. It’s been a real pleasure working with them.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They understand what we’re trying to achieve as a business, and they support us in that respect. There have been a lot of instances where they spotted the business issues that we missed. They thought two steps ahead when we only thought one step ahead. They proactively seek out and suggest things that can be beneficial and drive our business further.

They’re not simply someone executing an order from us–they look at things in a holistic way, in order to understand our business goals. This really comes through in the entire process with them.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, nothing comes to mind.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Clients shouldn’t keep their cards close to their chest. If we give Kodius a detailed brief and immerse them in what we’re trying to achieve, we’ll definitely be better for it. They can add a lot of value in areas we hadn’t thought of, so we don’t look at them as just an execution team. They’re a team that can understand our business and help it grow.

5.0
Overall Score We wouldn’t be here as a business had it not been for them.
  • 4.5 Scheduling
    ON TIME / DEADLINES
    I can’t think of a single sprint that overran significantly.
  • 5.0 Cost
    Value / within estimates
    They offer outstanding value for our money.
  • 4.5 Quality
    Service & deliverables
    They’ve delivered per our expectations.
  • 5.0 NPS
    Willing to refer
    I’d refer anyone in need of help to Kodius straight away.