A Fractional CTO Is Not a Part-Time Advisor. It's a Full-Time Owner Who Bills You Part-Time
A fractional CTO is defined by accountability, not hours. Most of what's sold under the title is advisory theater. Here's the distinction that matters.
Blog · 88 posts
A fractional CTO is defined by accountability, not hours. Most of what's sold under the title is advisory theater. Here's the distinction that matters.
What an MVP really costs: why the $10K quote is a trap, why $40K–$100K is the real band, and why scope discipline sets the price.
An opinion piece arguing that hiring remote developers is a retention and team-design problem, not a sourcing-and-screening one — and what to do instead.
An opinion piece arguing that agentic AI consulting, sold as standalone strategy, fails where agents actually live — in engineering, evals, and ownership.
An opinion piece arguing that rapid MVP development optimizes the wrong variable — building speed was never the bottleneck; deciding what not to build is.
A dev team isn't a number you dial up and down. It's accumulated context in the people who stay. Churn, not headcount, decides whether anything ships.
Speed isn't the hard part of an MVP. The scope decision is. And "it's just an MVP, we'll rewrite it" is the lie behind the codebases we get hired to rescue.
An opinion piece arguing that the right way to staff an MVP is small, senior, and stable — not the cheap, churning, body-shop team most founders are sold.
In outsource app development, the in-house-vs-offshore debate is theater. The real variable is continuity versus churn. Here's how to buy the right one.
Outsourcing web development works. But only when you buy team continuity, not the cheapest hourly rate. Turnover is what actually bankrupts the build.
Outsourcing means you delegate the project. Outstaffing means you hire the people. One gives you a deliverable. The other gives you a team.
Outsourcing mobile app development is the right call for most companies. But only if you stop buying hourly-rate arbitrage and start buying continuity.
The "interchangeable headcount" version of staff augmentation is body shopping. Retention, not the hourly rate, decides whether it pays.
Offshore web development isn't a labor-arbitrage play, and treating it like one is why it fails — the real variable is who stays on your codebase.
Custom mobile app development is sold as a launch. It's really a decade-long maintenance commitment. The native-vs-cross-platform debate is a decoy.
Staff augmentation and outsourcing are different models with different economics. After 11 years running both, here's what actually matters.