Startup advisory & technical leadership

You don't need to know everything. You need the right expertise at the right moment.

We help founders see what matters, solve what matters, and move forward — combining systems thinking, technical and business expertise, and the right people at the right time.

Time-boxed. Outcome-driven. No endless consulting.

01 — When founders call us

Something is already happening, and getting it wrong is expensive.

“Our cloud bill is growing faster than our revenue and nobody can explain which part.”
“Users sign up and disappear, and we've run out of theories about why.”
“An investor asked for technical due diligence. We don't know what they'll find.”
“We're entering a market none of us has worked in, and we're guessing.”
“One engineer built everything, and they're leaving in six weeks.”
“We need senior people and nobody here can evaluate them.”

02 — What we do

Four ways in. One question first: what's the actual problem?

Time-boxed

Startup Problem Solving

You come with one concrete problem. We work out what actually needs solving, which expertise is missing, who to involve — and come back with recommendations you can act on.

  • Churn, retention and product problems
  • Pricing, go-to-market and positioning
  • Marketplace and operations dynamics
  • Technology, architecture and scale
One problem · fixed timeframe · written outcome
Ongoing

Founder Advisory

A thinking partner for the decisions you can't make in a team meeting and shouldn't make alone. Not a course, not a framework — a person who has built things and will tell you what they actually think.

  • Strategic decisions and prioritisation
  • Difficult situations and team dynamics
  • Leadership and growth challenges
  • The founder problems nobody puts in the deck
Regular sessions · ongoing relationship
Core expertise

Fractional CTO & Technical Advisor

Senior technical leadership without hiring a full-time CTO. Eight years inside production systems — infrastructure, cloud, Kubernetes, platform engineering — applied to your architecture, your bill and your roadmap.

  • Technology strategy, architecture and roadmap
  • Cloud, infrastructure and cost efficiency
  • Scalability, reliability and technical debt
  • Technical readiness for your next funding round
Fractional engagement · from three months
Start with a technical audit →
Additional

Startup Talent

Not our main scope, but we can help with it — usually as a continuation of technical advisory, when the answer to the problem turns out to be a person you don't have yet.

  • Working out which role you actually need
  • Finding candidates through the network
  • Technical assessment and interview calibration
Scoped case by case

03 — Underneath all of it

The Startupologist Expert Network

No single advisor has solved every problem. What matters is knowing who has.

When a problem sits outside our own expertise, we bring in people who have spent years inside it — not generalists with an opinion. You work with us, we stay accountable for the outcome, and you never manage a roster of strangers.

The most expensive thing a founder can buy is a senior-sounding guess in a domain nobody in the room has worked in.

ProductMarketplaceRetail SalesMarketingFinance LegalAICybersecurity ManufacturingAgricultureOperations

04 — How we work

Problem first. Deadline attached. Something in writing at the end.

01

Diagnose

Find the real problem — which is usually not the one named in the first sentence.

02

Connect

Identify the expertise that's missing, and bring in the person who has already lived it.

03

Advise

Turn what we learn into options, a recommendation, and a plan with a sequence and owners.

04

Execute

Stay involved while it gets done, if that's what you need. Scoped separately, never assumed.

05 — Who you're working with

Eight years inside production systems, not next to them.

The Startupologist is led by Oksana Linkevych, a platform and DevOps engineer with 8+ years of experience running Kubernetes in production, rebuilding observability stacks, cutting infrastructure spend, and keeping systems standing during the incidents nobody writes case studies about.

Her method is the engineering one: find where the constraint actually sits before touching anything, measure instead of assuming, and make the trade-offs explicit rather than fixing whatever is loudest. It works the same way on a problem that isn't technical.

She founded Tech Garden, a community for women in tech.

Kubernetes / EKSAWSTerraformArgoCD OpenTelemetryPrometheusVictoriaMetrics LokiSplunkCiliumFinOps

06 — Fit

This is probably not for you if…

Good fit: a technology startup where something is already happening — funding, revenue, paying customers, a working product, a growing team — and a decision in front of you that is expensive to get wrong.

07 — Start here

Tell us what's happening. Thirty minutes, no pitch.

If we're not the right people for it, we'll say so on the call and point you at who is.

hello@thestartupologist.com