You answer the same eleven questions in every first call.
Build or buy. When to hire. Whether their stack is the problem. Write each one once, decide who gets which, and let the call start at question twelve.
- Your first calls are unpaid, repetitive, and the same eleven questions in a different order.
- Write the answers once. Prospects and their assistants ask your page before they ever book you.
- What is client specific stays behind an audience. What sells you sits on the open web where search engines and assistants read it.
How a fractional CTO sets this up
Three audiences, doing three jobs.
- Anyone on the web gets your positions
- How you think about building versus buying, when a team needs its first senior hire, what you refuse to work on. In full, cited, and readable by search engines and assistants. This is the part that makes somebody decide you are the person.
- Anyone signed in gets the detail
- Your longer how-tos, the way you actually run a technical review, what your first thirty days look like. A free account to read it, which means you know a real person asked.
- People you invite get the specifics
- Send an invite link to a prospect mid-deal and open the things you would only say to somebody serious. End it when the deal ends.
The ones worth writing first
If you write nothing else, write these. They are the questions that decide whether you get the engagement.
- When does a team actually need a CTO
- The answer that disqualifies the wrong prospects before they book an hour of your time is worth more than the one that flatters everybody.
- Build or buy, and how you decide
- Your actual heuristic, with the time you got it wrong. This is the single most asked question in the trade.
- What you will not take on
- The engagements you turn down and why. Nothing sells a specialist like a clear refusal.
- What the first thirty days look like
- Concrete, in order, with what you need from them. This is the answer that turns a conversation into a contract.
About client confidentiality
The thing that makes this safe for consulting work is that what an audience may not have is removed before the AI sees it. It is not a note in a prompt asking a model to be discreet about your clients.
In practice: write the lesson, not the account. The named client, the numbers, the thing said in a board meeting, all of that either does not go in or sits at Hidden. Money is not storable here at all, by anyone, which removes the most common way this sort of thing goes wrong.
Write four answers and put the link in your signature.