Beliefs

What I believe

If you're a founder building a SaaS product with a small team, these are the principles I work by.

Early-stage SaaS breaks at the decision layer - not the code layer.

The decision gap

In small SaaS teams, the hardest calls sit between product and engineering. What belongs in v1. Whether to buy or build. Which integration is worth the mess.

These calls are too technical to wave through and too important to leave sitting. They pull founders into the weeds and steal focus from the developers who need to ship.

Someone has to own them. Close enough to the code to understand the cost. Far enough from it to protect the team's time.

That’s the job: owning the calls that would otherwise pile up until release week.

Not org charts. Not strategy decks. Timely decisions with real consequences.

Partnership, not handoff

Non-technical founders still own technical decisions. They just should not have to make them blind. What they need is someone who can turn options into trade-offs they can actually weigh: cost, speed, risk, reversibility.

Delegation into a black box doesn’t buy freedom: it buys uncertainty and rework.

A good fractional CTO doesn't take over. They bring the founder closer to the product and help them see it clearly. Founders who disengage from technical decisions do not get freedom. They get surprises.

The goal is shared judgment, not outsourced responsibility.

AI made code cheap. Decisions are still expensive.

AI lowered the cost of code. It did not lower the cost of judgment. A motivated founder can now ship an MVP without a developer, but more code still does not mean a better product.

The expensive part is deciding what to build, what to ignore, and what not to break on the way. As the cost of building drops, the cost of building the wrong thing stays exactly where it was.

Used badly, AI helps teams create more debt, more brittle architecture, and more cleanup in less time. It accelerates mistakes just as easily as progress.

AI didn’t remove the need for a CTO.

What gets more valuable is judgment: knowing when to lean on the tool and when to slow down. Part of what I do is help teams build processes that use AI for speed and exploration, not as a shortcut around the hard parts.

Credibility from doing

The best advice comes from people who are still building. Not people who only talk about building.

I build my own products alongside client work. I still run into scope creep, awkward integrations, and the temptation to over-engineer. That is not a distraction from the advisory work. It is what keeps it honest.

Founders deserve guidance from someone with skin in the game, someone who has been wrong recently enough to learn from it. If your advisor's only product is advice, ask what they're pressure-testing their ideas against.

Playing the long game

Trust is not a claim. It is a track record.

I show up consistently. I say the uncomfortable thing when it needs saying. When I see a problem forming, I raise it early instead of waiting to be asked.

My longest client relationship is over a decade. The best ones go well beyond architecture and shipping. Founders bring me hiring doubts, team problems, and bets they are not sure about. That only happens when someone has earned the right to be in the room.

I lead with generosity, not pressure. I would rather help a founder for free in a community and never hear from them again than push a pitch on someone who does not need me.

If you're stuck on a decision or want to think something through, let's talk. The best engagements usually start with one concrete problem.

If this feels like the right fit, let's talk.

The best way to tell is to bring one real problem. We can see quickly whether we'd work well together.

Get in touch

Based in Bulgaria, EU. EET timezone.