Expanding the MarsBased team (again)

I am so happy to announce that we’re expanding the MarsBased team again. We kicked off 2016 gracefully with three new projects and a good forecast for the months to come.

I’ll frame this so you can understand it better. We usually get a new client every two or three months. The projects we do are big enough to sustain this. Also, we work with fewer clients, because we also carefully select them.

Our clients value our quality-over-quantity attitude, our fluid communication skills, our long-term relationships, and trust us to come up with high-caliber solutions where they only see uncertainty and difficulty.

Therefore, you can only imagine what happens when you land three in the same month.

Luckily enough, we’ve been harvesting our network for almost three years now. Not only have we organised many events, but we also attend developers’ meetups and keep in touch with the community via Startup Grind Barcelona or our Slack community for freelancers and Startups in Barcelona.

To keep a sustainable and organic growth within the company, we outsource part of our workload. This way, when we finish a project and have nothing ready on our pipeline, we take the outsourced projects in-house. If we didn’t do this, we couldn’t grow as we’ve done, and we probably would have had to shrink the team accordingly.

Besides that, outsourcing has also earned us the possibility to get to know brilliant individuals with whom we are very happy to work. This way, we worked with Mortensen in three or four different projects at the beginning, so when decided to quit their company, we approached him to hire him right away.

Our company is built upon trust, and recruitment is not an exception.

In this case, we hired someone we have known for quite a long time. He was the first person to join Startup Circle when we created it, even before we launched MarsBased. We’ve been friends ever since.

We want to welcome Oriol to MarsBased. His experience in Rails and his previous experience as CTO at Dineyo will give a real boost to our already wonderful team.

In fact, Oriol was among the attendees last week at the first open Ironhack talks, where I was honoured to be the first speaker. About 50 people showed up, amongst which I found some familiar faces from the community we’re building around our company.

Some background: Almost two years ago I gave the first talk about MarsBased at Ironhack. I was invited to talk about our experience, even though the company was barely a month old, so I spoke about what I knew from my previous companies and my failed ventures before MarsBased. Back then, these keynotes were only for Ironhack students.

Last week, I did this keynote with the lessons learnt during our first two years at MarsBased. Two years. Two years and 9 employees later. Who would’ve thought, when I quit my previous job in December 2013, that we’d reach this far.

In short, not many people knew MarsBased before the talk, only about ten, but in spite of that, 50 people showed up to learn from us. That was inspiring for me, and I hope it was also inspirational for them.

It’s time to start telling the tale.