Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased
Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased
079 - Building the next 10 years of MarsBased
Celebrating a decade of bootstrapping brilliance, I, Àlex, founder of MarsBased, am back behind the mic to share an emotional tribute to the journey we've shared. As we revel in a significant milestone, I'm incredibly grateful for the unwavering support from our clients, friends, and the wider community. The anniversary bash in Barcelona was an unforgettable affair, filled with poignant moments that underscored the collective effort that's helped us thrive in an industry that's often obsessed with the fast money game. Our steadfast commitment to an office-less model and sustainable growth has been our secret sauce, and there's a palpable sense of pride as I recount the values and culture that will propel us forward.
As we peer into the horizon, the future is abuzz with possibilities and challenges for MarsBased. After a much-needed respite, the podcast format is ripe for innovation, promising more spontaneous episodes that might just come to you from a plane en route to San Francisco. The company is gearing up for expansion and adaptation, from hiring fresh talent to huddling up in Andorra for a strategic retreat, all while fine-tuning our business acumen to better serve our evolving client base. We're embracing new technologies like Python and AI, and as always, focusing on the sustainable growth that's been our cornerstone. Strap in and join us on this exhilarating ride into the next decade of MarsBased, where innovation meets resilience.
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🎬 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. Welcome after a few weeks of hiatus. I'm Alex. I'm the CEO and founder of MarsBased and I'm really happy to be here again because it's been a while since I last recorded an episode. It's going to be a solo episode. I'm going to be rambling on for a few minutes. First off, my apologies. We haven't been releasing podcasts because we've been very fucking busy. We turned 10 years old, as you might have realized, because we have been putting out a lot of content. We have announced this on social media, on our usual channels of communication.
Speaker 1:We organized and we hosted this big event in Barcelona, as a matter of fact, about the 10 years of the anniversary of MarsBase and Startup Train, and I wanted to start off by saying thank you. Thank you to everybody who came, thank you to everybody who sent the videos and some kind words for our team, for my co-founders, and I Thank you for everybody who shared you know cheers and kind messages on social media, sent emails, whatsapps, called us to say you know, to say nice words and sharing some memories with us. I compiled the video 30 minutes long. I had to keep it at 30 minutes only. We received so many videos from people across the globe, from former clients, current clients, former employees, friends of the Mars Space family, startup brand speakers, podcast guests that we had, partners, providers, sponsors. You know it felt our hearts with joy. I shared the video internally with our team because there are some some things are confidential, but it almost brought me to tears when I was editing it. It took me almost a weekend to compile it. So thank you to everybody who sent the videos. Thank you to everybody who attended the event.
Speaker 1:We had almost 300 people at Valkyria on the second week of March, we gathered the StartBrand team, the MarsBase team, and for the first time in 10 years, I spoke at length about MarsBased at StartUpBrand, which is something I really wanted to do, but I always want to keep both things very separate. I didn't want people to think that we organize an event to sell our services. Nothing further from the truth. Entrepreneurs are fucking broke. They're not our target audience, and that got me wrong. I really don't want to work with friends, and so we'd rather work for other companies, and so that helped to create a more transparent, honest and a purer event, if you will, because if we wanted to sell something, then we'd organize Shopify events or Ruby on Rails events or technical conferences and whatnot, and then you can sell there, you can hire. Startbrand is something that we give back to the community with. This is our way to pay it forward grow community and help others and, you know, in the true StartupBrand fashion, following their values. This is something that we have curated for 10 years, and so we had an evening of meeting a lot of people and I shared I think for the first time we didn't have the speaker and I put together a keynote intended for 30 minutes ended up being almost an hour or slightly over an hour because we also had, like, some technical problems with the microphones at the event, but nonetheless it was a really good event. You know, I was welling up at the end of my keynote saying the heartfelt thank you to everyone, and so thank you to everybody who made it possible.
Speaker 1:We created the company 10 years ago. We were not sure we would make it to the first six months, and here we are, 10 years afterwards more than $2 million in annual revenue, completely bootstrapped. Never had an office, never had a board, never had investors, never had advisors, never had a lot of things that most companies have, and we just don't. We see the world differently and it's funny because a lot of the companies I have interviewed at Startup Brain over the years when we started in March 2014,. These companies don't exist anymore. We have survived a lot of these companies, and to our credit, not saying that we do things better.
Speaker 1:But I have to speak up and we have to take pride in what we do and explain the world that there's another way of doing things, outside of the typical hustle of raising funds and going through accelerators, incubators, and going after VCs and business angels and building something that you don't know whether people need it, trying to find product market fit and trying to hit the hockey stick. Growth and all of that I don't know. There's another world out there Bootstrap companies, services, agencies, organic growth, you know, sales-led growth, if you will, and it's as healthy, if not healthier, than other kinds of entrepreneurship. And one thing is for sure we think more about the long-term sustainability of these businesses and I'm pretty sure that we made it to the 10 years because we followed this model and we will be for another 10 years if we continue being true to this model. A lot of companies get lost, especially in our sector, when, after a while. After they hit a certain scale, they see an opportunity and they're like, oh, fuck it. Now I know that we can just multiply our team by factor five or 10 in two years and raise a little bit of investment, open an office and whatnot, and they just grow too much and they lose their culture and the way of doing things and they fuck it up, and precisely that's what we don't want to do. So anyways, long story short, we've been very busy.
Speaker 1:After the celebration of the 10 years I had to take a little bit of a break. I was a little bit burned out, hence podcast taking this unintended break. So sorry about that. I don't know when this episode will come out. I'm going to San Francisco for the next two, three weeks, very soon. Hopefully I can edit it and publish it before I board my plane, otherwise I'll do it on the plane.
Speaker 1:I don't know if I will be recording more episodes in the next weeks. We don't plan to shut down the podcast. Fear not, we'll be coming back, but maybe I record on the go. I don't know. I will be just being a little bit more disruptive with the podcast. I'm feeling a little bit tired of the Firestay chat slash interview that I've been doing for so many years 10 years of Sutter Grind, three, four other years at other events before that, and now the podcast. I've interviewed. I don't know more than 300 people 500 people, I can't even count and I'm feeling like I got to do something more disruptive. So stay tuned.
Speaker 1:I don't want to promise anything. I still want to record a few episodes that we have in mind, that we wanted to do, you know, the 10 years anniversary Q&A with Xavi and Jordi, my co-founders. We'll be sharing more stuff, probably some more technical stuff. We do have stuff on the pipeline, but I don't really want to promise anything. I'm really focused on building the next 10 years. So what I really realized last week when I got back from the break is we made it to 10 years. Now how do we build the next 10 years for the company?
Speaker 1:Right now, we are focused on a few fronts. I can go really quickly over a few of them. One of them is hiring. We're hiring two people by the time this podcast is aired. I don't know if we will have hired these people, just in case. We're hiring a front-end developer React, slash, angular, what have you? We are hiring a tech lead with Rails, ideally with DevOps as well. It can be tech agnostic, but ideally we need more with Rails because one of our most senior person in the team, oriol, is leaving the company after eight years and we're massively thankful for these years with him. So we need to replace him and so we're focused on hiring.
Speaker 1:We are focused on the company retreat coming up in June. Early June we're going to Andorra for a week with the team and you know this one hits close to home because it's one of my favorite places on earth and we've been dying to do this retreat for a few years, and so it's going to be fun. And it's the first retreat to organize without Leda because she's still in maternity leave. We're super thankful to have Ellie on board her replacement, and so it will be a very good one. We're also very busy with changing clients. This and last year I've commented it on the pod already we are changing clients more often than we were used to. Because of the macroeconomic situation. Companies run out of business, they run out of budget, projects get canceled, postponed. They've reduced capacity more often, so we're in a good situation.
Speaker 1:Last year was pretty good, actually Probably the second or third biggest year of Mark's based in terms of profit and biggest one to date in revenue. But it came with a lot of effort, so it was not easy sailing. It was not smooth sailing, but yeah, we're still in this dynamic of, like, smaller projects or not as many ongoing retainers as we used to have, there's more fixed bits, projects or projects chopped up in phases. So, mvp, slash, prototyping, slash, concept, what have you Then? Phase one, phase two. Between phases sometimes they take a break, which is very uncomfortable as a company, but that's the reality right now. So excited because some of the names that we've got on the sales funnel are pretty big and some clients coming back. Most likely we're going to end up working again with Localistico. It's a company that we worked for about five years until they ran out of money a couple of years back, a couple of years back, excited to work with other companies that we respect and admire, and I can't disclose the name. So basically, we're putting together so many great proposals. Javi and Jordi have really stepped up and helping me so much in the sales department, so this is great.
Speaker 1:What else? We are also very busy in defining how do we have to present ourselves and our pitching, our value proposition as a company, because for many, many years we've been tied to development projects only and maybe we want to be known for something else. Right, we have had a few consulting slash business projects in the last year, year and a half. We feel like now we've shaken off this imposter syndrome and we want to do more stuff. You know, for the first five years, we're doing exclusively Ruby and Angular, and still nowadays people are like you only do Ruby, right, you only do Angular.
Speaker 1:And we're like no, we've been Twink, react, react Native, Nodejs, vue Ionic since 2018, 19, 17, depending on the technology and last year we started doing Python and AI, and I think we do have Python on the website, but we don't have success cases. We don't have blogs about Python. We don't have clients on the website. We have signed a couple of AI projects that we are developing right now. We haven't completed them, so that's why we also don't have portfolio, but we do have to get this shit on the website. Ai is nowhere on the website, so how are we going to get? We're getting clients actually without putting it on the website, so how are we going to get? We're getting clients actually without putting it on the website.
Speaker 1:But we have to decouple from being a development-only consultancy and incorporate business or innovation into the conversation, and so that's one of the challenges I have right now. We're hiring also a marketing slash, content slash, growth person, versatile person, a generalist if possible, that can help me with marketing and so that I can focus more on sales, but I will still be doing some marketing, can help me to co-host the podcast, so that I am not here alone in front of the mic, in front of the camera so often and probably can help to make sure that we don't skip a week without dropping an episode. All right, so you know, working for building the next 10 years of the company is a very, very big thing. Building the next 10 years of the company is a very, very big thing. I will have a lot of time to ponder and reflect on this on the way to and back from San Francisco and while being there for the Startup Grind Global Conference. But yeah, content, more portfolios, more podcasts. We'll rework a lot of the things that we will redefine, a lot of the things we have stopped using, a few software pieces that we're using. That's going to be on the. That's one of the upcoming blog posts I'm writing.
Speaker 1:We we actually have passed the baton on startup digest. We'll not be creating Startup Digest anymore. We have done it for almost eight years, week in, week out. Hundreds of issues of Startup Digest have been sent out by either Leide or me over the years. We have passed it on to someone else. We were looking to pass some other projects as well, so that we can focus more on our stuff and maybe launch new stuff or double down on some of the things that we think require more investment and more effort, like the podcast or the startup brand events or our newsletter stuff like that right.
Speaker 1:So a lot of challenges coming up and so extremely thankful for the 10 years that we have enjoyed. Extremely thankful for the support that we keep receiving from former clients and the community and everybody sending questions to the podcast, suggesting speakers, sending improvements, or just sending some social the podcast suggesting speakers sending improvements, or just sending some social media love. Or saying like, hey, I listened to your podcast, it's very good, or a podcast, you could improve these. The interest the interest are too long. Fucking Kedu Manchon from MailDrag is like your interests are too long. I skip them all the time, but the podcast is great. Thank you, this is really helpful. This is honest, honest feedback. If you say this is good, it's not really helpful. If you tell me what we can improve, one thing we can improve, I'll try to do it. My working ethic is always trying to improve one thing at a time. That's one thing that we did with Startup Grind. Improve one thing every event. That's why we have a Kikas event.
Speaker 1:We will be sharing more stuff. You know all of these 10 years of learnings about remote work, async technologies, management, mental health I don't know if there's a lot we can share. So, for those who have accompanied us for many, many years even those that came to the first Startup Trainer Band, listened to the first podcast episode, were sent the first clients or somewhere in the middle, or even the last contract we signed with companies like E-Tech, eclair, travel, tax Free, heartflix Extremely thankful for these 10 years. So thank you everybody. If you like the pod, keep supporting it, keep sharing it, subscribe, give a review on your favorite podcasting platform and send some more ideas and I'll see you sometime soon, maybe in a week, two, three, five, six. Definitely we'll come back before summer, hopefully with recharged batteries and fresher ideas and without further ado. I think that's all from me, what you can expect now. So thank you very much. Here's to 10 more years of MarsBased and, with your support, I'm 100% sure that we'll see that day. Thank you very much.