How the two of us started
We met at technology events, built things at hackathons, and found the interesting problem was not the technology.
We met at technology events in Sydney. Not at work, and not through anyone. The kind of evening where thirty or forty people turn up in a borrowed office, somebody presents for twenty minutes, and the actual conversations happen afterwards next to the pizza.
We kept running into each other at those. Then we started going to hackathons together, which is where you find out very quickly whether you can work with somebody. A hackathon is two days, a problem nobody has scoped, and no time to be precious about anything. You learn how a person argues, what they do when a decision has to be made with half the information, and whether they finish.
We finished.
The part that surprised us
What we expected to enjoy was the building. What we actually kept talking about, on the train home, was the businesses.
At those events you meet a lot of owners. Somebody who runs a shop, or a clinic, or a small importer. And a pattern shows up over and over. The thing costing them money is almost never a hard technical problem. It is a contact form that has quietly stopped sending. It is a price list that only exists as a PDF, so nobody can find it and they cannot change it themselves. It is an address on their own website that goes to a person who left two years ago.
None of that is interesting engineering. All of it is worth real money to the person it is happening to.
That gap is the thing we started MarYan for. There is no shortage of people who can build software. There are far fewer who will sit with a business, work out which of its ordinary problems is actually costing it something, and then fix that one instead of selling a rebuild.
What that means in practice
It means we look before we sell. If we write to you, we have already opened your website in a browser and found something specific, and we will tell you what it is whether or not you ever pay us. That note is free and it stays free.
It means we do not lead with technology. What we build with matters to us and should not matter to you. What should matter to you is whether the enquiry reaches your inbox.
It means we are honest about where we are. MarYan started this year. MarYan has no clients of its own yet, and we are not going to invent any. What we have instead is this blog, and whatever we find on your site when we look.
Who you are talking to
Ryotaro Hyodo, who goes by Ryan. Builds websites and web applications, and is the person who answers your first email. Native Japanese speaker, works in English.
Marlon Tuquerres. Builds, and also does application security — reviewing things before they go live, checking who can sign in to what. First language Spanish, works in English.
Both of us are in Sydney. You can have this entire conversation in English, Spanish or Japanese.
If something on your own site has been bothering you, send us the address. We will look and write back, and there is nothing to pay for that.
Questions people ask
- Who is behind MarYan?
- Two developers in Sydney. Ryotaro Hyodo, who goes by Ryan, builds websites and web applications and is the person you talk to first. Marlon Tuquerres builds, and also does application security. There is nobody else, and no account manager between you and the work.
- How many clients has MarYan worked with?
- None yet. MarYan started in 2026 and has no clients of its own yet. We have both delivered commissioned work before, in Japan, and we have not asked those clients for permission to name them here. We would rather write that down than imply otherwise, which is also why this blog exists: it is the work you can judge us on before you have paid us anything.
- What languages do you work in?
- English, Spanish and Japanese. Ryan is a native Japanese speaker, Marlon's first language is Spanish, and we both work in English. A quote, a report and a screen recording can come to you in any of the three.
