Back

This is what we do

Captain's log, stardate d63.y39/AB

MarsBased Projects Web development Backend Frontend
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit
Founder & CEO
This is what we do

We often get asked what are we working on. Here's a comprehensive summary of the projects we're doing right now as a company.

We are on our seventh year of operations right now. Hitherto, we have been working in almost 100 different projects, which is a number I find insane. We're so grateful to be still in operation after all these years 🙏🏼

As a consultancy, we get to work for clients of all sizes, different countries and very diverse sectors, too. Most of our clients have been with us for years, but every year we get a few new faces.

This is a quick update of all the different projects we've got ongoing right now.

First off, we are still working for Naiz, evolving their platform. We have been working together since 2015, and we've been able to help them to undergo important transformations like the adaptation to a mobile-first design to all their widgets, a redesign of the entire site or improvements to their newsletter and caching systems.

For them, we have become their technological partner of choice, helping them in many fronts even outside of development, but mostly we're doing both intensive backend development and frontend projects, combining a lot of different profiles from our team over the years.

We also provide Rails development to Localistico, a UK-based company driving online traffic to offline stores. We have been helping them with pure Rails backend development for two years now, but we can't talk much about this project in particular until we publish the success case for our portfolio in a few weeks!

Another pure Rails client we have is Spin, the US-based e-scooters company, part of the Ford group. We have been working for two years helping them to develop the core of their mobility platform as they scale up their services and expand their business to other countries. This is exactly what we do for another California-based business as well, Valuation Metrics.

Sometimes, our clients need also help with refactoring, improving their code and add testing to it to complement what their own team is doing, or to help them reach the quality they haven't been able to produce internally. This is the case of BlueprintHQ, a UK-based small startup whose founders moved on from development to sales and growing their business when they decided to bring us in as their tech team.

Rails is really important in what we do, and it's been fundamental in our company since our inception, but we work with other programming languages and frameworks. In fact, we work for the Swedish product agency Prototyp providing them with React and Node.js (using GraphQL & Express) development.

Prototyp have been a regular customer of ours since 2016, and we find it very easy to work with and for them because we share a common vision and most of our values as a company. We also provide React services for a Catalan company in the industrial sector who prefer to remain anonymous, to help them to build their internal tools and maintain their technological platforms.

Outside of regular development, we also like it when we can conceptualise and design the products we will develop. Since early this year, we're working for the European Climate Foundation. For them, we're in the final stages of designing a very ambitious platform for their marketing and communications efforts. We have spent about half a year coming up with the product, defining specs & functionalities and now we're polishing the design before starting the implementation and full-stack development in the coming weeks.

In the same space, we are working for C40. The values of companies and organisation fighting climate change resonate with ours, so we like to get involved with them to help them in their cause. For C40, we're maintaining their bespoke platform, built with Ruby on Rails, helping them with occasional UX/UI consulting and design.

Although most of our clients come already with an idea of what they need and even a prototype or a somewhat-functional design, some do not, and we can help them do the user discovery phase, using diverse methodologies such as design thinking and the like, to then move on to iron out the UI/UX of the product we will develop afterwards. Last year, we did it for Startup Genome, and this year it's been the European Climate Foundation.

Speaking of Startup Genome, we are building a really cool platform for them on top of Locomotive CMS. After redesigning their site and rebuilding their content management system with this Rails-powered CMS, we are adding new functionalities to the site and helping their teams to increase sales and put out valuable content for the startup ecosystems worldwide.

Similarly, we also build e-commerce platforms. In such cases, we use Shopify to build sites like zapptales, a Munich-based startup selling books made out of chats, and Freshis, a Spanish e-commerce selling km0 & bio food in Madrid (soon expanding to Barcelona!).

We have also been acting as a rescue squad some times. In fact, the aforementioned Naiz hired us in early 2015 when their previous provider shut down almost overnight. We had to take over the project and hit the ground running to ensure the platform's uptime and its correct service to their visitors.

An even more extreme example of rescue squad project is when we were hired to develop an emergency tool for a national health entity due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Because of a very strict NDA, we're not able to disclose much about it, but let's say we built something functional in less than four days to help them navigate the extremely-adverse circumstances. Every second counted, and we're still working on that platform nowadays to adapt it to the different phases of the fight against the pandemic.

Last, but not least, we can also provide high-level expertise and specialised teams to join forces in huge projects. In this case, Everis has hired us to help them to architect and develop two critical projects in the football space for tier-one football clubs in Spain, where we bring our best experts in Node.js and Angular to join their teams in a common effort to tackle some of the biggest projects we've ever been part of.

So, all in all, we're working for different countries all over the world, different sizes of companies and different sectors. Sector-wise, we've got insurtech (BlueprintHQ), mobility (Spin), fintech (Valuation Metrics), media (Startup Genome, Naiz), e-commerce (Freshis, zapptales) and communications/adtech (European Climate Agency, C40, Localistico), sports (Everis) and more.

And now, how can we help you?

Share this post

Related Articles

Lighthouse

How to handle client work remotely: our communication Stack

We use this communication stack to manage client work remotely.

Read full article
Ruby

Five reasons why our clients love Ruby on Rails for their apps

Contrary to popular belief, developing your project using Ruby on Rails won't make it more difficult to maintain. It's a competitive advantage, nowadays.

Read full article
We've adopted Linear for project (and company) management!

We've adopted Linear for project (and company) management!

At MarsBased, we like to review our workflows, tools and policies every now and then because what it used to be good for us, might not be the right fit now. For instance, last year, we changed our project management tool from JIRA to Linear.

Read full article