At seven this morning my phone was already going. Jan, my CTO, was mid-thread, working out who takes what this week. I was still in the kitchen, mixing in the coco fat and real masala chai melange from India, reading his messages come in one after another.
Somewhere in the middle of it I typed the line that turned a loose idea into a plan. "Ok. Let's make that the goal."
The goal: one new client in 45 days. Bring Jan from part-time to full-time in that time. A growing pipeline behind that first one. And the number we both said out loud, the one that makes this a business and not a side project, $15,000 a month each by the end of the year. As a minimum goal, or why are we doing this? In Switzerland, that's me and my family barely surviving.
I have written before about how I think about hiring a CTO in the age of AI. Jan is that person. This morning was the first time we pointed the whole thing at a single number with a date on it.
The offer behind the number
The thing we are selling is the one I put on its own page yesterday, and it is simple enough to say in a sentence. You are about to spend $80,000 to $100,000 and maybe even a lot more a year on one hire. Get two skilled operators, me and Jan, for $5,000 a month instead. No contract, cancel any time, run it as long as it is working.
I keep coming back to the same gut check. If someone pitched that exact offer to me, with a site that showed they could actually do the work, I would try it for a few months. The downside is one month of spend. The upside is two senior people taking the operational weight off my desk. When I run this by my AI coach the coach says: Run away from this. This sounds like an AI task fire hose that will kill your margins. My response back to the coach is, we need to get things going. I have no leads right now, because I have been so busy on client fulfillment and have not had time to send out even one prospecting email. This is the whole reason I am confident about 45 days, and it is why I wanted a real page carrying the maths and the proof instead of me explaining it across a kitchen table one owner at a time. The page is here: a fractional AI team instead of hiring.
Why we are being aggressive on purpose
Here is the part I had to be honest with myself about. In twenty years I have done a lot of cold outbound, and I know in my bones that spraying a blind list is a waste of everyone's time. Mine and theirs. So we are not doing that.
Jan is cleaning up the final touches on our AI prospecting agent that does the opposite of spray-and-pray. It looks for people who are actively posting that they need a skill set, the exact moment they are reaching for a hire. A job ad. A "looking for someone who can do X" note. A "we are hiring" post. That is a person who has already told the world they have the budget and the pain. My job this week is to go find the real examples, the actual posts and the actual places they live, so Jan can tune the agent on real signal instead of a guess. Not even this week, by the time you read this. Done.
That split is the plan: Jan owns the machine, I find the live targets and work the other channels, and the enterprise controller build keeps moving in the background. Two of us, two jobs, one number.
Aggressive is the right word, and it is a choice. After Finn, I do not have a lot of patience left for vague goals that drift. A number you text your business partner at seven in the morning, with a date attached, is more real than one that sits in a planning doc nobody opens. We said it to each other, so now it is real.
The work I do for a stranger's reporting is the same care I owe every person who gives to the fund in my son's name. Get the small things right, name the goal out loud, and do the work. Today the work was a page and a number. Tomorrow it is ten real examples for Jan.
Oh, and in the midst of all of this, we also set up the Finn fund donations page, set up the bank, the Stripe account, and made a test donation. A post for another time.
Monthly Revenues $11,000 | Clients 2 | Prospects (AI outbound agent now live) | Team: Me + part time Jan (CTO) Day 83 of 365.