MarsBased podcast - Life on Mars is your go-to space for technology, entrepreneurship, and innovation. Brought to you by MarsBased , a high-end development consultancy specializing in Ruby, JavaScript, and Python. If you are a software engineer , you can expect deep dives into tech, but we go far beyond the code. We share our first-hand expertise on remote work, company culture, management, and digital transformation based on our journey building a successful lifestyle business. Every two weeks,…
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Building a bootstrapped software consultancy comes with unique challenges, unexpected financial gaps, and hard-learned lessons. In this episode of the Building MarsBased series, Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit examines four significant errors that could have derailed the company but didn't. Most startups operate on a razor's edge, but MarsBased was built on financial independence and optionality, allowing…
Only 6% of companies see a real Return on Investment from AI. The rest buy licenses, burn through tokens, and confuse faster individual coding with actual business value. Speeding up an individual developer is meaningless if team workflows and PR reviews stay completely unchanged. On the MarsBased podcast, Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit joins Sven Peters, AI Evangelist at Atlassian, to tackle why most…
Adarsh Pandit (founder of Cylinder Digital, ex-Thoughtbot, ex-McKinsey) met Àlex 12 years ago in San Francisco when MarsBased was just getting off the ground. They catch up on a decade of building software agencies, navigating career shifts, and managing team dynamics. Adarsh shares the story behind firing a high-profile client who was verbally abusing his team, the panic of dropping a production…
Is traditional SEO officially dead, or has search simply evolved? In this episode of "Why SEO isn't enough anymore: The rise of GEO", hosted by Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit, Clemens Rychlik from Hello Operator joins the show to examine the seismic shift away from Google's Page 1 and into AI interfaces like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. Together, they explore why customer decisions and conversions…
In this episode of Road to CTO, Jennifer Woodard shares her remarkable journey from founding a startup as a non-technical leader to becoming the CPTO of an AI-native company. Jennifer breaks down the reality of earning technical credibility, the importance of European AI sovereignty, and why the "imposter syndrome" is a constant companion even for established experts. We also discuss the shifting…
Welcome back to another episode of Building MarsBased, the series where we share the completely transparent reality of how we have built our development agency since 2014. In this episode, we pull back the curtain on our 18-month journey of adopting Artificial Intelligence within our web and mobile development workflows. The rapid evolution of large language models has completely transformed the…
The AI slop problem is getting worse. AI can crank out code, decks, and landing pages in minutes, but somehow everything starts to look exactly the same. That sameness is not just an aesthetic problem; it is a trust problem. I sit down with David Okuniev (Founder of Typeform and Supercut) to unpack what “taste” really means when anyone can one-shot a product, and why people still crave signals of…
What is the real difference between a CTO and a VP of Engineering? How do you build a technical team from scratch in a non-tech company? In this Road to CTO episode of the MarsBased podcast, we sit down with Emma Burrows (Ex-Google, Ex-Stripe) to talk about her incredible career path. From her time at Google to leading as CTO at Stripe Payments UK and her current jump into the founder world with…
The tech landscape is shifting under our feet. In this episode of Life on Mars, our CEO Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit sits down with Linus Ekenstam to discuss the 100x era, a world where technology becomes 100x faster and cheaper every 6 to 12 months. Linus breaks down why the ability to write code has moved from a competitive advantage to a basic commodity. He warns that if you are 100% dependent on a…
Signing a non-disclosure agreement just to have an initial coffee or hear a pitch is often the ultimate "tell" that you’re a rookie in this industry. In this episode of Building MarsBased, our CEO Àlex Rodriguez Bacardit breaks down why we stopped signing NDAs "left, right, and center" and how we transitioned into using them as a qualification tool rather than a barrier to entry. After 12 years of…
