Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased

How to come up with your first business idea: Building MarsBased

• MarsBased • Season 2 • Episode 104

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Starting a business begins with one powerful idea, but how do you come up with your first one? In this episode of Building MarsBased, we share the real story behind our company’s early days and how a simple concept evolved into a long-lasting, profitable business.

You’ll learn how to identify opportunities, validate ideas, and turn side projects into sustainable ventures, all based on real-world experience from a fully bootstrapped tech company.

If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, freelancer, or agency owner, this video will help you find direction and clarity for your next move.

💡 Want to build your next digital product with a trusted partner? Let’s talk: https://marsbased.com/

Contact: hola@marsbased.com

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🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Life on Mars. I'm Alex, CEO and founder of Marspace, and in this episode, we start a new podcast series, Building Mars Based. This is the first episode of this new series aimed to encourage other people to create their own companies, and we will share our story, our learnings throughout all of these years. We'll help you to pick up some interesting ideas, to try new business models, what worked for us, what didn't work. We're going to be sharing a lot of anecdotes, projects, failed experiments, fuck-ups, and much more. As I mentioned in the introduction video, this is a podcast series that is largely inspired by Building Infinite Red, a podcast from theCUBE creators of Infinite Red, a Rails Development Cultancy that turned into React Native specialized boutique consultancy. They're very friends of ours. As a matter of fact, I interviewed the CTO Jamon Holgrim in the and this very podcast a few months ago. Check out this episode because it's uh it's equal parts, interesting, educational, and fun. So in this first episode, I'm going to be talking about how we came up with the idea of Mars-based and uh a few other sections that might help you to get a business off the ground. So picking up the idea, finding the inspiration, rolling out stupid ideas, and much more. So if you want to have some context as to how and when Mars based started, I cannot start this episode without mentioning that I co-founded Marspace with uh Xavi and Jordi, two of my best friends since early childhood. So with this, I am saying that we are breaking one of the first rules of entrepreneurship, which is don't go into business with your friends and or family. In this case, they are friends or more than that, they're actually closer to family than to friends. But probably these consolidated and really stable relationship of friendship that has lasted for over so many years, that's actually what brought us so far into the company. Actually, are turning 12 years old as a company in just a matter of months. And I think we cannot explain the company without the friendship that unites the three of us. So we actually have got a background in consultancy, the three of us. Um I don't want to go into too much detail, but we were working for several companies for a few years. We endured uh old school consulting, in some cases, uh larger companies, corporations, and some others. And we were, to put it mildly, slightly dissatisfied with our professional activities and careers. And over the course of many, many, many months in which Jordi was trying to convince Xavi and I to pursue some entrepreneurial adventure, yet to be named, because he had more the virus of being an entrepreneur than we were, and he wanted to create a company or just, you know, maybe make it in such a way that we would be three freelancers and working together. Because even though our three careers had intertwined throughout the years, the three of us never worked in the same project. So Chavi and Jordi worked as freelancers for some projects. Jordi hired Chavi to be the lead developer in the company that he was working for. Chavi and I co-founded an association. Jordi and I had been designing and building websites since uh middle school and stuff like that. I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting a few other entrepreneurial activities that uh that we had done in the past. The three of us actually had never worked in the same project. So over the course of many, many dinners, we just meet every week or two to have dinner and discuss life on like the mid-20s. Jordi is always insisting that we should do something together. We should do something together. Like, I'm really tired of my boss, I really don't like my company. And the three of us were sharing our frustrations. And that's actually a very good lesson that a lot of people tell you in business books or business schools that, hey, try to find something that doesn't work in your field and just fix it, right? And unbeknownst to us, we were actually doing that. We were complaining about how old school consulting sucked at treating employees unfairly, working with really old laptops, tried to this presentialism in the office or just being super servicial to the clients and not being opinionated and many, many, many things that we were not satisfied with. And so, inspired by the books of Basecamp, so we work and remote, no office required, we were like, hey, how about we create a small design development shop, something that we can actually use as a platform for us to freelance for other people, right? We just quit our jobs, we do what we know best, which is actually developing and designing applications, and sell them to other people, right? And so that was the genesis of Marspace, the origins. And but it actually took almost a good couple years since we actually got to work on something, because you know, Xavi and I were pursuing other interesting activities. We're another moment of life, which is also another interesting lesson, is that you have to be in the right moment of life to become an entrepreneur, right? Um and so we got to a point where we said, fuck it, let's start. Let's let's do it. Um, George, we're gonna take your initiative and we're gonna convert it into something. So we actually got ourselves to work. And the first iteration of the of the project was, hey, why don't we build an app that we need? And you will some might think that Marspace is was an overnight success or has been an overnight success, which is very far from the truth because actually what people don't know is that before Marspace, we tried three projects that luckily didn't see the light of day of these, so it's very briefly. Uh one of them was not even built. Um the second one, I've let's try to see if I can if I can get the order correctly. It was a social network for producers and consumers of biofood and ecological products. And so if that application doesn't exist today, I think it's fair to say that it was well ahead of its time in 2012 or early 13 probably. That application was called Wolliva, so you can say something here. Uh it was designed, it was built. I think we never got around to launch it. Because again, like in the first project, we spent too much time in the analysis paralysis, right? The first project was killed because of analysis paralysis. We spent too much time uh working on something that, you know, analyzing, talking to potential stakeholders, potential customers, trying to see there was financing for that. But it actually we just grew tired of the project before we were launched. The second one, Wolliva, we built it, we talked to potential people who'd be interested in that, potential customers, potential partners, but we didn't see a way to monetize it. When we actually soft launch it, people are like, yeah, that's cool, that's nice, but how are we like, how are you gonna monetize it, right? And we we didn't think that was the model. Um and actually, I it's also fair to think that perhaps we in retrospect we didn't have the context. No, we didn't have the context, and we didn't have the business knowledge to see, like, probably we should have tested this with an MVP, sending some emails to the right people with some forms and whatnot, before actually committing to such a large um idea. The third one was cooking.me, which is also a project you can cite uh you can see over here. Um, because we thought, you know, the first two projects were killed because they were too ambitious, and we thought we wouldn't be able to find somebody who would use them. And for the third one, we said, how about we build something that we actually can use, and people and our immediate surroundings can use, like friends and family, and perhaps one or two fools as well. Um and hence cooking.me was born that was designed and built to be the cookbook, a digital cookbook for iPad. Because at the time, most of these applications either sucked or they were just like too overloaded with stuff, they looked like really old, they were not correctly adapted to iPad, which is the sort of device you bring into your kitchen and have it as a reference for helping you to cook, right? That happened more or less around the time when a company from Barcelona got very popular and was selected as one of the Apple's highlighted apps for that year. And that company actually did exactly and precisely that. So our app was killed before we even started. We could have launched anyways. We could have launched anyways because uh it's never too late to be number two in the market and whatnot. But like it happened with the first two projects, we didn't have the right connections, we didn't have the right contacts, we didn't we didn't know what to do with that app. And that was our problem. Because we did these three failed projects, we found out that actually we were good at designing and building applications, not the rest of things that come with it. We were not good at selling it, marketing it, raising funds for it, trying to s strike some partnerships with people, thinking about the potential product roadmap, building community and stuff like that, right? So after these three failed experiments, we discovered our forte. And hence we said, what if we just forget about all of the surrounding stuff, about all the stuff that comes with launching digital products and we have other people launch them? How about instead of us committing a lot of money and time and effort into building something that we don't know if we can launch it correctly, if we are the right people to do that and market it properly, and just like trying to commercialize this around the globe, how about we help other people to do that? People with ideas, business people that come to us, they need an IT partner to help them to design and develop applications. We built the right solution for them, and they figure out the rest. And moreover, we can actually cash on that, right? So we get paid to do what we want. And so we came up with the idea of establishing as a group of freelancers. And the first idea of Mars-based, which was yet to be named Mars-based, to be honest. Uh, but there will be a separate episode for that. We'll talk about naming in another episode. So we decided to become a small design and development studio. But again, we got it wrong, or at least not exactly right, because some people might think, oh, you guys created your you knew you were gonna be an agency. No, we didn't. We didn't. As a matter of fact, I have a very good anecdote for you. And I think that is a the sort of stuff that will help you to see if you're really aligned with your co-founders, right? I remember that at the very beginning of Marspace when we were conceptualizing, oh, so we are coming up with the idea of creating the company. Uh, let's think about names, let's think about like the services we can offer, what technologies we're gonna work with, what we will do, what we will not do, what will be a value proposition, all of these you'll find in the next episodes, most likely. But there's one thing that I I think I came up with this idea. I don't know if I borrowed it from somebody else, but I asked Xavi and Jordi and my two co-founders to send me an email saying where did they see they were going on a personal level, and where would Marsbase be in one month time, three months, and six months, in one year, three years, five years, and ten years. And so it was fun to read all of this, but we actually got it all together, and I scheduled some emails into the future, so that in a month's time we'd be receiving the three answers, that of Jordi, that of mine, and that of Xavi, to where did they see themselves professionally and personally and the company in one month, and successively three months, six months, one year, etc. etc. And that goes to show that we are very good at overestimating what we can achieve in the short term and underestimating what we can do in the long term. So it was fun after all these months and years past to receive this email because the first ones we did expect them. The last ones we had completely forgotten about them. And what's more, as I mentioned, like they go to show that we are not really good at planning. We as species, not as a company, not as Marspace. Um because the predictions for the next month, of course, we nailed it. For three months, we actually underestimated what we could do. And we surpassed our expectations and the goals we had set. Six months, we completely surpassed. And then that dynamic changed. Like in the in year three, I think it was year three, it's like we thought we were gonna be bigger than we actually were, but at least the exercise was really good because it helped us to see whether we're thinking about the same things or not. Like, did we actually have uh want to have a team? Did we actually want to grow the company to be part of a bigger project someday or just run it as a lifestyle business, like we've done? Do we actually want to bootstrap or we want to raise funds? Uh, do we want to keep being a small and specialist boutique agency, or do we want to grow to become like a large, big generalist consultancy and stuff like that? That exercise was really, really useful. The other thing that was really useful, and I think that also is a great exercise for first-time founders or also for you know serial founders, but uh I think it's most likely first-time founders don't know about this, the rest have got it figured out is how and when will you commit full-time to the project? And that's something that we defined early on in the in the conversations because at the time Xavi and Jordi were keeping their jobs, and I just I had to quit my job because I I was taking a giant leap of faith, and uh my I really hated my own job, my my previous job, and I wanted to start something new and I wanted to be, you know, unshackled and try to be more focused on what I was doing because I thought like if I if I commit 100% on this, even though I'm burning my savings, this is gonna fly sooner, right? And uh they've got families, they needed more cash, they needed the cash more than I did back in the day. So I think it was uh reasonable that I took this leap of faith and they didn't. So the other thing with it is hey, um the company, you know, when we found the first projects, and that will come in another in a separate episode, but uh what is the right moment when we will start paying ourselves a salary? How do we know that is the right time to commit full-time to this? So we established a couple of rules. One of them was recurring revenue. So we have to have this minimum of recurring revenue per month. And the second is a minimum amount of cash and the bank. Whenever these two goals were met, we would start going full-time for the project. At least me get paid, then they would join later on and uh start working on the company full-time with exclusivity as well, right? These two things help to get Mars based off the crown, and I think there's uh there's a couple of really interesting experiments that you might want to bounce off your co-founders and might help you get your company off the crown. What else? Another thing that I wanted to comment in this episode was uh naming and branding, right? Because even though we can have a separate episode about this, there's something really, really short I want to say here, which is don't wait till you have the perfect logo, don't wait till you have perfect name, right? Because we committed these mistakes and the first three projects um that we never really launched before Mars based, we knew we Marspace couldn't suffer the same fate. And so we decided to go for something quicker. We decided to, hey, let's do like I I think even the first logo was done with Microsoft Pain uh by Jordi. And great. I mean, you can say it here. It's not not not terrible. You can see it. It I think it remained with us for at least one year or two. And with the naming, it was something great. We just did a naming experiment of hey, we gotta we gotta come up with something quick. Like uh let's set some ideas. And at the time it was uh two syllables, um uh this vowels, and it's got to be like, you know, easy on the tongue and stuff like that. Our reference was like pocket buffer, companies like that. Um and so I think it was Jordi who just got a like a bag and threw in some small papers with uh two collections of words that we could mix, right? And so the first name we came up with that we actually liked, so by mixing them, I think it was moon-based. Or like, there's something here we like this name. And I don't think we ever designed a logo for that one. But the next day, Jordy came and said, I've got something better. And he comes with a logo on the name. It's like Marspace sounds better. Now, a lot of people have asked when I asked people on social media and our you know surroundings to to send questions for for the podcast. And one of the most popular questions is like, why did you choose the name of Marspace? Well, that we'll have to wait for the episode that we actually dedicate fully to naming, but no, it has nothing to do with David Bowie, even though we have used David Bowie as a reference for a lot of things. You can say it here, whenever we launch our first website, there's a reference to Space Oddity that I had uh or that we had built onto the deployment process of our website on Jekyll, if I remember correctly. And um and there were more. We would use David Poe in the hiring process. There was, I think there was an Easter egg on the website, um, there was a reference on the first blog posts and stuff like that. But we never got to the conclusion that we got the reference or the inspiration from David Poe. It's like we liked how it sounded. Marspace definitely like struck on us and we're like, yeah, sounds great, looks cool. It's got this alien idea that we really like. Like we, you know, we want to make things differently and uh also related to innovation and technology somehow. Um, and so it was cool, and definitely that's why we've always weaved space exploration and you know astronauts and aliens and Martians onto our website, our documents and stuff, right? And I think that's pretty much everything there is to say about the how to find idea. As a recap, we tried many, many things over the course of a couple years. And so we started building stuff around 2011, experiments in 2012, even 2013. We actually built the Mars-based website and we sent the first email. One year we incorporated the company, one year before we actually incorporated the company. So that was in March 2013. The company was incorporated in March 2014. And so for that year, we silently kept working on the background as a side thing. That's also another learning. Like you don't have to commit full-time freight. Like you can do it if you really can afford it. We could not afford it. Um, we thought it would be more sustainable if we just did it on the side until we were safe. Um, another learning is I know, you never get it right on the first try. And in our case, like that search spent over the course of many, many years. And also, most of these things were not planned, they were not analyzed, they were not strategized, they were not architectured, like we didn't know what the hell we were doing. This is the first company, hopefully it will be our last company. And I just want to share this, you know, as open-heartedly as possible, that we didn't know why we do certain things. We still don't know why we did them. In hindsight, they look like reasonable decisions and very sound decisions made by us. But at the time, we're just figuring things out. And some things work out great, some things didn't fly. And some of the things that didn't fly never saw the light of day, like these projects or some other marketing initiatives and stuff. Some you saw over the course of the years, like some events, like the Martian tech events that we Martian talks that we that we did in 2016 or so, they didn't fly. The first iteration of the newsletter didn't fly either, and stuff like that. But some others, they worked since the very beginning, right? And even though they look like a really, really, really good set of decisions, there's a part of luck that you cannot really count on it if you want to build a company, right? So we just want to be as transparent as possible. That's the one of the reasons behind this podcast series. And we just want to encourage other people that if you want to build a company, you can do it. Send us more questions. I'll be happy to answer all of these questions coming in. We've got some episodes where I'm just talking, like in this one. We've got some other episodes in which I will be going over one question only because it's very broad and very, you know, it provides for a lot of um a lot of explanation and and storytelling. And some episodes will be like, you know, so technology, for instance, like A, B, C, like going over a set of questions, and and so feel free to send them at Ola at marspace.com or tweet at me directly, uh send them through our social media. And so, until the next episode, subscribe and like this video, subscribe to the channel and share with other people. If you got ideas for companies and you want more guidance, happy, happy to schedule a call with you or send the questions to to the to the podcast so we can answer them here. And um, feel free to share your journey with ours because uh we have been inspired by other people. We just want to inspire the next generation of Mars based and entrepreneurs. So I'll see you in the next episode. Thanks.