One year ago, in early 2021, we opened Maladeta Studio in Val d'Aran — a valley in the Catalan Pyrenees where you're as likely to hear Aranese in the street as Spanish or Catalan. It's not exactly the first place people think of when they picture a software company. Twelve months in, before the story of this year hardens into whatever version is easiest to tell later, I wanted to write down what actually happened, what surprised us, and what I'd tell myself if I could go back to January.
1. What we expected vs. what happened
I expected the first year to be slow: a handful of small contracts while we built a reputation, then hopefully something bigger. That's roughly what happened, except the 'small contracts' turned out to be more interesting and more demanding than I'd planned for. We built tourism apps in the GuidAran mold, worked on civic infrastructure like parking management systems, and shipped JoRecicli, a waste-management tool for municipalities. None of that was glamorous, but all of it forced us to get good at the unsexy parts of software: procurement processes, data migrations from whatever spreadsheet or legacy system a town hall had been using, and support that has to work when the person calling you isn't technical at all.
What I didn't expect was how early we'd start our own product. NaturPark, our natural-space management software, began as a side conversation about a problem we kept running into with client work, and by the end of the year it had become something we were actively building for ourselves rather than for someone else's spec. I don't think we would have started it this soon in a bigger city, if only because there would have been more billable work competing for the same hours.
2. The rural trade-off, honestly
The honest version of working from Val d'Aran instead of Barcelona or Madrid is that it's a trade, not a free lunch. The hiring pool here is small — there is no local surplus of backend engineers waiting for a job, and we know it. What we get in exchange is a different set of levers: cost of living is lower, quality of life is genuinely different, and it changes what kind of company we can afford to be while we're small.
- Most of our clients are remote-first by necessity — Val d'Aran was never going to be a place they'd visit weekly, and that turned out to be much less of a handicap than I expected going in.
- The clients where physical presence does matter — town halls, parking authorities, natural park administrations — are exactly the ones where being local instead of a faceless vendor from the capital has been an advantage. Trust builds faster when you can show up.
- The unglamorous parts of running a small company in Spain don't care where you're based: grant paperwork for programs like Kit Digital, compliance, the general administrative weight of being an SME, all land on us the same way they'd land on a studio in any city.
3. What's next
Going into year two, the plan is to keep doing bespoke work — it pays the bills and keeps us honest about what real users actually need — while giving NaturPark more room to grow into an actual product with a roadmap of its own. Somewhere in the client work this year, weather data kept showing up as a problem nobody had solved well: for parks, for trails, for anyone whose plans depend on conditions in the mountains. We're not building anything around that yet, but it's the kind of problem we keep coming back to, and I suspect it won't stay a side note for long.
A year isn't long enough to know if betting on a rural, remote-first tech studio was the right call — it's long enough to know it wasn't the wrong one. The open question for year two is whether we can grow the team without growing out of the reasons we started here in the first place.