Could Your Startup Use a Fractional CTO?

Fractional CTOs may just be the best thing to happen to startups since sliced bread and remote work. If you need help fleshing out a tech strategy, building a digital product, or gathering a development team, a fractional CTO can help guide those initiatives for a fraction of what you’d pay an in-house CTO. Here are some of the main things a fractional CTO can help your startup achieve.

Get a CTO without paying a CTO’s salary

The average CTO’s salary is $200,000 (though it can be as high as $1,850,000). Can you afford to pay that? Most startups can’t. The beauty of a fractional CTO is that it gives you that highly specialized knowledge without that highly expensive price—because a fractional CTO isn’t a full-time, salaried employee.

Start your project sooner

Building a tech product takes time. Add to that time months of recruiting CTOs, sifting through applications, and conducting interviews—then repeating that process for each member of your product development team. 

Hiring a fractional CTO cuts all that time out. Naturally, you may still need to do a bit of searching to find your fractional CTO, but it’s generally a lot faster (and easier) than recruiting a full-time employee, and once you’ve connected with the fractional CTO, they’ll put together a team quickly using developers from their network.

Ease up your CEO’s load

If your startup is developing software or another tech product, whether in-house or outsourced, you’re going to need someone to oversee that development. Your CEO could do it, but they’re likely bogged down in supervising operations, managing growth, seeking funding, and forming partnerships. (If you are the CEO, hi.)

A fractional CTO can bridge the gap between CEO and development team: whether that means outsourcing, gathering a team from scratch to work in-house, or simply managing an already assembled team. A CTO does more than simply oversee development: they track progress, optimize processes, and report back. Besides simply lightening the CEO’s load, this ensures that someone with real tech experience is overseeing development.

Say yes to the digital age

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, it should come as no surprise that today’s companies need to embrace digital transformation to stay relevant. In fact, to really be successful, your startup needs to do more than simply keep up: it needs to be one-step ahead of the curve. That means embracing change not just as a necessary step every once in a while, but as a constant way of doing business.

If that sounds overwhelming, a fractional CTO may be the answer. They can provide your startup with in-demand skills and knowledge you wouldn’t find elsewhere, and they can help lead your company through change and transformation.

Take your tech strategy from zero to hero

A fractional CTO can help you structure your startup from the ground up, especially in the technology department. If you have a concrete tech strategy already in place, they can help you implement it. If you have a fuzzy idea of what you want to accomplish, they can help you develop a solid plan. And if you have no clue about anything tech-related, they can create, implement, and oversee a working tech strategy for your startup, even assembling developers and other tech professionals as needed.

Get your product to market

As a startup, you may not have much experience taking products to market. Not to worry! A fractional CTO can help with that, too. Whether you’ve already built the product and just need a strong launch strategy, or are still in the planning stages and need the product built and launched, a fractional CTO has the expertise and experience to make it all happen.

Smooth out the transition

As a startup, you’re typically operating with lean resources, which means a fractional CTO is going to be your best bet for at least the first couple years. Even after that, you may find that working with a fractional CTO gives you the best value at the lowest cost. 

But if at some point in the future you decide to hire a full-time, salaried CTO, your fractional CTO can help make that transition easier: from suggesting qualified candidates to training the new employee and making sure the hand-off goes smoothly.

Need a fractional CTO for your startup? Talk to one of ours, today.