Mateusz Worotyński
Fractional CTO & product consultant · Kraków, Poland · EN / PL
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.
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.
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 pageWhen 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 runsWhen 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 pageStrategy, pricing, market and the product organisation.
Technology track ↓Systems, delivery, scale and the engineers who run them.
Business track ↑Where startups call me in
Everything else I help with
Track record
Research & development — WDFT, co-owned
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.
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
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.
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
AI, two ways
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.
Two of my own products are AI products, so this is operations, not theory.
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.
