Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased
Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased
087 - Our 2024 in review + forecast for 2025
What if economic downturns could be a springboard for growth instead of a setback? Join Àlex, the CEO and founder of MarsBased, as he shares the inside scoop on how his company not only weathered the technological market storm of 2024 but emerged stronger. Learn from their journey through industry challenges, management demands, and the strategic pivots that led to exciting collaborations and a revenue milestone of 2.5 million euros, all while remaining bootstrapped and expanding the team.
Despite grappling with project estimation issues and sudden contract cancellations, the story of MarsBased is one of resilience and adaptability. Àlex recounts the emotional journey of navigating a tense Q1 and the strategic decisions that helped regain stability. From transparent communication practices to celebrating MarsBased's decade-long journey, this episode paints a vivid picture of staying the course amidst uncertainty. Get insights into how MarsBased's strategic shift to smaller projects and consulting work opened doors to contracts with entities like Mobile World Capital.
Join us as we explore MarsBased’s technological strategy evolution, focusing on the decision to standardize their tech stack with Ruby on Rails and React. Àlex explains how this strategic move ensures reliable, cost-effective solutions for their clients without compromising quality. Discover the balance between embracing innovation in areas like VR and AI while staying committed to proven technologies. As the episode wraps up, Àlex invites listeners to share feedback and ideas, reinforcing the collaborative spirit of the MarsBased journey.
🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/
Well, hello everybody and welcome to Life on Mars. I'm Alex, ceo and founder of MarsBased, and in this episode I'm going to be reviewing what happened in 2024 at MarsBased and in the industry in general, and what will be of us at the industry in general in 2025. Was a really exciting year, not void of any kind of pressure, because it was a transformational year for us. It was a year in which we have seen a lot of changes in the industry. To give a little bit of context, in mid-2022, when there was a huge decline of the technological market, when all the stock went down, the season of layoffs started, everything changed drastically for boutique agencies and agencies and consultancies in general, but more so for boutique agencies, while it didn't affect us immediately because these things are caused by a rippling effect. So, basically, the effects of that stark decline, we saw them almost six months afterwards. We haven't quite recovered from that as an industry as a whole. Right. And August 2022, when more or less this was getting crazier, when the roller coaster of technology was on the way down, we did not see any changes coming in the months after. That is that companies were much more cautious about approaching external development and services in general, because they were not able to raise funds as quickly and as swiftly as before, and they were not able to get money from banks or venture debt or other sources also as easy as it was before the summer of 2022. So, fast forward two years of some sort of an economic downturn, also for agencies. This short-sightedness, this dryness in the pipeline for investment for many, many companies and the cancellation and postponing of projects obviously affect a lot of the companies, but not all of them.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:There's a point to be made that actually crisis or crisis I don't even know what plural, right plural for this word is in English are good times for consultancies, and we have discussed this in the first season of Life on Mars with Gordon Cardiff, the CEO of Clear Peaks, a company that we used to be providers to back in the day, and he grew the company through a couple of, because the company is 20 years old. If I remember correctly, he sold it a couple years ago to German private equity, and so he was always sort of counseling me on how to endure these long winters, because these are opportunity times for smaller agencies to get bigger clients right. Smaller agencies to get bigger clients right. A lot of customers, big corporations, for instance, they want to cut down on costs and sometimes they look for cheaper alternatives. Well, that's not a good opportunity for us, because on very rare occasions we are cheaper than the actual provider of our prospective clients because, at least for Spain, we're on the expensive side of things. In other countries, in comparison, maybe we're cheaper than the local players, but not in our local market, but anyways.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:So what started in 2022, it is still lingering in 2024, or it was lingering in 2024 at the time of recording January 2025, we are still in the same situation and a lot of our competitors slash friends, slash similar companies with like-minded company cultures and methodologies and ways of doing things. They have been wiped out by the pandemic, either because they took the wrong decisions, they overhired, they bet all on single client or technology that ended up not working, or because they grew tired of business and they just wanted to look for an exit, or maybe they just, you know, fought between the partners and they had to shut down. That left us very alone in the boutique space and, as a result of that, the boutique ecosystem has sort of disintegrated and whereas before we would be on the mid-range the price because there would be the generalist companies on the cheaper side of things, and there would be the more expensive companies, the super specialized boutiques. They have been 20, 30 years doing this. They have the most experts in the market. They only work in very, very specific technologies and kind of projects Like, for instance I'm thinking of ThoughtWorks, where I'm thinking of people at the labs back in the day. They were the expensive ones.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:There were, on the other side of the spectrum, the cheaper ones, and we were sitting in the middle and therefore we would be in an advantage position to win a lot of the prospective clients. They discard the companies on the edges of the spectrum and they focus on the mid-ranges. But when all of the players disappear and suddenly not you know, we have a situation where players in the middle are not the majority but the minority. There's a shift in the middle are not the majority but the minority. There's a shift in the buying intention towards, especially towards the cheaper side of things, right, and we are discarded with higher end Together. We're lumped into this bag of expensive companies, right? And the companies who want to get a better bank for the buck or they just want to save some money because it's downturn, there's a crisis out there, they just go for the cheaper companies, and so there's a point to be made in that if you're able to lower your prices and just act more cheaply, then you have a higher chance of survival in these kind of scenarios.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:But we didn't want to do that and we have endured this. We have not only survived, but we have thrived in these trying times, right, in spite of all these things that go against us, these unfavorable winds, we have grown the company. We have managed to close 2024 with an annual revenue of 2.5 million in euros. We grew the team three people last year. We have consistently been growing the team two, three people for 10 years straight and growing every year. As a matter of fact, 2024 was a record year for us. We have been hitting record year after record year since probably the third year of the company, something like that, growing at a steady pace of 20 to 35% every year, completely bootstrapped. For those who don't know us, we're an entirely bootstrapped company, super healthy, growing organically, perhaps more slowly than we should, perhaps more slowly than we could, but we don't know any better. And by doing it this way we have made it this far. But we don't know any better, and by doing it this way, we have made it this far. So we know that at least there's a good chance that this was the right decision all along.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I wanted to do a little bit of a recap of what happened last year and why we've been so inactive and so intermittent in either social media and communications, podcasts and whatnot. It's because we've been working on projects right. This whole situation of prospective clients wanting to go for the cheaper side of things. We ended up chopping projects in phases right, and whereas previously to 2022, we would sign annual retainers, now we're signing multi-phase projects right. Sometimes phase one concatenates with phase two just right away. There's no gap in between phases. Sometimes there's a huge gap between phases right. That's not ideal. That implies more management overhead. That implies that sometimes the people who develop phase one of the project, if there's a gap of, say, four months, maybe they are not able to go back to the project in phase two right, so there are inefficiencies there. There's going to be more friction. Luckily for us, not very often, and we haven't had any bad friction with the clients in 2024. So, super, not only happy, but extremely grateful for that.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:But, yeah, that forced us to do more management, and the three founders, xavi Jordi and I we've had to manage many, many situations. We've been hired a project manager two years ago, cristina to help us with this, and we have created a couple of people in the company to do tech lead. But that's not enough. We're always lacking more management capacity, and so that's why I have had to step in to do some management in the recent years and, as a result of that, the marketing efforts of MarsFace, the projects like you know, it's Startup Prime, startup Digest, the newsletter, the podcast they've had different fates. I'm going to be going over all of this.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:So, basically, q1 started pretty badly. We came from having had a situation with a client in which we sort of messed up with an estimate Client also didn't do the job, so it was more of a 50-50 thing. We ended up solving the issue, but we had to double down on effort on a project to make sure that we met the deadlines, and that took away all of our focus and distracted us for a good two, three months, in which this situation wasn't able to be stabilized until later on in the year. So, basically, q1 started off not so well for us. It was record in revenues, but we don't only optimize for revenues in the company. Actually, revenue is not a KPI of Mars East, it is a byproduct. We optimize for margin and we optimize to bring down stress and we optimize for quantity, but revenue is more of a vanity metric, if you ask me.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:In the beginning of the year we also I think that's where we kept the bleeding we stopped the bleeding of losing the annual retainers, the last two annual retainers. We lost them end of 23, beginning of 24, with a couple of startups that they were not able to raise more funding. One of them shut down, the other one had to internalize all development and cut down on costs to make it to profitability, which, in all fairness, it's fair play for them. And we started signing only small projects. Right, we started signing projects, a lot of them, more than ever. You know, this year has been a record year in the number of projects we have signed. Maybe, if I'm able to remember the number, it will be a big number. But whereas, like maybe five years ago, we'd sign two or three contracts a year and we're already 15 people, and now probably we sign like 20 or 30 because they're smaller.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Right, we started working in for a couple of old clients Shoptimus, ai, despasa and ZapTales. Zaptales, for instance, is a company that we had signed in 2015, if I remember correctly, or 16. And so for a couple of years, they had to internalize development to cut down on costs and whatnot. We also, interestingly enough, we started selling more consulting projects, like audits, and, while that seems like a little bit of a distraction because they're on the smaller side of things and some of them I have to do them myself, like, for instance, we started working for the Mobile World Capital, the organizing entity of Mobile World Congress.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:That was the first project I did alone and by myself in the company, where no one else in the company knew what the fuck I was doing. Since 2018 or 19, when I did some work for MailTrack, I remember that was some consulting projects we did back then, which was more like BI, market perspective, figuring out stuff like pricing and how to approach VCs, how to approach potential sales and stuff like that in Barcelona, attracting top tier speakers to speak at the conference and make the same play they did with four years from now, 10 years ago, and to build a huge developments conference or a tech conference in Barcelona within the Mobile World Congress right. I did that project. It was very fun, went very well. As a matter of fact, we renewed the contract just a month later to do it again for this year, so that was positive.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:That all happened in Q1. One of the other good things is we we found one that really works very well and, more importantly, in Q1, we celebrated the 10 years anniversary. It was a fantastic event. We managed to get 300 people in the room, with old clients, new clients first employees, our first intern, emilio, a lot of the speakers of Startup Brian or the Mars Base podcast, vips from the Barcelona tech ecosystem and we even had a couple of clients flying in from other countries. Super happy, it went very well. It was a fantastic night. I rambled for 90 minutes on stage about everything I had learned about business and life in general running MarsBase, and it was very emotional. I ended up welling up and almost crying because I have family in the front row. I had the whole MarsBase team there. I had my two co-founders coming on stage and I was deeply moved, so that was very good.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:That was a great way to end Q1, but the situation was very uncertain and we had to learn how to balance sharing too much versus sharing not enough, as transparency is one of our core pillars in our company culture. We, we, we also we were sort of realizing that for too long we were sharing bad news. We're saying that it's so cold out there, you know, layoff season, company shutting down, the interest rates going up and life is becoming more expensive. Salaries might be going down for people in the industry not for us but it's not a good time to change. Companies or people are not taking as many risks as before. And so it dawned on us that maybe we were bringing down the morale inside the team by being too over communicative and this aspect and this kind of things. Right, and in many ways that was true.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Like the situation was not getting better after two years and we were starting to lose faith. We found this, were like this shit is not improving, what is happening? And so we we tried to, you know, we tried to keep everybody motivated as best as we could. Company was doing well We've always done well financially, and that was no exception but there was more risk involved. Like, even though we had a lot of money in the bank, we didn't know what the situation would be like in two or three months potentially so in 2024, every three months we've been in a situation that within a few weeks, half of the team would be unassigned or they would have no project right, because people renew last moment and projects are so small, phase one doesn't really finish when phase two should start, and stuff like that. So there was a lot of uncertainty involved.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:However, we went to you know, we celebrated our company retreat, we had celebrated the anniversary, all was well. We, you know, we got all the projects under control again. That was good, but that came at a very high price. We had to stop doing marketing and I had stopped the podcast. The newsletter had been one year without sending. We had shut down other projects, like Startup Digest. Other side projects were starting to feel a little bit abandoned, like our open source, our Slack community, and so all of a sudden we realized that, hey, we need somebody else to run this. Alex can do it no more, and so, unless you know, I focus on that, but I couldn't run the projects and I couldn't run sales, which would have been very short-sighted and probably the end of the company as we know it.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Right, we had one situation that sort of exemplifies the extreme bad luck we've had in 2024. We were supposed to visit our friends in Nice, in the Basque Country, and on the way there there was a huge storm in Bilbao, where we were supposed to land in northern Spain, the Basque country to be more precise. And so as the plane started descending, it lifted up again and the pilot said ladies and gentlemen, we're not able to land because of the lack of visibility, so we're going back to Barcelona. We're like but what the fuck? We're just there. We were literally on top of the airport and we were being brought back to Barcelona because of the extremely nasty weather conditions. And so we flew back to Barcelona. But Charlie Jordi and I were like but we gotta visit them anyways, surely there's something else we can do. And so we said like, how about? Fuck it, let's drive. And so we got on the car and we drove six hours. We made it there.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Of course, we lost most of the day, and we had planned to use that day for, you know, meeting some other clients them and then the next morning we would fly back. So we had to shift this a little bit more, and because we're not taking the plane back at eight or nine am in the morning next day we could stay longer. We decided to postpone the meeting to the next day, right? So on the way there we had some sort of a partner's meeting, chubby jordy and I, and we decided not few things and how to do this, how to do that and whatnot. And I remember that, know, we went for dinner and drinks and whatnot.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:And so we wake up the next day to an email from clients saying, hey, sorry to let you know, but we will not be renewing our contract. And that was June, and they canceled for August. Right In August they were not able to continue extending the project. I was not a big client but I said like, okay, what a pity, but we sort of expected that to happen, you know with a small startup. So we go to the meeting with the client, we receive another email, this time from HP, a huge client, and they say our contract that was ending in August will not be renewing because we're recentralizing all of the development of HP and it's going all to India and and so we'll not be extending our contracts. Oh, wow, that was bigger because we had two developers there and then, yeah, so two and a half developers in the project, so it was a bigger hit.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I said that doesn't really feel right. And in the middle of the meeting, lo and behold, we received an email from Repsol which is from a contract we had signed one year before. That never started. They canceled it altogether. We sort of expected we were not counting on that project, because you know, we signed a contract and after a year the project hasn't started. Something's not right there. And so we, even though it was not a good I mean, we didn't expect that project to start. It was not a big project anyways, but it felt like a truck, like it was a big emotional hit, like three contracts canceled on the same day. That must have been a joke. So we took the meeting with nice fantastic meeting. We had lunch and then after lunch we drive back and we went into.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:We decided to go into I don't like the terminology of war mode, but we had another. Well, we had to basically throw away everything we had decided the day before on the way to the pass, count free and repeat the same meeting, which I've enjoyed, and discuss stuff and scenarios and outcomes, and you know what we should do here and there for the months to come. And so you know some other clients we lost last minute or some other prospective clients that we lost last minute, and between May and August is always a hard time. It's basically the lowest months for us in sales and those look pretty harsh, right, because we're not selling anything, but yeah, so we had to double down on sales.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:However, not everything was wrong, not everything was bad. We signed a few contracts. We started working for Moody's. That was not everything was wrong, not everything was bad. We signed a few contracts. We started working for Moody's. That was not a huge contract, but it's a huge client, right, and that gave us a little bit of hope. We signed a contract with Nieves Energía, an energy company from Spain, to redo their mobile apps, which is a pretty substantial contract, and then a few other like smaller projects basically bespoke CMSs, marketplaces and whatnot and so we signed something that got us through the months of summer, right, but we decided to go a little bit like into savings mode. We started cutting down on expenses. Jordi did a terrific job there and because we push sales, because we cut expenses at the beginning of Q3, we turned the situation around, and so, whereas everything before the summer looked gloomy and dark and looked pretty bad.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:After the summer, the outlook was very positive. Right, we signed a few deals, mainly thanks to that big sales push. Right, we signed Vueling, for instance. We signed an innovation project with Vueling. We signed Everesting, which is an e-commerce, and we'll be doing more stuff for them, but basically started off as only as like a marketing pages and e-commerce and whatnot. Trompo, that is an Endora company marketplace for second-hand cars. And HappyScribe, a company that has appeared in the podcast. It's a bootstrap company doing AI, built in Ruby and Rails, who started working for them in the beginning of Q3 of last year.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:So this turned the situation around. That's when we decided to increase the team. We incorporated a couple people, we signed an audit a tech audit that usually we don't do because we don't have the capacity but we started doing this kind of process as well. So we're reactivating hiring, we reactivated some of the marketing initiatives and we even got some developers writing blog posts for Mars Space for the first time in 10 years. But I'm not, I'm not going to go into that, but yeah. So basically we changed the narrative of it's cold out there, like the prospect isn't as good, not good, the future is terrible too. Well, it could actually be a very good year for us, and we are.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:We have turned the situation around, right? It's funny how you go from one to the other in just a matter of a few weeks, but it shows that when you do the work, it actually comes back manifold, right? We started optimizing as well some stuff in the company, like how to be more effective in internal processes. We realized that we're losing a lot of opportunities because we're very slow in the process of taking requirements, building a proposal and sending to the client, right, and so we decided to double down on that, and we came up with a pretty good strategy that we're going to share in another episode, just so we don't extend this one for too long, right? We?
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I don't like admitting this in public, but we signed a couple of WordPress projects Not that we love WordPress, but it's not that you do. What you got to do is. You know they were part of something else, right? One of them was Shopify project that they also had a WordPress, and so, okay, why not? And the other one was somebody who really, really wanted to work with us and, after having analyzed it because we had analyzed WordPress as an option to build our website we launched last year and so we felt confident we could do that project. And turns out we signed a pretty substantial deal and so we're working with WordPress. Nowadays, as we speak, wordpress projects are being built.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:And then towards the end of the year Q4, thanks to that, moody's project we completed successfully. The client was very happy and they decided to sign a retainer with us, which was the first retainer we signed in almost two years. So very happy with that. It shows that if you do a great job, then clients might want to pay you back and give you more trust. We hired two people, mateo and Enrique. They joined the company right before our Martian day of Christmas, the last Martian day of the year. That was a very good one. We had pretty shit weather in Barcelona, but it was a really fun experience.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:And then, you know, we started also enlarging the team on the freelancing side, because we started having these peaks of work and we wanted to have more people to be able to deal with them, and so I think Q4 was the time that we have built more innovative projects. So we built a VR project, we built WordPress, we work with AI. So we completed two, three projects in AI. We did consulting, we did audits, we were a little bit all around but also we tried new tools to be able to work faster. I'm going to go into this a little bit all around. But also we tried new tools to be able to work faster. I'm going to go into this a little bit later, but basically adopting AI to be more effective, more efficient and probably bringing down the cost of the projects. Right.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:For instance, we tried Versus V0 to prototype stuff or to build designs. We tried Courser, copilot, raycast, ai stuff like that in order to, you know, build more efficiently, maybe avoiding Googling so much and, I know, spending time on what matters, not on what doesn't right. We also started putting out more content. That was good. That was a huge push to the marketing process of MarsBased. But, on the other hand, I quit StartupFriend, which is something that I had been doing for 20 years. I had been doing for 10 years and it was a big milestone. After 10 years, 143 events, three of them conferences, five or six summits, 9,000 subscribers to newsletter, more than 30,000 people that you know came to the events all combined, and God knows what other metrics.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I decided to quit to focus more on Mars Space. Mars Space demanded me more than ever, and so it was time to pass the baton. We have yet to find somebody, but in case you're interested, just drop me a line. But yeah, the company demanded more, and so that was a responsibility-based decision. So that was 2024.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:We had other realizations there. We realized that we were still receiving a lot of deal flow in Rovi. We realized that we were not extremely efficient in certain parts of the productivity side of things, when building apps or in internal methodologies and whatnot. But, yeah, basically because we saw that we are receiving more requests to build MVPs and prototypes, both from startups and corporates, because probably they want to test the waters a little bit more before going full product, we decided to standardize this more, and I'm going into what we will do in 2025, right, one of the main decisions we've taken technologically speaking, is to standardize our tech stack and decide look, if the client wants to do it more cheaply without skimming on quality, we'll say look, you want to do it more cheaply, we do it with our stack, and our stack will be Ruby and Rails on the back, react on the front and all sorts of technologies that we can spec out and we can share later on right? I don't want to get too technical on this particular podcast episode, but if you want to have more control on the tech stack and the architectural decisions, libraries and whatnot, it's going to be a little bit more expensive for you. So there's going to be this trade-off. We'll see how that plays out.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:We have found out over the years that in a lot of cases, clients don't really care, and if we're able to save them some bucks by choosing the technology, then so be it. That's of great value to them, right? Of course we're doing it. Technologies that are awfully tested tried and tested. Big ones are built on this one. So you know, basically, on Robeat, rails and JavaScript, they are tried and tested. They are not new technologies, right, tried and tested. There are not new technologies. Right, we have seen how technology is changing but at the same time, we don't want to be on the bleeding edge of technology.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:We decided to take the approach whereby we'll not be the first ones doing things. Right. We didn't jump on the AI bandwagon two, three years ago. We did it last year. Python became popular many years ago, or React, and it took us a few years to get into this, like when we started the company in 2014,. React was already around, but Angular was the big thing, right? So we decided to, we chose Angular and then we moved to React in 2017, if I remember correctly, when it was tried and tested.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:When Facebook had Facebook and Airbnb, they were doubling down on React and just investing big time in them and big companies were using it. So we said now it's a good time for us to go into this technology, right? We don't want to be the innovators, we want to be followers in this case, and this will allow us to train us properly, to have more time to inspect things and learn the technologies and avoid fuck-ups. Right, and come into the projects as experts in the technologies. When you cannot be an expert if you are, you know riding the wave you might be lucky, but you cannot be an expert if you are, you know riding the wave, you might be lucky, but you cannot be an expert because you haven't really figured out all the nuts and bolts of this technology and you haven't tried it in five or 10 or 15 different projects. So, anyways, as I said, you know standardizing the tech stack.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:For the curious ones, it will be Rails API for the backend, reactos Remix, or Nextjs, the frontend Tailwind, css for the styles, shadcn as a UI components library I'm reading this because it's quite a lot of things Fake command designs for projects, lineart for project management, render for backend hosting, cloudflare, slash Verso for frontend hosting, react, native with Expo for mobile, and there could be more, but we will be sharing this soon. So you know, in terms of technology, a little bit of forecast for 2025 is Ruby is not dead. As a matter of fact, we're seeing a renaissance of Ruby. We have seen that probably people being laid off from companies like Shopify, stripe, microsoft are huge Ruby players of them. They're creating the new companies in Ruby, right? I know a few folks that got out of Factorial and they built their app on Ruby on Rails because Factorial is a huge Ruby on Rails player, right? So it makes sense and it's still a very good technology. It's very solid, it's very modern, it's adapting to the new ways of doing things, highly opinionated, but still really good, and so we're still really happy with it.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:React has proven to be a good investment for us. We don't see any other technology overcoming React in the next year or two, so we're dabbling down on that one. We have tried all flavors front-end. We have tried Svelte, we have tried Vuejs, angular, ember. Back in the day, we still have got an active project in Backbone, which is pretty funny, but yeah, so basically it's going to be React all the way. You know, we we have other other learnings in in technology that we can share on on a on a blog post. But, yeah, the main thing that we want to share for 2025 and now I'm things we want to get away from the narrative.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:We are a development boutique. We are a development shop, development agency, ruby and Rails agency, whatever you want to call it and we want to focus on innovation and technology. We want to appeal to bigger clients or, to put it another way, we don't want people to filter the projects before they arrive to us. If we focus so much on technology, like with the Ruby and Rails, javascript, python somebody who has got an idea for a project and comes to our website will be like oh, I thought the best, I think the best technology for it is like a mobile app, and these guys don't do mobile or it's. I've been advised to do this in Java. These guys cannot help me, so therefore, I will not approach them. Right, maybe that project doesn't really require Java. Maybe that mobile app is not a mobile app, maybe it's like a progressive web app, or maybe it's a web app altogether. Maybe it's a desktop app, right. So we want to do that filtering for you. That's why we're getting away. We're probably like putting down, like lowering the position of the technologies and the ranking on the website in favor of technology innovation product. We're still figuring it out right, so we're not becoming a generalist.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:But what we have learned is that over the course of these 10, almost 11 years now, we have been overly cautious and extremely conservative when it comes to technology and pretty much everything that hasn't quite fitted our exact we have said no to. Even before we did React. If a React opportunity came around, we would say no. The jump from Angular to React was very big, but we just didn't want to do it because we wanted to make sure that we fucking nailed it. But in a couple of occasions we were forced to use another technology, either by the client or because we were really good friends with the client, and we said, ok, we'll split the risk right. Or this is a sandbox project, or this is like an experiment. This is something that we just want to build, but we'll not be using it a lot. So you guys can play with new technologies. Okay, let's do it right. We did it with mobile in 2016 for DPL. We did it with Nodejs for Clear Peaks in 2017 or late 16.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:And we did it with VR for a big corporation last year. So clients said like, look guys, we want a VR project and we want you to build it because of references, and they kind of like forced us to do it and we're like, okay, well, at that time we're probably short of projects. That wasn't the big driver behind that decision, but we said, if we can afford to make this move and take this risk, it's now. This project with this client right, turned out, it went really fucking well. And so it dawned on us that most of the times, the success of the project is not tied to technology. It is on the methodology. It is is not tied to technology. It is on the methodology. It is on who manages the expectations. It is on correct communication with the client and doing the right work, doing work that matters right. And so we decided to open up a little bit the spectrum of technologies, provided that we can manage that, and we have calculated the risks with the client, and so there's a huge learning. We'll be doing a software branding of the website, of our marketing materials, because we have to communicate this to people. Right?
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Most people still know us as like the Ruby guys, right? The Ruby agency from Barcelona and even some of our actual clients, some of our current clients I know they don't listen to this, but one of them every year comes to us like, but hey guys, I've got new projects, but let me know when you guys do Nodejs, and every year we have to tell them we have been doing Nodejs since 2016. But yeah, it's a recurring meme. So that goes to say that it's sort of like the Harry Potter effect, right, that the actor that characterized Harry Potter will forever be Harry Potter, just like Elijah Wood would always be Frodo, right? So we will always be the Ruby guys, even though we have done mobile, vr, ai, python, nodejs, react, what have you. We will always be the Ruby guys, but if we're new clients, we can get some people that can understand this and can get like we're not. We'll not change the image that past clients have got of us. That's perfect, it works. It could be better, but it works because they will still be coming for projects because they always do right.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:But for new people, it would be great to communicate that we are a bigger agency, that we're not just three guys doing Ruby like 10 years ago. We're 20 people in-house. We're not just three guys doing Ruby like 10 years ago. We're 20 people in-house. We're 10 freelancers. So we're at a 30-people workforce that can do all sorts of projects. That's why we enlarged the team. That's why we have decided to bring in a little bit more management on the technical side. We don't want pure managers, we want technical experts that know what they're doing and how to do it.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:And yeah, so 2025 is going to be an intense year. We have sold a few projects already. We're excited. We're getting a lot of renewals. We hope we can get more annual retainers, but the sales pipeline it's great. Like I'm saying this with confidence, I think 2025 will be a big year for us, even more so if we manage to work on our goals, you know.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:So, standardizing the tech stack, as I mentioned, keep investing in organic and sustained growth. We might even want to double down on that. Up until now, we have hired two three people a year. This year, we want to hire five, right, including a marketing person, right. So that's an odd thing. We step up in marketing and sales and to do that we have to bring in somebody else, because I cannot take care of everything. I cannot take care of sales and marketing at the same time as I used to do up until now. Now the company's bigger requires more people to work in this department.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:We'll do more kinds of projects, more technologies Maybe there's another VR project coming soon. Definitely there's more Python that we're signing, more audits, more consulting projects, more innovation projects where we have to figure out the technology as we go in a discovery phase for big plans, doing corporate innovation and corporate venturing. I have a feeling that we'll be getting more clients from abroad again, right. As the the economy opens up worldwide, they will be looking to expand the horizons and looking for ways to collaborate, especially when now everybody goes back to the office and there'll be a need for remote experts somewhere else. Right. We'll be also investing in more visits to clients, because we have seen that this is a proven methodology to basically get everybody on board and be happy with us and, as I mentioned, this transition from being the Ruby guys or the development agency to one-stop shop. That would be the right term. Right, the one-stop shop for innovation and technology partner that you just come with an idea, come with a problem and we'll fucking figure it out.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Right, we will decide whether this is a mobile app, whether this is a. You know, this is a dashboard. This is like some low-code project. This is built with python or react native, right. So we have to decide that because we also want to get more projects from the existing clients. Sometimes we're like, okay, yeah, the project is finished. Good, I will talk again. Whenever you guys need something, call us. No, now we're taking a proactive approach. We're sharing all of our projects with the rest of clients saying, look, this is what we did for this and that and that, provided we don't infringe any DA agreement. But yeah, we want to suggest, hey, you can build this. We did this for X, y and Z clients, or we thought this is a great idea. We're pitching ideas to clients and actually some of them I'd say like 10% of them are getting accepted, which is like a 10% of deal flow that we didn't have last year. So I can only imagine that if we start doing this with more solid proposals and ideas, this is going to go up and we'll be able to generate more projects to kind of like keep the wheel spinning, and so not much more from my side. Thank you very much.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I know the podcast has been again stopped for a while. Really, I'm really sorry for that. But also I'm really focused on a couple of other things, like working on getting the marketer finding the right person to help me with this. Ideally, she or he will take care of the podcast as well. That doesn't mean I'm going away, just that I will not have to do all the scheduling, editing, creating the editorial calendar and sharing it on social media, creating the snippets for this specific video PR campaign we're doing and blogging about it, and correcting the AI fuck-ups and whatnot.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:And the Corporate Innovation Summit. That's right. We're going back to events because we know events are a big thing at MarsMaze and we have a soft spot for them. After having oxygenated from not doing startup, for instance, summer, I felt like we should be going back to events and we signed a couple of sponsorships for a Corporate Innovation Summit, the fourth edition of this event that we have been doing for a few years now, during the Week of Mobile Congress, march 4th. Cios, heads of innovation, corporate venturing and other interesting individuals. They will be joining us for an evening of a couple of panels about AI and maybe quantum computing, if I'm not mistaken, and right now Orkig and the best catering in town. So if you're interested, check out our blog it should be there our social media where we have announced it.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:And that's it from my end. No question of the day, no question of the week. Thank you for your patience, thank you for your support. If you made it this far, let me know on Twitter. I will be forever grateful. And if you got ideas for projects, we got ideas for content for the podcast. If you got ideas for improvement, if there's something we can do to help you or your business, let us know. And that's it from my side, blogging off. Thank you very much, peace.