There are basically three formats for getting technical advice when you are running a small company.
One off calls. You book a consultant. You spend an hour. You get a report, or a verbal summary, or a slack thread. Then they are gone.
Fractional CTO. You sign a retainer. Someone shows up ten or twenty hours a month, runs on your behalf, takes on ownership of decisions.
Office hours. You join a group. You show up at a regular time. You bring problems and you hear other people’s problems.
These are not the same product. They serve different needs at different price points. Here is how to think about which one you actually want.
One off calls are for sanity checks
If you have already decided what you are doing and you just want someone to tell you whether you are crazy, a one off call is perfect. It is cheap. It is fast. You get a second opinion and you move.
The failure mode of one off calls is that they are surface level by definition. The person giving advice does not know your team, your history, your market, or the constraints you took on two years ago. They are pattern matching on what you tell them. That is sometimes enough. It is often not.
Fractional CTO is for heavy lifts
If you need someone to own a decision, or to run your technical strategy for a quarter, or to build and manage the engineering side of the business, fractional is the right shape. You pay for ownership. You get someone who actually does the work with you.
The failure mode is cost. Fractional is almost always two thousand dollars a month or more. For a founder still figuring out whether the company will exist in six months, that is a real commitment. For a company that has product market fit and needs engineering leadership, it is cheap. It depends where you are.
Office hours are for decisions that are not yet problems
This is the format I run in CTO Connect and the one most founders underrate.
Office hours work because the best technical decisions happen before they are decisions. The rewrite conversation matters most when you are thinking about rewriting. The hire matters most before you have posted the job. The architecture decision matters most when it is still cheap to change.
A one off call catches you when you are already committed. A fractional engagement catches you when the stakes are high enough to pay a retainer. Office hours catch you in the middle, when the problem is still forming and you can still change course cheaply.
They also work because you are not alone. Every month you hear five other founders ask questions you were about to ask next quarter. You learn by watching other people work through their problems. Some of the best insights you will ever get about your own business come from listening to somebody else’s.
Which one to pick
If you have a narrow, urgent question and nothing else, book a one off call.
If you need someone to own technical leadership for a quarter, hire fractional.
If you are running a small team, making decisions that compound, and you know you are going to need someone to talk to more than once, office hours is almost always the right choice.
For what it is worth, CTO Connect is ninety nine dollars a month, first month free, and built specifically for the third case. But this post is meant to be useful even if you pick one of the other two.