Agency Q&A: Recruiting "Champions" and optimizing for answer engines (AEO) Building MarsBased #6

How do you find employees who care as much as the founders? And in an AI-driven world, should you stick to traditional SEO or pivot to Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?

In this episode of Building MarsBased, CEO Alex Rodriguez Bacardit answers two deep-dive questions from the agency community. We explore the "Champion" profile, why former freelancers and entrepreneurs are the secret to delegation, and how MarsBased hit 30 people in 2025 by restructuring their leadership.

We also discuss the marketing strategy behind their new spin-off, GPT apps. Alex explains why they are using paid ads for the first time in 12 years and how to optimize your content so AI bots recommend your brand.

Transcript

Setup And Listener Questions

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Hello, everybody, I'm Alex Silly and founder of Marspace. In this new episode of the podcast, we're bringing you another edition of Building Marspace. And this occasion I'm going to be answering two questions by fellow members of the community, two good friends of the company, two good friends of Marspace, who happen to have created their own agency themselves. The first of which is our good friend Wojtek, all the way from Poland. He created Brains and Beards. Well, over 10 years ago, we did one of our first collaborations, must have been in 2014, when because he built a mobile development agency. And back in the day at Marspace, we didn't do it mobile. We referred a big client and to them. And ever since then, we have been good friends. We've been referring each other clients. We've been hiring each other as well. And uh they're still going strong. And uh they're uh they're one of our favorite companies to work with. So super happy and thankful to be answering this question. The question goes like this: when you're growing an agency, how do you screen candidates for potential leaders that would run your projects? In the early agency states, the founders run everything and they care a lot. There's a lot on the line for them personally if the project goes badly. It's hard to delegate it to employees because they don't have the incentive that you do. How do you make sure you hire people who care and get things done? Well, it's a pretty complex um question. It has got many angles, so I'll try to be as succinct as possible. In our case at Marsface, we we have had to hire very senior people from the get-go. But they don't necessarily, they they they have never necessarily been project leaders. In our case, we started hiring only senior developers, nowadays senior engineers, because as a small agency back then, we would run the projects ourselves. And more or less, if you are in a company size of up to 20 people, more or less, give or take, depending on the services you offer, you can manage all of these people yourself. So therefore, the founders are the owners of the projects. And give or take, you can manage up to 10 developers, 10 employees per person. I've heard different numbers, different figures from different companies. Some of them they say they can go up to 20, 25, depending. But there's a certain point in the company that you need to start building a layer of middle people. Um, maybe not necessarily project managers, but you want to have some champions for certain projects, just because they require leadership, but also because you want to scale yourself as a founder. And one of the big challenges we've had in the company last year in 2025 was to scale ourselves, the three um, the three founders of Martsface, me in the marketing and sales department, Jordi in operations and project management, Chabi on the technological side. Because we hit 30 people last year. We we currently maxed out our management capacities of each one of us, even though I don't manage 10 people. I manage the entire department of marketing and sales, and that required me to hire a marketing champion. Jordik hired a couple of project managers to delegate staff of his own, and we also delegated some of the project management parts of the more technical projects onto the tech leagues. That's another role in the company that we have. And Xavi, in turn, he hired more technical people. One of them, two years ago, we hired an engineering manager. That's a role that we already had in the company by promoting somebody very very senior. But two years ago, he decided to quit the company, so we found a replacement. Effectively speaking, and trying to answer the the question that Boitek sent, I think that the probably the only champion we have consciously hired to sort of run the things effectively speaking, more or less as a founder, has been this engineering manager. That's a person that is capable of managing all of the developers in the company, is a person capable of managing all the tech leads in the company. So that's the other layer we got on top of the developers or engineers. We got the tech leads. This person sits on top. This person would be effectively speaking the second CTO of the company. Whenever Xavi is not around, he's designated to operate as a CTO, not as a founder CTO, but as an operating CTO. For instance, right now we're undergoing the ISO 27100 27,000 um certification, and we have to designate a secondary person neck after the CTO for a lot of processes, meetings, documentation, chains of responsibility, and chains of command. And this person we have designated that's the engineering manager. Uh, whenever Xavi goes on holidays or is unavailable or some projects, we fully delegate those projects onto Juan Sataloo, and this person is the engineering manager. But I think there's a little bit more to that. Why can't the project managers or product managers the champions? They can. I think, in my opinion, they can, but it will grow in them. Some people have got this agency, some people have got this ownership, some people don't have it. And some people can be taught, and some other people will just be born with it. They're natural born leaders. You can, I think you can increase the likelihood of somebody becoming really good at owning a part of the company, even though they are not founders, if they have been either entrepreneurs themselves or they have been freelancers. Let me tell you why. Entrepreneurs and freelancers more or less can be the same thing. Entrepreneur freelancers are basically the CEO and CTO and COO of themselves. Some of them they even hire and collaborate with other freelancers, and sometimes they create a cluster of people they usually work with. And so they don't have a company per se, but they operate as a as a hive, right? As a as a swarm of people that that usually work together, and sometimes they can group up to be five to ten people. So more or less that's the size of a really small agency, and that works. These people have got the accountability, have got the uh the the will to communicate very often, to they they know how to manage expectations, they know their job is on the line, uh, or maybe the the plate on their table is on the line if they don't deliver because it's freelancers. You it really depends on how you negotiate, you don't get paid if you don't deliver the job, right? So having this ownership and agency, I think it only comes from having these two kinds of profiles as a as an owner of a company or as a freelancer for long enough because you have to look for your clients, you have to uh look after your revenue, your people, you have to nurture a certain kind of um uh circle of relationships and whatnot. So if for for instance, Marspace, the first 10 people we hired, they either came from not from recommendation, we directly had to work with them in previous companies or previous projects or related projects, or they were founders in our vicinity, or they were people that freelance for us for a while, and we ended up hiring. And this this case freelancers turned into uh full-time employees has been a consistent kind of hire we've done over these 12 years we we have completed now in the company. And every year we more or less hired one of them. And they either owned small microagencies of one, two, five people, or they were operating as a solo freelancer, but those people were already used to having us as a client. Now they jumped the fence and they they joined us. And we we hired them precisely because we saw they were good at delivering, they were good at communicating, they had agency, they had ownership, right? A really good performing freelancer can turn into good employee, and maybe they will turn into this internal champion. That's I wouldn't take that for granted. It is not automatic. In our case, there are two or three people in the company who I would consider they are champions of this kind. People who you give them a project and they take it to the next level. They excel at what they do, they exceed the um the expectations, and they just go above and beyond just to make things happen. But I think they have grown into this role. They have grown into this role because they are they felt valued in the company. We have given them more trust over the years. We have been able to sort of like coach them and mentor them and make them grow personally. I don't want to maybe personalize this in uh in somebody specific, right? But uh there are a couple of cases in the company which uh person who join in a less senior profile with a proper coaching and mentoring and training, they have been promoted several times, and they have been long enough in the company. Uh, I think that by year two or year three, they started having their own initiatives, they started like uh challenging the founders, they're stying to start having their like pursuing their own ideas and trying to push them because that they they were the best for the company. And they uh they talk like this. They're like, oh, it's better for the company if we do this. Or I think the client really wants that, not what you say just because you're the founder. And once you start seeing all these patterns and and these trends, I think you have found yourself a champion, right? But if I were to hire this kind of person, we only did it once with the engineering manager, and it was through an agency, but I wouldn't say agencies work, like they haven't worked for pretty much any of the processes we have run through them. Uh it worked in this specific case, but I I wouldn't say it was thanks to the agency. I think Juan Salvador really has got this in his DNA. He used to manage projects in another agency. So experiencing similar company in in management positions uh always works as well. So people who have been working in either one or two similar companies and and usually they progress, they get promoted from if they were a developer one, then they become something like a tech lead in the next step, in the next company, then in the next company after a few years, they can be hired as engineering manager or VP technology, something like that, just because they have the accumulated experience. So I I think that's that's my take. Uh, it's very complicated for small agency owners to find this kind of profile, basically because we find it really hard to delegate, especially when it's our first company. And second, because we deep down below, we really, really know that we can do it better ourselves. But it's really hard to understand, it's really hard to let go of some of the things that really depend on you. And uh, you have to delegate to somebody. And you know that the first two times, the first five times you delegate this kind of task, they will not do it as good as you do. But precisely because you don't delegate, they will not be able to grow into this role. So to sum it up, former entrepreneurs, former freelancers, or people who have worked in management positions and similar companies, that they they they can come with a different perspective to what you do. They can grow into this kind of profile that that really has got the agency and the ownership of the projects that could resemble the ownership and the agency that a founder could have on the projects, right? Uh it's not impossible to find. It's very hard to, it's very hard to find. If you really find them, just have them stick around and give them really good conditions. Um in our case, we don't give equity to the employees, for instance, right? Uh I know that some companies trap their people or lure uh kind of um the the really specific profiles with equity. The equity in service-based company, it's really worth not much. So we don't really trick people into accepting that sort of lottery. And so, but give them good salaries, give them responsibility, give them room to grow, um, have them lead you know the strategy for a certain kind of a part of the company, have them teach and mentor younger people, uh, give them a project of their own, give them their 20% rule and stuff like that, special conditions, maybe uh a salary out of off-range or or some other perks, just because you want you want to have them around. If you really find this kind of person, you can have them long enough in the company, they can be as transformational for the company as uh having another founder. And we have another question from our good friend Luis Inglés. He used to be the CTO at Exotica, and I met Luis massive around seven years ago when he was a CTO at Exotica. I hosted him for the Marspace podcast. Actually, he was one of our very first um our very first profiles, but I I had been following him on Twitter and we had mutual friends in the in the company. And so I really respect him. Uh, he's part of the group of CTOs that we've got on WhatsApp, and uh we have tried to collaborate for many, many years now. And during a couple of uh, I think it was uh last year, he decided to create uh his own company as well, a consultancy for like really specialized bespoke development, something more like CTO on demand. And uh he sends us a pretty long question, but very interesting nonetheless. He says, Despite my short journey as an entrepreneur, remember, Dewey said been CTO and VP engineering and all these technical roles of management in many, many companies, some of them scale-ups. He said, Despite my short journey as an entrepreneur, I've already figured out that setting up a generalist agency doesn't really pay off, even if it means missing out on some opportunities. Which is something that I have already covered in building Marspace in the early episodes. Generalists versus specialists, make sure to check out that episode. The question goes on what truly matters is to narrow down what your agency actually does and what it doesn't. Once you've nailed it down, the next step is getting the word out. And that is where I believe new agencies face both a challenge and an opportunity. While organic traffic is dropping because of AI reshaping search, there's room to speed up and stay ahead of the curve. So, here comes the question. Bear with me. Do you stick to more traditional SEO SEM strategies, or do you opt for building content authority and diving into AEO? Answer engine optimization. Oh, that's uh that really requires a long winded answer. I'll try to make it as clear and short as possible because there's a few nuances here. The first one is when you start from scratch. So I can compare basically what we have done at Marspace and what we are doing with GPT apps right now. So Marspace, you already know because you've been following the podcast for many years right now. In case you joined today, you were living under a rock, you woke up today from a deep coma of 70 years. Marspace is an development agency from Barcelona. We have a team of 30 people who were founded in 2014. And we started doing, we figured out that the best way to grow this kind of company, a boutique specialized only a couple of develop uh programming languages. We figure out that the best strategy to uh build this kind of company was through inbound marketing. Traditionally speaking, inbound marketing is generating lots of content, building authority through events and community and other kinds of uh marketing efforts so that people find you. You don't go to chase people, people chase you. People find you through Google, through search, through recommendations and stuff like that, or listicles. And so we have been doing this for 12 years. We did try outreach and cold email, cold calling in the first year and a half of the company. It didn't quite work. We got a couple of projects like that, but it it was not our vibe. It was difficult that a super specialized agency like we were um could actually hit the right companies because up front we don't know, or we didn't know what technologies they were working in. And initially, Mars-based, we were only doing Ruby on the back end, Angular on the front. So the chances of us calling or emailing a company with that particular tech stack were very fucking low. Therefore, we ended up just going through listicles, and the chances are if you are finding companies or you're researching companies through their tech stack on publicly available repositories or lists and stuff like that, chances are somebody else is doing that as well. So you're gonna be hitting companies that have already been hit by other agencies, perhaps more aggressive agencies, bigger ones, companies with SDRs that they can just like spend all the day calling. So it was not a very pleasant or rewarding experiment for us. That's why over the course of the years, or maybe after the second year, we stopped doing outreach and we figure out that let's just build authority through our technical blog, through our events, through our uh other kinds of content that we put out, our newsletter. For instance, we had a community for entrepreneurs and technical people in Barcelona on Slack, and we organized conferences. I talked on different podcasts, my co-founders went to events as well. Um, we did some trainings on Iron Hack and other boot camps and stuff like that. All of that comprised the whole of our marketing efforts. And so that was more traditional. SEO, we didn't do any paid. For instance, for 12 years we haven't done any paid. As a matter of fact, we started right now. So, right now, we started with YouTube because our content platform, the Mars-based podcast, is taking off. And we decided to give it a little bit of a boost to see if that traffic that is already finding us on YouTube can be directed, can be forwarded to the website, because so far YouTube isn't converting. And that's the first the first experiment we're trying. We after this will be trying Google Ads and some other kinds of paid strategies that we haven't implemented basically because I didn't have bandwidth to do everything. Also, because of a personal conviction, I think that up until now, we didn't need it. I don't like paid, I never liked paid, I didn't want to do it, but I came to the realization, also somewhat suggested by my co-founders as well, that if we're gonna take the company to the next level, we have to have a strategy for paid as well, because we can't rely solely on organic traffic and organic referrals and network. So that's why we're experimenting with paid right now. But I don't have much to say. I don't have much to share. I cannot show you results of anything. At the end of the year, we're gonna be sharing everything that we've done that has that has worked. So that's what we've done Marspace for almost 12 years now. But as you might be aware, last December or November we launched a new brand, a separate brand, a spin-off of the company that's called GPT Apps. It's a separate agency where we are providing better implementation of AI for companies, safer and faster. Maybe not cheaper. That's also been part and not part of the equation at Mars based. But if you really want a top tier um implementation of AI in the company, say it's just maybe learning how to work with Gemini or Cloud or these third party apps, or developing certain like basic staff integrations with their Platforms or MCP servers or custom GPT apps or Jams and Gemini and stuff like that. Or if you really want to scratch a little bit down the layers of AI and go for more like bespoke development in other kinds of AI projects, we're happy to do that as well through this other brand that it's called GPT Apps. So GPT Apps was effectively speaking created two months ago. And so we haven't done any paid for it. But because it's pretty niche, we will implement paid from the get-go. Right now we've built a website, we've built the uh social handles, we built the blog. So we laid out the traditional SEO strategy that we have been rolling uh out at MarSpace for these 12 years, and we'll try to replicate as much as possible. So a great portfolio, a great-looking website, a contact form, a blog to demonstrate our authority and stuff like that. And but this one will come sooner because we're creating a company right now and we don't have the authority nor the network. And we sort of, so GPT apps lives under the shadow of Mars-based, we have to compensate that. Because people know me and my co-founders because we're the faces of Mars-based. But they might not necessarily have heard about GPT apps because there's a an attention deficit everywhere. Everybody's chasing attention. It's hard to get the eyeballs or not only the attention, but the retention of information as well of what you read on social. So a lot of people might not have noticed that we have launched GPT apps and that we are there. As a matter of fact, we don't even appear on the website because we just said, like, oh, we're the guys from Marsbase, and that's it. We don't need to have our team publicly available on the website just because we don't have the bandwidth to build that page. We prefer to spend it somewhere else. So for that one, specifically for GPT apps, we'll be implementing paid from the get-go. We don't have a newsletter for GPT apps, we don't have uh much social to kind of like share. We don't have a we have a blog, but we don't have a podcast there. We will not be doing events, perhaps. I don't know. We're still uh defining the strategies. So what is most effective for this kind of new experiments when when you have something bigger, so as a spin-off, a separate project, side project, innovation project, um, call it what you will, the best or the most effective way to try these um these new experiments is to chip in some money and um just do some paid, see if it floats and if it if it takes off, um, then it's time to invest more in this. So for me, um, as I mentioned, uh, I if I had to start a new company and I had the means, probably I would just spend on paid from the get-go. I really don't like it. I I'm really against the principles of advertisement altogether, but I know this is me speaking, not um not shouldn't be uh it shouldn't be advice. I think that if I think it's good advice to say that actually if you want to help your business get off the ground, you should use paid. But you should use it wisely, because I've seen many, many projects as an investor now, for instance, that they use paid from the get-go and they they're really not validating the same things, right? Um so if you pay to get users to your website, what you're validating is that if you're paying, they will get to your website, but they will not come to your website otherwise. You have to build a strategy for that to occur as well. Meaning for GPT apps, that's why we're building SEO and paid at the same time. Because we know that paid will only accelerate this, but we have to build these solid and strong foundations so that when we stop, we cut off the paid part, we will continue to acquire organic people, inbound people. And so they have to go hand in hand, I think. If you're starting a company today, the competition is very fierce, but everybody else is paying. There's literally no chance that you're starting something today that will function without paid unless you're one in a million uh people who happen to have like this genius thoughts, or maybe sheer coincidence, you are in the right place at the right moment, and for whatever reason somebody famous mentions you on stage at freaking web summit or on live TV, and boom, you hit the jackpot. But if you really want to maximize the likelihood of this happening without you know the the alignment of the stars and really depending on you, I would rather, if you have the money for it, spend a logical amount of money with really controlled bets, measured, repeatable, unpaid. And so my bets today, for instance, what I've been trying and what we have been hearing from experts in the industry is try to avoid generalist channels, so don't advertise on Google, Facebook, Instagram, stuff like that, go to really specialized niche communities. I've seen a trend on spending uh ads on Reddit because the the um the um answer engine uh optimization um bots they read from there, Reddit, Quora, this kind of this kind of uh community-like um sites, that tends to work. I've also heard that so marketing agencies that we have been uh consulting with, they told us if you are to pay to promote your company, your brand as an agency, just go and promote yourself on Clutch, on freelancer.com and stuff like that, the specialized marketplaces, because these are the uh the kind of listicles that the price per ad, price per word is way lower. There's way less competition, and they provide better results because you don't have like it's not the easy route, even though it's not super crazy to think about this. But uh uh the easy route, big companies and multinationals and or marketing agencies, they all like dump their money on the big platforms, therefore they really inflate the price for everybody else. If you go to places where this the majority or 90% of the companies will not go, chances are you will get a better ROI for your investment. So the last thing in consideration with the uh with also the AEO, right? Um the answer engine uh optimization. Um we have been doing a conscious effort at Marsface. Last year we started reworking the content on our website, uh, make it more conversational. We will be releasing an FAQ section on the website. For we have already released it for GPT apps. We haven't got it for Mars Faced yet because there are two different CMSs. And so in one, we built the module, but we don't have it in the other. We are rewriting part of our portfolios to make them more conversational. We're adding video as well. And we have to also work on content that is outside of our own domain, right? So we have to get citations and referrals from other platforms. Luckily for us, we we have always been pretty active on GitHub through open source and and and because we used to build projects with Jekyll back in the day, we appear on a few listicles of companies building Jekyll. We are not interested in Jekyll projects anymore, but um that helped us because um github.com as a domain has got very high authority amongst developers, and so it sends really positive traffic. I think it's called so SEO juice, but um, but also some authority. If you guys have a list of there, chances are you're a good company. And these kind of engines, they they crawl the sites and they get information, they extract information from there. So uh places where you can get recommended, they're really useful. We are learning as we go. Right now we're testing with Google reviews on Google My Business. We might be experimenting with Reddit. I don't know. We are experimenting with with YouTube and Instagram as we speak. Um, I'm not too keen on sponsoring stuff on LinkedIn or Twitter, for instance, or even like TikTok. Um but I don't know. All of these learnings will be sharing with you uh in a sort of building in public. So um happy to to be sharing more information and more insights and findings on how to optimize uh for these kind of uh these kind of initiatives. And that's why we one of the motivations why uh we are recording these kind of episodes, because we want to encourage other people to build their own agencies. Uh we we know for a fact that the agencies might not be sexy businesses, they don't sell for a lot of money. But if you're really keen on working something that you love, you're passionate about your craft, and you really want to live like an interesting and mentally stimulating life working with people you enjoy working with and cherry picking your clients, creating a boutique agency, a lifestyle business, a bootstrap business like Marspace, that's something I really recommend a lot of people to do. We'll be happy to help you on the way up. And uh I'm really thankful for the questions from Juiz and Boytek. And likewise, if you have other questions, send them at Ola at Marspace.com, send them through the LinkedIn or um profile or through the YouTube channel, wherever you can find us, wherever you listen to to our podcast or you watch our podcast, and maybe your question can be featured in another episode. So, thank you for the questions. I'll see you in the next episode.