The technical person your business is missing.

Whether you are starting from an idea, launching a prototype or running software that has outgrown how it was built, I take ownership of the technology so you do not have to.

Need someone senior to own the technical decisions, roadmap, developers and risk? Get practical CTO leadership at the stage you need it, without hiring too early.

Architecture, delivery planning, developer and agency oversight, hiring, security, infrastructure and investor questions. Plus hands-on development when that is what the situation calls for.

Hire a fractional CTO →

Sound like you?

These are the sentences I hear most often from founders and business owners on a first call.

Where are you starting from?

Prototype to Production

Take your prototype to production.

Built with AI, freelancers or an agency? I assess what is there, finish what matters and get it ready for real users. I preserve what works, fix what matters and replace only what cannot be trusted.

Review my prototype → Software Development

Get it built properly.

Web, mobile, SaaS, integrations and custom business software, for founders starting from an idea and for established businesses that have outgrown how they work now. I define it, architect it, build it and stay accountable for it.

See what I build →

Already live and struggling? Stalled agency builds, developers who vanished and unstable production systems are covered by App Rescue.

Why John is different

Most fractional CTOs advise. I also inspect, build and fix the software directly.

I am John Croucher, a hands-on technology leader and software engineer with more than 20 years of experience building, operating and rescuing production systems. I work directly with founders and business owners to turn ideas and prototypes into dependable products, make the hard technical decisions, and build the foundations for future technical teams.

Strategic enough to make the hard technical decisions. Hands-on enough to implement them. Based in Adelaide, working remotely with clients across Australia.

No rotating consultancy team
No junior developers presented as senior leadership
No salesperson handing the work to someone else
Direct access to the person making the technical decisions
One person across business strategy, architecture and code

Building a working demo has never been easier. Building software that can safely handle customers, payments, private data, failures and years of change is still difficult. AI has made it possible for more founders to start building. I provide the technical judgement, engineering and ownership needed to finish and launch.

Track record

Shincro Tech is new. The experience behind it is not. This is work John delivered over 20+ years, before Shincro existed.

News Corp

Established newsroom, working with journalists and editors rather than engineers.

Problem: Data jobs behind interactive stories took hours, blocking time-sensitive journalism.

John's role: Built the tooling end to end and worked directly with non-technical newsroom staff.

Multi-hour data processing cut to 15-20 minutes. The work won industry awards.

Festival ticketing

Live events where failure at the gate is visible to thousands of people at once.

Problem: Venue connectivity drops, but gates still have to scan tickets and stop fraud.

John's role: Architecture, platform, mobile apps and being accountable on event days.

Offline, sub-second scanning running across 5+ festivals with no gate downtime.

Koi ecommerce

John's own ecommerce venture, so every technical decision had a direct commercial cost.

Problem: Listing a single product took 15-20 minutes of manual writing and image work.

John's role: Owner of the product and the platform, from idea through to daily operations.

AI descriptions and image processing brought listing time down to 4-5 minutes.

Payroll and warehouse systems

Operational business software where mistakes affect people's pay and stock on hand.

Problem: Manual time tracking and logistics processes across a workforce of 200+ staff.

John's role: Designed, built and ran the systems, including biometric time tracking and integrations.

Payroll and warehouse logistics running in production for 200+ staff.

Legacy modernisation

Platforms over 20 years old that businesses still depend on every day.

Problem: Systems nobody wanted to touch, understood by people who had already left.

John's role: Audited, stabilised and modernised them while keeping them live.

Migrated and refactored without stopping the businesses running on them.

Not ready to commit?

All three are fixed price, independent, and carry no obligation to continue with me. Start with whichever matches where you are.

Not sure which one you need?

Book a free call and describe where you are. I will tell you the honest next step, even if it is not me.

Book a free 30-min call Send a message

The technical person your business is missing.

I become the technical side of your startup.