The demand for Fractional Remote employees
Hey,
I'm Sergio Pereira, and this is the Remote Work newsletter 👋
Today let me tell you about my views on Fractional careers. And the absolute chaos that is my top funnel at the moment, with multiple startup Founders reaching out every week.
As you probably know, I've worked remote as a Fractional CTO for several years. But the ways clients find me, and their awareness about this whole Fractional work arrangement has changed massively.
A few years ago, most startup Founders wouldn't know what a Fractional CTO was. The conversations usually derived from a full time CTO opening, and I had to educate them on the benefits of investing the same budget to hire a more experienced CTO on a fractional basis, instead a full time CTO with less experience.
Nowadays, most Founders who reach out to me already know:
• What a Fractional CTO is
• That they want to hire a Fractional CTO
• That they want to hire me
This is a huge privilege that I'm still learning how to process. In a call this week I asked a client how he had found me, and he said:
• "I attended the SaaStr conference a couple months back in San Francisco, and in some networking booth there, a few other founders were talking about you, and the benefits of hiring a Fractional CTO. I decided to reach out to you."
I couldn't make this stuff up in my wildest dreams. Imagine a group of Founders in SF, at one of the most important Startup conferences talking about me, a guy sitting in my home office in Lisbon.
I must reckon that they probably were not talking about "me". They were likely talking about the content I write online every day about being a Fractional CTO, and how I help startup founders. Especially non-technical first time founders, who are prone to making several mistakes that many times cost them their startup, very sadly.
I've been seeing more and more:
• Published Fractional CTO job openings in job boards
• Founders posting on Linkedin and X that they are looking for a Fractional CTO
• Mentors at startup accelerators suggesting their mentees to hire a Fractional CTO
Interestingly, several instances of each of this end up in my DMs through someone in my network who sees it and loops me in with those Founders.
A few months ago I wrote this article about startups being remote by default, and increasingly hiring Fractional talent. This forecast is proving true.
Eg: For a few months now, I've been working as a Fractional CTO at BrightCheck. We're a team of 12 and almost everyone is on a Fractional capacity. It's not just the tech folks, also marketing, sales, finance. Most employees are on fractional engagements like myself.
The speed at which we're closing B2B clients, onboarding them, iterating on the product and underlying data models is incredibly mature. I'm loving it, and more startups should take this route!
In fact, given this crazy demand I'm experiencing for my time, I've now split my engagements into 2 broad categories:
1/ Startups post product-market-fit:
Usually these startups have a product and a team, they've gone from 0 to 1. However, founders think that their current setup won't take them from 1 to 100.
They hire me to nurture a more mature tech team, upgrade the engineering standards, and create more robust architectural foundations for the growth of their product and client adoption.
These engagements are usually a monthly retainer, ranging between 8 and 20 hours per week. And I don't take more than 2 of these clients at a time.
2/ For startups pre product-market-fit
Usually these startups need to build the first version of their product, and my initial job with the founder is to massively descope anything that's not key for the MVP. That's a couple weeks of work, in a mix of product management, mentorship and system's architecture. A lot of fun!
With that thin scope, I invite Software Engineers in my close network to build it, in what's usually a 1-3 month sprint. A great opportunity for those builders to emerge as lead developers once the startup matures, btw.
I'm hands off for the most part here, but I'm in the loop for whenever that startup "graduates" into a post product-market-fit client that needs (and can afford) me on a fixed capacity.
So, with all this momentum I'm confident that I'm in for a successful 2025. This Fractional CTO life isn't as glamorous as it may seem sometimes, I've suffered a lot from severe anxiety and dry months in the past. As I described in this recent interview, my main goal is to avoid those $0 months like the plague, and that's what success would look like in 2025. I believe I'll make it.
For now I'm deciding on which Fractional CTO clients to accept for 2025, from this vantage point of having different offers on the table, plus existing clients who want me to continue working with them. I'm still adapting to the privilege, it's crazy.
For 2025 I'd like to be more outspoken about my ongoing client engagements, and I'm discussing it with some clients and prospects. I think my clients would benefit from my reach, and also my readers (you!) would benefit from reading some insights on the exact challenges I had, how I solved them, etc while working as a Fractional CTO. Let's see how this goes.
Besides that, I'll be announcing some new initiatives for 2025, on my public speaking and on my micro-SaaS entrepreneur parallel careers.
In the meantime, since you read it this far, I have some goodies for you:
• If you want to start your Fractional CTO career, watch the session at the Remote Jobs Braintrust, where I've explained my playbook.
• If you want to learn how I manage my remote teams, watch my course Mastering Remote Work.
• If you're looking for a job, try JobsCopilot.ai, it will help you a lot!
In the spirit of Christmas, I've left the Black Friday discounts on. You can check out any of those materials with these steep discounts today still. Go for it!
Talking about Jobs Copilot, I've been improving the search a lot. I've built a whole new data normalization layer for job titles, skills and many other fields. This should address the feedback about people getting too few results for their search criteria.
Indeed, in a database that's pulling 250k new job openings a week, some people were getting matched to only a few dozen. That was a result of malfunctioning data clustering, and it's now much better. Will still improve more until the end of the year. If you're a customer, you should login and try it. If you aren't a customer yet, signup today and get 25% off with the code BLACKFRIDAY2024.
In fact, JobsCopilot doesn't simply find you relevant jobs, it will also auto-apply to the ones you like. This is how that part works:
1/ Your auto-application profile
Once you switch to the Premium plan, you'll be prompted to fill in a profile section with your replies to common demographic questions found in job application forms:
2/ Your auto-apply flow
Besides that initial setup, you'll now find this new button in the jobs card. Just click the "Auto Apply" button on the jobs that are relevant to you, and that will trigger the auto-apply backend flow (no application is sent before your final revision):
3/ Application form is fetched and pre-filled for you
All jobs you've ticked "Auto Apply" are moved to the "Jobs to Apply" tab. And for each of them our backend pulls the application form, and our AI generates replies to each of the form questions based on the job description and your profile. Within a couple minutes you can find the pre-filled job application form in each job card:
4/ One-click confirmation
For now, I'm requiring you to review and click this submit button for every job, as I want you to feel in control of your applications, and I want to capture feedback on quality of this flow. I might make it more automated upon some configs in the future.
Once you submit a job for Auto Apply, the copilot will submit your application in the following minutes/hours (depending on work load). You'll get these messages on your email on a frequent basis, like I'm receiving for the past few weeks myself:
As I mentioned above, it's the last chance to take advantage of the Black Friday discount, simply use the code BLACKFRIDAY2024 on your checkout.
In case you're interested, I've just setup the JobsCopilot Affiliate program. Just signup, share with your community, followers and friends and you'll get a 30% lifetime revenue share.
PS: If you've read this far, drop me a message with your CV. I'm increasingly hiring remote Software Developers for my clients, the market seems to be picking up. I usually post those opportunities in the Braintrust's private Slack. But in case you aren't there, just send me your CV and I'll see it's a fit to any opportunity I have.
Thanks for reading this newsletter until the end. You can read all past editions here. Make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues so they can read it too.
See you next Friday,
Sergio Pereira,
Startup CTO & Remote Work Lover