Fractional CTO leadership from a working CTO.
Any of this on your desk?
- You're the CEO, and every technical decision still lands on your desk.
- Your developers or agency ship what they're told, but nobody senior is deciding what to tell them.
- You're comparing vendor quotes and architecture proposals with no way to judge them.
- An investor or enterprise customer asked who owns your technology, and the honest answer is nobody.
- A full-time CTO salary isn't in the budget, but the CTO problems have already arrived.
What the engagement includes
A fractional CTO engagement here is a flat monthly retainer, a recurring leadership session, and a single accountable owner for every technical decision your company makes. Here's what that covers.
Architecture & Roadmap
Build versus buy, rewrite versus patch, what ships next quarter and why. We own the technical roadmap and defend every call in plain English.
An Owner When Things Break
Production incidents, vendor surprises, deadline collisions. You have a senior technical owner to call, and an engineering team behind that call when action is needed.
Team & Vendor Direction
We direct your in-house developers, contractors, or agency: code review standards, delivery accountability, and honest evaluations of the quotes sitting on your desk.
Codebase & Infrastructure Audit
Every engagement starts with a full review of your code, infrastructure, and deploy pipeline. You get a clear picture of where things stand before we change anything.
Security & Risk
Access control, dependency patching, backups, and an incident plan. The unglamorous work that keeps your company off the front page.
A Technical Voice in the Room
Investor diligence, enterprise security questionnaires, key vendor negotiations. When the conversation turns technical, you stop being outnumbered.
Is a fractional CTO the right move?
Best fit when:
- You run a real business with revenue, and technical decisions are bottlenecked on you.
- You have people who can build, but nobody senior setting direction.
- You want one accountable owner for architecture, security, and delivery.
- You want leadership that can also ship when hands are needed.
Not a fit when:
- You need a full-time, on-site executive.
- You want a name for the pitch deck rather than someone in the work.
- You're looking for a technical co-founder to work for equity.
- You need staff augmentation to plug into an existing engineering org.
The person you're hiring
Fractional CTO work at Ecliptic Ideas is performed by Brendan Ronan, our founder.
Fractional CTO of Wine Spies
Brendan is the fractional CTO of Wine Spies, an 8-figure wine e-commerce company Ecliptic Ideas has worked with since 2016. Read the case study.
Owner of InsightLeap
Brendan has owned and operated InsightLeap, an analytics platform for Amazon vendors and sellers, since we acquired it in 2022. It anchors our Amazon analytics engineering work.
We show our work
The judgment is inspectable: we publish field guides for the upgrades we run, like Rails 6 to 7 and 7 to 8.
Leadership that comes with a team attached
Advice alone still leaves you searching for someone to do the work. Our fractional CTO engagements plug into the same retained-team model we run for every client, so the person making the calls can put senior engineers on them the same week.
Weighing whether you're at that point? We wrote about the signs you need a fractional CTO. And if you're local, so are we: see our fractional CTO services for San Diego companies.
Fractional CTO FAQ
What does a fractional CTO at Ecliptic Ideas actually do?
The same job a full-time CTO does, on a part-time cadence: own the technical roadmap, direct the people writing the code, make the build-versus-buy and rewrite-versus-patch calls, and answer for security and reliability. Brendan Ronan, our founder, takes the seat, a role he already holds in production at Wine Spies.
How much of your time do we get?
Enough to keep decisions moving. The engagement runs as a monthly retainer with a recurring leadership session, and questions between sessions don't wait for the next meeting. When the workload outgrows that shape, we scale the retainer rather than let things queue.
Do you write code or only advise?
Both. The fractional CTO role is backed by the Ecliptic Ideas engineering team, so the person setting the direction can also put senior engineers on the work. If you already have developers or an agency, we direct them instead.
How is this different from hiring a development agency?
An agency waits for a spec. A CTO decides what belongs on the spec in the first place, then answers for the outcome. You get the second thing here, with an engineering team behind it whenever there is building to do.
What does it cost?
Every engagement is a flat monthly retainer sized to the responsibilities you're taking off your plate, with no surprise invoices. We put a number on it after the intro call, once we understand the scope.
How do we get started?
Book an intro call or send us the contact form. The first weeks of every engagement are an audit of your codebase, infrastructure, and team workflow, so every recommendation is grounded in what you actually have.
What Our Clients Say
The best part about working with Ecliptic Ideas is the ease of communication, such that they deeply understand your business and work as an extension of your internal team. That is a massive force-multiplier and consistently results in shipping high-quality end products which meet the users better than the competition.
Start with a conversation.
Tell us where the technical side of your business hurts. We'll get back to you within one business day. Prefer to talk it through live? Book an intro call.
