AM2 Studio is (currently) the largest Croatian WordPress agency. Close to 30 people, with offices in Zagreb and Banja Luka (Bosnia and Herzegovina), AM2 are looking to hire 8 new people by the end of the year. We are talking with Andrej Šimunaj, CEO of AM2 about their company, plans for the future and how they see the Croatian WordPress community.
Welcome Andrej and thanks for sponsoring WordCamp Split as gold sponsor. Can you tell us more about your company?
AM2 Studio is a development agency with 2 main departments: WordPress department and Enterprise (Laravel) department. Within our WordPress department, we have completed more than 400 projects ranging from small corporate websites to large high-traffic sites. We specialize in custom WordPress solutions (themes and plugins), large site migrations, optimization and building web apps. We have a team of 25 people and what makes us different is we are working within ‘Flexible Work Environment’, meaning that our team is distributed, our working hours and even place of work is not strictly defined. Our offices are currently in Zagreb and Banja Luka, although we have people working from 5 different cities on top of that.
Apart from WordPress websites and web apps, within our Laravel department, we are building in-house ticketing solution with our partner company in Canada, large startup project in California and several custom ERP systems across North America.
We are growing rapidly, in our roadmap we plan to hire 8 more people until the end of the year. Our growth is generated by the quality of work and referrals alone, as well as the fact that we are investing in our internal projects which are successful and hungry for more tech resources.
Split is an amazing setting for the event
You are sponsoring WordCamp in Croatia for the first time and we thank you for that. What do you expect of WordCamp Split?
Last year we attended first Croatian WordCamp in Rijeka and in my opinion it was a huge success. We were delighted to see respected experts from international WordPress community recognize the event and joined as speakers as well as attendees on top of our (Croatian) community. The event was very well organized, professional and we were glad to be a part of it.
This year and every following year I expect it to be the best Croatian WordCamp up to date! A year has passed, Croatian WordPress community has grown (both in numbers and in experience), also Split is an amazing setting for the event.
We are delighted to sponsor the event, as well as speaking at the event. That’s the very least we can do, as we know the hardest part of putting up a successful event is falling on organizers and volunteers. I’d like to take this opportunity to say ‘Thanks!’ to everybody investing their time into organizing WordCamp Split, you guys are doing an amazing job!
We plan to hire 8 people by the end of the year
We see that AM2 Studio is constantly searching for new people. Now you operate from 2 offices in Zagreb and Banja Luka (Bosnia and Herzegovina). Can people get in touch with you in Split and how? What kind of people do you tend to employ at AM2?
We are steadily expanding over past few years and we continue to do so. At this point, we are looking for Senior Front End developer, 2 backend developers with experience in Laravel and a Full stack (WordPress) developer with experience in building custom WordPress themes. We are looking to hire 4 people until the end of September, and 4 more until the end of the year.
Sure, people can get in touch in Split, just look for a bunch of people with AM2 t-shirts and feel free to start a conversation! It would be great to get in touch even before the event, for anybody interested please drop by our website am2studio.hr and send us an email.
What are the plans for the future?
One of our company core values is ‘Think Big’. Our Big vision is to disrupt 2 huge markets by incorporating tools we have built and experience we have gained from a SaaS model. We are looking to build AM2 Tickets plugin that will be built upon our own ticketing solution, provide free tools for small event promoters to sell tickets easily and disrupt companies such as Eventbrite and Ticketfly. We are also building AM2 ERP both as Laravel SaaS platform as well as WordPress Plugin that will enable small to medium companies to utilize the full power of ERP and business automation systems, and disturb high-priced ERPs like Salesforce. On top of that, we are rapidly expanding our website development services.
We plan to cautiously grow. When I say cautiously, I am referring to the amount of effort we are putting in first and foremost building an amazing work environment for our team and being highly competitive in the job market.
People are today requesting WordPress – no need to explain them what it is
How do you see the current status of WordPress in Croatia?
WordPress has gone a long way from a blogging platform to full blown framework and it took some time for people to realize that. I must admit, we no longer need to educate people on WordPress. People went from frowning on WordPress to specifically requesting their websites and web apps to be built on top of WordPress.
What do you think about the Croatian WordPress community?
Croatian WordPress community is amazing, but we are still maturing. Just by looking at how many people went to WordCamp Europe in Vienna this year is a great sign that community is expanding. There is still a lot of room for improvements, a lot of steps to go through, but I think it’s moving in the right direction with not only growing in size but also growing in experience. in experience.
Get your ticket today!
We have released 200 tickets with a price of $20 (around 130 kn) and you can buy them at the Tickets page. The ticket gets you the entrance on the conference day, lunch, goodies from our sponsors, WordCamp Split t-shirt and the entrance to the afterparty with free drinks included.