So you are a business owner and want a CTO… but you don’t want/need a full-time one, and don’t want to give away equity? Smart move :)
This is where I operate.
A little bit about me
I’m an experienced engineer, engineering manager, and chief technology officer with 10+ years shipping/maintaining products in various industries; and building teams both in offices and 100% remote.
With a strong business and product knowledge I’m able to identify and maximise business opportunities through technology, identify and manage technical risk; and ensure business and product scalability. Many CTOs don’t have this experience, and it’s a big problem, causing a sort of tunnel vision that is overly tech focused.
I love talking to people; defining problems; gathering requirements; problem solving; selling ideas; developing proof-of-concepts; and leading teams towards successful and continuous deliveries.
If something can be automated, it will be.
I know a lot about:
- Software businesses
- Talking to investors
- Solutions engineering for SMBs and big corporates
- IT security
- Operations
- Backend, Frontend, Mobile
- Users
- Software engineers
Here’s what I do
Ideation (before official pre-seed/seed)
I’ve spoken to dozens of people over the years who just needed someone experienced to spar with about the ideas they’re having.
I won’t tell you what you should or shouldn’t build, but I’ll guide you through how some things are much easier to build than others, and how distribution/messaging is often the problem that causes things to fail, not whether or not something is possible to build. At this stage, knowing how to interview potential customers is a lot more important than tech.
I’ll challenge your ideas similarly to how investors will when you speak to them :)
Pre-seed/seed
At this stage, change is the name of the game. The product will change and shift extremely quickly. You may build several prototypes and proof-of-concepts.
It’s important to have a good base and processes to work on. Business and engineering need to send and respond to feedback from one-another. Business people need to know how to communicate to engineers, and vice-versa.
I will:
- Create the foundations of your engineering and communication processes
- Address quality issues
- Build your team (s)
- Show you how to communicate with your engineers
- Show you how to simplify your product/features (why take 6 weeks building something that can be built in a couple of days?)
- Help with MVPs, POCs, and customer conversations
- Help with requirements gathering (it’s very hard to solve a badly defined problem, I know exactly what to ask from an engineering perspective)
- Help with hiring (I’ve hired dozens of engineers over the years)
- Help with investor conversations (I’ve raised money before)
- Help with technical documentation
Series A/A+
At this stage, you know what your product does and you’re likely making cash. Congrats! 🚀
The mistakes here range from hiring way more engineers than you need and inadvertedly slowing down your development, to creating silos in between business/tech, or even within the tech.
And of course, the silent killer nobody expects to happen to them: security issues. A data leak at this stage could kill customer and investor relations.
Engineers may start to leave, and unless you want a revolving door, something will need to happen.
I will help you:
- Build the right teams for your organisation
- Create an environment people want to work in
- Identify and minimise silo’d information
- Identify and minimise technical debt
- Align teams and reduce waste
- Make your processes more effective
Extra
My secret sauce to building teams
In the past two years I’ve developed a method to attract and screen above-average developers in a guerilla sort of way, in a very time efficient manner. I’ll share this process with you.
Notes for those just starting out
When talking to first time founders at the beginning of a new project, it has come to my attention that many tend to overthink about the wrong questions, over develop, and get their engineers to over engineer.
The right questions aren’t obvious. Over engineering means overspending & affects your speed. The market will inevitably force you to make changes, and these need to be quick. I’ve seen many good people spend a lot of money on things no one ever needed or wanted. Proper validation is of tremendous importance, and unlike many CTOs, this is something I will help you with :)
If you’re starting something from scratch and don’t have any code yet, the best decision you could make BY FAR is to get a fractional CTO at least as a one-time consultation to:
- Go over your idea
- Help you think about the right questions
- Simplify your idea
- Turn it into requirements that any developer can start working on
- Decreasing time to market (because the market is very irrational)
- Gathering input from real life ongoing usage data
If you’re still reading, drop me a line in my contact page