It seems incredible, but it is indeed possible that something which is free and effective does not spark the interest of those it is intended for. This is exactly what happened with the Gosjar application, which the City of Zagreb has been using for 14 years. The Zagreb company Kodius, which deals with information technology (IT), aimed to design the online platform Gosjar for managing public lighting to enable cities and municipalities to maintain, operate efficiently, and reduce public lighting costs, but the reality is different. Although Zagreb confirmed the system’s effectiveness as it records 400,000 entries of faults and work on the public lighting network, other cities and municipalities did not recognize Gosjar, which Krešimir Bojčić, the founder and CEO of Kodius, wanted to offer for free two years ago. Despite everything, he believes that Gosjar has achieved exceptional success in Zagreb and that a doctoral thesis could be written on the analysis of network performance indicators. The application has also been enhanced with a topology feature for monitoring electricity at measurement points, and it can be adapted for other business entities.
– Zagreb has not paid for maintenance for the last twelve years, and the software still works well! Other cities were not interested, or perhaps we did not explain the advantages of the application well enough – thinks Bojčić.
Developing Own Products
Nevertheless, Bojčić is not resting on his laurels but is developing a new product. The tool named Kloki is intended for office management and is the result of Bojčić’s desire to provide a reliable and efficient tool at a fixed price, unlike other solutions on the market that often change policies and start charging excessively for services. He states that Kloki is tailored to the Croatian market and legislation because he primarily wants to help domestic companies. In December, he will also release a time tracking module that could be interesting for all agencies that operate on a T&M (time & materials) basis, where the service requester pays the contractor for the actual time spent on the project and the materials used.
– We also support migration from Clockify and Harvest (time tracking and productivity applications) to facilitate the transition for those who are satisfied with their tracker but want to pay less and at a fixed price. Our largest investment so far has been in Kloki, around 200,000 euros. It represents our strategic decision to focus on developing our solutions and reduce dependence on client projects. We believe that Kloki will allow us to offer something new in the global market and bring long-term value to the company. With the office management product, we plan to enter the Croatian market and then the global market. I believe that focusing on our own products will allow us greater control over operations and reduce vulnerability to changes in the external environment. Our role model is 37signals, an American web software company that generates 360 million a year with 60 people – hopes Bojčić.
