A CTO for 5–10 hours a week: the outages stopped
Alloka, call-tracking SaaS
Part-time CTO, 2018–2021, alongside a full-time role. 5–10 hours a week on average, up to 20 in heavy weeks. Team of 5–6.
- Site availability
- Before:
kept going downAfter:no outages - Server and phone-number bills
- Before:
full priceAfter:halved
Where it started
The site kept going down. Customers complained, and some left. The team saw the problem but couldn’t fix it, and there was no one owning technology end to end.
The weak spot was the database: a single instance, so if it failed, the whole service failed. For call tracking that means calls nobody recorded, lost for good. Infrastructure and telephony providers also cost more than the load justified.
What I did
- Took ownership of technical direction — priorities, reliability, risk — without a full-time seat.
- Removed the single point of failure: MySQL replication with automatic failover, and the same principle at the application layer. A database failure stopped being an outage; nobody had to wake up for it.
- Moved provisioning and deploys from manual work to Ansible and Docker. Releases became routine, not an event.
- Halved the two biggest bills — servers and rented phone numbers — at the same performance.
- Built the team that shipped a new version of the product in 2021.
What changed
- The outages that had been costing customers stopped: no service outages for the rest of my time there.
- Server costs −50%, phone-number rental −50%.
- A new version of the product in production, and new customers with it.
- The format held for almost four years — part-time, alongside a full-time job.
After the handover
Part-time leadership only survives that long if the system doesn’t need you in the room — so that is how it was built. I left in 2021, when the company could no longer fund its next stage. What I built was still running in 2025, four years later — and Alloka is still running today.
Stack: MySQL replication with automatic failover, Ansible, Docker
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