Fractional CTO for Seed Stage
Seed stage startups have validated their MVP and raised institutional capital to find product-market fit and build a sustainable business. You've proven the concept works with early customers, but now...
Typical Funding
$500K - $2M
Team Size
4-10 people
Revenue
$10K - $100K ARR
Runway
18-24 months
Understanding Seed Stage
Seed stage startups have validated their MVP and raised institutional capital to find product-market fit and build a sustainable business. You've proven the concept works with early customers, but now face the challenge of scaling from scrappy MVP to a robust product that can handle growth. This stage is about building the right team, establishing processes, and making infrastructure decisions that will carry you through Series A. Technical leadership is critical as you transition from founder-led development to a professional engineering organization.
Key Priorities at This Stage
- Hire your first 2-5 engineers and establish strong engineering culture
- Refactor MVP technical debt while maintaining shipping velocity
- Build product features that drive key growth metrics and retention
- Establish development processes: code review, testing, CI/CD
- Scale infrastructure to handle 10x user growth
- Implement analytics and data infrastructure for product decisions
- Set up monitoring and on-call rotation for reliability
- Prepare technical foundation for Series A due diligence
- Define engineering career ladder and compensation framework
- Balance feature development with technical foundation work
Why You Need a Fractional CTO
- Experienced CTO leadership at 1/3 the cost of full-time VP Engineering ($60K vs $200K+)
- Proven playbook for scaling from 1 to 10 engineers successfully
- Network for recruiting senior engineering talent in competitive market
- Objective technical assessment and roadmap for Series A investors
- Avoid common seed-stage technical pitfalls that delay Series A
Common Challenges at Seed Stage
First technical hires are critical but founders don't know how to evaluate engineers
MVP works but has technical debt that slows down new feature development
No engineering processes causing chaotic deployments and bugs in production
Scaling issues appearing as user base grows (performance, reliability)
Tension between moving fast and building things right
Can't afford experienced VP Engineering yet but need senior technical leadership
Technical roadmap not aligned with business goals and fundraising timeline
Security and compliance becoming important as customers get larger
Engineering team lacks direction and clarity on priorities
Difficulty competing for engineering talent against well-funded competitors
Budget Guidance for Seed Stage
Fractional C T O
$4,999-$8,000/month (20-30 hours/month)
Engineering
$400K-$800K/year (2-5 engineers at $120K-$180K each)
Infrastructure
$500-$2,000/month (cloud hosting, databases, monitoring)
Tooling
$500-$1,500/month (GitHub, Linear, Slack, Datadog, etc.)
Recruiting
$20K-$50K/year (job boards, recruiter fees for key hires)
Total Monthly Tech Burn
$40K-$80K/month
Success Story
Seed-stage B2B SaaS, 6 people, $1.5M raised, $40K ARR, 18 months runway
Challenge
MVP built by founders was breaking under load. No engineering team, founders couldn't scale development themselves. Needed to grow to $1M ARR in 15 months for Series A. Previous attempt to hire CTO failed after 3 months (bad fit). Burning $80K/month with slow product progress.
Solution
Fractional CTO joined as head of engineering. First 30 days: technical audit, prioritized critical infrastructure fixes, defined hiring plan. Months 2-4: hired 3 senior engineers (2 full-stack, 1 backend), established sprint process, implemented CI/CD, refactored authentication and billing systems. Months 5-12: led team to ship 6 major features, built analytics pipeline, achieved 99.8% uptime, established on-call rotation. Prepared technical materials for fundraising.
Result
Grew from $40K to $1.4M ARR in 14 months. Engineering team of 5 shipping weekly releases. Clean technical diligence from 3 Series A investors. Raised $8M Series A led by tier-1 VC. Fractional CTO helped recruit full-time VP Engineering, transitioned to board technical advisor role. Company reached $5M ARR 10 months after Series A.
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