In which stage is your startup right now?

Have you ever heard of interim CTO?

You have propably already heard of interim executives for the CEO or CMO, while interim CTO is rapidly becoming a popular option for early stage startups. In most cases, seed round stage upto series A stage startups are in need for this particular service.


Because it works and it’s insanely convenient for both party.

Let’s face it.

If you are entrepreneur yourself you already know how costly to hire CTO right?

Besides the cost, you just want MVP to be launched as soon as possible, and hiring process for developers are just awefully terrible.

That’s when interim CTO comes in.

Interim CTO helps a startup for a couple of months or for a longer term of say, 18〜24 months. Interim CTO can accelerate your startup in ways that CMO nor CEO are unable.

In this post you’ll figure out why every startup founders should consider hiring interim CTO and not full-time CTO or software developer.

But before jump into the topic, I thought it would be appropriate to explain the difference between interim CTO and technical co-founder.

While both of them sounds exactly the same, what they actually FOCUS on is completely different.

So let’s start with that.

What Are the Differences Between Interim CTO and Technical Co-Founder?

Most of the time technical co-founders are considered as CTOs. He is the guy who join the startup in an early days.

Many of them put great amount of their time on the immediate development needs, rather than the long term vision for the business.

What does this mean?

This means that solving today’s problems become more important than looking at the goals of the future.

Maybe in the very early stage, technical co-founder is still valuable. However, the problem arises when a startup starts to accelerate and require strong leadership through growthhacking period.

When scaling up a startup an experienced interim CTO likely to perform better in terms of development lead and team leadership as well as giving a direction.

An interim CTO, therefore can provide the necessary skills to help accelerate software development in the early stages of the startup. As the startup begins to find a product or market fit, the interim CTO can help transition to a full-time CTO role.

How Can Interim CTO Accelerate Startup Success?

You know it.

Startups, especially in early stage ones is all about SPEED. 

As a founder, you want your prototype ready, you want to sell, scale and grow as fast as you possibly can.

Correct me if I’m wrong.

But this is what majority of startups are aiming for, at lease until their business stablize and finally become into companies and not startups.

Interim CTO can accelerate early or mid-stage startup success in a number of ways:

・Support transition an early-stage startup from cowboy coding to a consistent , repeatable, and scalable process and coding.

・Knowledge and expertise to fill in the gaps which is unavailable for the early stage startup.

・Save financial waste by avoiding costly mistakes such as building the wrong product or code, the wrong technologies, hiring wrong core team members.

Interested in Learning More?

Interim CTO may be a new term for you.

I totally get it.

That’s why I want to help you learn a bit more about it.

Do you think an interim CTO may help your startup?

Why don’t you drop us an email and see if it may be a fit for your startup.

Oh, Have I mentioned that we have 95% success rate taking startups to the next round and further…?