Ealyx: From Idea to Production in 90 Days, With Four Engineers and a Fractional CTO

The facts first, because a case study written by the vendor is only worth the facts it can stand on. Ealyx is a Barcelona company that builds circularity software for e-commerce. In May 2024 it had an idea and founders who knew their market. Ninety days later it had a product in production. The team that built it was four Conectia engineers and a fractional CTO, working as one team with the founders. The relationship is still running in 2026.

That is the whole story in four sentences. The rest of this page explains what each of them cost, what they required from the founders, and what we would check before buying the same thing from anyone, us included.

Why "idea to production in 90 days" is the right unit, and "MVP" is not

Most startups measure the first phase in features. We measure it in the distance between an idea and the first day real customers depend on the software. For Ealyx that distance was ninety days, and the number matters less than what it rules out: there was no six-month "discovery", no prototype that had to be thrown away, and no hand-off between the people who designed the product and the people who built it.

The reason the distance stays short is structural, not heroic. A fractional CTO owns the architecture and the scope from the first week. Four engineers who already work together take the build. The founders stay in the loop every week and decide; they do not translate between a designer, an agency and a freelancer. One team, one backlog, one definition of done.

What a fractional CTO changes in the first ninety days

In an early-stage company the most expensive mistakes are not bugs. They are decisions nobody was qualified to make: which parts to build and which to buy, what the data model has to survive, where the first integrations will break, how much to spend on infrastructure before the first paying customer.

Ealyx did not have a full-time CTO, and hiring one before having a product would have cost a quarter and a large part of the runway. A fractional CTO gave the founders the same decisions, made by someone who had made them before, at a fraction of the cost and from the first week. In practice that meant three things:

1. Scope locked early. The first production version was defined in the first weeks, with what it did not include written down. Everything that came later was a second phase, not scope creep inside the first.
2. Architecture chosen for the next two years, not the next demo. A standard stack, one database, clean boundaries between modules, so the product could be extended by the same team or by a future in-house one.
3. Weekly decisions with the founders. Priorities, trade-offs and what to show customers were decided every week with the people who owned the business, not in a quarterly steering committee.

Four engineers, one team: how the build actually ran

The engineers were employed by Conectia and worked inside Ealyx's repository and tools from the first commit. The cadence was two-week sprints with a demo of working software at the end of each one. The founders saw the product grow every fortnight and corrected course when the market told them to.

What this is not: a marketplace of freelancers coordinated by the client, or a project handed to an agency and received as a zip file three months later. The founders never had to manage individual engineers; the fractional CTO and the team did. What the founders did was the only thing nobody can do for them: decide what the product is for.

What "ongoing since May 2024" means

A product in production at day ninety is a start, not a finish. Real customers find the edges, integrations change, the roadmap grows. The same team that built the first version has kept building it, which is the part of the story we care most about: the architecture chosen in the first weeks did not have to be replaced, and the knowledge of the product did not walk out of the door at the end of a project.

This is also why we do not sell "an MVP" as a sealed box. We sell a first version that holds up with paying customers, built by a team that can stay as long as it is useful and leave when it is not. The code, the repository and the infrastructure are the client's from the first day, so staying is a decision, never a dependency.

What we would check before buying this from anyone

If you are a founder considering a fractional CTO plus a small team to take an idea to production, these are the four questions we would ask any vendor, including us:

• Who owns the architecture decisions, and are they in the project every week? A name and a calendar, not a role on an org chart.
• Who employs the engineers, and under which contracts? Direct employment with IP assignment is a different product from a chain of contractors.
• Where does the code live from day one? In your repository, in your cloud account, under your name.
• What happens at the end? A thirty-day notice and a documented hand-over is the right answer. A framework contract measured in quarters is not.

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to take an idea to production with a fractional CTO and a small team?

It depends on the scope the first version has to carry and on how much already exists. We fix the price of each phase at the end of the diagnostic, in writing, and the diagnostic is deducted from the build. The entry packages are on the pricing page.

Is ninety days realistic for every product?

No. Ninety days is what a tightly scoped first version with a senior team and a founder who decides every week takes. Products with heavy regulatory requirements, hardware or complex data migrations take longer, and we say so in the diagnostic.

What if we already built an MVP with AI tools?

Then the first phase is an audit of what you have instead of a blank page: what to keep, what to harden and what to rebuild. This is how we take an AI-built MVP to production.

Do we keep the code if we stop working with you?

Yes. Everything is in your repository and your infrastructure from the first commit. Stopping means a notice period and a hand-over, nothing more.

---

If you have an idea, a spec or a prototype that has to become a product in production, tell us what you have and a CTO replies in writing within 24 hours.