"But I already have a technical advisor."
Three weeks ago, a founder said that to me right after telling me her production database had gone down over a weekend and nobody on her team knew how to restore it. Her advisor — a former CTO she'd met at a pitch event — hadn't returned her message in four days.
"He's great for strategy calls," she said. "But he's not really... around."
That's not a criticism of him. It's a scope problem. She'd hired an advisor and needed a fractional CTO, and nobody had ever explained to her that those are two completely different jobs.
Here's What Usually Happens
I hear a version of this conversation constantly. A founder brings on a technical advisor early — often for a small equity grant, sometimes for free as a favour — and assumes that covers "technical leadership" for the company. It doesn't. It covers periodic advice.
Typical time commitment from a technical advisor — scheduled calls, occasional emails, nothing more
Here's what an advisor is actually signed up for: a monthly or quarterly call, maybe a sanity check on your roadmap, occasionally an intro to someone in their network. That's it. They are not signed up to review your code, manage your contractor, sit in on your standups, or answer their phone when your database goes down on a Saturday.
The real cost of this mismatch: Founders who think they have technical leadership covered by an advisor routinely go 3-6 months without anyone actually accountable for architecture, hiring, or production stability. That gap is where expensive mistakes happen.
Sound familiar? This happens at least twice a month in my conversations with founders.
What Each Role Actually Does
I've done both. Here's the honest breakdown of what you get with each.
A technical advisor gives you:
- A monthly or quarterly strategy call
- A sanity check on big decisions
- Occasional intros to their network
- Someone to name-drop to investors
A fractional CTO gives you:
- 1-3 days a week of hands-on involvement
- Code and architecture review as work happens, not after
- Full ownership of your technical hiring pipeline
- Direct management of your contractors or engineers
- Someone who's reachable and accountable when production breaks
An advisor gives you an opinion. A fractional CTO gives you someone who owns the outcome. If your architecture doesn't scale or your hire doesn't work out, that's on me — not on some advice you chose to take or ignore.
Not Sure Which One You Actually Need?
I'll walk through what's on your plate for the next quarter and tell you honestly whether an advisor covers it or you need someone hands-on.
Let's Talk About Your Situation →What Each One Actually Costs
Here's where the confusion gets expensive. Founders sometimes assume "fractional CTO" and "technical advisor" cost roughly the same, since both are part-time. They don't.
Technical advisor: Usually 0.1%-0.5% equity, vesting over a few years. Cash retainer is either $0 or somewhere around $500-$2,000/month for more active advisors.
Fractional CTO at ShipSixty: $5,000-$20,000/month depending on how many days a week you need, sometimes with a smaller equity component (0.5%-2%) if we structure it as a hybrid.
Roughly what a $12K/month fractional CTO retainer works out to at 40 hours — about the same hourly rate as an advisor, just a lot more hours committed
That's the part people miss. The hourly value is similar. The difference is entirely in how much of my time you actually get — a few scheduled calls versus real, ongoing involvement in your business.
What We Did for the Founder With the Broken Database
Back to the founder from the top of this article. Here's what happened after that call:
- Week 1: I audited her infrastructure and found there were no automated backups running — that's why the Saturday outage turned into a 30-hour recovery instead of a 10-minute restore.
- Week 2: Set up automated daily backups, a staging environment, and basic error monitoring. Kept her existing advisor in place for quarterly strategy calls — that relationship was actually fine, it just wasn't covering operations.
- Weeks 3-8: Managed her two contractors directly, cleaned up a deployment process that had been entirely manual, and got her technical hiring pipeline started for a full-time engineer.
Total cost: $10K/month. She kept her advisor for the strategic perspective and added a fractional CTO for the operational one. Two different jobs, both covered, no more Saturday night panics.
Got an Advisor But No One Actually Running Things?
That's the single most common gap I see. Let's figure out what's missing and what it would take to close it.
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How to Tell Which One You Need
I'm not going to tell you that everyone needs a fractional CTO — plenty of founders are genuinely well served by an advisor and nothing more. Here's how I'd tell you apart:
You probably just need an advisor if:
- You don't have a product built yet, or your team already has enough hands-on technical capability
- Your open questions are big strategic ones, not "how do we build this"
- You genuinely can't afford $5K+/month right now
You need a fractional CTO if:
- You have contractors or engineers and nobody managing them day to day
- You have a live product that real users depend on
- You're about to hire your first technical person and need someone to run that process
- Your investors expect someone accountable for execution, not just strategy
Most of my clients end up with both — an advisor for outside perspective on one thing they don't specialise in, and me for everything operational. That's not overkill. That's the two roles doing what they're each actually good at.
How I Work With Founders
If you land on needing a fractional CTO, here's how we'd structure it:
- Advisory-Plus ($5K-$8K/month): 4-8 hours/month, but hands-on when it matters — code reviews, a hiring push, a specific technical crisis. For founders not quite ready for the full retainer.
- Standard ($10K-$15K/month): 2-3 days/week. Full technical leadership, team management, hiring pipeline ownership. This is what most seed-stage founders end up on.
- Intensive ($15K-$20K/month): 3-4 days/week for MVP builds, fundraising technical due diligence, or recovering from a mess an agency left behind.
Month-to-month, 30 days' notice, no lock-in. If you already have an advisor you like, keep them — I'm not trying to replace that relationship, I'm filling the gap it was never meant to cover.
Stop Guessing Whether Your Technical Leadership Gap Is Covered
Tell me what's on your plate and I'll give you an honest read on whether an advisor's enough or you need someone hands-on — no sales pitch, just a straight answer.
Tell Me About Your Situation →30 minutes • No obligation • Honest feedback