# Weaverley.

Fractional CTO at the most fragile stretch of a pre-launch product.

Pre-seed product, weeks from launch, with a deployment process the team had stopped questioning — weekly merges straight to production, no pull requests, no review gate. The fragile pre-launch window where small wrong calls compound fast. Dathan was brought in as fractional CTO. Within weeks the trajectory shifted.

> “He doesn't hand me theory, he hands me the next correct decision.”

The mandate

## Senior technical direction at pre-seed scope and pace — without the commitment of a full-time hire.

A full-time CTO is a hire a pre-seed company can't responsibly make and can't afford to get wrong. The Wilde Agency fractional CTO seat covers strategy, architecture, hiring direction, and weekly delivery rhythm — embedded with the dev team, not advising from the outside.

What changed in the first weeks

**A deployment process the team had stopped questioning.** Weekly merges straight to production, no pull requests, no real review gate. Named the risk in plain terms. Steered to PR + mainline-development workflow. Small, frequent, reviewable changes replaced quiet weekly fire-drills.

**Onboarding and UX named as the real launch blocker** — not raw feature count. The team had been pushing feature work because it was easier to scope than user experience. The pre-launch focus shifted to what would actually determine whether early users came back.

**A confusing scoring control turned into something users can reason about.** Specific UX intervention on a control the team had stopped seeing.

**A 2.5-week stalled fix shipped in a week.** Read the situation directly: stop waiting on someone else's pace, take agency over your own codebase. The PR + mainline shift made it possible.

In David's words

A specific moment that changed direction

The moment I knew this engagement would matter came around a fix that had sat stalled with an outside dev team for two and a half weeks, quietly blocking our beta. Dathan's read was direct: stop waiting on someone else's pace and take agency over your own codebase. He steered us onto a pull-request and mainline-development workflow that let us make small, frequent, reviewable changes instead of being held hostage to a black box. That single shift changed our trajectory. Since then the throughput and the clarity have been night and day: decisions get named, risks get surfaced early, and we move on them the same week instead of letting them drift. He brought momentum to a launch that had been stuck.

A fractional CTO with deep operator experience

At pre-seed, a full-time CTO is a commitment you can't responsibly make and can't afford to get wrong. Dathan gave us a third option: a 3x CTO with three decades of production experience, embedded with our dev team and shaping technical strategy, at the scope and pace a company our size can actually carry. The value isn't a fraction of a CTO, it's the senior judgment that usually only arrives much later and at much greater cost. Having him own the technical direction freed me to focus on product decisions, our user cohorts, and the raise. For an early-stage founder, getting that caliber of operator without the weight of a full-time hire has been one of the highest-leverage decisions we've made.

— David, Weaverley

## Have a launch you can't afford to get wrong?

A 3x CTO with three decades of production experience, embedded with your team. Weekly cadence. Outcome-tied.

[Add experience →](/lp/accelerator)

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