Senior technical leadership, on a fractional schedule.
For founders who need a technical partner — not a deck. Architecture decisions, roadmap, hiring, and hands-on execution from someone who has actually shipped production systems. Not advisory hours. Not a deliverable that disappears.
If you are between an agency and a VP of Engineering, we built this for you.
Funded founders without a CTO
Pre-seed and seed founders with a non-technical CEO who need a senior partner on architecture, hiring, and vendor decisions before they hand off to a full-time CTO 12 to 18 months from now.
SMBs outgrowing agencies
Owner-operators whose stack has gotten complex enough that "let me ask the agency" is no longer a strategy. You need someone in the room when technical decisions get made — not a vendor on a per-ticket clock.
Series A teams hiring up
Recently funded teams with two to ten engineers and no senior technical leader. We bridge the gap until your full-time CTO or VP of Eng starts — and help you hire them.
Strategy and execution. Not slide decks.
Fractional CTO is a category full of advisors who never touch a keyboard. We are not that. The four things below are roughly 90 percent of every engagement.
Technical strategy & roadmap
Quarterly roadmap that maps to your business milestones, not engineering wishlists. We make the build-vs-buy calls and the sequencing tradeoffs so you can fundraise, ship, and hire on time.
Architecture & vendor decisions
The expensive decisions — database, hosting, auth, observability, AI vendors. We read the contracts, run the proofs of concept, and tell you which choice will not be a regret in 18 months.
Hands-on builds when it matters
For load-bearing pieces — auth, payments, data infrastructure, AI integrations — we will write the code ourselves. The point of having a CTO is that the hardest things are not handed to someone learning on your dollar.
Hiring & team scaling
Job descriptions, sourcing, interviews, take-homes, and reference calls. Eventually we help you hire your first or second full-time engineering leader — and run the search, screen the candidates, and hand off to them cleanly.
What we do not do
- Hand you a slide deck and disappear
- Write strategy memos with no execution path
- $50,000 audits that recommend another $200,000 audit
- Outsource your build to offshore developers
- Sign you up for tools we get a kickback on
- Pretend to be specialists in stacks we are not
Three steps. No surprises in the contract.
Discovery is free. Engagement is honest about what month one looks like (mostly listening). Real impact compounds in months two and three.
Discovery call
You describe what you are building, what is on fire, and what is keeping you up at night. We tell you honestly whether we are the right fit. If we are not, we suggest someone who is. About one in three calls ends with a referral elsewhere.
Foundation engagement
Architecture and code review in week one, decision-and-roadmap doc in week two, then we work the roadmap. Weekly working sessions, async availability, and a clear set of milestones. Fixed scope, fixed price.
Ongoing retainer
After the 90 days, most engagements continue as a month-to-month retainer. Same lead, same cadence, sized to what you need: usually 20 to 40 hours a month. Pause anytime with 30 days notice. No annual lock-in.
Production systems we built and operate.
Most fractional CTOs cannot show you what they have shipped. These are live, in production, serving real users — and they are not portfolio screenshots. They are sister brands that we built, deploy, and maintain ourselves.
Digital Minerz
Multi-tenant SMB lead-gen platform — Caddy, EC2, DynamoDB, SES newsletter system, full CI/CD with blue-green deploys.
digitalminerz.com →Operator Workflows
Conversion-engine landing site running on the same shared API + Caddy stack. Same buyer-funnel architecture you would inherit on an engagement.
operatorworkflows.com →Johnson Intelligence Group
Government & enterprise consulting site — capability statements, FAQ schemas, compliance-aware content. Same authoring stack, different audience.
johnsonintelligencegroup.com →These are sister brands under the same parent company (Digital Minerz LLC), shown here as evidence of execution capability — not as comparable services. The fractional CTO offering is materially different from the retainers and consulting practices on those sites.
One tier. Honest floor.
No three-column pricing matrix. The engagement is shaped on the fit call to what you actually need — but the floor is public.
Plus a $15,000 fixed-scope foundation engagement to start. 90-day minimum, then month-to-month.
- Weekly working sessions with the engagement lead
- Async availability via Slack or email, same-day responses on weekdays
- You own all code, decisions documents, and infrastructure access
- 30-day notice to cancel after the 90-day foundation
- Specialist contractors brought in against your budget when needed (security audits, ML, niche infra)
The objections we hear most.
How is this different from a full-time CTO?
A full-time CTO at a funded startup or growing SMB runs about $250,000 to $400,000 in total comp, plus equity, plus the cost of being wrong about the hire. Fractional CTO gives you the same caliber of judgment on architecture, hiring, vendor decisions, and roadmap, sized to what you actually need right now. When you outgrow fractional, we help you hire your full-time CTO and hand off cleanly.
Why a $5,000 minimum and a 90-day commitment?
Below $5,000 there is not enough cadence to actually move a roadmap. The 90-day minimum is because the first 30 days are mostly listening — reading your code, talking to your team, understanding what is real versus what looks real on the surface. The decisions that earn the engagement back happen in months two and three.
Are you just one person?
Yes. The engagement lead is a single senior operator who shipped the production systems on this site. For specialized work — security audits, ML, niche infrastructure — we bring in trusted independent contractors against your budget. You always know who is doing what and you approve every outside engagement before it happens.
Can you take over from our existing dev shop or contractors?
Often, yes. The honest answer is that some agencies do good work and the right move is to keep them and add technical oversight. Others have left you with code that needs to be replaced. We do an architecture and code-quality assessment in week one and tell you which situation you are in — and what to do about it.
What stacks do you work in?
Day-to-day: TypeScript, Python, Postgres, AWS, Next.js, NestJS, Prisma, Docker, GitHub Actions. Strong opinions on boring infrastructure and shipping over rewriting. We will not pretend to be specialists in stacks we are not — if your problem is, say, a Rails monolith or heavy ML, we will tell you up front whether we are the right fit or not.
What is the timeline from first email to kickoff?
We respond to every application within two business days. If we are aligned on the fit call, you get a one-page engagement proposal within 48 hours of the call. Most engagements kick off the following Monday. The whole process from first email to first work session is usually under two weeks.
Apply for a fit call.
Two business day response. No pitch deck. 30 minutes. We will tell you honestly if we are the right fit.
Apply nowOr email admin@digitalminerz.com directly.