Fractional market fit

Some people talk about going fractional, and some people just go. Over the past year I've corresponded with a fair number of people in the first group, looking for thoughts on how to start.

I'm happy to talk about it, but my honest answer is almost too simple: my first clients came by way of my friends. That's not much of an answer, so let me unpack what was underneath my own experience.

The prerequisites

I think people imagine that my going fractional started the day I decided to do it. But day one was actually the first day of my full-time product career, in July 2015.

Going fractional isn't really a pivot; very little about the work is different. It's more like a SaaS company moving from seat-based pricing to consumption-based. Same product, repackaged in line with market demand. A decade ago there wasn't much demand for part-time anything. Contractors have always existed, but mostly full-time. Then the gig economy arrived, and tech doesn't really have shift work, so this is what that looks like here.

I'll also add that calling this "my own business" feels a little generous to me. It's kind of you all to say I own a business, and yes, I handle the things a company handles: withholding taxes, health insurance (which I get through my full-time employed husband, and I know how lucky that is), expenses, billing, paperwork with the state. But I don't have employees or inventory. I don't do sales and marketing. My point is that this is a handful of tasks you can absolutely handle. You're not launching a startup or opening a brick-and-mortar or becoming an Amazon seller.

So the question I'd start with is, are you good at your job?

If you ran a full-time search for your role, will you get hired? If the full-time version is a stretch right now, the fractional version will be too.

Then take it a level up. When you were in seat, were you good? Not by your own assessment; did people unsolicitedly tell you they loved working with you? Did they tell you you're good at this? Do you have results beyond shipping, like change, impact, something that had your fingerprints on it rather than a roadmap you were handed?

Did you make friends at work? Are you still in touch with people you worked with at companies past? Has anyone tried to bring you along to their new company, or gone looking for roles on your behalf, or referred you without being asked? Those are all signs you were good at your job.

Finally, fractional hiring assumes you've been in the seat a long time already. A lot of people considering fractional have five years or fewer in their discipline, and that's often what's in the way. I had ten.

If those things aren't there yet, the W2 route is the better bet, and I mean that as a practical observation rather than a verdict. Full-time hiring is a stranger assessing you on the merits of an interview. My fractional journey has been more relational, with word of mouth baked in. There are very few fractional listings to apply to, it's almost entirely warm intro-based.

All you may need is to recognize you've already met these points. Plenty of people have all of it and don’t think it counts. So here it is, written down. If you pass, you can start thinking about the how.

Get serious

The next step is deciding you're actually doing this. Not saying "I'm fractional" to sound employed while you run a full-time search. Not to pick up cash between roles either. Nothing wrong with that, it's just freelance work rather than being fractional as a model.

The logistics are lighter than people expect. You don't need an LLC right away; I created mine moments before signing my first contract, and it took minutes online. You don't strictly need one at all. You can work under your own name and social, with a little less formality and fewer protections. You don't need a business bank account or a business credit card. You'll probably want those things, but don't let any of them become the reason you didn't start.

You do want to have your finances in order. I was in a position where I could afford to work part-time. If you can't, and you need 40 hours, it's worth asking what's drawing you to fractional. It's more work than a W2. It doesn't come with more security or any benefits. You find your own clients. I'm not the right person to advise anyone building a full-time roster. What I can tell you is that a part-time engagement comes together much faster than a replacement for a full-time job.

In order to do it, you have to be able to describe what "it" is. Going fractional means staying in a lane you're already qualified for. It's narrower than a general job search, by design. You can absolutely iterate on your offering and your messaging as you go, but you have to start somewhere.

That may take research and discovery first. For me it didn't. My whole career had been at upmarket SaaS companies selling B2B with contracts in the six figures. At my second startup, JW Player, I decided to stay in that lane because most product managers chase B2C. So my description wrote itself. I don't have a vertical niche like fintech, healthtech, or edtech, I'm just early-stage SaaS, and that is enough.

You may not have as clean a pattern. The work is recognizing where you're strongest and where you aren't. If you don't have a niche, I wouldn't try to sell yourself into one. I'd never go after an edtech engagement; that sector wants edtech people. That's not rejection, that's information, and it saves you a lot of time. If you want to work in fintech, take a full-time role there at a level below where you are now.

Tell people

Now that you know you're doing it for real and what you're hirable for, tell people. Over and over. That you're serious, that this isn't cover for a job search, and why you're qualified.

You catch up with people. You tell them over coffee. Over text. You email them. I posted about it on LinkedIn a lot, in posts I wrote myself (AI-edited, but never AI-generated). I made a company LinkedIn page for the LLC so I had something to link to.

Because I'd done the other parts, that's all it took for me to get started.

I also overhauled my website, the one you're reading this on, and described my offering plainly, but the jury is still out on whether that is a requirement.

The rest of it

This won’t work for everyone. You may not have a clear lane yet. You may not have the professional network. If that's where you are and you still want to do it, the path runs through something I don't have and can't teach: sales. Connecting with total strangers, building relationships from nothing, getting them interested in you. If you can do that, you're already ahead of me here.

As I mentioned in my last post, it's only been a year. I've held to my own rule of one main client at a time. Some of it was lucky timing. But laying it out like this, I think those two or three steps were real, and I've tried to reconstruct them here so you can judge for yourself whether it's luck or something repeatable.

Also, the people I know who've made this work, maybe four or five of them, didn't get there by asking how to get clients. The relationships and demand were there. Their question was more like: huh, I'm fractional now. Is this what I'm doing?

So an article called "how to find clients" was never going to hand them anything they didn't already have. At most, it's confirmation they're on the right track. But I'm not standing at a gate in front of this deciding who gets through. This is just what it looked like from where I was standing.

Know thyself, and go forward!