Launching our podcast: Life on Mars!

Mark your calendars! Save the date! June 2nd, we're launching our first podcast: Life on Mars!

The current pandemic has forced companies to reinvent themselves, and even all-remote companies like us have been affected by the situation.

In our case, our bi-monthly Martian Days, where we get together in Barcelona to discuss the future of the company and spend quality time together, we've had to do them online, and this week we should've been in our company retreat. That will have to wait, too.

On the other hand, our events have moved to online too. Up until the pandemic, we had hosted 74 monthly editions of Startup Grind Barcelona plus three annual conferences, among other events we organise. Of course, we have followed the strictest indications and moved our events online for the time being.

We spearheaded the transition to online events for the whole Startup Grind community, doing two events per week, to be able to keep our community together, give them inspirational and instructional content and, above all, keep them company in these rough times.

In fact, a few people reached out to thank us saying that our events gave them company, just like a radio.

Eureka

The idea: why a podcast?

I have been approached a few times in the past by companies wanting to sponsor a podcast of ours - even though we never had one and didn't plan to, so I always declined the idea. Also, our events we selling out every month, and adding another project on top of that would just go against our policy of less is more.

However, at the beginning of the year, we decided to invest in YouTube. YouTube is the second largest & most-used search engine, so in order to grow our online presence - fundamental, if you're a purely inbound company - we need to be present in the top channels.

We started uploading our talks from other events, and some old recordings from events we organised in the past that somehow never saw the light of day, and so, our MarsBased YouTube channel was born.

We piggybacked on the Startup Grind events we were producing to live-stream them from our channel. Because the Startup Grind platform wasn't prepared for this, our online events have been a great idea to start growing our YouTube channel, but we knew all along that this was temporary, and that we would need to feed our channel with our own MarsBased content.

So, in the middle of these online events, we felt like we should be doing this on our own. We were doing two events per week, to a truly global audience, about topics we normally don't cover at Startup Grind, with different formats, with a different team and... it just didn't feel like Startup Grind at all. Also, given that we had the video recording, we could turn evey event into a podcast with relative ease.

... And thus, the idea of the Martian Podcast was born.

Test, test, test

I spent an entire week head-down working on getting the basics of a podcast. I consume a lot of them, so I knew the basics, but I didn't know how to produce them.

For a week, I spent many hours per day editing audio, turning them into episodes, recording intros, and I came up with three episodes in English and three in Spanish, a podcast artwork, a description, I hired a couple of people to narrate the intros/outros for us and then uploaded all of this to Buzzsprout to present it to my partners, and after some discussion about strategy, we decided to give it a go.

The project: we're just getting started!

So on June 2nd, we're releasing the first episodes! Our podcast will be available on the biggest platforms, in Spanish and in English, in two separate feeds.

For now, we will release a new episode every week, alternating languages, about technology, entrepreneurship and innovation, but the format, the hosts, the frequency, topics and whatnot will be defined as we go.

Life on Mars will be our podcast and our office of sorts as well. We will be hosting and learning from the most interesting individuals and companies out there from the technological standpoint, and we will also listen to the stories of some of our clients, partners or friends in the industry.

Join us in this new chapter! Subscribe to our newsletter to stay tuned!