Thank you (and see you in 2019)!
Captain's log, stardate d176.y38/AB
We're about to wrap a really good year. 2018 has brought us new clients, new friends and lots of experiences learnt. We'd like to be thankful for everything we've lived this year, and to everyone who's shared the ride with us.
Our team is our best asset. Not only have they worked meeting our quality standards, but they've also embodied the MarsBased values: less is more, quality over quantity, transparency, and to always exceed the client's expectations.
We can't be thankful enough for all the trust they've placed on us. Not only some of our earliest hires, who joined when the company was less than a year old and therefore not the most stable boat to jump into, but to all the team, who get along so well and contribute to making our get-togethers (the bi-monthly Martian Days and the annual Martian retreat) something exceptional.
If you still haven't met all of them, you can get to know them a bit by visiting our Team page.
We'd like to extend our gratitude also to our significant others and most beloved families, for their continuous support. They also contribute to making this possible.
Our gratitude also goes to the extended family. As much as we'd like to do all of our projects ourselves, we sometimes have to rely on extra hands.
We complement our phenomenal Martian team with a set of brilliant freelancers and other specialised agencies. Sometimes they cover some technologies and frameworks we don't do, so we can offer more solutions to our clients.
It's not easy to find like-minded people, but when you do, you've got to keep them close, and that's why we tend to employ them as much as possible.
Some people have gotten to know us through our monthly Startup Grind events in Barcelona and in Andorra.
In the case of Barcelona, we've organised 59 Startup Grind Barcelona events in well over four years of operations (since April 2014), and this year we've extended our team of five up to nine full-time members. Such a superb team allowed us to organise the second annual Startup Grind Tech conference, with over 900 participants. Check the Startup Grind Tech 2018 highlights video here:
In Andorra, a much smaller chapter, we have just started this year, and done three high-quality events, including one with the Minister of Economy, Innovation and Competitiveness, Mr. Gilbert Saboya. Check all the Startup Grind Andorra events here.
Thank you all, Startup Grind Barcelona and Startup Grind Andorra teams!
2018 has been a really good year for sales. Not only have we renewed all of our contracts with our clients, which is a healthy signal, but we've also been able to bring on new ones by increasing our team.
Companies like Naiz or Zapptales have been working for years with us and we've renewed our vows for an extended period of time. Other more intermittent clients, like the Barcelona City Council, keep coming back to us for extensions of contracts and new ideas every now and then, such as when we developed the Barcelona Startup Map or the Decidim.Barcelona platform.
As for new clients, we'd love to highlight Blueprint, Startup Genome, Freshis and Localistico.
We had a theory at the beginning of the year: there must be people out there who want to know more about MarsBased. That's why we launched our newsletter in early May.
The newsletter was launched silently mostly because we didn't want to make a big fuss about it, but we've closed the year with 352 subscribers. It is an amazing number if you consider that we've spent 0 euro in ads, we haven't worked on it beyond sending it once a month and we haven't used any dodgy tactics like offering "gimme-your-email-to-download" PDFs/eBooks.
It's grown through pure word of mouth and because it's been properly located on our website and on our email signatures, but that's it.
So, we'd like to thank all those 352 subscribers, plus all the other MarsBased fans out there: the ones that follow us on social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn...), the ones that like/RT/share our content, the ones that comment our blog posts, the ones who star our Github repos, the ones who come to our events and those who want to talk to us but haven't yet built the courage to do it. Feel free to drop us a line to tell us how can we help you, using this email address: [email protected].
A big thank you goes to the Startup Grind fans out there, too!
During 2018, we've hosted about 20 events, including some Startup Grind events in both Andorra and Barcelona, plus some more-technical MarsBased ones to discuss technology, development and blockchain.
A huge thank you goes to amazing people (and speakers) like Alex Puig, Anna Gener, Carlos Trenchs, Vicenç Martí, Pau Garcia-Milà, Timo Buetefisch, Juan Arnau, Chiara Massironi, Erik Auld, Ingrid Verschuren, David Tomàs, Helena Torras, Vincent Rosso, Pere Vallés, Cecilia Tham, Orit Kopel, Ryan Bubinski, Josh Feldberg, Alexis Bonte, Chad West, Dhiraj Mukherjee, Clancy Childs, Laura González, Svetlana Velikanova, the one and only Xavier Nòria, Miguel Valls, Montse Guàrdia, Pepe Agell, Jordi Romero, Josep Mitjà, Scott Mackin, Sunil Bhardwaj, Minister Gilbert Saboya, Denise Matthews, our buddy from Ironhack Agustín Tonna, Toni Raurich, Quirze Salomó, Daniel Reilly, Georgina Smallwood and Denise Barrett.
I'm pretty sure I've listed them all. If I've forgotten about you, it's because you're too great and deserve to be put on a higher list. Promise.
As most of the events out there, our events do not happen without their sponsors and partners. We've been lucky enough to count on partners and sponsors that are there for the long term, and ask very little, if anything, in return.
Companies like Caixabank, Page Personnel, Schibsted, Catalunya Emprèn/Start-up Catalonia, Barcelona Activa, ACC10, Ikoula, Muns, Iyi events, O'Reilly Media, Malt, Spaces, Estrella Damm, e-Residency Program from the Government of Estonia, Ironhack and a few others also deserve a giant round of applause for being always there.
if you're happy about the services you're paying for, you should say it. Some of these companies, like us, work mostly through word of mouth, so this is another way of thanking them: by recommending them publicly.
Thank you Altisent for helping us with the contracts and all the required legalese to run such a particular company like ours.
We've had a fantastic experience working with Barcinno when we wanted to promote our events and our job openings. They are really good value for money and we can't recommend them enough.
Really talented boutique shops like Swwweet and Atico3 aren't easy to find, and we're extremely grateful for having found them, worked alongside them, and learnt from them. To many more years!
Last, but not least, if you like the photos & videos from our events, they're from the folks at Madbo Estudio and El cocu.
We live and breathe open source. We only work with open source languages and frameworks, such as Angular, React, Node.js, Postgres, RSpec, Redis, Redux, Rubocop, Ruby on Rails, Ruby, Kubernetes, Sass, vi, vim, Sinatra and many others.
We're equally thankful for other tools that are supportive of open source, such as Github, Docker, Heroku, Netlify and Cloud66, just to name a few.
Of course, we couldn't leave the whole Ruby/JavaScript community out of this, the organisers of Ruby events around the globe, like our favourite EuRuKo, the contributors of the language itself and all its gems, and tools like Rubygems.org, RubyWeekly, RubyTapas, npm and many more.
We draw inspiration daily from companies like Basecamp, and their blog & books, because they do not only build incredible software, but they teach us how to run a company.
We wouldn't be able to run a 100%-remote & officeless company without tools like Google Drive to store our documents, Gmail to store our email, Spark & Superhuman to manage our emails on native desktop apps or Amazon for providing virtually every service a company and its clients need. Other tools we use include Trello, Slack, Harvest, HelloSign, Hubspot, Buffer, Hotjar, Cloudfront and Airbrake.
We're also thankful for the whole OSX toolset like Keynote, Numbers and Pages, which we use for our templates & documents at MarsBased. It's partly because of them, if they're so beautiful.
We'd love to thank you for reading this. You're really important to us. You're always there and we hope we can be there for you too.
In a few days we will roll out some important changes in the company, and we want you to be the first to know, so stay tuned and subscribe to our newsletter!
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