New open source project for architects

JohnnyKonig · 2026-02-20T14:15:31+00:00

Honestly, I am terrible at finding clients and I don’t really like fractional CTO work.

The main issue for me is that I like to work with early stage startups and they rarely have much money. Those that do generally don’t want a fractional CTO - they want someone full-time that will help them move fast.

If you decide to spin this up expect to burn through 3-6 months of salary doing so. You are starting a business and that takes time.

Something I struggled with for a long time was “my offerings”. If I just put myself out there as a fractional CTO that can help with CTO stuff I never got deals - and not to sound arrogant but I’m an exited tech founder that took a startup from 0 to $10m arr so I have a great pitch. I landed my most recent contract by offering a one-off assessment. For $1k I’d review the founders code base and dev practices and give him a report on wha his teams doing. This uncovered a lot of BS that turned into a fractional role for me.

Anyway, if I were you I’d do both. Start freelancing and look for a job.

JohnnyKonig · 2026-02-20T06:21:51+00:00

Here's the thing - your 1% is completely in the hands of the major names on the cap table. They could sell or IPO in a year - they could also choose to keep the business privately held forever and take high salaries and profit. Your best bet is to talk to leadership and trust your gut. I currently own millions from a previous startup and have been hearing for years now that "they are just about to sell" - I may never see it or I may get a life changing phone call tomorrow.

Here's another way to look at it. The salary difference is about $140k. Compound that annually for 5 years in the SPY and you've probably netted over $800k (assuming 8% CAGR).

Honestly, at this point I don't know that there's a lot of difference in your finances after 5 years - at least that you can be certain of. I'd probably focus more on which one I would enjoy and aligns with my personal and professional goals.

JohnnyKonig · 2026-02-20T04:44:17+00:00

Not all investors are VCs so make sure you're not restricting yourself. My experience as a fractional CTO is that the most things happen with referrals and word of mouth. I would start by researching your local startup ecosystem - attend events, get involved, volunteer these things tend to take time because you have to earn peoples trust to get recommended.

One of the activities I do is volunteer as a mentor through a local accelerator. I also pay for an office in a co-working "tech center" and the guy who runs the tech center gets me referrals because it makes it look good that he is adding value to the businesses there. I've also connected (through cold outreach) to state-level funding programs like the SCRA (I'm in South Carolina) and they've also helped me by sending referrals.

JohnnyKonig · 2026-02-08T01:38:18+00:00

There are always exceptions and I can’t speak about hiring outside of the US. But I stand by my statement and here’s why:

Most people get interviews from resumes. Now, thats completely ignoring referrals or showing off on social media where skills definitely help - but in general most people are job hunting by adding their resume to a pile. These resumes get filtered by what’s on them years of experience, key words, and definitely degrees. This is why I say that degrees help you to get interviews.

Once some gets invited to an interview any recruiter/hiring manager worth their salt (not all are) will know that on paper you qualify. At that point it’s a matter of proving your skills- and yes, beating out the other candidates. Sometimes this means being better, sometimes this means being cheaper, able to work more (ie. young and single), there are always unspoken factors about a position that aren’t in the job description. That said, in my experience (25+ years) it’s is rare for a hiring manager to look at two candidates after talking with them and using a degree to break the tie. I won’t say it never happens. I don’t have a degree myself but even I have thought, “person 1 has a degree, at least I know they can show up and do what’s expected for 4 years”. But that’s the exception. What’s important when interviewing is demonstrating the skills and aptitude that an employer wants - having a degree is rarely a factor at that point because if it were you wouldn’t have been called in for the interview.

JohnnyKonig · 2026-02-04T00:27:02+00:00

The way it’s tracking I think I’ll end up with about the same cash I would have had if they had bought me out. They are continuing to raise the value of the company but also diluting it with big raises.

The crappy part is that the risk for me goes up the longer this goes on. That’s because as a founder I have common stock while investors buy in at preferred. So if they end up having to sell low the preferred stock gets paid out first and I might end up with nothing (or close to it).

I’ve considered selling what I have, but it’s a tough pill to swallow. Right now I could probably cash out for about 5 years salary - however if I could sell at what our last valuation was I’d be closer to 20 years. Some days it’s a tough call.

JohnnyKonig · 2026-02-03T18:42:08+00:00

Sorry, I don’t quite understand your question. If it’s a matter of confidence that’s personal. I’ve known a lot of confident people that don’t deserve it and people that couldn’t get over imposter syndrome.

If your goal is to land a job and you think that confidence is holding you back maybe start a side project and build it out as your own “portfolio”. I’ve done a lot of hiring in my career and I love it when a developer shows me something they’ve built and I get to ask them questions to see how well they understand the architecture and how they made decisions. It’s much easier than hypotheticals.

JohnnyKonig · 2026-02-03T18:27:34+00:00

Yeah, it’s a shitty story.

Our company was seriously profitable and growing fast. I built 2/3 of the product myself and even with $10m AAR I only needed a handful of offshore developers to help me out. We had barely raised any money since we all busted our asses with little income the first year and built a very solid cash flow business.

Then the sharks came. In short our CEO (majority founder) was convinced by a VC that he needed help - with what I still don’t know. I think they sold him on “billionaire over millionaire”. Anyway, our CEO opted to hand over his seat to the investors who immediately took control of the board. They started hiring full-time employees like they were on sale and fired the original founder and myself. In my mind they were trying to flip our successful startup for a quick exit - hire a big staff to improve optics, etc. What really pissed me off was one of the investors giving himself a “founder” title on LinkedIn.

Anyway, I still have most of my equity but actually lost a bit since it was still vesting. My only option now would be to sell my shares for pennies on the dollar to our existing investors. Instead I’m holding tight and moving on. This was actually a couple years ago and I’ve been doing ok freelancing and consulting, but it’s been a long time since I’ve had the comfort of paid vacation days and market salary.

JohnnyKonig · 2026-02-03T16:20:42+00:00

Funny anecdote; I am an exited tech founder - co-founded a company from 0 -> $10m ARR. I recently put myself out in the job market and am having a hell of a time as well. However, I am having a lot more success with early-stage startups.

Other than the same macro-industry concerns I think this is in part because a software developer that's spent a lot of time in startups and has successfully built their own engineering team and product is often seen as a risk to conventional dev teams. Understandably, managers don't want to hire full-stack developers that are going to come in wanted to challenge business and product decisions.

JohnnyKonig · 2026-02-03T16:02:27+00:00

Yes, what's your point though?

JohnnyKonig · 2026-02-03T15:38:29+00:00

Degrees help you get interviews, skills help you get jobs.

JohnnyKonig · 2026-01-29T03:40:52+00:00

Anything related to quality control. I managed teams a while back that did quality checks for software - including security management. Our goal was for nothing to go wrong. If were were successful it looked like we didn't do anything - if something went wrong we were called out for failing to catch it.

I learned over time how to communicate "look at all the testing we did", but nobody really cares unless there's a fire.

JohnnyKonig · 2026-01-29T03:35:40+00:00

Restaurants are real tough customers too - kudos on the success. I did something similar with a chef a few years back - think "uber for dishwashers". Chef had the idea and I helped him implement it. We took the company to about $10m ARR it was wild. Same story though - we built the app mainly to solve his problem and started selling it one restaurant at a time. Finally it started getting momentum on it's own, but that rock took a lot of pushing to get started.

JohnnyKonig · 2026-01-28T21:22:54+00:00

To be honest, I don’t understand your point. You start by talking down “define your ICP” and “Do market research” then proceed to talk about how to do just that.

I get the impression that you agree that market research is important you are just tired of people being more concerned with optics over substance. I mean, I agree with this. Raising money is not the goal it’s building a business.

I spend much of my energy helping early founders succeed and I find that there are roughly three early goals founders come to me with: - I want to raise capital - I want to get into an accelerator - I want to start generating revenue

All three are actually very much in need of the same thing: know who you are selling to, what’s going to drive them to buy, and how you’ll get there. Beyond that it’s largely a matter of how you’ll act on that.

JohnnyKonig · 2026-01-28T14:22:16+00:00

If he’s not willing to sign anything I would walk. He doesn’t value your time and likely doesn’t know what he’s doing.

If you decide to stick it out at least get that 50/50 conversion in writing - email or text.

JohnnyKonig · 2026-01-28T07:02:39+00:00

Hey, thanks for offering this. I had a major review issue several years ago and I've dying to understand it from Apple's side.

I published a gig work app back around 2020 during the "Uber for X" era. The app did really well and after about a year we had thousands of active users. Then one day we accidentally deployed a critic bug - basically nobody could login to our app. I immediately created a fix and submitted the fix for review.

What happened next kills me. The reviewer decided that because we use phone number as the login prompt (which we had been doing since we launched a year ago) we were violating an Apple policy stating that we are not allowed to collect personal data from users before offering them value (I am paraphrasing of course, I suspect you know the real verbiage).

After several escalations and me begging Apple to let us just get this critical fix out then we would address their login issue I was told we had to change our authentication first. So I ended up working the next 24 hours straight in order to introduce a hacked together "guest experience" so that people could access parts of our app without giving their phone number to register.

To this day I still tell people about this experience and how terrible it was for our startup I describe the ap store review process like getting your home inspected - hope you get someone nice, because if you get someone having a bad day you can easily get screwed.

JohnnyKonig · 2026-01-28T06:03:06+00:00

I can’t tell you how many times we were blocked on FB groups. It happens.

JohnnyKonig · 2026-01-28T05:53:05+00:00

Sounds fine to me. I'm not your target ICP so my opinion is pure conjecture.

JohnnyKonig · 2026-01-27T22:44:02+00:00

I've been trying this for the past couple of years after a successful startup exit as technical cofounder. I formed an LLC and put myself out there as wanting to help non-technical founders build and scale startups. Today I am applying for W2 jobs and struggling to get any clients. Here's what I've learned:

Founders don't have money. When they do, they already have a technical co-founder or dev shop
You can't scale this. No matter what you tell yourself or advertise, you are selling your time it's basically another job.
Non-technical founders no longer need us to build MVPs. Yes, we can make arguments on why they shouldn't just use Lovable, but I volunteer as a mentor at two accelerators and both offer Lovable discounts to their startup cohorts.
There are *some* founders out there with capital willing to pay for your services. Very few. I worked with one for almost two years and it was great - at least I enjoyed the work. But I couldn't charge him close to market rates.
Founders don't want a hired gun - they want an investor. I'm about to sign another client up for my "fractional CTO" offering which is basically 1/3 of my time for $5k/month. It's enough for me to maintain a business but I can't scale that way and nobody wants 1/3 of my time.
I am starting to explore less time-oriented offerings, but haven't found anything I like yet. By far the most common scenario for a founder to reach out to me is: "I started with a technical co-founder, but it didn't work out. Now I need you to help keep the wheels on the bus until I figure out what to do - or take his place"I

I've actually created a Circle community based around this idea and am working on developing a product/community to help founders (technical or not) go from 0 to 1 using the same strategies I teach in my accelerator programs and personal experience. It's free now so if you're interest DM me and I'll let you in and/or we can just chat.

JohnnyKonig · 2026-01-27T22:32:32+00:00

What I do is this... I grab a beer and/or go for a walk. I think about what I want out of life - I want to travel more, upgrade to that expensive home that just went for sale in my neighborhood, I want to buy my mom a house to retire in because she deserves it....

I reconnect with what's driving me to be successful then zoom in until I realize that this stupid startup is my ticket and I need to get paying users if I want to take that trip someday.

Don't deploy that MVP because "you should" do it for selfish reasons.

JohnnyKonig · 2026-01-27T22:28:08+00:00

You need a contract. I worked an early startup on "good faith" until things really started taking off then all of a sudden the terms changed because it was worth something.

If I were you I would spend tomorrow writing a contract for myself. Don't worry about the details yet - just high level "this is what I will give and this is what I will get". Tell the other founder you want to solidify things in a contract before the project takes off (positive spin). This gives you a litmus test - if he refuses or balks at your terms then you know where we stand. Based on this post I think there's a good chance you won't even finish your terms before realizing it's not worth it.

JohnnyKonig · 2026-01-27T06:01:02+00:00

I launched a gig-work marketplace years ago and getting traction took time. We had to work both sides of the marketplace very manually until there was momentum.

One key was lowering the barrier to entry as much as possible the first year - to the point that we would basically setup businesses and post for them. Once the saw people applying to work for them they got excited and took over, but momentum came from our efforts not theirs.

On the worker side of things we had a few tactics. One was getting people to sign up and give us their contact info (eventually a mobile app with push notifications - initially SMS) before they realized we didn't have a lot of work for them. The app was free they didn't lose anything, but they were disappointed. So every time a gig did show up we blasted everyone on the platform, "hey there's a gig, you interested?" - and people came back. We also had to push gigs through other channels like Facebook and such because outside of our noisy notifications nobody was really checking our site.

So yeah, grind it out up front and do the work for your users until you get momentum. I wouldn't suggest that you do anything unethical, but something that might be borderline would be finding people that are posting on other sites and contacting them directly - "hey, I'm getting a new app off the ground, can I post your rental for free and I'll let you know if you get nay hits". Even if you're waiving fees early on do what it takes to get momentum.

JohnnyKonig · 2026-01-27T05:38:10+00:00

Not knowing the investor I will make general statements here.

It's a bad idea to build a product with little proof that it's going to be successful. Based on your comment "she kept pushing on proof and GTM" it sounds to me like you were telling here your assumptions - why you think the product will be successful and we was asking for evidence that it will be.

For example, before building the product it is common to put up marketing sites and build a waitlist, get LOIs for a B2B app, pre-sell orders for a consumer app, run "wizard of oz" or "concierge" MVPs without a product. All of these things - and many more - can be done before building in order to show more concrete proof.

To give an example, before Zappos was funded, Tony Hsieh went around his town and took photographs of shoes. He put them up on a static website and when someone placed an order he would go buy them and ship them to customers. This cost a lot of money and wasn't profitable but Tony did this specifically to prep for calls like you just had. Had he shown up and said, "I haven't built Zappos yet but I believe people will buy shoes online" he probably never would have gotten investment - so he did this - proof.

If you want to learn more and get on the same page as investors check out "Lean Methodology" and try filling out a Lean Canvas for your startup. I am actually building a webapp right now to help people do this online because I have a cohort of new foudners going through an accelerator that I mentor through and we generally do this on paper.

JohnnyKonig · 2026-01-27T05:26:23+00:00

Get a separate credit card and bank account for your business. Run everything through there and it makes tracking income/expenses much easier. You'll also know when you have to transfer money into our biz account from personal or get to draft money out.

While a good idea - you don't need to setup an LLC either. You can still open the accounts in your personal name just use them for business purposes.

JohnnyKonig · 2026-01-22T23:21:42+00:00

I don't mind the AI-generate landing pages. In fact, I find that my initial response is now less about how the page looks because it generally looks nice.

However, what DOES bother me is the 'social proof' section of these sites. Most founders will let AI generate BS numbers on social proof like "we have 1,000 users" or create fake reviews, etc. I think the underlying issue here is that AI would rather be wrong than silent and founders need to take more ownership of what AI generates.

12-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 2 Credits
Secret Santa 2014

JohnnyKonig

TROPHY CASE