Technical co-founder or fractional CTO? The cost in pounds
A technical co-founder costs equity and a fractional CTO costs cash. Worked through in pounds, with dilution and the EMI rules, and when each is right.
Notes from the studio
Writing on two subjects: technical leadership for companies that aren’t ready for a full-time CTO — when you need one, why AI pilots stall between the demo and production — and the small, honest tools the studio ships, and what building them teaches.
What a fractional CTO costs in the UK, and how it adds up
UK fractional-CTO prices as providers publish them, side by side, dated and linked, plus how a day rate becomes a retainer and what moves the number.
Your board wants an AI strategy. Here’s the shortest honest one.
Somewhere between “ignore it” and a 40-slide deck is a strategy you can write in an afternoon: five questions, answered in writing, with names and dates.
How to tell if your agency’s code is any good, without reading it
You can’t review the pull requests. You can still catch most problems early: five observable tests any non-technical founder can run from the client side.
When you need a CTO, and when you just need a developer
Founders overpay for the wrong one constantly. The difference isn't seniority — it's which decisions are on the table, and whether anyone in the room can tell.
Most AI pilots die between the demo and production
The model was never the hard part. Why AI pilots that impress in week one quietly disappear by month six — and what the surviving five per cent do differently.
Why do food blogs put a life story before the recipe?
The memoir above the method isn't padding. It comes from copyright law, ad economics and search incentives, forces that reward length over usefulness.
How to get just the recipe (and skip the life story)
Recipe pages bury the method under ads, popups and a thousand-word memoir. Here's how to get straight to the ingredients and scale them while you're at it.
Why habit streaks backfire, and what the research says
Streaks are meant to motivate, but for many people they do the opposite: loss aversion, the all-or-nothing cascade, and habits without a chain to break.
Turn merged PRs into launch posts you'd actually publish
A repeatable way to turn shipped GitHub pull requests into LinkedIn posts and tweets — without the generic AI slop that nobody reads.
What “small, honest software” actually means
No ads, no dark patterns, no catch. The constraints behind every Drizzlelabs tool — and why we keep them small on purpose.