§ 04 — Hire
Fractional CMO
Seventeen years in ecommerce, six companies built or bought, two exits, one public shutdown. If you need someone senior on marketing without hiring a full-time CMO, this is the arrangement.
What it costs
Monthly
$6,000
per month
For when you want to see whether this works before committing to it. Same access and same cadence as the block — you're just paying for the option to stop.
Rolling. Thirty days' notice either way.
Start monthly→Three-month block
Best value
$15,000
for three months
$3,000 less than paying monthly. It's cheaper because three months is where this actually starts working — the first month is mostly me learning your business, and I'd rather you not pay full rate for that.
Paid up front. $5,000 a month, effectively.
Start a block→Both are billed directly. Month-to-month, or the block up front.
Hourly consulting
$400 / hour
A different thing from the fractional engagement above — a single call rather than an ongoing role. Booked and paid through MentorPass.
How it works
A weekly call, a shared document that stays current, and asynchronous access to me in whatever channel your team already uses. I read your numbers before the call so we spend the hour on decisions rather than on reporting.
Month one is diagnostic. I go through your acquisition, your lifecycle, your pricing, and your numbers, and come back with what I think is actually wrong. That's usually different from the thing you hired me to fix, and if it isn't, I'll tell you that too.
Months two and three are execution support. Your team does the work. I'm in the decisions, the reviews, and the arguments — the parts where a wrong call costs a quarter.
I write things down. Everything I recommend lands in a document you keep. When this ends, the reasoning doesn't leave with me. I've been on the wrong side of a handover where all the context lived in one person's head and I'm not going to do that to you.
- Cadence
- Weekly call, async in between
- Clients at a time
- Two, maximum
- Commitment
- Monthly rolling, or three months
- Based
- Austin, Texas
- Works with
- Remote, any timezone
What I'm actually good at
Acquisition
Paid, organic, lifecycle, and the arithmetic underneath all three. I've bought traffic with my own money since 2009 and consulted on roughly $1M a month in spend at Fashion Nova. I know what's a creative problem, what's an offer problem, and what's an account problem — most people conflate all three.
Retention and lifecycle
Email, SMS, post-purchase, and the parts of the order lifecycle everyone leaves on the floor. I built LiveRecover, an SMS cart recovery company, and sold it. The unglamorous half of the funnel is usually where the recoverable money is.
Pricing and packaging
What to charge and how to structure it. I've priced a two-sided marketplace with no market price, run performance-based pricing at scale, and watched what that does to a business. Most growth problems I see are pricing problems wearing a marketing costume.
Shopify and app distribution
Eleven years on Shopify and eight building apps on it. Four public apps in the App Store: three I no longer operate — two sold, one shut down — and OrderSurvey, which is current. Plus a stint as an apprentice product manager at Shopify itself. If your growth depends on app store ranking, partner channels, or the platform's roadmap, I've had that exposure and I've been killed by it once.
Hiring the function
Who to hire, in what order, and what to stop paying an agency for. The point of a fractional CMO is to eventually not need one. I'd rather build the team than become the team.
The full record, including what didn't work — /work →
Whether this is a fit
This works if
- →You're doing real revenue and growth has flattened for reasons nobody internally can name.
- →You have a marketing team without anyone senior enough to tell them they're solving the wrong problem.
- →You're spending money on acquisition and can't tell which parts are working.
- →You're on Shopify, in the app ecosystem, or selling to merchants.
Don't hire me if
- ×Pre-revenue, or still looking for the product. I'm not the right first hire and you can't afford me yet.
- ×You want someone to execute the campaigns. This is strategy and direction; you or your team run it.
- ×You want a full-time CMO. Hire one. I'll help you write the job description.
- ×Anything outside ecommerce, DTC, or software sold to merchants. My judgment isn't worth much there and I'd rather say so.
Getting started
Not sure which one? Email me what's not working. If I don't think I can help, I'll say so in the reply.
If you already know, the buttons above start it now — no call required. Otherwise tell me what you sell, roughly what you're doing in revenue, and what you've already tried. That's enough for me to know whether there's a conversation here.
The email link opens a draft with those questions already in it — you just fill in the answers.