James Williams - Fractional CTO Masterclass

James Williams of Cofebe.com joined me on Ditching Hourly to give what amounted to a masterclass on how to avoid failure and delight clients as a fractional CTO.“The chance of failure increases proportionally with you accepting what the client tells you what to do.”“If you accept 100% of your client’s suggestions and three months from they can’t launch or it fails, guess whose fault that is.”“If you keep the narrative on the goal, you can avoid debates about scope.”“I lead with questions from the back.”“I ask a trillion questions upfront to disqualify prospects before considering pricing.”“I’d rather take the advisory part and use the client’s dev team whenever possible.““I’d rather use their team than mine.””We don’t even do scope of work.““It’s not about the hours. It’s about the outcomes.”“To guide the engineers, I write paragraphs on how the client should feel at every demo and what the qualitative goal should be.““My goal is always to get smaller, not bigger.”James’ LinksWebsite: https://www.cofebe.com/Courses: https://courses.cofebe.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdubyou/Substack: https://jdubyou.substack.com/ ----Do you know you need to niche down, but keep hesitating because you're afraid of picking the wrong niche, cutting off good opportunities, or boxing yourself in?You DON'T need more convincing that vague positioning is a problem.You DO need a way to make positioning feel less risky so you can finally choose a direction, test it in the market, and adjust without blowing up your business.On Tuesday, September 8th, 2026, at noon Eastern Time, I'm running a live workshop called Positioning For Soloists Having A Hard Time Niching Down.That's what we'll tackle in this workshop.It's the second session of my Fall 2026 Soloist Growth Workshop series for expertise-based business owners just like you.Live attendance is limited to 20, so don't wait.Learn more at: https://jonathanstark.com/sgsEnroll in Positioning For Soloists now »Hope to see you live in Zoom on Tuesday.