New series: How to build an agency | Life on Mars

We’re launching a new Life on Mars series: How to Build an Agency, a practical, transparent guide for freelancers, micro-agencies, and growing studios. We’ll cover everything from picking a name and services, getting your first client, contracts and NDAs, and building a portfolio, to harder topics like crisis management, pricing, hiring and firing, founder dynamics, and keeping long-tenured teams motivated. Episodes will mix solo deep dives, voices from the MarsBased team, expert guests, and community Q&A, slotted between our regular interviews. You’ll also see more in-person recordings from our Barcelona studio (while we keep remote interviews for global guests). 

Inspired by friends in the industry (Infinite Red, Thoughtbot, Pivotal Labs, Mobile Jazz, Codegram), this series distills 10+ years of agency lessons into actionable episodes you can apply the same day.

Send us your questions in the comments or via our social channels, and we’ll include them in upcoming Q&A episodes.

Chapters

• 0:07 New podcast series announcement
• 0:42 In-person vs remote interviews
• 2:20 How to build an agency series
• 5:22 Topics to be covered
• 7:14 Submit your questions

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

Welcome everybody. I'm Alex, ceo and founder of MarsBase, and in this episode I'm announcing a new series of episodes for the English version of the Life on Mars podcast. That's right. We started the Road to CTO the successful Road to CTO series of episodes both in the English and Spanish version of the Life on Mars podcast before the summer and they have driven very good metrics into the podcast that they've been pretty successful and we're loving it so far, and so we are thinking of doing something new.

Speaker 1: 0:42

As you might have seen already, we have been recording more and more episodes in person, which doesn't in and of itself mean that the remote podcast will go away. On the contrary, we will maintain the same kind of format that we had before, purely because some people we can't interview in person in Barcelona Think of the CEO of Ghost when we had him a few months back, or whenever we will have DHH from Basecamp, or when we had the CTO and CIO of Zynga back in the day, right so these kind of people I don't think they will be coming to Barcelona in the near term, so that's why we will keep doing some remote interviews near term. So that's why we will keep doing some remote interviews, but, whenever possible, we are recording the episodes in person because we have found a very nice location, a very nice setup, a podcast studio in the center of Barcelona. We are loving the vibe, we're loving the people and you have seen with the podcast of David Poblador, ex-spotify, that we had this setup, this background, this environment that you will get to see in many, many more episodes. Sometimes we will record from the offices of the people we are interviewing. Right, it was the case of Jordi Minó or the founders of the Hotels Network. That works too, because they're super generous and their offices are cold. So why can't we take up on this offer? Right? So we will be keeping the remote interviews for some of the episodes. We are still keeping Road to CTO in both Spanish and English, but only and exclusively for the English feed of Mars-based podcast, life on Mars. We'll be launching a new series that it still doesn't have a name, but what we'll be covering here is how to build an agency.

Speaker 1: 2:32

Right, we draw inspiration from the podcast Building Infinite Red, which is, as a matter of fact, one company I admire, and we've been close to them in recent years when we've met them in person in the US, and obviously that's one of the companies that we draw inspiration from, like we drew inspiration from ThoughtBot back in the day, pivotal Labs, mobile Jazz here in Barcelona, our friends at CodeGram, so other companies that we draw inspiration from. But I know there are tons of people out there that they want to draw inspiration from us or they have already been doing that. We work with micro agencies, we work with freelancers, that they somehow they look up to us and when they work with us or we meet regularly with them, they say, oh, we copied this from your style, we did this because you also did it. Or you know from your style, we did this because you also did it. Or you know, we have seen your handbook, which is, by the way, publicly available on GitHub, and we have implemented these rituals that you do and stuff like that. So that fills us with a lot of pride and I'm really happy that this happens. And, as a matter of fact, I have like two or three conversations every week with entrepreneurs and freelancers and agency owners that they want to learn more from us. You know, maybe it's a new venture from somebody who's more experienced than us but hasn't caught up with the changes in the industry and he's been doing product for many, many years. He wants to go back to services, or somebody who's reinventing the company or pivoting, or somebody is launching like kind of like a venture studio or a company builder and stuff like that.

Speaker 1: 4:13

I think that the kind of advice that we'll be sharing here will be equally interesting for small agencies, big agencies, solo agencies like freelancers, or micro-agencies, 2-3 people only, generalised agencies, boutique and specialised agencies, marketing agencies, video agencies, development agencies, eventually. So I think that I'll try to make the content as general as possible, so, but with very specific details on how we did this, with good stories, anecdotes, and maybe bringing in also some like other people from the company or some guests that will help to explain this. Oh, remember when this happened, this project. So we bring in this person. We will be launching these episodes in the middle of the other episodes, so it's not like we're stopping everything else and now we'll have only 10 episodes like this because I think it wouldn't be relevant to our community. On the contrary, I think that as the questions come in and we have a few lineup already, we'll be recording the episodes right. What will I be covering in these episodes?

Speaker 1: 5:22

Things that happen in the daily life of an agency, right Like from the very beginning, which is choosing the logo, choosing the name, choosing the services you want to offer, going for your first client, drafting your first contracts, making your first hire to something more intermediate, like surviving a crisis or firing a person or changing your value proposition, or how to bootstrap on the long term, how to add new portfolios to the website or new services you might want to offer, to more like advanced level content, like after 10 years, how to manage the motivation and performance of the people with the longest 10 years in the company. How to how to survive like the perfect maybe not the perfect, but like a very good mental health scheme as a founder right, our personal crisis and stuff like that. Or how to survive the losing your biggest client. Or how to talk your way out of uncomfortable situations like acquisition talks or approaches by your biggest customer right and stuff like that. Or whether you have to depart from the company or part ways with one of your co-founders and stuff like that, which hasn't happened, will not happen, hopefully, but I think that we've got plenty of experience in previous companies and friends' companies that we are able to explain this. So, all in all, if you want to send some questions, send them through our social media profiles linkedin, facebook, instagram or our email, uh, ola at marspacecom or through my personal accounts. I'm fairly uh accessible through the previous um the previous social networks I mentioned and uh send questions that can be in just textile or video.

Speaker 1: 7:24

Um, we'll be recording some episodes. They will have a question or two. Some episodes there will be like a compendium of q? A, basically, and some episodes will be like I'm going only to speak about contracts today, or nds, or writing the portfolio for your website, or remote work or asynchronous work and stuff like that. So stay tuned If you want to hear more. The next episode will already be one of this. Make sure you like and subscribe to this channel. And because we're very close to meeting some of the metrics that YouTube gives us to promote us farther, we, as a matter of fact, we surpassed the 500 subscribers, which is something very, very good and it makes us very proud. And until that happens, I'll see you in the next episode.