Who to hire when
There are roughly four shapes of technical help available to a non-technical founder. They solve different problems. Picking the wrong shape is the most expensive hiring mistake you can make at this stage — more expensive than picking a mediocre individual within the right shape.
The minimum rule
Match the shape of the help to the shape of the problem.
- One-off problem, narrow scope → contractor
- Decisions you can’t make alone, ongoing → fractional CTO
- Big project, fixed deadline, you don’t want to manage it → agency
- The build is the company, you have funding → full-time engineer
That’s the whole heuristic. The rest of this lesson is what each shape actually involves and what it costs.
The four shapes
| Role | Best for | Watch out for | Typical cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freelance contractor | Specific, scoped work — a feature, a fix, a migration | No long-term ownership; will move on | £400-£800/day, project rate |
| Fractional CTO | Strategic technical voice in your room, not full-time labour | Often busy with other clients; demand defined hours | £1.5k-£5k/month for 4-12 hrs |
| Agency | Coordinated team, fixed deadline, you don’t want to manage individuals | Paying for layers of management; quality varies wildly | £20k-£200k per project |
| Full-time engineer | The build is the company and you’ve raised | Senior is £8k-£14k/mo all-in (UK); they need real work to do | £80k-£180k/yr + on-costs |
Costs are 2026 ballparks for the UK / Europe / North America corridor. They scale up in SF, down in Eastern Europe, way down in good parts of Asia.
Freelance contractor — when scope is clear
A contractor works best when you can hand them a specific deliverable: “Migrate our app from Replit to Cloudflare Pages, including DNS setup, env var migration, and a one-page handover doc. Fixed price. Two weeks.”
Where it goes wrong: you hand them the whole codebase with no scope and ask them to “make it production-ready.” That’s a fractional CTO problem, not a contractor problem — but the contractor will quote you for it because they want the work, and three weeks in, both of you are unhappy.
Find them on: Toptal, Arc, Toptal-style marketplaces, your network’s recommendations. Avoid Fiverr and Upwork for technical work above the most trivial — the signal-to-noise ratio is terrible.
Interview them with: the four interview questions in the next lesson. Same questions; the difference is you’re hiring for a project, not a relationship.
Fractional CTO — when you need judgement, not labour
A fractional CTO sits in your room (literally or virtually) for 4-12 hours a month and helps you make decisions you can’t make alone. They don’t ship code; they review it. They don’t run sprints; they help you run sprints.
This is the role most non-technical founders most underestimate. The leverage is enormous — for the cost of about half a day of senior contractor time per month, you get someone whose primary job is to be on your side of the table when you’re evaluating engineers, agencies, architecture decisions, and quotes.
When to use: any time signal 5 from the previous lesson is true (you can’t evaluate a quote). Also when you’re about to hire your first full-time engineer — let them help you run the process. They’ve done it before; you haven’t.
Find them on: GoFractional, CTO-as-a-Service marketplaces, your investor network if you have one. Many ex-startup-CTOs will take 1-2 fractional clients between full-time gigs.
The trap: they’re often busy. Get specific about hours upfront. “Up to 8 hours a month, with a 24-hour response SLA on Slack messages” beats “as needed.”
Agency — when you need a team and a deadline
Agencies are useful for one thing: coordinated, deadlined work that you do not want to manage day-to-day. A redesign. A specific feature with a launch deadline. A migration that touches many systems.
The trap is that agencies sell themselves as good for everything — “we’ll be your technical co-founder,” “we’ll handle your whole roadmap.” When you hire an agency to be your engineering team forever, you end up with a coordination tax (their PMs, their account managers, their handoffs) on every decision, and a strong incentive for them to keep the work going.
When to use: a defined project with a defined budget and a defined deadline, where you’d rather pay 1.5x to have someone else manage it.
When not to use: ongoing product engineering. That’s a full-time hire.
Vet them by: asking for references from clients whose projects ended more than a year ago and who are still using what was built. References from current clients are useless — agencies pick those.
Full-time engineer — when the build is the company
If you’ve raised money and the build is what the money’s for, hire a full-time engineer. There’s no shortcut. The fractional / agency setup eventually breaks because nobody has full ownership of the codebase.
When to use: post-funding, with at least 12 months of runway, and a problem space large enough to keep one engineer busy full-time.
When not to use: pre-revenue, pre-funding, just to have one. A full-time engineer with no clear work will either invent work (often the wrong work) or quit.
The hire to make first: a senior generalist who’s shipped at small companies before. Not a specialist. Not a junior. Not a “10x engineer” (the term is a flag).
A senior generalist at a small company has done the whole loop themselves — backend, frontend, deploys, on-call, debugging weird issues. That’s the shape of work you have. Specialists are for when you have specialised work.
↳ Sanity check before hiring full-time
Can you afford 12 months of their full salary right now, with the funding you have? If no, you’re hiring on a runway you don’t have. Either raise more first, or stay fractional until you do.
The mixed setup that works at this stage
For most non-technical founders shipping AI-built software, the right setup for the first 12-18 months is:
- You — keep building with AI tools, doing the founder work
- Fractional CTO, 4-8 hrs/month — strategic voice, code reviews on big changes, hire-line judgement
- One contractor on call — for specific projects (migration, integration, feature) as they come up
This costs £2k-£6k a month in total and gives you everything except a full-time builder. You become full-time-builder material when revenue or funding makes it justifiable, not before.
Skills you’ll pick up
- Matching shape-of-help to shape-of-problem before you go to market
- Pricing 2026 ballparks across roles so you can spot wildly off-market quotes
- Spotting the “agency over-sells” pattern and walking away
- Knowing when fractional is enough and when full-time is the only answer
References & further reading
- GoFractional — marketplace for fractional execs including CTOs
- Toptal — vetted contractor network; expensive but consistent
- Lenny’s Newsletter · How to hire your first engineer — search the archive
- First Round Review · The Hiring Field Guide — operator-led guides, free, deep
- Will Larson · Lethain on Hiring — for when you’re running a real process, not just a vibe-check