Senior technical leadership,
without the full-time hire.
For non-technical founders who need a senior engineer's judgment on architecture, vendor choices, hiring, and tradeoffs. Ongoing partnership, scaled to where you actually are.
You're making technical calls you'd rather not make alone, and you can't or won't hire a full-time CTO.
- You're a non-technical founder with a working product
- You're making technical decisions you don't fully trust your gut on
- You've outgrown asking friends and Twitter for advice
- You need someone in your corner for hiring, vendor choices, and architecture calls
- You can't justify a full-time CTO salary yet, or you don't want one
If three or more of those land, let's have the call.
I stay long enough to live with my recommendations.
I'm Matt Turley. Twenty years of shipping software, mostly for founders. I've been the technical cofounder, the fractional CTO, and the rescue engineer. The work I'm proudest of is not the launches; it is the relationships that compounded across years. My longest active client since 2010. A travel-booking SaaS owner since 2022. A field-service SMB owner since 2020. Decisions you don't have to make alone, made by someone still in the Slack when those decisions play out.
"Decisions you don't have to make alone."
The pipeline.
The first month is mostly listening. Recommendations come after I understand the business, not before. Most of my engagements run for years; the front-loaded listening is why.
Listen
Two weeks of listening to your business, your team, your code. No recommendations yet. I take notes.
Diagnose
Where the technical risk actually sits. What's keeping you up. What's keeping you slow. What's fine.
Recommend
A short, ranked list. Hires, vendors, architecture, sequencing. With reasoning, not just verdicts.
Decide together
We talk through it. You decide. I'm an advisor, not a board override. Your company, your call.
Implement
You execute, your team executes, or I do (if it's the AI Dev Pipeline kind of work). I help unblock either way.
Iterate
We revisit weekly. Decisions made under uncertainty get re-checked. Plans change. The relationship doesn't.
The relationship is the deliverable. Everything else is in service of it.
One engagement. Two intensities.
Same partnership, different cadence. Most clients start at one and grow into the other.
Advisory or Embedded.
Advisory ($2,500/mo): one weekly 1:1, async Slack availability, decision-grade input on hires, vendors, and architecture. Embedded ($5,000/mo): two 1:1s a week, faster async response, deeper involvement in hiring and review, attendance at strategic meetings.
Book a Fit Call →- Weekly 1:1 standing call (60 min)
- Async Slack availability for unblockers
- Architecture and vendor decisions reviewed before commit
- Hiring support: spec, JD review, interviews, offer calibration
- Quarterly written technical health review
- Direct line on any technical fire, no triage layer
Long relationships. Compounding context.
The brand here is steady technical partner, not fast shipper. These are the engagements I'm proudest of.
BizJetJobs, embedded since 2010. WordPress to a revenue engine.
The owner is non-technical. I have been the technical partner for 15+ years across multiple platform rewrites, a recession, and the entire post-pandemic charter cycle. The deliverable was never a deck. It was that I was still there when the next decision came.
Field-service SMB, lead-gen ops retainer, ongoing.
Travel SaaS, operator-led booking platform.
Three founders, one technical partner. The pipeline runs the backlog; I run the architecture and hiring conversations. Both paid for, one engagement.
Read the case →Straight answers.
The questions every non-technical founder asks before they bring someone in.
Two honest doors.
Pick the one that fits where you are.
If your build is broken before this can help, see Project Rescue. If you need code shipped continuously, see AI Dev Pipeline.
Matt