Fractional CTO · B2B SaaS
Fractional CTO for B2B SaaS founders
From first paying team to enterprise readiness without rebuilding the foundation.
The case
B2B SaaS engineering is not generic engineering.
Most B2B SaaS products die in the gap between 'self-serve startups love it' and 'enterprise teams will pay for it.' That gap is engineering: SSO, audit logs, role-based access, sandbox environments, API rate limits, and the dozen other things every procurement team asks about. I help B2B SaaS founders build the right architecture early so enterprise readiness is a quarter of work, not a rewrite.
B2B SaaS architecture decisions compound. A fractional CTO with SaaS battle scars makes the high-leverage calls — multi-tenancy, RBAC, public API design — and stays on long enough to ensure they survive contact with your first 10 customers.
The first 90 days
What a b2b saas engagement actually looks like
A fractional CTO for B2B SaaS makes the multi-tenancy, RBAC, and API decisions that determine whether enterprise readiness is a quarter of work or a rewrite.
- 01
Weeks 1–2: Tenancy and data model review
Settle shared-schema versus schema-per-tenant with evidence rather than instinct. Shared schema with tenant scoping wins for most products; the exceptions need a real compliance or noisy-neighbour reason.
- 02
Weeks 3–4: Enterprise readiness gap analysis
Inventory what procurement will ask for — SSO, SCIM, audit logs, role-based access, data residency, sandbox environments — and sequence it against your actual sales pipeline instead of building it all speculatively.
- 03
Weeks 5–8: API and billing architecture
Design the public API against OpenAPI as the source of truth, with a versioning and deprecation policy written down before the first customer depends on it. Separate usage metering from application state so billing disputes are answerable.
- 04
Weeks 9–12: Activation instrumentation and handoff
Instrument onboarding so you can see where activation actually fails, then document the architecture and hand it to your team or your first in-house engineering hire.
What we cover
B2B SaaS-specific decisions I help you make
Tools I use in b2b saas
Request a triage
Talk through your b2b saas problem.
Free, 30 minutes. Tell me where you're stuck — I'll tell you what it takes. I confirm every request within 24 hours.
FAQ
B2B SaaS questions founders ask
How do you decide between shared-schema and schema-per-tenant? +
Shared schema with tenant_id columns wins for 9 out of 10 B2B SaaS products. Schema-per-tenant only when you have compliance or noisy-neighbor reasons that force it — and we make sure those reasons are real, not hypothetical.
When should we add SSO? +
When your first prospect with a $20k+ annual contract asks for it. Build it on WorkOS or Auth0 rather than custom — they handle the protocol edge cases (SAML, OIDC, SCIM provisioning) that will eat months otherwise.
How do you handle usage-based pricing? +
Stripe Metered Billing or Orb for the billing engine, with usage events written to a separate ledger you control. Never derive the billing total live from your application database — you need a separate, immutable, queryable usage record for disputes and audits.