Austin Mander — fractional CTO & AI lead
A CTO in the room. Features shipped in days.
I take a seat inside your company — the person you can always ask — and ship production features at a pace agencies can’t match. The speed of AI, with a name on the warranty.
I.Your options until recently
01
The agency
A quarter of your runway and a quote that assumes code is still typed by hand. Account managers between you and whoever builds. Priced by the hour — so slow is profitable.
02
The freelancer with AI
Fast, cheap, and impressive — right up until it touches your real data. Then it's load-bearing, undocumented, and nobody answers the phone in month six.
03
The full-time hire
£120k+ a year, months to find, and you can't technically vet them — vetting technical people is precisely the skill you're missing.
There’s a fourth option now: a code factory with a CTO’s name on the output. That’s what I run.
II.Receipts, not adjectives
I’m the CTO of a live AI company. Not an advisor who used to be one.
I’m chief technology officer of an AI platform used daily by multi-billion-pound investment firms — systems I built read thousands of documents a day, and analysts act on what they say. The founder talks to me the way you’d talk to a cofounder: questions through the day, answers within the hour, the feature by Thursday.
I don’t supervise that from a distance — I ship it, with a fleet of coding agents I run myself. Which is why I know exactly what AI-written software can be trusted to do and where it lies to you: catching it is my day job, not a talk I gave. The failures, fixes and working methods are in the field notes.
III.Why days-not-months holds up
Four rules, all paid for the hard way.
- 1
Machines generate. I verify.
I ship with a fleet of coding agents I run myself — every artifact passes a review gate built to catch exactly what the generator can't see about its own work. That's how days-not-months holds up in production.
- 2
Proof lives where the failure lives.
A green test that can't go red is decoration. Security gets proven on a real database, not a mock. Deploys get verified on the surface users touch. “It works on my machine” is a hypothesis, not a result.
- 3
Knowing when to stop is the expensive skill.
Most “edge cases” are invoices in disguise. I've learned — the costly way — that the tenth round of polish on the wrong thing loses to shipping the right thing plainly. Descoping is a decision, and I'll make it out loud.
- 4
Own the outcome.
Advice without accountability is just content. If I recommend it, build it, or sign it off, my name is on the breakage — and I'd rather tell you an uncomfortable truth early than manage a comfortable failure later.
IV.The model
A retainer for presence. Features priced as outcomes.
The retainer buys the seat — someone technical who is yours, fully briefed, and answerable. Features are quoted as fixed prices and shipped in days, so slow is never profitable for me and surprises are never billable for you.
The retainer
Your CTO, on call
A seat inside the company: the technical decisions, vetting of every vendor, hire and quote, code review, and answers to your questions — most within the business day. I keep a living knowledge base of your company, so every conversation starts fully briefed. Advice, reviews and small fixes live here.
£1,250 a day · 2–5 days a month
Features
Shipped in days, warranted
Anything that adds a capability is quoted as a fixed price before work starts. Built with full context from your knowledge base, produced by my pod, verified through my gate, and delivered documented with a named owner. If it breaks doing what we agreed it would do, fixing it is my problem.
Fixed price per feature — quoted, not metered
The rescue
Harden what AI built you
Someone in your business built a tool with AI. It worked, people started relying on it, and now nobody can touch it. I audit it, fix what would have failed, and hand it back with an owner, documentation and a safety net.
Fixed fee, scoped after a look
Mander also runs a diagnosis-first practice for the back offices of UK trade, wholesale and logistics businesses — that lives here. Same factory, different door.
V.Straight answers
Why not just get a freelancer with Claude?+
For a one-off internal tool, honestly consider it — and if that's your situation I'll say so on the call. What you can't get that way: someone who already knows your systems before the question is asked, proves the work before you rely on it, and is still accountable in month six. Fast is cheap now. Accountable isn't.
What does the retainer actually cover?+
Presence and judgment: decisions, reviews, vetting, architecture, and answers — plus small fixes that take under a couple of hours. Anything that adds a capability is a feature, quoted as a fixed price before work starts. The line is written into the one-page agreement, so neither of us has to negotiate it later.
Can a few days a month really feel like having a CTO in the company?+
Yes — and that's the part AI changed. Because I hold a living knowledge base of your company, I answer fully-briefed within the business day, not after a week of context-gathering. Founders I work with message me the way they'd message a cofounder. The knowledge base is yours, too: if we ever part ways, you keep it.
What are you deliberately not for?+
Two-hundred-person engineering orgs, enterprise procurement cycles, and compliance theatre. If you need a grey-haired CTO for steering committees, that's a different product and I'll say so on the first call. My buyer is a funded team or a growing business where the technical side is the part the founder can't see into.
Do you take equity instead of cash?+
Cash at the full rate; equity on top when I believe in the business, never as a substitute. I've done the equity-heavy version of this deal once already — it's how I know to price properly now.
How does an engagement start?+
A conversation, then a one-page agreement: scope, days, price, response terms, and what “done” means, written down before any money moves. If I'm the wrong shape for the problem I'll say so and point you somewhere better.
One conversation. If I’m the wrong shape, I’ll say so.
If the technical side is the part you can’t see into — that’s the conversation.
Prefer email? austin@mander.ai