Technical leadership for non-technical founders.
From idea and prototype through launch, hiring and growth, Shincro gives your startup experienced technical ownership without hiring a full-time CTO too early.
We become the technical side of your startup.
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.
These are the sentences we hear most often from founders on a first call.
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"I have an idea, but I do not know how to build it."
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"I made a prototype with AI, but I do not know what is safe to launch."
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"I have an agency, but I cannot tell whether their advice is right."
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"I need to hire developers but cannot assess them."
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"I have received several development quotes and do not know which one to trust."
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"The app works, but nobody owns security or infrastructure."
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"I need a technical co-founder, but I am not ready for a full-time hire."
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"Investors are asking questions about our technology."
Take your prototype to production.
Built with AI, freelancers or an agency? We assess what is there, finish what matters and get it ready for real users. We preserve what works, fix what matters and replace only what cannot be trusted.
Review my prototype → Startup DevelopmentBuild the first version.
Starting with an idea? We can define, architect and build the first version while providing the technical leadership around it. Web, mobile, SaaS, integrations and AI-enabled products.
Build my first version →Already live and struggling? Stalled agency builds, developers who vanished and unstable production systems are covered by App Rescue.
Most fractional CTOs advise. Shincro can also inspect, build and fix the software directly.
John Croucher is a hands-on technology leader and software engineer with more than 20 years of experience building, operating and rescuing production systems. He works directly with non-technical founders 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 founders 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. We provide the technical judgement, engineering and ownership needed to finish and launch.
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.
Both of these are fixed price, independent, and carry no obligation to continue with us. Start with whichever matches where you are.
CTO Health Check
Find out where your product really stands before you spend more money. An independent review of your technical position, architecture, developers, quotes and roadmap. Fixed price, no obligation to continue.
Book a CTO Health Check →Launch Readiness Audit
An honest technical assessment before you put the product in front of customers. What is solid, what is fragile, what is dangerous, what is missing, and the likely path and cost to launch. Fixed price.
Book a Launch Readiness Audit →Not sure which one you need?
Book a free call and describe where you are. We will tell you the honest next step, even if it is not us.