Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased
Welcome to Life on Mars! A podcast about technology, entrepreneurship and innovation from MarsBased. You will listen to stories of the best founders, investors, experts and celebrities from all around the galaxy every two weeks.
Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased
Halfway through 2025: How MarsBased is evolving, growing, and staying true to its values
In this new episode of Life on Mars, we take you behind the scenes at MarsBased to share how the first half of 2025 has unfolded for us as a team and company.
This year has marked the beginning of a new chapter, one shaped by growth, clarity, and transformation. We’ve strengthened our pipeline, expanded the team, and taken meaningful steps toward building a more mature and intentional company culture. But more importantly, we’re doing it all while staying true to our values of transparency, trust, and long-term thinking.
From company structure and team communication to leadership challenges and internal reflection, this episode is a candid account of how we're evolving to meet the demands of our clients, our people, and ourselves.
If you’re interested in how a boutique agency scales with intention, this is for you.
🎬 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, ceo and founder of MarsBased, and in today's episode, I bring you what has happened in the last six months of MarsBased the first half of 2025, in which we are experiencing some kind of transformation in the company, and I want to share, in all openness and in the spirit of transparency which is one of our core values, what has been happening inside the company. We started the year really well compared to the last two years, where things were a little bit more shaky. In 2023, we started off losing a couple of big clients. 2024, we were in the midst of some kind of market transformation in which contracts were shorter, the sales cycles were longer and projects got postponed or paused or they were in a terminal end state, so to speak. 2025 has started in pretty good shape for us. We have been able to have a stable pipeline of sales, we have been able to increase the team that's something I'm going to cover a little bit farther down the line and we have been also extending contracts and selling longer contracts than we have sold in the last two or three years.
Speaker 1:I mentioned in previous episodes that the market had changed since August 2022, more or less. When the tech stocks were in heavy decline and the M&A industry was really slow, the VC landscape was drying up for a lot of startups. Therefore, the market was not as bullish as it had been in the past and therefore people were more skeptical about longer investments, longer contracts and maybe doing more conservative approaches to their projects, downsizing their teams to their projects. Downsizing their teams, downsizing all the efforts and maybe planning in a more like short-sighted manner for most companies because they were running out of time, running out of budget. In the case of startups, if they were busy, backed or if they were corporations, they were maybe more tied to shorter time plans and to smaller budgets. That being said, how did we start this year? As I mentioned, we were able to start a few new projects with some of the existing clients that we had and that we increased in size the kind of projects. For instance, whereas we had started with only the website development for Everesting, which is a sports brand client that we signed last year, then we started this year doing something bigger for them. We went from doing only the WordPress website to creating a full-fledged app for their hall of fame, for their community of people who have completed successfully an Everesting challenge, and that is something that we have built in-house here at Marspace, with a team of three people, and also setting the foundations for a long-term maintenance of the project.
Speaker 1:What else we have also increased the team at a company that we had signed a few months ago. That is called Olafly, which is a company providing electronic SIM services for not only individuals but also for companies. As a matter of fact, we started giving them services only in Shopify and now we're helping them to build the entire B2B platform so that they can service companies. Funny fact we had used Olaffly in our annual retreat last year. We went to Andorra. We had to buy SIM cards for everybody in the team because it's not in the EU and therefore we would have been charged with heavy, heavy roaming charges for a team of 20 going into that beautiful country, for a team of 20 going into that beautiful country. And so this year, if we had to do it again, we would be using our own platform, our own B2B platform for LaFly.
Speaker 1:What else? Another thing that we've done this year that is significant is we turned 11. And while it is not as significant as it was last year, because the landmark of the 10 years was a turning page for the company of the 10 years was a turning page for the company and that gave us some recognition. We appeared in the newspapers. We had clients flying from abroad to Barcelona to attend our big, big event of the 10th anniversary of Mars Based and of Startup Grind, which, as a matter of fact, we haven't released the, the talk, the keynote I gave at that event. Uh, I know, right now, as I speak, david, our marketing person, is working on that, so it will be released very soon on this podcast. It will see the light of day for those who couldn't attend the event last year. It will come with, you know, with one year of of delay, but I think it's still very relevant and very interesting for most people who want to learn more about Mars Base, startup brand and what we have been doing for the last 10 years. I don't know if there's a lot of new learnings from last year to now, but most learnings concerning sales branding, team management, earnings concerning sales branding, team management, specialization versus being a generalist company, culture, remote work and all of that. They are enclosed in that episode, so it should be out very, very soon. What else? I've got a ton of things to cover here. I try to be as succinct as possible because I don't want this to go for very long.
Speaker 1:But another thing that is happening in the company, as I mentioned a little bit earlier on, is that we have hired a significant amount of new people Up until 2025, up until the very beginning of this year, we were hiring only two people per year, and so the company has grown organically and in a very natural way by increasing the team two, three people every year. Maybe if a year somebody left the company, we hired a third or fourth person, but the team was very organic. It was very slow. It allowed us to cement the foundations for the new hires. Every time we hired somebody, we really took the time to have him or her adapt into the company, give him or her all of the time to accommodate into all of our workflows, our working philosophy, our company culture and whatnot. And this year we have decided to take it up a notch. And this year we have decided to take it up a notch.
Speaker 1:We had realized in our 10 years meeting with my co-founders that we perhaps we had been playing too conservatively for too long, and I'm going to explain this a little bit better. What I mean here is that pretty much every year, we kept our growth by only hiring two people, and we had numerous times in the past the occasion to grow even farther, but we turned it down. We turned these occasions down because we thought, ok, maybe we're able to make more money this year, we can increase the revenue if we hire two or three extra people, but that would come at the expense of something, and that something would have been the quality of the outcomes, the team structure or the team satisfaction. Or maybe we would have been the founders, the management layer, we would have been more stressed and we didn't want to strain neither the company nor the relationship with the employees or between the employees and us. And so we have always tried to have this very slow and sustainable growth. But I think that we did it for too long, and the reflection was the following for too long and the reflection was the following On the one hand, we never wanted to increase the team for more than this number.
Speaker 1:On the other hand, there was this thing whereby we turned down multiple opportunities to work on projects whose technologies we're not an expert of, and so we could have done Python earlier on in our company life. We could have worked using React in 2014 and 15, but we decided to turn down all of these requests and, for instance, we started doing React actively. I think should have been around 2017. And so we lost a lot of opportunities. For the first three years of the company, we turned down Python until two years ago. So for the first nine years of the company, we turned down Python until two years ago. So for the first nine years of the company, we never did Python, like we never did Scala or Java or NET right, and we will continue not doing most of them right. Why? Because we relied always on our focus, on our specialization, and because we wanted to err on the side of quality confirms our strategy.
Speaker 1:The truth is, every year more or less, we have experienced or we have had to deal with a technology that we're not entirely comfortable with, but we decided to give it a go. For instance, in 2015, late 2015, early 2016, something like that we were approached by a company that wanted us to do mobile development, and I remember that 2014, our friend Sergio Gago tried to hire us for mobile development for Rakuten, where he was a CTO, and we turned it down. But one year later, another good friend of mine came and she was the CEO of this human resources company and said I want you guys to do our mobile apps and I said, well, yeah, that's great, but we don't do mobile. And she said like no, no, you're going to do mobile. So we decided to split the risk and to share it between two parts, and turns out that the project was very successful, right. And turns out that the project was very successful, right, and not only we were able to deliver it on time and on budget, but also that technology, that platform that we developed, helped them to ultimately sell the company in 2019. Big thanks to our technology, yeah, and experiences like this, or situations like this, repeated over the course of the years.
Speaker 1:In 2017, we were approached by our biggest client, who, at the time, we were doing Angular for, and they said do you guys also do backend development with Nodejs? I was like no, but we could give it a go. We got somebody in the company who has experience, who really wants to work on Nodejs, and I was like, well, time to give it a try. Right, I was successful. That was one of our biggest clients for five years, and so it was another successful experiment and we did a few more like this. I remember we tried the experiment of working with Go for a company called Spin in the US in around 2018, 2019, something like that Worked really well with. An IoT project went really well with it. An AR project for Moody's went really well. We will share it soon on our social media blog and the portfolio.
Speaker 1:We did some projects with AI and so we've been doing all of these experiments and, at the very end of the day, they have all been successful and more than that. I think that most of these projects have worked better than some of the projects we have worked on where we're specialists on the projects, maybe because we manage the expectations better, maybe because they were more enclosed, were more defined, the risk management was done more correctly. I don't know what happened there, but I know that is uh, that's something that we uh, we assessed with chubby and jordan. We said look, all of these experiments prove that we are a company that can build pretty much anything, right? So why don't we stop saying we don't want to do certain technologies and at least publicly and we decide on a case by case basis? Right, and that's our new approach for this year. As a result of that, we haven't started any new technology.
Speaker 1:All of the projects we have signed this year are with technologies we had been working with in the past Python, ruby and Rails, javascript on the mobile side of things, react Native and stuff like that. But at least we are deciding, you know, on a case-by-case basis. As they come, we're like, okay, we could do this project. That doesn't really fit what we do, but it is interesting for the company, we'll take it. Or maybe we want to have this company as a client and we'll take it right. So we're more open.
Speaker 1:The other thing we have changed is we have decided to also gear up in terms of team and we have incorporated six people. Since the beginning of the year. We have incorporated both backend and frontend developers, project manager and also a marketing person, and that you know that could have strained the company. That certainly shook things a little bit when all of these people more or less they join around the same time. So it was pretty stressful for a while because we had to do a lot of onboardings three times more onboardings than we do in a regular year and they all happen in the span of two or three months, and so not that we're not prepared for that, but we had to concede a little thing, some things here and there and some projects they took a little bit longer to complete and we had more rotations than usual in the projects.
Speaker 1:But now all the dust has settled and I think that we are in a better state than we were six months ago or even one year ago and we're really happy about the team configuration we've got right now and this has proven to be a very bold move risky perhaps, but not as risky as we could have done in other situations. When we were approached by a big client sometimes in the past and they're like, okay, can you hire 20 people, 20 developers for me this year, I'm going to pay for all of that, we said no, we could have done it. It would have been risky, that definitely would have strained the company, that would have strained the team, the company culture, and we decided to turn down that really really good money because also, we've got a lot of principles. So what else? I've talked about team. I've talked about the general company direction in terms of sales, as I mentioned well, covered a little bit briefly what we did with clients. I mentioned in the case of Everest Inc. All of that.
Speaker 1:There's new clients that we signed in the last few months. We signed also with Dreaming Languages, a company co-founded by one of our ex-employees, pablo Roman, who was on the Spanish feed of the podcast, so we're going to leave the video right here, so if you want to watch it, it's very interesting how he transitioned from being a freelance developer for us in 2016, for three years more or less, to being a founder of this community of people learning languages, and they started with Spanish, now opening up French and quite possibly expanding to other languages in the mid future. We also signed another process, more sort of an MVP, for a company called Topstechnica in the industrial sectors, a data visualization platform, mobitrace. What else? We re-signed a couple of clients that we had stopped collaborating with in the past, like Travel Tax-Free, for whom we do Shopify services, and Localistico, which is a client that comes on and off depends on their funding and on their state, but I really have to work with them because they're really good people. We always enjoy it and they really value the quality of our code, and so it's always a pleasure to collaborate with people who appreciate this kind of things that we offer.
Speaker 1:We have increased the sales quota in terms of Shopify. Shopify is a technology that's built on Ruby on Rails and therefore we have extensive experience working with that. Our first client with Shopify was signed in 2015. It's a German company, zapdales, which we have uninterruptedly been working with them since 2015. It's a great company to work for as well, but outside of that, we work for other companies like Singularity, singularity Freshies, tax-free and a few more. We have a great new project for September, although it's technically not signed, for another consultancy from Barcelona. They want us to design and implement their corporate website, which is an interesting challenge, and hopefully, hopefully we'll help them with a pivot they are undergoing right now, and I don't know if I'm forgetting any other.
Speaker 1:All of this comes also from it's a derivate from, you know having increased the team. The fact that we hire a marketing person allowed me to focus much more on sales and therefore I don't have to juggle between marketing and sales, being a one-man band for both departments of the company. Not only that decreases the risk, but also that increases the quality of my outcome. If I'm able to focus much more on sales, I can be more on top of every negotiation doing the key account management, doing the renewals of the contracts for the maintenance, upselling clients, increasing prices here and there, negotiating new projects or practically offering new services and products to our clients, things we can help them with, like cybersecurity or AI or redesign or refactoring or a byproduct or some consulting services. Right, and David is working much more on covering me on the marketing side of things. He's taking over the podcast.
Speaker 1:As you have seen, the increase of the quality of the podcast is remarkable. Also, we have been much more timely in the cadence of the publication of the podcast episodes. It's helping me with scheduling production. So, even like some scripting or appearing in the podcast himself, and so this separation of concerns helps to be much more focused and, in the spirit of another company culture trait that we've got, which is less is more, we are able to do better output, better outcome of our work by focusing on single areas, right, in fact, another thing that has increased in my focus on sales, I'm doing much, I'm being much more on top with the relationship with our clients, and that translates to having much more, so many more visits, in-person visits to our customers. So we have been to the Basque country to visit nights. We have been to Valencia to visit a couple of clients I go to Madrid more often or in-person visits to clients around Barcelona, like Nieves Energia, for instance, that have been there on numerous occasions and also visiting their new offices. So we have more time and dedication for that, and that also translates to better relationship with the clients and more long-term vision and also better sales. So that's, overall, a very positive thing for the company.
Speaker 1:One more thing about the team is that we have decided to rebrand some of the levels of developers. We did have another layer that was called the tech leads, which were some developers, more senior developers juggling time, doing project management and more architectural roles in the project, and while that had been a role in the company, we decided that right now is a function that you can be a tech lead in a project. You can be a developer in another project. Depends on your depending on the project necessities, depending on your skills as well. Right and so, but we have incorporated, as I mentioned, uh, project manager and we have another figure, another role that it sits on top of the tech leads, that is, the engineering manager, which is a role that should help Xavi, our CTO, to the couple, to split his responsibilities and duties so that he can be more focused on certain decisions of the company, more like strategic vision, helping in sales, helping on doing the one-on-ones with the people and delegating some of the technicalities of the trying new technologies or certain complex challenges to this other role. That right now is covered by our good friend Juan Salvador, who is also, like you know, working shoulder to shoulder with Xavi and helping to manage the rest of the technical team. That is interesting. That is a company.
Speaker 1:I mean in terms of maybe growing the company. We don't want to increase in middle management because we know that the theory says that when companies increase the middle management, that's when things start to go south, because you lose the connection between the lower strata of the company and the founders. In our case, we're not as big. That will never happen. Everybody will have the rec line with Xavi the CTO or with we're not as big. That will never happen. Everybody will have the rec line with Xavi the CTO, or with me or with Jordi. So that's not a concern I'm taking or we understand that this happens when companies. They start overhiring, they go into hockey stick growth and then all of a sudden they went from one year being 20 to 200, or from 200 to 2,000, right, that's not our case, that's not going to happen. At most, in a given year, instead of hiring two or three people, and up until last year we'll hire six, seven, maybe 10. I don't know. But that will not create a lot of changes in the structure of the company, in the structure of the company that forced us to work more on building career plans, investing more in HR, in people, operations and stuff like that. Our good Ellie is working on that, and I think it's very challenging and rewarding at the same time to have these new, mentally stimulating challenges, because at a certain point, you know, it sort of felt a little bit like a routine. The company was doing the same thing year after year and therefore we were starting to get comfortable. We're pushing ourselves a little bit out of the comfort zone and I hope that translates or it is already happening, it is translating into better sales and more stability for the company.
Speaker 1:Just kind of to wrap it up marketing and sales a bit of an update here. As I mentioned, david has taken over pretty much everything in marketing. As you have seen, the newsletter is back after almost two years in hiatus. Not only he managed to revive it, it's back on good terms in numbers and in click-through rate, open rate and all of that. Not that we care a lot about metrics, but it shows that the newsletter is in good health. So thank you for reading it, and now we can share more stuff than we usually do in the newsletter, sort of a recap of what happened the last month at Mars Base. But we will maybe experiment with other stuff. We'll announce there are events or webinars if we decide to do so, if we launch something, some new marketing assets and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:Or, if you missed, the podcast episodes or other collaborations where we have appeared, as I mentioned, the podcast is great. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for sharing it with people. Thank you also for suggesting speakers. One thing that you could do if you first off and you made it this far and I know it's a big ask to watch for videos this long of only one person talking, rambling for half an hour is leave a comment down below. I'd really appreciate it if you're on YouTube, because that shows that we're doing this for somebody and it's really gratifying when we see that people are actually watching and commenting.
Speaker 1:The second is send questions. We are recording a few episodes of Q&A in the next month and we have more time and availability to do it, either for you know the C-levels maybe for Ellie, maybe for the project managers, for the developers, for the designers let us know or you know more than happy to answer pretty much everything and anything you might want to ask. And the website is always changing as well. If you take a look at the, we're publishing more portfolios, more blog episodes, more new services, more stuff. It's more and better. I'm really happy with the new direction of how things are going in the marketing department In terms of financials.
Speaker 1:People usually don't expect that, but we do share our financials. Every year. We share them on the BeWater page, the BeWater blog. They share the most capital efficient companies. In Spain, for instance, there is a ranking we're usually there in the top 10 as a company that was founded only with 3,000 initial euros of setting the company and that's it. And right now I think last year we closed with 2.5 million in revenue. This year we're projected to $3 million. We're close to a quarter million per month in revenue. So I think that is something that's pretty relevant for a lot of companies up there. It's inspirational. It certainly would have inspired me a few years ago to see this kind of numbers from a company I like and look up to. So that's why we're sharing.
Speaker 1:I want to give back to the community and we want to inspire new people to create companies, because we know it is possible. So if you're out there wondering if this is truly worth it, it's possible, it is. You have to put in the work and you have to believe in yourself and follow. I'm not going to say follow your trims, because that's pretty bullshit, but really, if you want to do a great job, you have great relationship with people, they respect you and you're good at what you do, you should give it a try, definitely. So that's why we're sharing.
Speaker 1:So stay tuned for the updates on the financial side of things as uh, with our open metrics of revenue and uh and profits and all of that. Um, you know we are very lean in terms of our uh. I wouldn't call ourselves struggle, because I think that we spend a lot on on stuff that really that we should be spending on uh, like you know, buying the best equipment for people to do their jobs, and we have a company retreat every year and stuff like that. A frugal company wouldn't do that. But we are pretty lean in our spending and we know how to review all of this spending every three months, every six months, every month, depending on the company department, and cut unnecessary costs where it's possible, because, as a bootstrap company, every penny we spend it's a penny that we have earned and work very hard to get. So money doesn't come for free, but we are the masters of our own destiny when it comes to money, because we don't rely on external investment like other companies do.
Speaker 1:And maybe a few words on technology before I wrap it up, but that's something that I really want to cover with Xavi, with our CTO, but we have standardized our tech stack, our technical stack. That's something that we had done in the last two years more or less, but it has consolidated using ruby on rails as the first option for the for building new projects, unless clients want a new, another technology in which we will always say like, look okay, we can do that with no js, with react, no problem, that's going to cost a little bit more. If we are in charge of choosing the technology, we can be more efficient, we can be faster and the project is going to be cheaper. So you know it's a trade off, but at least we can be flexible and offer all kinds of options to our potential clients.
Speaker 1:We have been working more on security lately because of the undergoing changes in the technology landscape when it comes to cybersecurity or because we have been working with corporates that they do require more technical and security audits every now and then, and so therefore we're incorporating this as an offering in the company or as a de facto part of every project we start. We are going to give our clients some security guidelines so that they don't share passwords on Slack, they use encryption on their hard disks and stuff like that, give and take the permissions and roles to the right people and revoke them when they are not in the project or in the company altogether, and pretty basic stuff like that that pretty much nobody does and I don't know. So maybe we're going to go into providing some cybersecurity services. We are preparing ourselves for the NAS2, which is going to shake a little bit the industry like GDPR did a few years back. We're already working on this and, generally speaking, more proactive in terms of working with security and keeping things up to date, like our documentation, our handbook, is a little bit more up to date than never before. Same goes for the security and technology guides that we've got on our handbook, that we have published. Check them out. I think they're really good, they're really interesting because right now they will be reviewed every three to six months, and so you know they're always going to be up to date and relevant for everybody. And that's pretty much everything for everybody. And that's pretty much everything.
Speaker 1:Maybe what can you expect from Mars, based in the second half of the year, is the consolidation of all the things that we have described this far, maybe doing more with the people we have after this initial six months of settling with the new team or the new incorporations to the team, and certainly also working in a much more solid way with the new clients that we'll have more understanding about. We'll be able to produce more and better work for them in terms of projects. Some clients are we're finishing the assignment or the construct with them. There's going to be new ones, hopefully increasing a couple of them. We're having really advanced talks with a couple of our clients to increase or even double the size of our teams there and more visits to clients, as I mentioned. So visits to New York City to go visit Moniz and Citadel Security, for instance, visits to MassCount country, again to people in nice, visits to uh, um, maybe some of the other clients that we got scattered around europe, like zapto in germany or blue brain in the uk and stuff like that and um, and maybe sharing more what we have been doing, because the first half of the year has been more of internal processes, optimizing, refining and fine-tuning.
Speaker 1:Second half of the year, if time permits and projects permit, we will be able to share more learnings, more of our internal trainings, internal processes and documentation in the shape of blog posts, of podcast episodes, of live events. Maybe we are hosting a first live event or a webinar. I think it's going to be a webinar first, that in person, with an AI consultancy from Barcelona and an AI workshop. That's something that we're going to pilot in September. See how that goes. And then, you know, keep refining the company and preparing for 2026, which is going to be a very exciting year If 2025 turns out to be the year, the really good year that it's projected to be.
Speaker 1:That's it. I think that's all from me right now. I don't want to go any longer. I think it's been long enough. Thank you, as always, for being here with us. Thank you for following the journey of Marspace and for being so supportive. Feels good when we send out something a tweet or an email or a video and you reply. So keep doing that, keep sending questions, keep sending feedback, keep sharing this with other people you like or who you think they would enjoy this kind of content, and keep being yourself Until the next time I'm out.