Celebrating a decade of bootstrapping brilliance, I, Àlex, founder of MarsBased, am back behind the mic to share an emotional tribute to the journey we've shared. As we revel in a significant milestone, I'm incredibly grateful for the unwavering support from our clients, friends, and the wider community. The anniversary bash in Barcelona was an unf…

Explore the power of AI in streamlining content creation and productivity in our latest podcast episode. We're joined by Clemens Rychlik from Bourbon, where he serves as COO, and the man behind the Barcinno newsletter, diving into how AI, including ChatGPT, is reshaping tasks like proofreading and SEO optimization. Clemens shares his insights on us…

Prepare to navigate the high-stakes world of mergers and acquisitions with insider expertise as Dimitri Steinberg and Brian Flynn from Founder Partners join me, Àlex from MarsBased, for a riveting discussion. In the ever-turbulent market of dwindling venture capital and faltering tech stocks, our guests share invaluable wisdom from their impressive…

Embark on an entrepreneurial odyssey with Keyven Ferland of La Web Shop and uncover the raw and real narrative of a bootstrapped business's ascent. From the humble beginnings of a solo design freelancer to captaining a burgeoning Canadian Shopify and e-commerce development shop, Kevan doesn't hold back on the experiences that shaped his agency's su…

What can you achieve as an entrepreneur without leaning on venture capitalist funding? How can we communicate more effectively in the modern work landscape? Today's episode is a deep dive into the riveting world of bootstrapped businesses, communication, and entrepreneurship with our esteemed guest, Amir Salihefendic, the CEO and founder of Doist. …

Brace yourselves for a riveting dialogue with Francesc Font Cot, the dynamic serial entrepreneur who co-founded Incapto Coffee, Nubelo, and Bandit. We uncover the raw truth behind the glitz and glamour of startup life and explore the harsh reality that only two out of 10 startups survive. Francesc, with his decades of experience, offers a rare pers…

With our special guest, Khash Sajadi, the founder and CEO of Cloud 66, we're unlocking the story of a technology that transformed the world of software deployment. Imagine a world where developers are freed from the drudgery of repetitive tasks. Cloud 66 began as a solution to that exact problem, and Khash takes us on a journey from the early days …

Ever wondered how a tech company rides the tumultuous waves of an industry in flux? Journey with us, as Àlex, founder of MarsBased, shares his company's evolution in managing a surge from one to two contracts a year to a whopping 10 short-term contracts. Get an inside look at the challenges, triumphs, and the newfound dynamism this pivot has inject…

In this episode, our good friend in and out of business, Josh Feldberg, interviews Àlex to discuss many topics for a good hour and a half. Two friends discussing business, where the podcast host, Àlex, becomes the interviewee in a long, free-flowing and casual conversation across all topics, ranging from usage of social media and discussing politic…

The story of MarsBased can't be told without a city in particular: San Francisco. Even though MarsBased started up in Barcelona, where the three co-founders are from and where most of the events pre-incorporation happened, San Francisco played a pivotal role. In late 2013, Àlex quit his corporate job and left for a three month trip to SF to soak up…

We hosted Job van der Voort, CEO @ Remote, to discuss the status of remote work (obviously) but also derivates of this: employee benefits, async work, leadership, our day-to-day as CEOs of tech companies, services vs product and more. Prior to founding Remote, Job served as the VP of Product at Gitlab, one of our reference companies when it comes t…

We have talked a lot about no-code back in the day, and far from being the technology that would render developers obsolete and take our jobs, it's become somewhat of a complement for quick experiments and lightweight MVPs. Now, in light of the recent happenings with AI, we're sort of seeing the same narrative around AI replacing developers and tak…

One of the downsides of running an agency, or a services-based company per se, is that you don't get media coverage. Only the biggest ones get some coverage but for us, small agencies, it's nearly impossible: we don't do B2C, we don't have products consumed by large chunks of population, most of our work is behind NDAs and also we don't raise funds…

A couple of weeks ago, shit hit the fan. A bank run on Silicon Valley Bank had to be intervened because hundreds of companies pulled their funds out of this popular bank. The US 16th largest bank, very popular among tech companies and startups, had to be sold because it became insolvent due to a series of bad decisions and their accumulated derivat…

We're excited to share this episode with you in which we talk to Kat O'Brien (Chief Partnerships Officer at ClimateTrade) about all things partnerships. Kat has been operating in the partnerships and marketing sector of both startups and corporates in the last years - as a matter of fact, we met when she was CMO at Polaroo, a former client of MarsB…

We bring in one of our references in UI/UX, Fabio Basile, to discuss freelancing in this sector. About time we discussed building a portfolio (with all the restrictions we can find as an agency: unlaunched projects, NDAs, etc.), choosing the right freelancer/agency for your project, red flags in clients AND in providers and much more. Of course, we…

Kicking off the new year in great fashion with a solo episode of Àlex (CEO) doing a recap of our historic 2022 and some of the landmarks we've accomplished as a company and a look into 2023, with some hints regarding what we will research as a company and new technologies we will be tinkering with. This episode is short and easy to digest, which co…

This week, we didn't have a guest speaker either, so we decided to record a solo episode. Àlex has addressed the team in an internal basecamp post to let us know that the company is very stable and that we're signing very long contracts with clients. That in mind, he gave us three things the company is doing to ensure more stability during this dow…

One day you're a developer, like all the rest, and then you're not one of them anymore. That's what happens when you go up the management ladder in technical teams. You still want to code and be cool, but you have to be focused on business, fundraising, managing people, putting processes into place and talking to partners and the leadership team or…

We had our friend Mark from AWS calling in from Websummit last year, we also had Jorge Jaramillo recording his podcast episode in a camper van, and now it's the time for someone to record from his car! Jonas Rinde, serial entrepreneur in the Nordic region of Europe, and current CEO of Nomono, shares with us a masterclass of calculating risks and ta…

Breaking news: Factorial raised 123.5MM in a series C funding round led by Atomico and Tiger Global, and Kantox has sold to BNP Paribas for 120MM. Both companies are built with Ruby on Rails, which might sound as irrelevant, but it's also great news for the technology and for its ecosystem. In this episode, Àlex rambles on for 20 minutes about how …

This episode will see us discussing text input and how to build keyboards for smartphones with Olivier Plante, CEO at Fleksy. Olivier has had a fruitful career in entrepreneurship but our paths didn't cross until some of the first Startup Grind events we organised in Barcelona, where he came and pitched his latest invention, ThingThing, a most flex…

Remote worker solitude is something that strikes within 12-18 months of working remotely. We all suffer from it yet very few speak about it publicly. As an officeless company, we have to be very aware of this, and coach people into spotting it and dealing with it correctly. That's why we have decided to normalise it, speaking about it publicly, on …

In this episode, our CEO Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit, devotes some time to answer questions from our friends from in- and outside of business, clients and other people we admire. Àlex rambles on for half an hour giving answer to the following questions: Who's the most brilliant individual you've ever worked with? What are your business weaknesses and w…

Back in the day, pre-pandemics and whatnot, we used to organise an annual conference called Startup Grind Tech. Oh, boy, long gone are those days. We hosted Carlota Pi, former CMO of HolaLuz, in her new role as chairwoman, to discuss their TV marketing campaign and marketing at scale. Carlota breaks down and shares all the learnings from that campa…

We talk to Marc Assens, CTO and co-founder of Happy Scribe, an AI product from Barcelona offering real-time translations and transcripts, completely bootstrapped as a business. With Marc, we discuss both the business part of his company but also there's a lot of tech talk, regarding their choice of programming languages, how Ruby plays with machine…

Appear.in was a video conference platform we started using in the early days of MarsBased, back when Google Meet Chats Hangouts, or whatever it was called back then, sucked big time, and the only alternatives were corporate platforms like WebEx and so on. We exchanged a few emails with them, from starting company to starting company, and since then…

In this episode, we talk to Pau Minoves, CTO at Typeform, one of the longest-standing and hottest startups in Barcelona, which recently raised $135 million in Series C funding. We talk about deployments, about company culture for hiring as well as for retaining developers. Pau tells us how they spur innovation into the company, how they evaluate pr…

In this week's episode, we discuss career paths for developers in the tech industry with Miguel Andrés (ex-Google, Badi, now CTO @ Simplr). If you're a developer and want to know what choices are out there, how can you choose between management, product or a purely technical progression path, this episode is for you. If you're someone looking to co…

Third episode talking about M&A and how to sell your business with our friend Mike Counihan, from Transcend Partners. On part 1 and part 2, Àlex and Mike discussed the first stages of the contact with prospective buyers, when to use M&A boutiques, what's the protocol, what to say, what not to do, how to calculate your price, how and when to prepare…

We've been collaborating with developer bootcamps throughout the years to ensure that we contribute to the next generations of developers, which is one of our favourite ways of paying it forward. LeWagon has consistently been adamant at teaching not only one programming language but many. In fact, they know the value of learning multiple programmin…

We sneaked into 4YFN (4 Years From Now), the startups conference of Mobile World Congress, to host a Startup Grind event - an event within a bigger event. Factorial acquired Codegram, a Rails consultancy we respect a lot, in December 2019, so this is one of the topics we cover in this interview, and how organic vs. inorganic growth are working out …

BOOM! the audio intros and outros are gone! We keep improving and iterating this podcast thanks to your feedback, making it a little bit better every day. In this occasion, we talk to the man, the myth, the legend, mr. Francisco Cruz, who spearheaded the community growth of Startup Grind globally, since their very first days to well over 300 chapte…

We have been curating the weekly newsletter of Startup Digest Barcelona since 2016 at MarsBased. Startup Digest contains a curated list of the best events in every city and we send it every Monday. We hosted Jessica Ford, their Director, to speak about the early years of Startup Digest, how they bootstrapped the project, how they built a bespoke pl…

OK - this one is a BANGER. It's got everything we like: async work, remote, hard opinions on corporates and VC-backed businesses, disruptive management styles, calendar & meetings management, how to grow company culture in fully-distributed teams and lots, lots of product. Amir has been spearheading Doist, the remote company behind Todoist and Twis…

We discussed no-code one year ago with Ben Tossell, from Makerpad, a few weeks before he sold his company to Zapier, in what would become the first Zapier acquisition ever. One year later, we decided to bring an expert in the subject, Nile Frater (Director @ NoCode.Tech) to bring us an update on the state-of-the-art of the no-code/low-code/less-cod…

Hope y'all are having a very restful winter break wherever you are in the universe! We're kicking off the year with our chin up and a very positive attitude to bring you the best content for this podcast, and we're also super thankful for your following and support throughout this year and a half of episodes! In this occasion, we bring you an inter…

Our CEO apologises publicly for the interruption of the programming of this podcast. We've gone through very busy six months, culminating with lots of launches of big projects and a major acquisition of one of our most important clients - just to name a couple of events. Àlex rambles on for half an hour about these past events and how we've dealt w…

Community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community …

We start this episode very well by stating that marketers ruin everything, so we don't expect to make a lot of friends with this episode - at least in the marketing industry. That's why we invited marketing & growth expert Thomas Petit to discuss ethics in product, marketing and growth because we really like his own perspective as an opinionated ex…

For six hours, Facebook and some related services, like Whatsapp and Instagram, disconnected themselves off the internet. The whole world turned to Twitter and to other similar services, taking them down too because of the spikes in unexpected connections, all the while they were overloading the Facebook servers with the incessant F5s from anxious …

One more episode remembering conversations from other events to kick off the new season of Life on Mars. We're bringing back the panel we hosted on our Startup Grind Tech 2019 Conference with our CTO & Co-founder Xavier Redó, and Laura González, from Schibsted, where they discussed hiring and managing developers, comparing the methods and workflows…

In this episode, our CEO Àlex talks at length about the new season of Life on Mars and all the changes that come with it. It is a symbolic change, not a full season change, so you won't see a different episode numbering. Instead, this is what we will change: More diverse formats Content linked to current events & news More and stronger opinions Mor…

For this last summer edition of Life on Mars, we're going all the way back to October 2018, when we hosted Elisenda Bou (CTO & Co-founder of Vilynx) at Startup Grind Barcelona. We usually don't host CTOs nor too technical people at Startup Grind, but Elisenda is not only a kickass CTO but also one of the co-founder of one of the most innovative sta…

We're repurposing an old (but still rings true today!) fireside chat we hosted at IronHack Barcelona in March 2017 with our good friend Dorion Carroll. Dorion had just quit his role as CTO/CIO at Zynga and was about to join Amazon as VP of Customer Engagement Technologies. All the while, he spent some time travelling, and visited us in Barcelona. A…

For this episode, we'd like to share a small interview with Àlex, our CEO, at an investors pitch event hosted by our friends at itnig. This time around, Àlex is the guest, while Bernat Farrero (Co-founder of itnig), interviewed him in the middle of the pitching event with startups for the Itnig Fund One, where Àlex is a partner (for the full disclo…

Studies show that over 50% of people have experienced sexual harassment at work, and even a bigger amount of people have witnessed it. We can't operate in business without acknowledging this and doing our small contribution to addressing this situation, irrespective of our team size. That's why we decided to bring on Eleanor Manley, CTO and co-foun…

We had the pleasure of hosting Didier Lafforgue, creator of LocomotiveCMS and CEO of the development agency NoCoffee. In 2016, we compared all the Ruby on Rails-powered CMS systems out there to pick one with which to build sites for less tech-savvy clients who wanted an alternative to Wordpress. We picked LocomotiveCMS, and we have been using it ev…

We wanted to celebrate our seven years as a company with a very special episode. Seven freaking years, already. We decided to take questions from the community, our closest friends and colleagues from the industry. The response was overwhelming, and we ended up with so many questions that we decided we're going to record an episode of Q&A with the …

Pixel art, dial-up modem sounds, 8-bit fantasy, RPG-like environments and tasks, retro music and HUGE loads of nostalgia. Does this sound appealing? This is what the folks at Twilio used to build their learning game TwilioQuest. TwilioQuest is a platform to learn how to code in PHP, Python and JavaScript using a videogame interface and dynamics. It…