Startup mentoring and technical guidance for an innovation center

When CB Insights went through the post-mortems of failed startups, the most common reasons had little to do with how well the software was written. Running out of cash topped the list, and "no market need" came a close second, cited in 35% of cases. Both usually trace back to decisions made very early, long before anyone worries about scale.

That's the stage where a young team is most exposed. The founders are often brilliant engineers or domain experts, but they're making product, architecture, and scope calls for the first time. A wrong one rarely hurts right away. It shows up a year later as a rebuild, a missed round, or a product nobody asked for.

So the cheapest time to get help is at the very beginning, while changing course still costs a conversation instead of a rewrite.

ZICER, the Zagreb Innovation Center, is the City of Zagreb's home for knowledge-based entrepreneurship. Its roots go back to 1994, when Croatia's first high-tech business incubator opened, and today it runs a 7,300 m² center with incubation, coworking, the Startup Factory accelerator, and Zagreb Connect, one of the country's best-known startup conferences.

Programs like that need more than space and funding. They need people who have shipped real software, for real clients, and can tell a founder what tends to go wrong next. Startup teams arrive with an idea and plenty of energy, but they don't always know which questions to ask. How big should the first version be? What will break when the tenth customer arrives? Which technical shortcut is fine for now, and which one will cost them later?

ZICER's challenge was finding mentors who could answer those questions honestly, and keep showing up year after year.

Mario Mucalo, our CEO, has worked with ZICER as a mentor since 2019. Much of that work starts in the lecture room, with talks on software development and product development for teams in ZICER's programs.

We don't teach from a textbook. The material comes from the projects we deliver for clients: scoping an MVP that can actually launch, choosing a stack a team can still maintain in three years, and spotting the "small change" that is really a redesign. Founders hear what those decisions look like in practice, including the ones that went badly.

Lectures only go so far, so a large part of the work happens in one-on-one workshops with startup founders.

Here the conversation is about their product, their roadmap, and sometimes their code. We help them cut scope to something they can deliver, find the risks hiding in their architecture, and plan the next steps in an order that protects their runway. It's the same review we'd run at the start of a client engagement, just earlier in the company's life.

Startup Factory ends with its finals at Zagreb Connect, where teams pitch for development funding in front of investors, judges, and a full room. We help teams prepare for that stage.

A good pitch has to survive the technical questions. So we pressure-test what each team plans to say about their product: what it does today, what it will do next, and how they know it will hold up. Teams walk on stage having already heard the hard questions once.

ZICER also organizes hackathons on behalf of others, primarily the City of Zagreb, as well as private companies like Hrvatska poštanska banka. We mentor teams at these events.

A hackathon compresses the whole product cycle into a weekend, which makes it a good place to learn discipline. We help teams pick a problem they can actually solve in the time they have, build the part that proves the idea, and present something that works rather than something that almost works.

The work with ZICER is ongoing, and it has become a steady part of how we give back to Zagreb's startup community. Over the years we've worked with a long line of teams, from first-time founders to Startup Factory finalists presenting at Zagreb Connect.

It also keeps us sharp. Explaining why a scope decision matters to a founder who's hearing it for the first time forces us to be clear about our own reasoning. That same clarity is what our clients get when we sit down to plan their product: an honest view of the risks, raised early, while they're still cheap to fix.