Ever wondered how a tech company rides the tumultuous waves of an industry in flux? Journey with us, as Àlex, founder of MarsBased, shares his company's evolution in managing a surge from one to two contracts a year to a whopping 10 short-term contracts. Get an inside look at the challenges, triumphs, and the newfound dynamism this pivot has injected into the company operations.
Unsure about the effects of the pandemic on tech prices? Listen up as we dig deep into the wider industry impact, discussing how businesses right from startups to corporates have been grappling with business adaptability. Hear out Àlex's insightful reflection on the reduced competition's influence on project pricing and the ripple effect it has had on businesses.
Get ready for a raw, real, and revealing chat about the trials, tribulations, and tenacity of the tech industry in these uncertain times. Buckle up, it's going to be an enlightening ride.
Totally generated with AI, all of the above.
🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/
Ever wondered how a tech company rides the tumultuous waves of an industry in flux? Journey with us, as Àlex, founder of MarsBased, shares his company's evolution in managing a surge from one to two contracts a year to a whopping 10 short-term contracts. Get an inside look at the challenges, triumphs, and the newfound dynamism this pivot has injected into the company operations.
Unsure about the effects of the pandemic on tech prices? Listen up as we dig deep into the wider industry impact, discussing how businesses right from startups to corporates have been grappling with business adaptability. Hear out Àlex's insightful reflection on the reduced competition's influence on project pricing and the ripple effect it has had on businesses.
Get ready for a raw, real, and revealing chat about the trials, tribulations, and tenacity of the tech industry in these uncertain times. Buckle up, it's going to be an enlightening ride.
Totally generated with AI, all of the above.
🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/
Hello everybody and welcome to Life on Mars. I'm Alex, the founder of MarsBased, and we're back. We've been away for a couple months unintended pause, unintended break of this podcast. We have had a very, very busy summer, happy to share what's going on behind the scenes. We've been extremely busy. We've had some changes in the company, but I'm very excited about bringing back the podcast because the podcast is a fundamental part of our business nowadays. It helps us to consolidate our message, it helps us to reach new audiences and you know what? It brings us talent.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:We've had a lot of people applying to the company, mostly developers. They want to join the company because they listen to the podcast. They are very much aligned with our values, our vision of life and business, how we work and, it's funny, they come to the interview and we don't have to tell them who we are, what we do, what our core values are, because they already know them. They are acquainted with the way we conduct business and how we act, how we think, because they listen to the podcast. So my gratitude to these people. It kind of validates everything we do and it keeps us going forward. But, as I said, I'm going to be breaking down what's going on at Mars Based that you are acquainted with it, and apologizing for not having published a podcast for two or three months. Maybe I wanted to take a break for a holidays for June late June, beginning of July, when I was out, but that's kind of like snowballed into other areas.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Basically, one of the big projects that has kept us very busy is the new website. We have been working on a new website, because the current one we've had for already seven years, if not eight. It doesn't produce the same wow effect as it did back in 2015 or 16 when we launched it. Then we revamped it. We had a few touches over the years, but not much. Right? It's basically the same website that we launched seven, eight years ago, almost nine perhaps. But we have been working on the website and we got a saying in Spanish that roughly translates in English to the shoemaker's children go barefoot, which means that you're too busy working on your craft that you cannot keep an eye or work on your very own needs, and so we never had people available for the website. We commissioned the design in 2020, late 2020, maybe going into 2021.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:We started working on the website almost a year afterwards because at that time after pandemic. Throughout the pandemic we had a lot of client changes and whatnot, and we always prioritized getting new clients rather than working on the website, which in hindsight might be a mistake. But you know, and in uncertain times you never know how this is going to play out. So it's always good to secure some business. But yeah, then we kind of like have been working on the website here and there, not really continuously, and that's a big mistake. That's been a mistake because we've been one year and a half working on the website. We still haven't launched it and even though we're pretty close now, it feels like it drags along for too long. It just drains the motivation and then it stops the. You know, I stop publishing content on our current website because I really don't want to duplicate efforts. Right, it's not like I want to publish a blog post or a case study on our website and then have to kind of like move it to the other one, and so we have been pushing the website.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Throughout the summer we had a couple of team changes. Didn't play out very well, so that's also been holding us back. That's why we we didn't publish the website, but mostly it's been also because we had a lot of client rotation, right, the market has changed and that's something I wanted to share, because I've been having lunch and breakfast and coffees and beer with many, many CTOs and other business people and it's been very cathartic to understand what's going on, because up until now, we haven't seen the rippling effects of the of the tech Crash, right, we sort of started noticing when startups were laying off people, when we saw competitors shutting down or selling their business, but it was not affecting us and, as a matter of fact, I don't think it still affects us. But the situation has changed as follows, right, whereas up until last year we had been signing one or two contracts per year, mostly annual contracts or, or you know, semi-annual contracts Semi-annual and working for six, eight, ten months, something like that at the time and then, with one, two contracts a year, we would hire three or four people and we kept our growth there because we want to be conservative, right, that allowed us to to grow at our annual rate of about 30 percent on average every year, this year we have already signed 10 contracts, why, you know, I shared this on Twitter on a, on a, on a thread, and while it might look like that's good news. Oh wow, you guys are signing so many new clients and so many new contracts.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:That's not good, because the average contract is shorter and the average project is just chopped down into several phases of shorter duration. So, not complaining, we have to accept what the what the market is. We maybe were accustomed to having the longer contracts because we were, you know, kind of like riding the wave. It was like tailwinds. Now there are headwinds for everybody.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:The companies are taking a closer look at their P&L and maybe they're not measuring their you know their payments. They're spent against a semi-annual or a quarterly P&L. They got to do it monthly now. So they want the, the projects, the investment projects, to be chopped down into phases or sprints in weeks Rather than months. Right, or months rather than years. So not a big deal for us, because whenever we sign a contract, usually in 95% of the cases we charge monthly. So it's always been like this for us. But now we're seeing more start and stop right. Even if we sign a contract for a year, would just, you know, be invoicing monthly, so the payments are evenly distributed throughout the year.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:It was predictable spend for the client. It was also predictable revenue for us. But let's, let's focus on the client now. Right, but now we're seeing more or less the same. It's kind of like oh, we got this project, we're gonna chop it down in like three weeks, six weeks at a time, things like that. But they come with start and stop. Maybe in between what?
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Phase one, phase two, there's an interval of three weeks without doing anything and you get a. You know, we do the work for three weeks. Then, even though we are scheduled to do something else, it requires another approval, it requires some internal QA by the client, and so sometimes these tracks along for several weeks. We we cannot have people waiting sitting idle for three weeks. I mean stop, because we can't afford it. It goes against our profit, but also it it just bores the shit out of people. Right, as a developer, you want to be assigned to projects, it's you don't like sitting around and doing nothing, right? Also, we thought we're not a company with a lot of internal projects. It's not like oh, yeah, cool, we'll work on our product and these other revenue streams. You got our main revenue stream. If not, the only one is doing development for people. So that's why we can.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:We like to keep everybody employed at all times and also because they're permanent contracts. So, you know, we like to have our people busy, we like to keep them entertained and have them doing work with what you know. It's sufficiently stimulating, mentally stimulating work. That being said so, as I mentioned, we've have had a lot of changes. These 10 contracts Maybe not 10 clients, but we started. We started working for a startup in Barcelona, school Hire flicks. We started working for Boston Consulting Group. We started working for Echler, which is a manufacturer for all the visual hardware. We started working for who else we started working for. We saw working for a few other clients when we have completed procurement, for Repsol, for instance. We also stopped working for our other clients. So these in turn has also cost a lot of management overhead and sales overhead, right.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I don't know how to quantify this, but prior to these change, I was spending one, two days a week doing sales. Now it feels like I'm doing five days a week doing sales, right, and I don't have that much time to to do marketing, and that's one of the reasons why I haven't been keeping up on the podcast, when I should have Also the newsletter stopped. There's another thing lady, our very own lady, is out on maternity leave, right, and she assisted me in a couple things in marketing, kind of like the, the production of the, of the podcast, sending out the marks based newsletter, start up, digest, helping in startup grind, and that's not happening anymore. So it feels like I'm a. I'm a one-man Orchester trying to do everything sales and sales and marketing, especially marketing, because in sales I got my two partners and co-founders helping me. But yeah, this creates a lot of overhead because you know, when we used to sign one or two contracts a year the contract discussions, scope discussions, the NDA's and the contracts and service agreements and other bureaucracy and paperwork they were done once or twice or maybe thrice in a year and there was a procurement process by a huge corporation, like we've done HB in the past, or CTO securities or or FC Barcelona, or you know some of the banking institutions out there. And Now it feels like in every process I mean it doesn't feel like. It is like that there is a contract we had a sign right, then when we finish the project sometime there's another, there's other paperwork you got to do and you got to take more meetings to wrap up the contract, wrap up the project, handover. Maybe you get it back a few weeks later, but you don't know.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:There's a lot of uncertainty, even in bigger companies. So, yeah, I mean and this is evenly distributed the most of the startups we have been working for many years. They either died down or they ran out of money. It's not a good time to raise funds and they had to internalize development or they have to. They have had to lay off everybody and and keep the team at a minimum. They have shrunk back to a few folks, maybe founders only to keep the lights on right and and kind of like weather this storm and see if they can raise funds, maybe go back and and try to make the company more Profitable in the first place and then try to grow it. A couple of these clients might be coming back in the short mid future, but but you know a couple of them. They will not be operating anymore or they, they. They had some serious Financial problems this year and they had to stop working with us. So we wish them the best of the likes and and hopefully we will, will we'll get them back someday if they, they recover financially.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:But that's also happened to To the two SMB's. In SMB's the situation has been more like. They have had to slash down budgets and whereas last year they reduced their teams in HR, marketing and Operations, this year the spend has been Slashdown in in research and innovation and technology and product, which are more Core lines of their business. This is much more critical to their business. So I assume they are. You know it's very complicated. It's very complicated times for for SMB's, especially if their margins aren't big, if they don't have financing. So I assume they they have had to change pricing. Maybe you know the their providers. You know maybe the price has gone up or their rent has gone up, but their clients are requiring them to lower the prices. So it's kind of complicated to make all of this matching.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:And in the corporates we have also seen changes in the corporates. Luckily our two biggest clients, they haven't changed anything. If so, one of the clients has increased the budget for next year, which is uncommon, saying the tendency. But we've seen in other companies and other competitors if you will, that their corporate projects have either been paused or canceled or postponed, or they have. You know, the off-holds have reduced the scope of the project. So definitely looking for shorter contracts. So definitely it's going to be rough.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:As a matter of fact, one of the things that is really challenging, and it will be challenging for us in the short and midterm, is the lack of competitors. Up until last year we had a lot of competitors in our very own space, not saying generic development. We never competed against the small and generic agencies they do everything and anything nor with the big ones, big corporations like Everise, accenture, deloitte and whatnot, that they do everything also and they are cheap just because they are very big and they have a lot of rotation, they have a lot of junior people and they can afford to kind of lose money on the first phase of the project and they will get it back in further phases when it will pay off, they will increase the chance, they will upsell the client and you know, they get in there. They kind of like spread the tentacles and try to infiltrate other departments and whatnot. But the thing is, up until last year when there was a CTO, say you know random company, typeform not that we've never worked with Typeform, but it just had a random name was sending out an RFP to potential providers. He was choosing MarsBased, mobile, jazz, codegram, karumi in Madrid. So boutique dev shops, because they know them, they trust them, they like their philosophy, they prefer to pay a little bit more but get quality code. So if the project was 100 grand, then the proposals quotes would range between like 85 and 115, 120, right. There was little deviation here and there 5 to 10% and they would pick the one that could start maybe earlier, or the one that had a similar project, or the one they had more affinity with, whatever their criteria was. But you couldn't. You were sure that they were going to do a good job because all of them had more or less same quality standards right, and same type of developers, same seniority, if you will, same same. That kind of like gusto for the pixel, perfect designs and the quality and the last finishing touches, right.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:But now we're finding ourselves in these situations that most of these companies I mentioned they shut down, if not all of them, right or they have sold right. I mentioned in the past, like Karumi in my trade, they shut down. Goldgram sold the factorial, brock Rails sold to I think it was Brock Rails sold to Shopify. Carbon 5 sold to a big financial player in the US. So we're not competing against them anymore. We are finding ourselves competing with the big generic agencies and the small generic agencies that, irrespective of their size, they have the same fees, right, and our fees that range between like 18, 110, 120 euros per hour.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Now we are competing against people who charge 30 to 45, maybe, right, and that's very low for quality coding, but it's not like a CTO is not going to choose the best option, which would be Mark Space, of course it's that maybe their CFO or the CEO, whoever the last person to sign this is. It's like how can you justify a 60% difference in the price with the other competitors, right? And what's worse, in some projects, like tenders, will be discarded right away because we are not in the 80% that conforms with the average price, right? So if you are too far away from it, if your deviation is too big, bigger than usually the top two, top three and the bottom two, bottom three companies in terms of price they are automatically discarded from the process. So we like the median price has gone down and therefore we have to adapt to that somehow and that's the reality we're reaching right now.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Luckily, we'll still. We're still getting clients. There are some companies that still value the quality development, but we cannot turn a blind eye on the reality and we have to accept the. Maybe we have to change the pricing, maybe we have to do adapt and have different tiers of quality. I don't know. Maybe we have to do more approach closed scope projects that we have almost never done in the last five years. It's that's something that we're working on.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:So definitely, as I mentioned so website later, not being here, being a one man orchestra and all of these overhead in in work, in sales and and and operations, legal and whatnot, has been keeping us very busy. That's why we we haven't been communicating much. We would like to share much more. We'll do an effort. I'll try to do my best to bring back the weekly podcast. Might be a few weeks that you know still not able to do it, but definitely keep an eye out. We'd like to launch the website in a few weeks, if possible.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:We have finished pretty much everything right, working on the content, spanish translation. We have built a really cool, a really cool thing. I will share a more in a separate episode, maybe the tech stack, the, what we've built, build something custom, something really really cool. Technology speaking, the design brings back the woe factor, which is really cool, and we'll be able to share more content and you know, the podcast will be integrated and the new website it will not be two separate websites anymore and and we'll be able to create more content and better and Definitely it looks. It looks really cool. I can't wait to share it and also bringing back the podcast, because we, we've got five, seven yeah, seven episodes recorded that I recorded throughout the summer. I never released, so we kind of leave them here and we we believe this is fundamental to our business we really want to, we were, we really want to invest in this and now that we've got somebody replacing lady For her during the maternity leave, maybe now we'll be more, more able to kind of To, to work on all of these other things more efficiently and go back to the, to the regular schedule of the podcast newsletter and whatnot.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:That being said, there's a couple things that maybe we want to Um pass down to other people. I'm just shouting out here so that you've got the exclusivity and that you've got a kind of like a first, first right to claim it start-up digest and the start-up bcn A community we got for freelancers. That's something that we might want to pass on to somebody else. We've been curating started digest for the better part of seven years now and Eight years for the other initiative. I don't know if we are the right people to keep doing this anymore. Maybe somebody else could do it better, and that's my feeling. We're not gonna pass down start-up grind, so don't ask me about that. But the other things, they really do not match value to us anymore and I think we kind of have outgrown them. Somebody else could profit from that.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Gives you good exposure. It's a little bit of work but it's well worth it and it's fun and you get to know interesting people, interesting projects. So if you're interested kind of like you know it's either one of them, the two of them, or you got interesting things to share with us Shoot an email, hit me up on twitter or x, however you want to call it, and let's talk about it, because we feel like that's something that you can make a dent into the startup ecosystem. Require somebody else to take care of it. We really want to focus on the things that matter the most to us and and bring us more effort, and one of them is the podcast. So definitely I want to. I want to shut down some lines here and pass the baton to two other people. So, that being said, thank you very much for listening. If you're liking this podcast, you know hit, like and subscribe in. You know the platforms that you can give us a review and then again Apologize for the for the lack of communication the last two, three months, but we're back and we'd like to hear more stories, ready to publish the the ones that we have already recorded and ready to meet more people and to share more exciting news about what is going on.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Want to talk more about our new clients stuff we're building, how we build the technology the fuck ups. We've had a couple of Great, interesting stories this this summer that we want to share with you about, like prime react and remakes technologies that we Traditionally hadn't used for for a long time. We had never used before, but now we have adopted, now we're experts in them. So really looking forward to sharing all the stories. So that's it for me from me now, so see you in the next episode. Bye.