Fractional CTO for founder-led SaaS
For what you are building, and what you inherited
A fractional CTO is usually sold to a founder who has not built yet. I do that too: scoping the first build, choosing the first developer, and keeping the architecture honest before any code exists.
Most of the calls I get are the other case. You have a product. It has users, possibly revenue, and it may already be doing something expensive that nobody has noticed. What you do not have is someone who can look at it and tell you the truth about it.
That is the job I take: technical ownership, whether the thing is still a plan or already running.
What I take over
- What gets fixed, what gets left alone, and what gets deleted.
- Whether the next engineer you hire can actually work in this codebase.
- Vendor and agency decisions, including the ones already being paid for.
- The release process, so shipping stops being an event.
- The technical answers in a fundraise, a due diligence, or a board conversation.
When founders call me
- An AI-built prototype has customers and no maintainer.
- A contractor left, and took the only working knowledge with them.
- Payments, auth or integrations were built by someone who has not operated them.
- A rewrite has been quoted, and the number is large enough to be worth a second opinion.
- There is a technical hire to make and no one qualified to interview.
How it runs
- Cadence
- One to two days a week, three-month minimum
- Decisions
- Written every week, so the reasoning survives after the call
- Review
- One scheduled call per week
- Communication
- Asynchronous by default. I am in Kuala Lumpur; the written record is what makes the distance irrelevant
- Access
- Inside your repository, your issue tracker, your release process
What it costs
A diagnosis comes first and it is paid: two weeks, fixed price, from $3,200 or £2,600. It produces the written answer you would be buying anyway, and it is usable whether or not we continue.
If we continue, technical ownership starts at $6,000 or £4,800 a month for one day a week, three-month minimum.
What I will not do
- Take equity instead of a fee as the default arrangement.
- Promise distribution, growth or revenue.
- Quote a fixed price for code nobody has read yet.
Questions
- Do you join our standups?
- No. I work asynchronously and write decisions down. You get a scheduled review each week and a written record of what I decided and why. If a specific meeting matters, I attend it; I do not sit in a daily call to prove I am present.
- What if the honest answer is a rewrite?
- Then you get a rewrite plan with a cost and a sequence, and the option to do it incrementally with the old path running. The diagnosis is priced the same whatever it concludes, so the answer is not for sale.
- Can you work alongside our existing team?
- Yes. That is the normal case. I work inside your repository and your process, and I try to leave the team able to continue without me.
- You are not in our time zone.
- Correct. Kuala Lumpur. What replaces proximity is writing: decisions, plans and reviews are documents you keep, not calls you have to remember.
Tell me what the product does and what it is doing wrong. First conversation is thirty minutes and costs nothing.
Start a conversation