How I engage.
I offer packages and solutions. Packages are monthly recurring services designed to fit into a budget. Solutions are special products or services that fit specific needs.
Offshoring CTO Services
The lure of offshoring teams is huge. The challenges are there, but often unseen. Domestic projects and offshore teams thrive when a technology mediator bridges the two communities: business and technology.
The Challenge: Technology is not a turn key. It requires trust, both between business challenges and tech providers. Business founders think in term of domestic needs, markets and objectives, while developers think in terms of execution, requirements and delivery.
The Solution: As an 'Offshoring CTO', I provide a bridge between requirements and offshore tech cultures. I build trust, and enable offshore teams to deliver value to non-technical founders.
Duration: Lifetime of the project. This type of project requires hands on work to build the team, support the mission, and ensure the team is aligned with the business.
The Secret: Good offshore companies will (often) turn away clients that lack in-house technology leadership. These companies have learned from past experience and been burned by founders who lack experience with tech teams.
Type of Engagement: Fractional Only.
On-Demand Tech Co-Founder
CEOs and Founders often need an outside perspective on their technology challenges. This perspective can be in the form of communications and mediation, that allow a business leader to navigate challenges in how their teams deliver.
Sometimes they need someone who will think like a founder and provide that key approach that moves their thinking and their business forward.
Duration: This type of work is often short term, and driven by a specific pain points, hiring challenges or tech patterns.
Who: myself, and when needed, a distributed team of seasoned CTOs. Over the past few years, I have built a network of builders, coders and tech leaders. I leverage network to get fresh perspectives.
Technology-Stack Review
For the last two years AI has been a constant source of stress for business leaders. The tools, patterns and skills required to harness the benefits of AI are challenging. A good starting point to an organization facing challenges is to do a top to bottom tech stack review.
Frameworks: A tech stack review can be most impactful when applied in a framework: "Effort vs Impact", "Sunk Cost Analysis", "Features vs Core Competencies", "Cost of Code Ownership". All of these are patterns, that when applied to a tech stack can provide leadership with insights that drive sales, hiring and management.
Outcomes: A tech stack reviews breaks down what you have and maps it to what you need, now. It can surface 'sunk costs', and provides Ai integration points and options for reducing tech debt.
Time frames: A tech stack review can range from a few weeks to three months, depending upon the maturity of the team and goals.
What tools do I use?
Every application is unique, and fitting the tech stack to the project and the business need takes experience.
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On the Back-end
Backend systems provide the business logic, identity management and control processes. |
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On Front-end
When a UI is needed solve a problem, I start with no-code and phase in the minimum front-end frameworks. |
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Persistence
When storage is needed, I default to SQLLite, then scale into schema vs No-SQL depending upon the need. |
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For Code Delivery
The landscape for deployment is rich and mature. |
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On the Cloud
Hosting on EC and burning budget and credits is the last step. Start with hosting options that avoid devOps requirements. |
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For Operations
Operations is the foundation of any scalable solution. Empowering a team with access and tooling that met them where they are is key to proving a technology stack. |
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Rapid Tool Recipes
The right technology stack items can drive innovation and scalable patterns. |
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My Perspective
Startups are all unique, but the pathways, pitfalls and blockers are not. Constant reinvention is a requirement to turn a vision into a reality. To understand how I approach the startup condition, here are some of the patterns and anti-patterns I have encountered and how I address them.
| Observed | Solution | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Context | When a founding team is heads down and building, context is hard to get, and learnings can get lost in the rush to market. | → | "Context is KING". A fractional CTO can help bridge the gap when tech challenges are impacting revenue and growth. It can build in source of new patterns and solutions. |
| Perspective | Founding teams build on what they know when they get started. When driving for revenue, its hard to justify a huge set of skill changes or framework refactor. | → | Changing tech stack and processes requires a different technique, patterns and approaches. Assuming a complete refactor will solve problems is a common anti-pattern. |
| Mental | "What got you here, will not get you there" This is a common warning to founders. Your assumptions about your customers and their needs can be a huge blocker to getting your company to revenue positive. | → |
A framework for scoring solutions can help
break the founder assumption problem and
breaking the 'this worked so far' approach.
And tech debt is not bad, its just misunderstood! |
| Myths | Startup founders and tech leaders often have myths and tropes that drive tech decisions. | → | The less tech used the better! No-code patterns is cheap, fast and too valuable to pass up or ignore. Startups raise money to hire tech. Tech costs often do not correlate to revenue growth. Tech decisions can enable teams break assumptions about their customers needs. |
| Experimentation | Founders know that experiments are important, but find that making them happen can challenge any agile team. | → | Promoting an experiment and measure mindset can help break the assumptions deadlock that leads startups to miss productivity gains. |
| Tuning | Teams grow, but founders can find productivity remaining stagnant. How can things not speed up with more people working on a problem? | → | Teams and processes need tuning. They need to assessed against metrics that align with milestones. Frameworks can help score solutions. Frameworks can promote tech decision making patterns that align with revenue growth. |
| Code | Code is the default for B2B startups. We raise VC funds to hire coders. We give equity to find tech resources. CEOs think they need dedicated tech resources to build a business. | → | Tech is a Capital Expenditure! Treat it that way. A focus on tech first solutions can impede learnings, and burn valuable funding. No Code, Glue Code and Duct-tape solutions are the way to break the tech bind. |
| Time | Limited time, limited runway and limited staff can train a founding team to make all decisions quickly, using instinct, in the place of intentionality. | → | Giving a team a source of context can allow a team to process decisions at different speeds, and break the "get it done yesterday" type of solutions that can become the norm in many startup teams. |
Some References
CEO of Augusta Care
“Stephan has been helping us in figuring out how we should get to SOC2 compliance within a reasonable budget. He's looked at our tech stack and gave us practical recommendations on how it should evolve over time. I'm looking forward to working with him again."
COO of Phoenix Tailings
"Stephan worked with our team as we started to scale up and address security requirements. He assisted in our selection of security frameworks that matched our unique funding, IP, and cyber-security needs. His startup experience provided us with options that matched our stage and immediate concerns. We hope to tap into his experience when our security requirements change."
Solutions Architect at Brytebridge
"We pulled in Stephan to build out our tech stack and API. He executed in record time, provided our front end teams with Just-in-Time API resources as we decided on email providers, payment gateways, hosting and storage options on AWS. He takes a very practical approach to solutions. He gave us both working solutions, as well as best practices for API route testing, JWT token security and a framework that we can hand off to a team to extend. He helped our team go from idea to revenue in 4 weeks. Zero to MVP in record time!"
CEO & Founder of Qase
"Stephan's contribution to Qase has been extraordinary: he found ways to reduce platform spend by 80%, decrease data migration time by 90%, all while improving Qase's resilience and security. Even more incredible is how he achieved this: instead of dictating solutions, he actively coached and mentored our existing staff, helping them to identify and implement new, better approaches. It's also rare to find a CTO equally comfortable in both the boardroom and the trenches. I highly recommend Stephan to any early stage company looking to scale their team and their business. "
TL;DR
If you have read this far, then what you should intuit is that I apply a startup lens to my work. I use the "low effort to high-impact" filter to all decisions, assessments and recommendations. This approach provides founders with the tools to balance their limited resources to get revenue positive. I look for tech solutions that provide practical and stage-relevant solutions.
As a tech founder, I know the pain of having to make decisions based on limited information, time and resources.
And when needed I roll up my sleeves and dig in: configure cloud providers, debug CI/CD processes, upgrade libraries, integrate an auth provider and just simply: write code.
References from past and current clients are available, after an initial screening call. Client data and relationships are all covered by NDAs. No leaks.