How a Solo Founder Built a SaaS With a Fractional COO

**Fexingo** (0:01)
You know, one of the most common pieces of advice for solo founders is don't hire too early. But there's a version of that advice that I think is actually backwards, don't hire employees too early, but do get help.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:15)
Help that isn't a full-time salary and benefits package, you mean?

**Fexingo** (0:20)
Exactly. And today, I want to look at a specific kind of help that I think is underused by bootstrapped founders, the fractional COO.
Not a consultant who gives you a deck and disappears, but an actual operator who comes in for say, 10 hours a week and runs your operations.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:38)
So not a virtual assistant, not a freelancer, someone at the executive level, but part-time.

**Fexingo** (0:43)
Right. And I have a concrete case. There's a solo founder I've been following, let's call him Dan, who built AB2B SaaS for independent insurance agents.
He hid about $3,000 in monthly recurring revenue on his own, coding, support, everything. He was stuck, couldn't grow because he was buried in operational tasks.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:06)
The classic trap, you're the CEO, the CTO, the support team, and the janitor.

**Fexingo** (1:12)
Exactly. So Dan found a fractional COO through a network.
A woman named Sarah who had been a VP of operations at a larger SaaS company. She was looking for flexibility after having a kid.
She agreed to 10 hours a week at $150 an hour. So $600 a week, roughly $2,400 a month.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:34)
That's not cheap. But compared to a full-time COO salary, it's a fraction.

**Fexingo** (1:40)
A full-time COO at a startup might cost $12,000 to $15,000 a month all in. So Sarah was about a fifth of that. And the agreement was very specific.
She would handle vendor negotiations, process documentation, and anything that could be systematized. Dan would keep doing product and sales.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:00)
So what did she actually do in those 10 hours a week? Give me a concrete example.

**Fexingo** (2:06)
First thing, she audited his vendor spend. Dan was paying for three different tools that overlapped, a CRM, a separate email marketing tool, and a third for appointment scheduling.
Sarah consolidated them onto a single platform that did all three, saving him $400 a month. That alone paid for more than a sixth of her fee.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:28)
So she basically paid for herself just by cutting waste. That's the kind of thing a founder might never get around to.

**Fexingo** (2:35)
Right. And then she built a playbook for customer onboarding. Dan had been doing every onboarding call himself.
Sarah documented the process, created templates, and then trained a part-time contractor, someone at $20 an hour, to handle the first two weeks of onboarding for new customers.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:55)
So Dan went from doing everything to having a documented system that someone else could execute. That's leverage.

**Fexingo** (3:03)
Exactly. Within four months, Dan's MRR went from 3,000 to about 7,000. Not all because of Sarah, but because he was freed up to sell. And then Sarah helped him negotiate better terms with his payment processor.
He was paying 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction. She got it down to 2.2% because she found a smaller processor that specialized in insurance software.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:29)
That's a real win. And the founder probably never would have known to look.

**Fexingo** (3:34)
Right. After six months, Dan was at 15,000 MRR. Sarah had reduced her hours to about six a week because the systems were running. Dan's costs for Fractional COO went from 2,400 a month down to about 900
And his margins improved by about 20% because of the vendor savings and the onboarding efficiency.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:57)
So the Fractional COO became a catalyst. But I imagine it's not for everyone. When does it make sense?

**Fexingo** (4:05)
I think the key signal is when the founder is the bottleneck on non-product work.
If you're spending more than half your time on operations, vendor management, hiring, process, and you're not growing because of it, that's the moment. Also, you need to have enough revenue to afford it.
Dan was at 3000 MRR, so 2400 felt like a lot, but he saw it as an investment.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:28)
And the Fractional COO has to be the right person. You can't just hire anyone. They need to have actually run operations at a growing company.

**Fexingo** (4:37)
Absolutely.
Sarah had been a VP at a company that grew from 10 to 50 employees. She knew how to build processes that scale. And importantly, she was willing to work on a fractional basis. There's a growing pool of experienced operators who want flexibility. Maybe they're semi-retired, maybe they have young kids, maybe they want to work on multiple projects. That's a resource Bootstrapped founders should tap into.