In February 2021, I made official something that had already been true for over a year: I wasn't just building software on the side anymore, I was running a studio. Maladeta Studio started as a name put on work I'd already been doing, and it grew into something with a clearer identity: we build custom, multi-platform software to solve real problems, based out of the Val d'Aran, in the Catalan Pyrenees. This post is about why that decision made sense — the timing, the place, and what we knew (and didn't) when we started.
1. Why here, why now
The 'why now' part is easy to answer honestly: it wasn't a single moment. Back in December 2019, I built GuidAran, a tourism guide app for the Val d'Aran, as a freelance project — no studio, no team, just me trying to solve a concrete problem for a concrete place. That project is the prehistory of Maladeta Studio: it's what taught me there was real demand here for custom software, built by someone who understood the valley, not a generic template. By early 2021, that pattern had repeated enough times that giving it a name and a structure stopped being optional.
The 'why here' part is less obvious, and it's the one I still think about. Val d'Aran isn't a tech hub. It's a valley of about ten thousand people, closed off by mountains on three sides, where Aranese is spoken alongside Catalan and Spanish, and where the nearest big city is a couple of hours away by car — more in winter, when the passes get difficult. Nobody sets up a software company here by default. We did it on purpose.
2. Betting on a valley
Being based in Val d'Aran instead of Barcelona or Madrid is a trade-off, and I'd rather be honest about it than sell it as a lifestyle choice with no cost. The local talent pool is small — if we need to hire, we're either convincing someone to move here or building relationships that work well remotely. Face time with clients often means driving, not walking to a coffee meeting. And when you tell people outside the valley what you do, you spend the first five minutes explaining where Val d'Aran actually is.
None of that outweighed the reasons to stay. Our clients aren't in the valley either, for the most part — the work is remote by nature, so the office location doesn't change how we deliver software. What it does change is what we understand. Mobility in natural spaces, sustainable tourism, weather management in mountain terrain, waste management in places without easy access to infrastructure — these are problems we see daily because we live inside them, not problems we'd have to research from a city. That's worth more to us than being five minutes from a bigger hiring pool.
3. Products and projects, from day one
One thing I was clear about early on is that Maladeta Studio would eventually need to be two things, not one. Most of the work at the start is what we call projects: custom software built for someone else, to their spec, solving their problem. That's the GuidAran model, scaled up — and it's what pays the bills while the studio is small. But projects alone don't build something that's ours. So from the beginning, the plan was to also build products: software we own, that we can improve on our own schedule instead of a client's, and that can outlive any single contract.
We don't have a product yet. What we have is a direction: four areas where we keep running into interesting problems worth solving on our own terms.
- Mobility in natural spaces
- Waste management
- Sustainable tourism
- Weather management in mountain environments
Every one of those is a problem we've already brushed against doing project work, and every one is specific enough to the kind of place we work in that a generic, off-the-shelf tool usually doesn't fit well. That's the gap we think we can fill, eventually, with something of our own.
4. What we knew, and what we didn't
What we knew: that there was unmet demand for software built by people who understood the local context, that being remote-first meant location didn't have to limit who we could work for, and that a studio with a real name and structure could take on bigger, longer projects than a freelancer picking up gigs one at a time.
What we didn't know, and still don't: whether we can actually build a product that competes on its own, without a client footing the bill first. That's the open question. GuidAran proved the demand exists. It hasn't yet proven we can build something that stands on its own, without someone hiring us to build it first.
For now, that's fine. The projects fund the runway to figure it out. But I wanted to write this down while the founding is still recent, before hindsight rewrites why we actually did it: we started here, in Val d'Aran, because the problems worth solving were already around us, and because doing custom software well seemed to matter more than doing it somewhere convenient.