Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased

When is the right time to start your company? Building MarsBased #2

• MarsBased • Season 2 • Episode 105

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When is the right time to start your company?
In this second episode of Building MarsBased, we answer a listener’s question that every aspiring founder wrestles with: Should I launch while keeping my day job, or go all in?

We unpack the real factors behind that decision: macro timing, industry waves, personal runway, team alignment, and share how we made the call that led to MarsBased.

You’ll hear why the 2012–2014 window mattered in Spain’s post-crisis context, what the “mobile app boom” taught us about riding vs ignoring a hot trend, why nights and weekends rarely scale, and the exact moment (December 2013) we took the leap. We also discuss the investor point of view on “founder commitment” and a practical way to spot opportunities from inside your current company.

In this episode, you’ll learn how macro conditions shape founder timing, what makes the difference between a viable and an advantaged moment to start, what the realities of bootstrapping look like compared to fundraising, why part-time efforts usually stall and what to do instead, and how to use your current job to validate a real problem worth solving.

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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 everybody to Life on Mars. Welcome to the second episode of Building Mars-based. In this episode, we bring you an answer to a question that we got from a fan of the company, a fan of the podcast that I'm going to be reading shortly. So in the first episode, we covered how to find the best business idea and how to find yourself adding value to the market and to potential clients. This time around, I'm going to be answering when is the right time to do it, right? When is the best time to quit your shop if you have one or to create the venture that you want to pursue? Or when is the right time to just follow a trend in the market, right? In this case, the question reads as follows. So, as someone trying to build something, I'd be interested if you could elaborate on some of these issues in future episodes. He's got three questions for us. I'm going to be covering only two of them because one of them merits an own episode. So the first question is balancing a regular job with trying to start a business. The second one is starting a business with friends, partnership agreements, time commitment, remuneration, conflicts, and whatnot. And the third one is when is the right time in life to start a business, right? As I mentioned, I think this is more about the time to build a company, not so much about the working with friends part of the company, because that deserves its own episode. And we've got plenty, plenty of angles to cover in that one. So with that being said, I'm going to be covering when to find the right time in life, for instance. How did it pan out for us in the case of the three founders of Marspace? As I mentioned in the first episode, in case you missed it, we had been working on previous ideas to Mars Based for about two years before we actually found that we wanted to create a consultancy and agency model, right? We worked on several products that they didn't see the light of date, most of them. And as a result of that, we found out that maybe we were better at working for other people. And therefore, we created a services agency, right? But when did that happen? There are several considerations here. One is the year, right? We started having the conversations in around 2012, in which Spain was sort of recuperating from the 2008 financial crisis. And while some markets were a little bit more bearish and a little bit more bullish, some of them, um, the technology sector was still holding back and was still not very well remunerated. That is very important because if you think of the tech salaries today, um I don't think you could explain why we created Marspace back in the day. To put it simply, when I started working for Deloitte in 2008, my salary was 13,000 euros a year, right? It was very, very low. A few years afterwards, um I trained jobs, and so my salary was around 30,000 a year, which was really, really low for a senior developer, right? This salary we don't even offer to s to junior developers nowadays, because obviously there's been a lot of inflation, but also a lot of um inflation in the developer salaries. And um, but in 2012, if you really wanted to make a lot of money working in technology in Spain, you were better off creating your own company than just switching jobs and working for third parties, right? So while the financial driver was not the main motivation we had, I think it helps to explain why we did it that year. If we had waited for three or five more years, maybe we would have been more complacent, maybe we would have been more satisfied with our salaries. Uh, because as a matter of fact, Jordi was the CTO of a company, Chavi was the tech lead in another company, and I was I was building my career also as a developer in another company. So we could have gotten to a place where, you know, we're making enough money that maybe it wouldn't have made any sense for us to start a company. However, because we were in 2012, and then these two years that we worked on these projects that never saw the light of day, the salaries still didn't evolve that much, at least in the consulting sector. Maybe they evolved in the startup sector. But we didn't discover it. We never went and worked for a startup. We never went and worked for a big technological company that had really good salaries. And therefore, I think this is key to understand the when did that happen, right? Put it simply again, if we had waited until 2015 or until 2017, maybe we wouldn't have created markspace. The second consideration uh after the macro economy is the trends in the market, right? Um, this doesn't really affect us, but for instance, if you're really passionate about AI and MCP servers and automatization and stuff like that, maybe as the right moment to go and create something on AI right now because there's a lot of investment, there's a lot of press, there's a lot of talent willing to build stuff on AI, and therefore it is a good moment to create a company around AI, right? It might be in a market that's adjacent to AI, it might be directly involved with AI, but definitely if you create something today that is not on AI, chances are that it will not survive for very long, or you will have to struggle more, right? It's not the right time to build NFTs today. It's not the right time to build a new cloud service, it's not the right time to build mobile apps, perhaps, right? Because those trends happened in the past. And if you catch the wave, it's a good time to start a um to start a company on that wave, on that movement. Because a rising tide lifts old boats, right? And if you're not super successful, at least you will profit from the momentum of the market, from like group dynamics, from an in maybe an overhyped and overinflated economy before the bubble bursts. But at least for a good while, for some years, it might be interesting, it might be sufficiently safe for you to start a company, right? Um that's for products, because you really depend on the market. In our case, for instance, we started a services-based company, and it would have been probably much more reasonable to start a mobile development company because that was even though 2014 was not the heydays of uh app development, it was still hot, right? Uh the more or less the mobile application developing craziness starting in 2009, 2010, um, and it went very, very hot for 2012. We decided we only wanted to do web development, right? Because the web is still there. Everybody needs web, everybody needs software uh outside of mobile. We didn't do mobile back then, and I think that that wouldn't disqualify us from being like a profitable, profitable business. But it's very it would it would have been probably much more interesting or safer or maximized the likelihood of us being successful if we had started doing mobile or chasing whatever programming language was the most famous at the time. And back in the day, Ruby on Rails was sort of famous, but all the hype went to Node.js and React, and we didn't pursue that. So that's why I said like there are certain considerations that we never followed, and in spite of that, it went well for us, but probably would have been more successful and more successful faster if we had followed these trends, right? Um, we also decided that certain technologies we wouldn't do. We didn't jump on the big data uh bandwagon uh when it became popular. We didn't jump into mobile development, we didn't jump into doing uh UX UI right from the get-go. We didn't jump into doing React from the get-go, right? So, but if you really want to start a business on something that is really, really hot at the moment and you think it's gonna last for a good while, it is very safe. Because as I mentioned, there's press, there's talent, there's investment, there's MA activity. So all of these things help to make a market more stable, right? And to create companies. Or if not a company, maybe to start your own small business. You can start with your own shop, your own small boutique agency. It's only you or a super small product. But I think, or you know, when Google Chrome released the marketplace for the add-ons to Chrome, a lot of people started their own mini businesses, Microsaa, or like these plugins and compliments for Google Chrome. One of them very successful from Barcelona, Mailtrack, rebranded to MailSuit later on. But I think like they they really created a really good product because they jumped on that trend. And so timing markets is very interesting. And unless you're really wrong, the that phase, that trend will last for two, three to five years. So that's sufficient time for you to find the next thing. And the last consideration about finding the right time in life to create a company for me is what is your situation at home, right? Um, you have to talk to your partner and to your family, and maybe to your friends as well. I don't know. Depends on what is your constellation of support around you. But definitely becoming an entrepreneur and quitting your own job and creating your own company, which will bring a lot of um a lot of uncertainty into the equation, it will affect other people. So it's much safer if you do it on your own, if you're single or you have no people depending on you, like children or elderly uh people at home. Um, so I think that you should also take that into consideration. In our case, what was the I I cannot give a lot of personal details, obviously, because uh there's a lot of privacy here involved. But uh in our case, no uh the three of us we didn't have children. Um I was the only the single one, and so that's why whenever whenever we decided to create Marspace, I took the leap of faith and I quit my job and I devoted full-time for Marspace because I really, really believed in the in the project, but also I had no other people depending on me, right? I hadn't bought any properties, I hadn't uh maybe children coming to the world in the next month, or or I didn't have even a partner that was living with me, and who, or maybe the household relied on my income, right? I could take that risk because it was a personal uh decision, it was the right time in my life to do it, and nobody else depended on me. So if you're going to do this now and you have other people depending on you, you should have this very, let's say, difficult conversation because that will affect your relationship with them and it might strain it, right? Uh when the times get rough or when things go south, or when you're not able to pay yourself in time, or when you the going gets tough and you have to probably lay off a few people and then that affects you personally, and you're stressed, or you're burnt out, or you're depressed, this is really going to affect you. So entrepreneurship is a very lonely journey. But if you can really partner up with your partner at home and uh they are on the same page as you, they're supportive, definitely you're going to need that. So as I mentioned, so for the finding the right time, I don't think there's ever a right time. But if you take into account the macro economy, if you take into account what's popular, and if you take into account whatever reality you've got at home, and these three things more or less align, I think you could have a safer or less safe situation or let's say a platform to build your business on top of that, right? The second question, well, as I mentioned, the second question, working with friends, that will come in a separate episode. And um the third question was hey, so when is the right time to quit your job and how do you balance this with working on another job? And I think that is a pretty interesting question because I think everybody has got different realities. But there are two ways of doing this here. One way is investors will tell you one thing, and the other one is the reality. What works. Let me get this straight. Whenever an investor says, I'm not going to invest in your company because you're working at another company, you're not working full-time free, you're not super committed. It is because they're betting their money and they're thinking about the return on their money. They don't care about your personal situation, they don't get about your mental health, they don't care about whatever struggles you are going to encounter, or whatever difficult situations you're going to face off, or whatever troubles you will get into with other people. They are seeing you as a financial speculative asset. That being said, there are a few investors, select ones that will invest no matter what, right? But like in everything in life, you have to analyze what are the incentives behind what people say. Why do I mention this? Why do I bring this up? Well, there's this mantra going around in the entrepreneurial world that it says that if you're not fully committed, it will not fly. That's not true. We've got plenty of examples out there of people working in another company and moonlighting with with their new thing, right? So make you working at nights, working during the weekends, maybe working during their daily shift because their job is maybe not super interesting or they don't have work all the time and stuff like that. So I do have some pretty strong opinions on this. I don't think it applies to everybody, but bear with me. It's going to be a pretty blunt, but I hope it will be carefully detailed explanation, right? In my case, for instance, I was working at another consultancy. Um technically speaking, you cannot work for other companies if that's on your contract. Some companies and some sectors are more strict with this, and they prevent you via their contract to work from for similar companies or the same kind of companies. So if I had been in another company in the same sector, um doing exactly the same thing, and my contract actually prevented me from working or from building Mars-based, I would have maybe incurred in legal trouble. Luckily for me, in my case, I was working at Advas's consulting company. Um they didn't have exclusivity in their contract, right? So I was not in potential trouble. But I could have been, because 99% of the consulting companies and agencies, they do have this exclusivity because it's understandable. If you're working for them, how do I know? So if you're working for me, how do I know you're not stealing my clients for your own agency, right? Because that's competition and that's understandable. And the second reason why I was on the safe, it's because we started off as building products, not services. So at the time that we were building cooking.me and the other platforms, so Wollivan and the third one I mentioned in the first episode, we were a product company. It was after I quit my job that we decided to create a consulting business, right? So on that part, I was safe. So make sure that if you have a stable job, your contract doesn't prohibit you from working on your business idea. It's going to be less likely if it's not in the same sector. But chances are that if you're creating a company, it will normally be around or very close to the company that you were working previously, because that's where you spot the inefficiencies, that's where you spot the opportunities, it's the market that you know, it's the context that you have, it's the opportunities that you see. So just bear that in mind. It might not be illegally viable to do it while you're on your steady job. And if you decide to do it, just think or take into consideration that it might be illegal. It might be you you it might pose a really contractual risk for you. And um just you might be able to you might face the consequences. Just take that into consideration, right? Um the second thing is how do you actually do it in this case, right? So most people what they do is they work during the day on this steady job, and then at night, in the evenings, whenever they're, you know, the children sleep or super early in the morning, they wake up like at 5 a.m., 6 a.m., they put in a couple hours before the other job starts, and then on the weekends and spare hours here and there, right? That's a way of doing it. Um, I don't think that's the best way of or the best use of your mental bandwidth and your gray matter, because those are probably the worst hours of the day, usually. If it's too early in the morning, you're super tired. If it's too late at night, you're super tired. If you have to wait until your children go to bed, you might be stressed and anxious about that. If you're doing stuff on the weekend, maybe your family is not super happy about this, right? So, um, and also you need to recharge your batteries. So if you work 40 hours a week on your steady job, working on top of these 40 hours might not be the best use of your time or your creativity and productivity. There's another way of doing it, which is do it while you're doing your steady job. Um that uh whatever your moral compass stands, you might be able to do this or not. There are certain jobs that allow for this because they are more reactive. Think of it if you're a firefight fighter, for instance. Maybe you don't have to do anything until they activate an alert, and then you have to go on the field to solve whatever issue or whatever uh accident happened. And so if you're stuck eight hours in the office waiting for the next thing, the next alarm to go off, maybe you can work on this. Maybe you've got a job that um you've got a certain amount of tasks that you're able to complete in six hours, but you don't get more tasks during the day and you got to spare two hours, or maybe you can have lunch faster, or take no breaks, and then work on your side project uh while, you know, in these little slots here and there. Maybe you can do it. Just also bear in mind that if you're using their laptops, their equipment, their Wi-Fi, their office, you might also be incurring into some kind of infringement uh in legal terms. So I would advise against doing these kind of things. But if you can work from home and then your, as I mentioned, your job is very reactive, that maybe you're able to do some stuff in parallel, or one day you got like less less work, or you pull an all-nighter for your steady job and you gotta compensate the day afterwards. Maybe that's the way to do it. Um I don't know. In our case, it was difficult. The way we did it is first off, for a while we were working on like the weekends and on the evenings, right? For the first, say, year or so, we were doing this stuff on the side. The three of us had very stable jobs and very demanding jobs. And some of them they required us to work longer shifts than the eight hours per day. So we had a few evenings here and there, we had a few hours here and there, maybe the weekends. We would just team up on a weekend, on a Sunday, and just work on the project, right? But that was never enough. And so that lasted for a little while until I decided to take the leap of faith. And that must have been around December 2013, when I decided, you know what, I really believed in the project. I was so fed up with my previous job that I couldn't see myself going any farther doing the two jobs, right? More than anything because I was fed up with my previous job. And so I said, if I'm if I go full-time for this, I will make things happen much faster, whether for the good or for the bad, right? It might be that if we have to be successful, we'll be more successful faster. But if we have to flop, maybe this will happen also faster because I'm able to work eight hours a day on this. So in mid-December 2013, I quit my job and I effectively speaking, I went full-time for this. That's when I moved to San Francisco for three months and doing eight to ten to twelve hours a day at dawn, even counted. Um I started getting the first clients for Marspace, and the rest is history, right? But my two partners, Xavi and Jordi, they kept their jobs for other reasons, right? They had their other motivations to keep their jobs, and also they were not ready, or it would have been unreasonable for them to do the same thing. And maybe the company didn't have enough work for the three of us to be full-time working on it, right? But also it was a financial risk that I was going to take because I had saved some money. Uh, my monthly burn rate was way lower, and I was always more like scrappy than my two co-founders. So I could do this. I could afford it, and I was willing to afford it, even if we had agreed that nobody would be doing it before due time. Before the agreement that we had that we would start earning money from the company when we had a certain amount of cash in the bank and when you had a certain amount of recurring revenue coming into the company. But I said, fuck it. For me, it's the right time to do it. I can afford it, and I think I will make things happen much faster if I go full-time for it, right? Even if I take no money. For the first six months, I earned no income from the company, and all I did was trying to get clients, right? Maybe this wouldn't have happened had I not quit my job, had I not taken this leap of faith, right? So you will never know. It's very easy to look back and reconstruct your narrative and still uh say, like, oh, this happened because I did this. We will never know, right? Why? Because it's very, it's very difficult. Um, I will go now to explain like what are the pros and the cons of doing both things, right? But so for the first six months of the company, so after I went full-time, Chavi, our CTO, kept his job at another company, at his previous job. And I remember very vividly the day when he called me. It must have been around June 2014, when his company was in financial distress. They were laying off people. And that's usually a very good signal to know whether it's the right time to quit your job and start being an entrepreneur. It's like if your company is laying off people, maybe it's good to take that severance and the compensation that comes with it and um build some economic cushion for yourself and start a new thing. Because you will always have time to go back to other companies. So while he wasn't personally affected, uh Tavi called me saying, Look, they're laying off people, the company seems to be in distress. Uh, I don't think this is going to last a lot uh for a lot of time, but I've been promoted. And they want me to lead the one of the biggest company uh projects of the company. At the time, that was the FC Parcel on a project. And I have a decision to make. Do I stay in the company, knowing that maybe I will be here for like three or six months before the company just shuts down or lays off more people? Or do I quit now because I don't really want to burn any breaches. I don't want to say yes and commit to a role that I will be quitting in a few weeks if things go well with Mars-based, right? And it was pouring the fuck down. And I was at Barcelona Activa and and I remember saying to Chavi, look, I never, never would have said this to any other person. I I don't, you know, I don't eagerly say to somebody, quit your job, follow your dreams, because for the most part, I don't believe in that, in that, um, in that kind of narrative. I think only super rich people tell you to follow your passion. But I said, look, Chabby, I think it's the right time to do it. Like we had signed a couple clients, and you you know, um Chabi being a tech lead super proficient in Ruby on Rails, Angular, Java, whatever. Like he would have found a new job in the blink of an eye. So I said, let's give it a try now, because we're developing pretty slow right now. You're doing it only on the weekends and on the evenings. Let's try to do it for a few months. And worst case, if this doesn't fly, you and I start looking for a new job at the end of the summer, because we had that amount of money to stay afloat for three to four months, more or less, right? And then our other partner, Jordi, kept his job for a year because he had a child coming in that summer. So we said, like, um, you know, you have to be stable at home. Let's take it easy on your case. And he's super efficient, he works super smart all the time. So for a year, he kept his other job. And so I think that that goes to show that we can actually do both things at the same time, even though it's not recommended because it takes uh an emotional and and a physical strain on you. But you know, there are several pros about about doing this, right? So you can say that about this is the taking the slow path, right? Slow path is hey, we gotta be uh we will keep our job while we create the new company. The pros are you don't have to worry about money. You got a stable salary that keeps coming in, and you you're able to think things through, to polish stuff more often, to just, you know, kind of like iron off all the details. You um you can make better decisions as well. Uh you will not be stressed by the lack of money. Maybe you're stressed because you're overworked. But I think you take more and better decisions, you produce better work if you can do it more calmly, right? Also depends on what is your driver, right? Do you do you want to work more hours? Do you worry are you able to bear stress? Do you do you want to make more money, less money? Do you want to run faster, uh, rent slower? That really depends on you. The other thing is it brings stability at home, as I mentioned. Like if you keep your steady job, your partner, your family will be happy, even though you will be overworked, but at least you will not stress about money. The other thing is you because you are staying in a workplace, maybe you're able to grow your network of contacts larger. You will see other opportunities in that market, you will be inefficiencies in the processes. So most of the time, most successful entrepreneurs they see something that is not working right in their company and they just create a new company to fix it, right? For instance, uh, our friends at Cantox, they were working at Deloitte, they saw that the forex trading exchanges were not super efficient in the company. Whenever they were talking to clients, clients would always complain about the same thing. Like the rates are not great, the commissions are super high, takes a long time. And they said, like, fuck it, we're gonna quit our jobs. If you uh hire this from us, we will create a new company, we'll fix it for you, we'll give you the best rates faster and better. And they did it, right? So that's a good way. They spotted the opportunity, they had the clients, and they created a new company, and it went well for them. It went actually super fucking well. Um and that's it. I think those are the main benefits of following this road, the other road, uh or the maybe the downsides of uh going this way. Slow of keeping the two jobs is that you might become more complacent. Because if you have a stable income, if you have no actual rush or urgency, then what's the point, right? Why running? I don't need it. I'm good like this. And this lack of urgency, then maybe creates this, you know, um satisfaction that will not make you think that will not that will not bring up the alertness of saying, like, if I don't do the right thing, I will starve. Right? Also, there's an opportunity cost. Each day that you say at your previous job, there's an opportunity cost. Maybe that day you would have employed these hours to go meet a client, to go to an event, to speak at a podcast, to launch a new feature, to uh run faster with product development and whatnot. And that was the right day. Because if you ship it one day afterwards, this person on LinkedIn doesn't see it. All right. So you are diminishing your own chances at winning the lottery. Uh also, as I mentioned before, if you keep a steady job that is a 9 to 5 job, then your best hours are used there. If you deploy your best hours, you know, gray matter from 9 to 5, chances are like 6, 7, or even like 11 p.m., you will be depleted. You'll be exhausted, you will not be creative, you will not be productive, and the only thing you'll think about is I need to sleep, right? Um, it's not the best use of your time. And moreover, most people, potential clients and potential hires, they will always want to talk during the day. And so if you are at your steady job, you will not be able to take sales call for your startup. Because whenever you start working for these like 10 p.m., they will already be home because it's their regular job, right? Unless you work for different time zones and your client, if you're based in Spain, then you work at night, then you're able to sell to the US. But that's a completely different ballgame. Um, and I think that it wouldn't be very unlikely to uh very, let's say, um acceptable to think like this from the get-go. These things usually come a little bit later in the game, right? And uh at the end of the day, you will be working more, right? If you were 9 to 5 for your comp uh, for your steady job, and then a couple hours a day for your startup and on weekends and on holidays, you will end up being overworked, which is something that we always say you can sprint, but marathons are usually not a good thing. Or you cannot sprint a marathon, right? You can sprint for 100 meters for 250 meters for half a kilometer if you want, and that is sustainable if you do it seldom, but you you cannot sprint during a marathon. That's not how it works, and you will end up being overworked and having health problems, mental problems, and emotional problems as well, right? So, with that being said, I think I've pretty much covered when is the right time to start a company. Uh, how did it pan out for us? Um, what are the considerations of balancing a steady job with your uh startup or your side project? So uh thank you very much for the for the question and keep them coming. We have already recorded a few episodes answering questions on top of the episodes that we've got about you know working with friends, sales, contracts, hiring, firing, and whatnot. And I'm happy to be bringing these episodes to you in the next weeks. And so stay tuned and thank you for listening.