Chris Wong · Melbourne
You built a product. But have you built a business?
Fractional operations for digital startups. Shipping was never your problem. Knowing which lever actually moves the business — and which stage of the funnel is quietly leaking — is a different job, and it is the one I do.
Fractional operations for digital startups
The build was the easy part. Where to from here?
You can build. What you have never had to do is run the commercial side — positioning, activation, the customer journey, the pricing. So the product works and the numbers do not move, and nobody tells you whether people are not finding you, not converting, or not coming back.
Some people call this a fractional COO. In AI and startup circles it is a forward deployed engineer. Either way the work is the same: I come in, find what is actually costing you, and build the fix myself.
“People find us, then they leave.”
I map the journey end to end, find the step where they actually drop and why, and rebuild that one step.
“Nobody is finding us at all.”
I work out which channel is realistic for a team your size, then build the system that works it week after week without you remembering to.
“Everything routes through me.”
I find what genuinely needs you, then build the tooling that takes the rest off your desk permanently.
“I can't tell which number matters.”
I instrument awareness, conversion and retention separately, so you can see which one is broken instead of guessing, and fix that one first.
How it works, and what it costs
A diagnosis
A$2,500One week. I find where it is actually leaking — which stage, which process, which decision nobody has made. You get a written document naming the one constraint worth fixing first and what it is costing you.
Then the build
A$15,000Six weeks. The smallest thing that removes the constraint — a workflow, an internal tool, an agentic process — built in your stack and handed over working, not demoed.
Also
Coaching for first-time managers.
Promoted from inside the team, no handover worth the name, and every book you have picked up assumes an organisation that works. A written review at A$180, or an hour on the problem in front of you at A$250.
Diagnose, build, hand it over.
I
Diagnose
Find the constraint that is actually costing you — not the symptom everyone has been arguing about since March. Interviews with whoever touches the thing, and time spent watching the actual process rather than the diagram of it.
II
Build
The smallest thing that makes it stop. Usually tooling, usually less than people expect, always in your stack rather than a demo of one.
III
Hand over
Documented, walked through, and running in your team’s hands. You own it outright.
Who you would be working with
An operator, not a consultant.
Eighteen years running operations and product — in high-growth startups, and before that in national sport, media and entertainment. The roles where you are accountable for whether the thing works, not for whether it was specified correctly. Most recently that has meant building AI tooling and internal systems that remove work rather than document it.
The pattern across all of it is the same. The published process is not the real process, the person everyone depends on is not on the diagram, and the problem being argued about in the meeting is almost never the one costing the money.
Building is cheap now, which means the expensive mistake is no longer building slowly. It is building the right-looking thing quickly, at the wrong end of the business. Deciding what deserves to exist is the work.
Get in touch
Tell me what is slow.
No form-filling ritual and no discovery-call funnel. Describe what is going on in a couple of sentences and I will tell you honestly whether I can help.
Got it.
I read these myself and reply within two working days. If it is urgent, say so in a second message and it moves up.