Marte Website Builder

In february, I teamed up with Jaime Marco to build a website builder originally aimed at law marketing agencies. We saw a real opportunity to simplify how these agencies made websites for their clients, which was painfully cumbersome and slow with WordPress.

After a few months, we realized that our business expectations were far from being met. Jaime and I decided to pivot. We rebranded to Marte and turned it into a more general website builder for small and medium-sized businesses.

We kept working on it part-time and brought in new team members to help develop the product, streamline operations and design client websites. Marte grew in customers and exposure, we even were selected as success case by EDIH.

While Jaime focused on sales and customer relationships, I handled product development. We built Marte on top of TinaCMS, an open source headless CMS. I used its schema and basic editing tools, and built on top of it all the visitor-facing interfaces, including reusable content blocks and theming options for designers, plus advanced editing tools integrated with the editor. This project also gave me the chance to apply so many things I had learned building Splash's web CMS.

The tech stack included Next.js, React, TypeScript, and TinaCMS, with content stored in Git and accessed through a GraphQL API.

Working on Marte reminded me how much I enjoy building products at scale and leading engineering teams. I also learned a lot about how to build a business, how to communicate with customers and how to work with a co-founder.