Croatian Startup Can Compete with US Firms

Croatian Startup Can Compete with US Firms

Over the past few years, Repsly has evolved from a more "Field Team Management" solution into a "Retail Execution Optimization" solution, according to Repsly CEO Matt Brogie. He is sure that with focus on Artificial Intelligence, Image Recognition, and Machine Learning they can add more value to their costumers.

When you started your journey with Repsly, what was your first impression of the company? What was the reason for you to come to such a company?

I first met Marko Kovac virtually in January of 2012.  He and Marko Linke were looking to move Salespod the prior name of the software to the U.S. market.  I immediately fell in love with both the software solution and the honesty, transparency, trust and focus that Marko approached me with. I had experience with startups as well as mobile software for consumer goods field teams in the past.  What I saw of the product was that is was simple, approachable, configurable, but yet it had great power.  This is a rare combination and I found it very impressive that the guys had been able to put this together.

How would you describe its current development and what are the plans for this year and the years to come?

Over the past few years, Repsly has evolved from a more "Field Team Management" solution into a "Retail Execution Optimization" solution.  We are rapidly evolving the platform to be able to take more data as inputs, and through analytics turn those inputs into insights that can be used to improve the performance of the team.  This will be the focus for the near term while we continue to look at how Artificial Intelligence, Image Recognition, and Machine Learning can add more value.

What do you expect from the market - what are your most important market segments, what are the key industries?

While Repsly is highly configurable and is used by field teams from many industries, our number one focus is on consumer goods companies.  Repsly is excellent at helping brands drive peak performance of their retail execution strategies!  There has been pressure on brick and mortar retail for many years now as on-line sales continue to grow, however we see brands with explosive sales in the 'real world' and the thing that they all have in common is that they are innovative, forward-thinking, and they work hard on continuous improvement of how they sell at retail.  These are our perfect customers and we believe that they will be successful for a very long time.

Who are your competitors on the market and how do you deal with such big companies?

We don't really have large competitors.  The large companies that work with customers in our market are typically solving a different problem than we are; SAP and Salesforce for example.  Neither of these companies have solutions that can be used by an agile, innovative field team.  The competition we meet is usually about our size, and regionally focused. Repsly is very well positioned to work with companies around the world with offices and partners in 10 plus countries and the software available in 11 languages. Our biggest differentiator across all competitors is that we are the most powerful solution, yet we remain extremely easy to implement, adopt and use.

Can European companies really compete with American companies, especially since Repsly comes from a really small country like Croatia?

Absolutely! We've only been selling in the US for about 5 years and we've already gained over 500 customers in North America! That by itself should remove any doubt that a start-up from Croatia can compete on a global scale!