Celebrating the first Martian Year

This week has been definitely a turning point in the life of MarsBased. Coincidentally, we also celebrated our first MarsBased birthday.

It's been truly memorable: not only did we enjoy a delicious cake commemorating the first year of the Martian family, but we sealed the biggest project to date for MarsBased, too.

Most of our first year, we spend it building our portfolio and tools such as Cookin.me, which we are releasing as open source in an alpha phase. The last few months, however, we devoted our time to work for other companies building apps and killer websites for them. Our customers are happy, and so are we.

In one year we have sealed projects abroad, attended some big events and, as MarsBased completed some important goals, we've learned and had fun along the way. On a funnier side, we've received job applications before we had any projects, we got the Nigerian prince scam, and two companies even tried to acquire MarsBased.

To celebrate this first anniversary, we want to share some of our best moments with you.

Learn by doing

Perhaps the best decision we have adopted at MarsBased was to always keep busy. Without a doubt, we learn by doing. In just one year, we've learnt more than what we would have learnt by reading expensive publications or in an MBA.

We have also refined our company culture by applying our values in our daily routine. We like to make better stuff by simplifying it, so we simplified our communication workflows and tool belt. Every week we devote some time to improve our routines and working methods to increase our productivity.

At MarsBased, we also like to adopt new technologies. Our latest adoptions have been Jekyll, CoffeeScript for our developments. We've as well cut down on communication channels by adopting Slack.

Community giveback

MarsBased are fully committed to contributing to the entrepreneurial scene that saw us grow. More than half a year ago we created Startup Circle with some friends, and now has grown to over 7 startups and more than 15 participants. Startup Circle helps new companies getting real by helping one another.

MarsBased has also lately become the technological partner of Startup Grind Barcelona, for which we are building a killer website at www.startupgrind.cat.

In these months, we've gotten to know amazing companies such as The Social Coin, Nektria, Thoughtbot, Monterail, ProRuby, DocSend, Typeform, etc. As we're in this together, we've always sought to help one another. Think global, act local.

And now, onto the second year!

So where are we now? As we speak, we're probably in three different geographical points in Catalonia. That's how we work: we might not necessarily know where the others are, but we know we're always there. Work-wise we are 100% sure of where we stand: we're set to work on our biggest projects to date, built on simplicity, quality, and elegance.

In the last few months, we have become a more mature company with clear roles & responsibilities. We have transitioned from being a product company to selling our end-to-end services and our expertise in web application development. Our focus is now set on understanding the customer's needs and making our vision converge with theirs to build the best apps in the market.

Our plan for the year ahead is to work with more and more diverse customers. Deliver to each and every one of them an entirely breathtaking app that we will later break down in our blog, describing the process we've been through from the very inception to its final delivery. And what's more: we want to keep having fun while developing because it's intrinsically rooted in the MarsBased DNA.

We want our customers to enjoy the ride with us. We are successful if they are successful. We learn if they learn. And we're satisfied if they are too.

We want to make consultancy simple, fun, and down-to-earth.