The situation before
Daniel Imberman is an AI and data engineering specialist based in Mexico City. A decade of experience building high-scale systems. A CTO track record. The kind of operator who walks into a room and immediately understands problems that take other people months to diagnose.
He had no shortage of interest. What he had was a ceiling.
Every warm conversation died somewhere between the first call and the proposal. He was spending hours building detailed technical documents for companies that went quiet. He was calling himself a fractional CTO - which, without him realising it, was pre-qualifying him out of 95% of the market and pulling in the one segment least likely to have the budget to pay him properly: early-stage startups.
He knew his pricing was off, but he did not know why. He suspected his qualification process was broken, but he could not see where. And every proposal he sent into the silence made it harder to diagnose whether the problem was his rate, his positioning, or something else entirely.
“I’m tired of talking to these early-stage startups that would love a fractional CTO and then try to offer me laughable rates.”
The diagnosis
The first conversation with Dan Gwalter surfaced three things in under 30 minutes.
The job title was doing damage. “Fractional CTO” signals to any company that already has technical leadership that Daniel is not for them. It narrows the addressable market to the one segment that almost never has the budget to pay a senior specialist: pre-revenue startups. Dropping the title and leading with the problem he solves opened the other 95%.
The foundations were wrong before the outreach started. ICP, product structure, and profile all needed to be correct before any conversation about pipeline or conversion. Going to market without those in place was not just inefficient - it was making every conversation harder than it needed to be.
Proposals were being sent blind. Without presenting them in person, Daniel never saw the objection. Prospects ghosted because they had nowhere to raise a concern. The fix was not a better proposal - it was a different process entirely.
What the programme actually looked like
Daniel joined a cohort in mid-March. What followed was not a course. It was a build, with Dan alongside every step.
On 16 March - the same day as a scheduled 1:1 - Daniel had a live prospect call booked in 15 minutes with a data and AI lead at a local government consulting firm. He rang Dan for a pre-call briefing. They worked through how to run the call, how to avoid the pricing conversation too early, and how to position a paid discovery instead. Daniel went straight from that call into the prospect meeting.
That is what unlimited 1:1 access actually means in practice. Not a scheduled monthly check-in. Dan available in real time, when the conversation is happening, when it matters.
Over the following weeks the sessions covered: how to trial close before presenting a price; how to scope a discovery engagement so it sits below procurement thresholds; how to protect rate without discounting; how to read whether a client is pain-aware, problem-aware, or solution-aware; and how to use the discovery itself as a bilateral filter - not just to sell in, but to decide whether the client is worth having.
By mid-April, Daniel was running between two separate client meetings, calling Dan from an Uber to prep for a prospect who had invited him into the office. Not hypotheticals. Live deals, live coaching.
The result
Ten weeks after starting the programme, Daniel messaged the Fractional Formula community late one evening.
“Dan! I got a verbal close on a second client! If this goes through I’ll make 40k this month! I also went on two podcasts this week and gave you a shoutout.”
The same week he left an updated testimonial - unprompted, because he had already been thinking about updating his original review the day before Dan asked. He is also coming to London at the end of May to have lunch.
In his own words
“Working with Dan completely changed how I run my business from the ground up. Dan taught me how to build something that’s both effective and compassionate - how to accurately identify customer pains, recognise when someone simply isn’t my ICP, and grow over time instead of mass-emailing thousands of strangers and sullying my reputation in the process.”
“Now I have prospects’ eyes lighting up when I hit their real pain point. I’m not refreshing my phone waiting for email responses anymore. Dan helped me build a process, and the process works.”
Who this is for
Daniel’s story is not unusual. It is the pattern.
Experienced operators - people with real track records, real skills, real credibility - coming into independent consulting and finding that what worked in a corporate context does not automatically translate into a pipeline. The capability is not the problem. The system is missing.
If you are generating interest but not converting it, sending proposals that go quiet, or finding that your network is starting to feel like a finite resource rather than an engine - the foundations are the starting point. Not the outreach. Not the content. The foundations.
Find out if the Fractional Formula is the right fit
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