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 interview with our CEO Àlex, from late 2019, when he was interviewed at IndieHackers BCN to talk about bootstrapping businesses, indie development, B2B sales, being an officeless company and how to hire and nurture less senior talent in an all-remote environment, and the challenges we faced as a company back then. We also delved into what was our product, at the time, a project that never saw the light of day - but we won't spoil you why.

Àlex also went over his relationship with Startup Grind and how this was combined with MarsBased in the first years of the company, and how he sold the idea to his two co-founders.

Àlex is also the kind of person who writes in third person when speaking about himself, like right now - but he's not a bad person.

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

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 with them, how this has affected team morale, what things have we stopped doing and other subjects like the changes in the jobs market (The Great Resignation), how boutique devs will struggle in the next years and how difficult it is to work with big corporations as a small company.

All the above derived in a blunt conclusion: we need to raise our prices, so if you're reading this and want to work with us next year (not for us, as Àlex wrongly speaks during his rambling), it's a good time to talk!

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

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 community community community community is all we see/hear and talk about nowadays. Everyone has an opinion on it but, truth be told, most people don't know jack about it.

That's why we brought in Mark Birch, from AWS, to discuss with our CEO Àlex what is community, why is it that fucking hard, and who can and who cannot do community. Let's dispell myths, drop some f-bombs and hard truths about community building, and most importantly, why most corporates will never understand the underlying truths of community.

If you want to build community around your project and/or have first-hand experience doing it and know the real pains: empty events, plateau in growth, lack of motivation, other projects sucking all your energy, toxic people in your events and whatnot, then this episode is for you.

This episode is also for you if you want to be the person in your group of friends listening to the most interesting podcast out there. Your choice.

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

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 expert in those fields.

We discuss the incentives of marketers and the philosophy of growth, especially that of VC- backed businesses and how that intersects with UX and technology. More specifically, we drill down into some of the most used dark patterns in marketing nowadays and who are the people using them and the reasons for it.

If you're addicted to the dopamine kick of seeing interactions on your social media profiles, or you're getting tired of seeing the same tone, messages and tricks in each and every app you're using, you should be listening to this episode.

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

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 people, trying to connect like crazy to Zuck's empire.

We brought two friends of the company to discuss this piece of news on an impromptu call: Jordi Miró (CTO @ TheHotelsNetwork) & Victor Castell (Job&Talent).

In this conversation, we discussed what to do when an outage like this happens to your company: what kind of team to assemble, what to document, how to coordinate, what to announce externally and internally, how to do a proper post-mortem and more.

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

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 of a huge corporate like Schibsted with ours, at MarsBased.

Huge congrats if you make it past Àlex's longest intro ever.

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

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
• More talking about what we do instead of just listening to other companies

Àlex goes on talking about what's happened during the summer of 2021 to the MarsBased spaceship, detailing team changes, operations complications, a couple of clients selling their companies, projects starting/finishing, and whatnot. You will see more changes coming up on our social media, next episodes and our blog, too.

It might as well be that he recorded this episode because he didn't have anything prepared after the holidays break. Everything is possible.

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

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 startups in Barcelona.

Recently, Apple has acquired the company, but at the time, they were hitting scale-up phase. Vilynx is a self-learning platform that categorises video for some of the most innovative companies in the planet, all developed from Barcelona.

In this fireside chat, Elisenda and Àlex nerd out on how to hire developers, how to structure teams, how to promote senior staff and delegate (spoiler: she doesn't/didn't delegate), where do they find Python/AI talent, and how to and not to micromanage people, among other topics.

Good acquisition, Tim Apple 👏

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

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.

Actually, you have heard Dorion before in this podcast, in episode #7 How to keep the house clean: sunsetting legacy systems and tech hygiene.

The audio recording is pretty terrible - our sincere apologies for that - but the content is very good and we think that every aspiring entrepreneur should listen to this conversation where the following topics are discussed:

• Misconceptions and myths in the tech industry
• Companies vs. products vs. features
• How to pick technologies for new projects
• How to find a technical co-founder or CTO
• How to hire developers
• Current technologies vs. more established programming languages
• How to communicate the cost of tech to non-technical business partners
• And more!

Also, you can enjoy Dorion's infinite tech wisdom and Àlex's failed attempts at standup comedy throughout the course of this fireside chat.

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

Support the show

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

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 disclosure).

Bernat improvised a fireside chat with Àlex to talk about his multiple initiatives, covering:

• How we work at MarsBased
• Why we have ARR as a services-based company
• Economics of a company like MarsBased
• What is Startup Grind Barcelona and how it is managed from MarsBased
• Why haven't we gone into product
• Why we don't have churn either in clients or employees
• Àlex's adventures in angel investing

If you want to see Àlex sweating bullets when asked about financials*, you ought to see this episode.

* Thank god we've got Jordi to make sure that the company is financially viable.

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

Support the show

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