Mateusz Worotyński Fractional CTO & product consultant · Kraków, Poland · EN / PL
Fractional CTO & CPO for early-stage and growing startups

I help founders make the calls that get expensive later.

Product, architecture and scaling decisions are cheap to get right at the start and expensive to unwind a year in. I made them under load — a platform at a billion events a day, a team of fifteen, an acquisition — and now I sit in the room when a startup has to make one.

Everything below is the same work read two ways: one column is the business, the other is the technology. Most calls need both.

Senior product & technology advice at a startup-friendly 175 PLN/hour.

Book a 30-minute call Write on WhatsApp Where startups call me in ↓
1B+ events a day on a platform I architected
200+ enterprise customers on it
15 engineers hired, led and mentored
Exit PushPushGo acquired by Vercom S.A., 2021

Developer, then CPO, then CTO of the company I co-founded. The advice on scaling, architecture and product decisions comes from building and running the thing — not from consulting alone.

The three reasons startups hire me

the doorway, not a menu
01 · technology leadership

Fractional CTO

When you need CTO-level thinking, not a full-time hire. I take the decisions you would hire a CTO for — architecture, hiring and the technical bar, build-versus-buy, vendor and cloud choices, the technical side of a raise or an acquisition — one to four days a month.

Fractional CTO page
02 · second opinion

Architecture & technical review

When the architecture, the scaling or the technical debt needs an outside read. Two to three weeks: what breaks first at 10×, what the debt costs you in weeks per month, which risks are real, and a prioritised plan your engineers can start on the following Monday.

How an engagement runs
03 · product decisions

Product & business strategy

When the roadmap, the pricing or the priorities need a decision rather than another workshop. What to build, what to kill, what it costs and who it is for — prioritised against revenue, with the trade-offs written down.

Product consulting page
Track 01

Product & business

Strategy, pricing, market and the product organisation.

Technology track ↓
Track 02

Technology & architecture

Systems, delivery, scale and the engineers who run them.

Business track ↑

Where startups call me in

Business
Technology

Everything else I help with

Business
Pricing & monetisation
Tiers, the value metric behind them, commission and freemium models, margin per segment.
Go-to-market & positioning
Who it is for, what it replaces, the sentence that makes it obvious, channels that fit the price.
Product strategy & roadmap
Row 03 kept running month to month instead of as a single decision.
Technology
Technical due diligence
Code, infrastructure and delivery process for investors, acquirers and boards.
Engineering leadership
Hiring and the technical bar, process, code review, release cadence, mentoring a first tech lead.
Architecture & scaling review
Row 02 run as a rolling review instead of a one-off engagement.

Track record

Business MarTech · exit, 2021

PushPushGo

From a side project to the leading push-notification platform in Poland: two hundred enterprise clients including TUI, POLITICO, Auchan, Hearst and Interia, a team of fifteen, and a majority acquisition by WSE-listed Vercom S.A. Co-founder, then CPO, then CTO.

Technology Event-driven · high throughput

PushPushGo

Multi-channel delivery platform: event ingest, fan-out, queueing and delivery for web and mobile push at over a billion events a day, on bare metal and cloud, with a data warehouse over the top and SDKs and APIs for customers — then inside a listed group after the acquisition, with the security and compliance reporting that comes with it.

stack · mongodb · rabbitmq · typescript · bare metal + cloud

Business FinTech · beta, going to market

GetViaMsg

57% of readers leave when they hit a paywall. One SMS unlocks one article — no card, no account, commission instead of fixed fees, and payout the next business day instead of after sixty. Co-founder and CTO.

Technology Session-based payments · DORA

GetViaMsg

Session-based micro-payments: QR or link, one SMS, content unlocked in seconds with settlement handled asynchronously. Operator webhooks, idempotent accounting, and DORA-aligned controls with documented operational resilience — the regulator's checklist treated as engineering work.

stack · fly.io · cloudflare · oracle cloud · two sms operators

Research & development — WDFT, co-owned

Business

Federated Payment Standard

Card fees make small payments uneconomical: roughly 0.25 PLN plus 1–3% per transaction, so nothing below a few PLN is worth selling online. This standard takes no percentage at all — a flat fee per package of transactions, designed at 5 USD per 1,000, which brings the cost of a payment close to that of an Elixir transfer.

Technology Concept · spec and bank sandbox

Federated Payment Standard

An open standard that uses the banks' existing rails and mobile apps — deep links and QR codes — instead of building another payment network. Four parts: a registry holding the bank directory, the webhook verification keys, an API and the mobile-app manifests; an SDK that generates payment links and verifies signatures; banks and providers that execute and notify; the implementor that creates the link and receives the webhooks.

sdk · flutter · dart · kotlin · swift · typescript

Business

Session-Based Payments

Instead of one subscription or nothing, a reader commits around 0.50 PLN per article inside a session and settles it with a single transfer later — which monetises the readers who would never subscribe.

Technology

Session-Based Payments

Short-lived sessions with small commitments, aggregated into a single settlement and paid out to partners. Four roles — user, operator, partner, bank — and a settlement step that has to stay idempotent.

status · runs in production as GetViaMsg

What I run today

Business MedTech · live, paying customers

Terapeuto

Scheduling, records, billing and waitlists in one system for therapy centres — with every booking arriving on the clinic's own domain instead of a marketplace that takes the patient and the commission. Founder, CTO and CPO.

Technology Multi-tenant · encrypted records

Terapeuto

Four-level pricing engine, AES-256 session records, conflict-free room and therapist scheduling, end-to-end coverage. Prototype in 30 days, feature lead time around two days.

stack · python · sqlite · litestream · fly.io · docker

Business AI · live, paying customers

uff.email

An assistant you hire by giving it a name: forward it the work you hate and the answer comes back in the same thread. No app, no onboarding, no card to start. Founder, CTO and CPO.

Technology Agentic · knowledge graph

uff.email

Email-native agent with a knowledge graph of people, companies, documents and events, isolated per assistant, plus deeper retrieval modes behind +researcher and +sources.

stack · python · docker · knowledge graph · ai

Business Local media · AI newsroom · no-person company experiment

Krazeta

A daily Kraków newspaper whose editorial team is AI: a new edition every day, city chronicle, business, sport, weather, an audio version. Founder.

Technology Pipeline · agents · AI experiment: cost optimisation

Krazeta

Agents collect sources, draft, section and publish the daily issue, orchestrated in Python workflows with model calls routed through OpenRouter. Audio edition generated per issue.

stack · python · paperclip · conductor · openrouter

Business Publishing tech · PoC, in progress

ceemes.

A proof of concept for a modern CMS for publishers. I own the product, the technology and the delivery. Early days — the site is at ceemes.eu.

Technology PoC · in progress

ceemes.

Static-first: pages are generated as static files with islands for interactivity, and every piece is pluggable. The editorial side is built for AI to drive it — an MCP server is exposed, so agents manage content directly. Published in the open as it is built.

design · static-first generation · islands · pluggable · mcp server exposed

AI, two ways

Business

In practice

Most teams buy AI and then wonder where the value went. I help pick the two or three workflows where it pays for itself — and where it is a toy.

Technology

Actually deployed

Two of my own products are AI products, so this is operations, not theory.

On the record

3 recordings
Micro-payments in Poland FinTalks · Future Processing 36:49 From 5K to 500M notifications a day Scale versus quality at PushPushGo · OVH Experience 12:47 Entrepreneur of the Year Founder pitch · University of Warsaw 1:37

Compliance, folded into the work

not a separate service
regulation DORA readiness Operational resilience, controls and evidence — built into GetViaMsg from the first line of code.
risk NIS2 technology risk Assessment and technical measures, treated as engineering work rather than paperwork.
practices ISO 27001 practices Controls and evidence that survive an audit, kept where engineers actually work.
reviews Audits & vulnerabilities Security reviews, triage and fixes with the team that owns the code.

Bring me the decision that is keeping you up.

Tell me what you are building, what it costs you today and what happens if it goes wrong. A thirty-minute call, then I come back with what I would do first, in writing. If I am not the right person, I will say so in the first reply.