Fractional CTO

A CTO who still writes the code.

Most companies your size choose between a consultant who hands you a deck and an agency that outsources the build. I own the technology decisions and then go and ship them. Built for $1M to $5M companies that need someone to own this, and do not need a $150K hire to do it.

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Why this works

Four reasons companies hire a fractional.

Not every business needs a full-time AI hire. Most do not. Here is who actually benefits.

You know AI is the next leverage point.

You are not asking if AI matters. You see your team doing manual work that could be automated. You see competitors moving faster. You know there is a way to do this. You just do not have time to figure out where to start.

You do not need a full-time hire yet.

A full-time AI hire costs $150K+ a year, plus benefits, plus the time it takes to find one. At $1M to $5M revenue, the work exists but it is not a full-time job. A fractional fits the actual shape of the need, at a fraction of that cost.

Your tools are not talking to each other.

You have HubSpot, Slack, maybe a CRM, maybe Notion, maybe ten other tools. They all do their thing in isolation. The AI roadmap should connect them. Nobody on your team owns that.

You want senior-level thinking, not a vendor.

Most agencies hand you a website and wish you luck. Most consultants hand you a deck and disappear. You want someone who shows up every week, builds the things, runs the systems, and stays.

What I have actually built

The work, not the pitch.

Here is what I have shipped in the last 18 months. Real systems, in production, doing real work for real companies.

Multi-tenant SaaS · In production

Phramed

A photo delivery and event platform I built and run. Cloudflare Workers, D1, R2, Stripe Connect with per-photographer payouts, and AWS Rekognition face matching. It carries a guardian consent state machine for minors and enforces its own deletion promise on a schedule. That last part is the hard bit, and most teams skip it.

Multi-agent system

ThreatCaptain outbound pipeline

A full multi-agent outbound pipeline for a cybersecurity sales platform. Sourcing, enrichment, personalised messaging and delivery, running daily without a human in the loop. Built in my day job as their Lead AI Developer.

Security review

Found a live data exposure in a partner portal

During a build review I found fourteen database functions callable by anonymous visitors, including one that returned which partner held which account. Confirmed exploitable with only the public key that ships inside the app bundle. Found it, fixed it, and wrote the default-privileges rule so the next function could not inherit the same hole.

Apps and platforms

Booking, POS, CRM, inventory

Scheduling with real availability and payments, a members-only POS and inventory build, a CRM, an iOS and PWA app, plus site migrations with the DNS and email deliverability work that usually gets left broken behind them.

Indie tools · In production

WebSight and Admint

A Maps scraper that builds lead lists from a description of who you want, and a bulk ad generator that turns one offer into variations at scale. I use both in my own business, which is the only endorsement that counts.

The differentiator

Marketing brain, engineering hands

I came up through photography, design and marketing before I wrote software for a living. I know what message has to land before I build the system that delivers it. Most technical hires can build the thing but cannot tell you whether it should exist.

How I work

The principles, upfront.

So we know we are aligned before you ever pay me a dollar.

Marketing first, AI second.

I build automations that move business outcomes, not automations that look cool in a demo. Every system I touch should answer the question: does this help you close more deals, save more time, or keep more customers? If not, it does not get built.

Your team owns it after.

I build things your team can run when I am gone. Documentation, SOPs, training. The goal is never to make you dependent on me. That would be doing it wrong.

Honest tools, not loyalty to platforms.

I will tell you when HubSpot is overkill and Airtable would do the job. I will tell you when an AI feature you want is not ready yet. The job is to find the right answer, not to upsell you on what I know best.

How pricing works

I do not quote before we know what it is worth.

There is no price list on this page, and that is deliberate. A number given before we understand your business gets compared against an hourly rate, which is the least useful way to think about any of this. So we work it out in the other order.

Step one

The diagnostic

A paid, fixed-fee look at your business. We find where the money is actually leaking, and we put a number on it together. You keep the findings whether or not you hire me, and the fee comes off anything you do next.

Step two

Three ways to fix it

You get three options at three scopes, each with a fixed price tied to a fraction of what it is worth. Not an estimate, not a range, and not a bill that grows. You are choosing which one, not whether.

Step three

A retainer, only if you need one

Building something is a project. Keeping it running, being reachable when it matters, and owning the roadmap as the business changes is a subscription. Those are separate, and you should not be charged monthly for work that finished.

Why fixed and not hourly

An hourly rate makes us adversaries. You want fewer hours, I want more, and every conversation about scope becomes a negotiation about my invoice. A fixed price tied to the outcome puts us on the same side: if I find a faster way to get you there, that is my problem solved and your result unchanged.

It also means you can say yes without a spreadsheet. You know the number before we start, it does not move, and the first thirty days are risk-free.

Capacity

I take a small number of clients.

This is a real constraint and not a sales tactic. Owning a company's technology properly takes somewhere between five and fifteen hours a month, every month, and there are only so many of those. A fractional who claims twenty-five clients is running a mailing list, not a roadmap.

So the book stays small on purpose. If I am full, I will tell you that instead of taking your deposit, and I would rather point you somewhere useful than do a bad job slowly.

Start with the diagnostic

Find out what
it is worth
first.

One paid, fixed-fee diagnostic. You leave knowing where the money is going and what it would take to stop it, whether or not you ever hire me. If you do, the fee comes off the work.

Book the diagnostic