I went in thinking the difficulty would be the hours. It was not. The difficulty was everything around the selling, the parts of the job no one warns you about, and those are the parts I want to write down.
For a stretch I was a fractional founder and the commercial lead of a travel-technology company, building the commercial side from close to nothing. Fractional is a tidy word for a messy experience. It means you are partly in, by arrangement, while the thing you are partly in is the most all-consuming thing in the world to the people building it.
We were selling a premise: that regions should stop paying for reports that go stale on arrival and rely on a living data layer instead. A clean idea. But a clean idea and a buyable idea are different animals, and the buyer had no shelf to put ours on. They knew the price of a report and the price of a dashboard. They had no budget line for a thing without a name. When that happens, the instinct is to push harder on the same pitch. The discipline is to change it.
The willingness to pivot, to move the wedge, to reframe the category, to narrow the buyer, is not a sign that the original idea was wrong. It is the job. Most of what looked like progress, in hindsight, came right after we admitted something was not working and changed it, not from grinding the same motion louder.
With a team of two, every hour is a trade. An hour on a deck is an hour not on a call. There is no one to absorb the thing you drop. The honest rule in B2B is that you should not even try to scale selling until the motion is repeatable: a steady price, a clear buyer, a few proofs that travel (Alder VC). And at two people you feel the absence of all of that personally. So your GTM cannot be a funnel you pour effort into. It has to be a sequence of bets, each chosen because it teaches you the most per hour spent.
You are not running a sales process. You are running experiments with your own time as the budget. And the scarcest input is not money, it is attention.
In Norway there is a real layer of non-dilutive support, grants and soft funding from Innovation Norway and the regional system, built specifically to help an early company test whether a market and a willingness to pay actually exist (Innovasjon Norge). The phased startup grants exist precisely for the stage where you are still proving the premise (Oppstartstilskudd 1), and the wider landscape of public soft funding is broader than most founders realize (Oslo Business Region). Learning to write for those instruments is not bureaucracy to be endured. It is a commercial skill. Capital that does not dilute you, and that comes with a credibility stamp from a public body, changes what you can afford to try, and at two people it can be the difference between having runway to pivot and not.
Everyone obsesses over founder-market fit and founder-investor fit. Almost no one talks about whether the program you join actually matches the company you are. Founders pick a program by its logo and its alumni list, but that is the beginning of diligence, not the end (Founder Institute). A program built for consumer apps will quietly starve a long-cycle institutional company of the right mentors and the right rooms, and the mismatch is slow and invisible until it has already cost you a year (Kevin Monserrat).
The right incubator for a B2B data company selling to municipalities is a different animal from the right incubator for a viral app. Fit is not a feeling. It is whether their network, their pace, and their definition of progress match yours.
People obsess over founder-investor fit, but I have come to think it is mostly downstream of founder-founder fit. The data is almost embarrassing about this.
So when an investor watches how two founders disagree, divide work, and hold each other steady, they are reading the variable that most predicts survival. You cannot fake the second fit to win the first.
Being the non-technical half of a technical company made this impossible to ignore. For years the rule was absolute: you are missing a technical co-founder (Included VC). But the ground moved. A founder with deep domain knowledge can now design and ship a real application over a weekend with a credit card and a stack of AI tools (FounderOperator). When shipping code is no longer scarce, the old line between commercial and technical founder stops marking what it used to.
So what is a technical founder now. I have come to think it was never really about typing code. It is about understanding how a system holds together, where it breaks, what must be true for it to scale, what should never be automated, and the best of them are not the best coders but the best learners (Soluntech). The real divide is no longer technical against commercial. It is between people who think in systems and people who think in tasks.
So what does a founder carry out of all this. Not the deals. Those stay behind. You carry the willingness to kill a plan that is not working, the habit of spending attention like the scarcest currency it is, the knowledge of where non-dilutive money lives and how to earn it, a sharp eye for which rooms are actually built for your kind of company, and a respect for the human seam between founders that no metric forgives you for ignoring.
Hidden inside the word fractional, you carry the discipline of building things that work when you are not in the room, because partly in leaves you no other choice.
That last one has shaped everything I have built since. I keep finding the same problem in new clothes: how do you take judgment, the thing that usually lives in one head and one calendar, and make it portable, so it keeps working after the person steps back. I think I learned to care about that, more than anything, by being only partly in the room, and discovering how much has to be built so that partly in is ever enough.