Do you work on pure equity?

I love working with ambitious founders, and I happily structure hybrid engagements — a reduced service fee combined with equity — when the fit is right. Pure-equity arrangements, however, aren't something I take on. A service fee is required on every project: it ensures focused delivery, protects both sides against misaligned timelines, and keeps the engagement sustainable the same way any senior technical hire is compensated. If you're an early-stage founder, let's talk — there's almost always a structure that works.

How much does a Fractional CTO cost in Europe?

Hourly consulting is €150/hour, day rate is €700/day. Ongoing Fractional CTO retainers start from about €2,100/month for a 2-3 days/month minimum and scale up with the cadence — a 1-day-a-week engagement typically lands between €5,000–€8,000 per month depending on scope. Partnership deals (reduced fee + equity) are available for aligned early-stage startups. All prices exclude VAT and French TVA applies where relevant; EU B2B clients with a valid intra-community VAT number benefit from reverse charge.

Fractional CTO vs full-time CTO — which should I hire?

Hire a full-time CTO when the role genuinely needs 40+ hours/week of executive tech leadership — usually post-Series A with 10+ engineers, a real product in market, and a 3-year roadmap. Hire a Fractional CTO when you need senior technical leadership but: you're pre-seed to Series A, your engineering team is under 10 people, you want to validate the product before committing to a cap-table-impacting hire, or you need a specific expertise (AI strategy, EU compliance, sovereign cloud) that a generalist full-time CTO wouldn't bring.

How does the Partnership model work?

It's a hybrid engagement: a reduced cash rate (typically 30-40% of my standard) combined with equity. The exact split is discussed case by case after we've talked through your stage, timeline, runway, and goals. The service-fee component is always present; it's what keeps the engagement focused and fair to both sides.

What's a typical engagement duration?

Consultations run 30 or 60 minutes. MVPs typically ship in 4-8 weeks. Fractional CTO engagements are usually 2-3 days per month minimum, with the cadence scaling up based on traction and fit. Shorter sprint engagements (1-2 weeks) are also possible for well-scoped prototypes.

Can you help with EU AI Act compliance?

Yes. I help companies classify their AI systems by risk tier (prohibited / high-risk / limited-risk / minimal-risk), implement the technical documentation and post-market monitoring required by Articles 9-15, align with GPAI obligations for foundation-model users, and produce the DPIA, Transfer Impact Assessments (Schrems II), and Article 28 DPAs needed. I also cross-walk with GDPR, NIS2, DORA (for financial services), and ISO/IEC 42001 / 23894. Sign-off always rests with your DPO or legal counsel; what I deliver is a defensible, documented compliance posture.

Can you help us migrate from OpenAI to sovereign infrastructure?

Yes — this is becoming a common request from European companies facing compliance pressure or customer procurement scrutiny. Typical path: audit current OpenAI/Anthropic usage, map workloads by quality/latency/cost sensitivity, select replacement targets (Mistral Large for most chat, self-hosted Llama-3 or Mixtral for sensitive data, Claude Sonnet via Bedrock EU where acceptable), build an eval harness that proves parity, migrate behind a feature flag, and cut over gradually. End state: zero prompt/response egress to non-EU jurisdictions, with an auditable trail.

Do you work with non-technical founders?

Yes — this is one of my most common engagements. Non-technical founders hire me to make the build vs buy decision, run the first hiring, set up the stack, ship the MVP, and represent the company technically with investors, partners, and early customers. I translate between product intent and engineering reality, and write everything in plain language so the founder stays in the loop without needing to code.

Do you work remote or on-site?

Remote-first, based in Paris. I'm open to on-site days in Paris and short on-site sprints across Europe for the right engagements. Most clients are 100% remote with weekly syncs and async daily updates.

How quickly can you start?

Usually within 1-2 weeks of signing. For urgent MVPs or discovery sprints I can often kick off within days, starting with a scoped 3-5 day discovery phase before we commit to the full build.

Yes. Mutual NDAs are standard. I can send you a clean one to start, or sign yours if the terms are reasonable. All client work, product ideas, and internal data stay strictly confidential — during and after the engagement.

Can you join as a technical co-founder?

Rarely, and only for startups I'm deeply aligned with — on mission, market, and long-term collaboration. Equity-heavy co-founder arrangements need mutual conviction on both sides and a realistic path to milestones. More often than not, the Partnership model (reduced service fee + equity) is a better fit for both of us: it gets you senior technical leadership without the co-founder commitment, and it keeps my focus across a handful of great projects rather than locked into one.

Can you work with US or Canadian clients?

Yes — North American clients are a regular part of the practice. Time-zone overlap with the US East Coast is 3-4 synchronous hours daily (your morning, my afternoon), and engagements typically run async-friendly with weekly syncs.

MVP in 4-8 weeks: realistic vs unrealistic expectations

The "MVP in 4-8 weeks" promise is ubiquitous in startup-builder marketing. It is also, for a meaningful share of cases, untrue. The window is achievable for a specific shape of product and overstated for everything else. The cost of treating an unrealistic build as realistic is paid in two ways: shipped products that nobody can use, and trust burned with founders who took the timeline at face value.

This post is about what actually fits in the 4-8 week window, what does not, and how to tell the difference before you sign.

What "MVP" actually means

The original definition from Eric Ries: that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. Two parts of that matter:

Validated learning — the MVP exists to test a hypothesis, not to be a finished product
Least effort — the goal is the minimum that produces the learning, not "the same product, smaller"

Most "MVPs" in practice are not Ries-style MVPs. They are small finished products. That distinction is what determines whether 4-8 weeks is realistic.

What fits in 4-8 weeks

Single-loop validation products

A product where one user, performing one core action, demonstrates the entire value proposition. Examples: an AI document-Q&A tool, a workflow-automation builder for one specific workflow, a niche scheduling app, a research-summarisation chatbot. The technical surface is small enough to build well and the validation question is clear.

Wrapper-style AI products

Products where the core value is a well-prompted, well-evaluated layer over an existing LLM API. The build is mostly UX, evals, and cost engineering rather than novel architecture. 4-8 weeks is realistic if scope is held.

Single-tenant SaaS for a defined niche

B2B tools that solve one tightly-scoped pain (compliance reporting, internal copilot for a specific document type, lightweight CRM for a vertical). Multi-tenancy can come later; the MVP serves one or two design-partner customers.

Marketplaces in their first city / first vertical

Marketplaces are usually too complex for 4-8 weeks at full scope, but the first slice — one city, one vertical, manual matching, no payments yet — often is. The shape that fits is "concierge MVP" not "platform launch".

What does NOT fit in 4-8 weeks

Multi-sided platforms at full scope

A real two-sided marketplace with onboarding for both sides, payments, dispute resolution, ratings, search, and operations is 6-12 months minimum. Any 4-8 week version is a concierge MVP — see above.

Regulated products

Anything touching healthcare (HIPAA, GDPR Article 9), banking (PSD2, DORA), insurance, education compliance, or AI under the EU AI Act high-risk classification cannot ship a real product in 4-8 weeks. The compliance posture alone takes longer. Founders building in regulated spaces should plan 12-24 weeks for a compliant MVP.

Hardware + software products

IoT, robotics, embedded systems. The hardware iteration cycle alone exceeds 4-8 weeks. Anyone promising you a hardware MVP in that window is selling a software prototype.

Products with strong network effects from day one

Social products, communications platforms, anything where the empty room is a non-starter. The technical build might fit, but the user-acquisition and seed-cohort work that makes the product useful does not.

AI products with custom model training

A product whose differentiation depends on a fine-tuned or trained model, with eval harnesses, data pipelines, and inference cost-engineering, takes 12+ weeks. 4-8 weeks works for products that use foundation-model APIs as-is; not for products that need their own model.

The deliberate trade-offs that make 4-8 weeks possible

Even within the "fits" category, the timeline only holds if the team makes specific trade-offs explicitly:

One core user flow only. Login + the one thing the product does. Everything else (settings pages, onboarding wizards, edge-case admin screens) is post-MVP.
Off-the-shelf auth. Clerk, Auth0, Supabase Auth. Not a custom auth implementation.
Off-the-shelf payments. Stripe Checkout, not a custom billing portal.
Boring stack. Next.js + Postgres + a vector index if needed. Not an excuse to evaluate 7 frameworks for novelty.
One environment. Production. Staging comes when there is a reason for it.
Manual ops where automation is expensive. Customer onboarding by Calendly + email is fine for the first 10 customers.

Founders sometimes resist these trade-offs because they want a polished product. The trade-off is the product: keeping all of them in scope means the timeline doubles, and the product that ships at week 16 is rarely better than the one that would have shipped at week 6.

Common scoping mistakes

Treating MVP as "smaller version of the dream product". The dream product has 80 features; the MVP has 4. If your "MVP" has 30, it is not an MVP — it is a product launch.
Hiding scope behind generic verbs. "User management" can mean a one-line Clerk integration or six weeks of role-based access control. Specify which.
Including "AI" without bounding what it does. An LLM call with a fixed prompt is a day. A retrieval-augmented agent with refusal scoring and audit logs is six weeks.
Underestimating non-feature work. Deployment, monitoring, error tracking, basic analytics, GDPR compliance for a EU launch — these add up to 1-2 weeks even on a small build.
Skipping evals for AI products. An LLM-driven product without an evaluation harness is a demo, not an MVP. Allocate at least a week to evals if AI is the core mechanic.

How to know if your build is realistic

Before signing on a 4-8 week MVP build, run this check:

Can you describe the one core user flow in three sentences?
Are you willing to use off-the-shelf auth, payments, and analytics?
Are you OK with manual customer onboarding for the first 10 customers?
Is the product NOT in a regulated industry (healthcare, banking, insurance, EU AI Act high-risk)?
Are you OK shipping with one feature, not five?

If you answered yes to all five, 4-8 weeks is realistic. If you answered no to two or more, the build is bigger than you think — start a different conversation about scope before timeline.

Bottom line

The 4-8 week MVP window is real, but only inside specific constraints — single user flow, off-the-shelf primitives, no regulatory complexity, willingness to defer polish. Insightrix MVP Builder works inside those constraints deliberately. If your build sits outside them, the right conversation is about scope and phasing, not timeline.

Editorial content. Informational only — not legal, financial, or professional advice.