Fractional CXOs
Pick the executive function your business needs right now. CMO and CFO are currently active. Scale up when ready.
Brand strategy, GTM, demand generation and growth loops. The person who makes people actually hear about you.
Runway management, fundraising prep, financial modelling and investor relations. The person who stops you running out of money.
Systems, processes, team structure and execution. The person who turns your chaos into a company that actually runs.
Hiring strategy, culture building and team growth. The person who makes sure your first 10 hires are not your last 10 mistakes.
Founder’s Office
There are things a founder carries alone that do not fit a job description. Market research at midnight. Competitor teardowns before a pitch. Figuring out whether an idea is real before spending six months on it. That is where we sit.
Deep dives into your space before you commit. Who is already doing it, how well, and where the actual gap lives.
Systematic breakdown of what your competitors are getting right and where they are leaving room. Not a quick Google. A real teardown.
Before you build, we stress test how you plan to make money. Most founders skip this step. That is usually when we meet them.
Narrative sharpening, deck logic, and anticipating the questions a serious investor will actually ask in the room.
A thinking partner for the calls that matter. Pricing, positioning, pivots. A second brain when yours is too close to the problem.
A full pass on your product and messaging before anything goes public. We find what you stopped seeing months ago.
Payment Models
No cash? Go equity. Have a budget? Cash works. Somewhere in between? So is everyone else.
Pre revenue, pre funding. The CXO bets on your growth. You preserve every rupee of cash. Everyone wins when you do.
Post funding and want a clean cap table. Monthly retainers, no equity involved. A straightforward working relationship.
Reduced cash and some equity. Both sides have skin in the game. The most aligned arrangement we have seen work at early stage.
Case Studies
Three engagements. Three founders who caught the problem before it compounded. Click any card to read the full story.
A founder built an app. It wished you good morning, gave you a daily quote, showed your city’s AQI. Well built, genuinely. We spent a session trying to find the money in it. We could not.
We went through every monetisation angle we could think of, and we genuinely tried. After a while we both got quiet and landed in the same place at the same time. There was no answer.
The only realistic option was ads. And ads on a good morning app would generate enough to buy chai once a week.
The founder had put real time into building it. The product was not the problem. The problem was that it had been built to demonstrate that he could build something, not to solve something someone would pay to have solved. Those are two completely different projects, and they tend to look identical until the monetisation conversation.
That distinction is the entire game. And far too many founders in India have not made it yet.
Building to prove you can build is not the same as building a business. A product with no monetisation path is a portfolio piece. The sooner a founder understands which one they are making, the better.
A founder came with an idea for an AI driven UGC platform where brands could assign work to creators. The model made sense on paper. The market research told a different story.
I built the financial model first. A platform cut that varied by category, higher for in demand niches, smaller for quieter ones. No upfront investment needed. The whole thing would fund itself from early revenue if it got traction.
Then I started the market research, and the picture changed quickly. The UGC space was already packed. Multiple founders were building almost identical products, and at least one of them had cash behind him and was prepared to spend it to own the category.
A broad entry was not going to work. The only path with any logic to it was a narrower one. Focus on micro influencers specifically, or pick a single vertical like food or tech and go deep there before expanding anywhere else.
That became the recommendation. Without this work being done before any money moved, this founder would have spent months building into a position he could not win from.
A good idea in a saturated market is not a good idea yet. It is a positioning problem. The work is figuring out which slice of the market you can actually own before you commit to building for all of it.
The founder of ValueForStartUps built a company research platform, launched it, and announced it on LinkedIn. One problem: he had built Screener.in, and Screener.in already existed.
The product let you pull financial data and company profiles on businesses you were researching. Useful in theory. The kind of thing serious investors and analysts genuinely want. But Screener.in had been doing exactly this for years, with the user base, the trust, and the SEO to match. There was no version of this story where a newer, identical product wins that fight.
The second problem was sitting right on the screen. The entire site had been built with AI and it showed in every corner. Graphs were spilling out of their containers. Sections had inconsistent spacing. Elements sat misaligned in ways that told a visitor, at a glance, that no one had actually looked at this before shipping it.
None of that had been caught before launch. The founder had not just published the website. He had announced it on LinkedIn. The broken version was the public version.
The work here was twofold. The product needed a reason to exist that Screener.in did not already own. That meant a tighter niche, a different type of user, or a layer of interpretation on top of raw data that no existing platform was offering. And the execution quality needed to be treated as seriously as the idea itself. A product that looks unfinished on day one trains its first visitors to expect nothing better on day two.
Launching fast is not the same as launching ready. If your first impression is a broken graph and an undifferentiated product, the second chance at that visitor is a much harder conversation than the first one ever needed to be.
About Apostles
Vrushank Naik spent years studying the rise and fall of large cap, small cap and micro cap companies across sectors. The one thing that kept appearing in every stagnation story was the same: solo founders trying to do everything alone.
He built Apostles to fix that. Not with recruitment or job boards. With fractional senior leadership that founders can actually afford, and a Founder’s Office that handles the strategic work that never makes it onto anyone’s job description.
He has published startup insights and breakdowns on Medium, helping founders understand what actually works.
Read on Medium →Also a writer at Startup Stash Editorial on Medium.
Get in Touch
Whether you need a fractional CXO or want to bring in Founder’s Office support, reach out through the details below.
