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The Non-Technical Founder's Field Guide to Technical Decisions.
The calls every founder has to make, explained bluntly and without jargon. Read what you need, skip what you don't, share it with whoever's about to make an expensive mistake.
Chapter 01
How to hire your first engineer
The three hires founders get wrong, what to actually screen for, and why your first engineer is a bigger decision than your framework, your cloud, or your stack.
Chapter 02
How to evaluate a dev agency
The ten questions that expose a bad development shop before you sign — and the contract terms that protect you when the answers were lies.
Chapter 03
Your AI-built MVP: what it bought you, what it didn't
AI coding tools got you to market in weeks. Here's what that MVP actually is, when the rewrite conversation is real, and when it's just noise.
Chapter 04
Build vs. buy, decided in 20 minutes
The only four questions that matter, the hidden costs on each side of the ledger, and the default that's right for startups nine times out of ten.
Chapter 05
Technical debt: what your board actually needs to hear
How to talk about technical debt without fear or jargon — a translation layer between your engineers and your board, plus the one metric that makes it legible.
Chapter 06
When do you actually need a CTO?
Full-time, fractional, or none: an honest decision guide — including the cases where the answer is nobody, and the cases where fractional (including us) is the wrong call.
Get the whole guide as a PDF.
Plus one useful read every two weeks from The Signal. No noise — that would be off-brand.