Vantum - Decision engine for fractional operators

152 interviews. One Common Pattern.

Fractional CFO

3 retainer clients

"I haven't lost a client yet, but I know it's going to happen eventually."

Miles Carter

Fractional CMO

1 retainer client

"I haven't even done a website yet. It says 'coming soon' and it's been coming for a year."

Naomi Reyes

Co-founder & CEO

4 retainer clients

"I'm still not running outbound. I have this conversation on a weekly basis."

Rowan Blake

Fractional CTO

3 retainer clients

"The best clients require years of cultivation. I keep forgetting to reach out — I forget who I'm even supposed to be reaching out to"

Avery Quinn

The pattern

We asked 152 fractionals: what's killing your week?

Their top 5 answers, ranked by how often they came up.

Feast or famine pipeline

"Three months later, sh*t, where's my pipeline?"

of 152

Can't make myself prospect

"I have this conversation on a weekly basis."

of 152

Urgent fires eat the strategy

"Fire drills while the real work sits there."

of 152

Letting myself down

"Not the client. Myself."

of 152

Tool chaos, calendar sprawl

"Six calendars. It's a hot mess."

of 152

Five problems. One engine to fix them all.

The cost

What this is costing you is measurable.

Four ways the same pattern shows up on your P&L every year.

"You get focused doing the work, drop the self-promotion, then you're starving. By the time you pick up your head, you're back at zero."

Fractional CMO

"Wake up at three o'clock in the morning every day thinking you're running out of money."

Fractional CFO

"If I have 40 hours a week committed to clients, when the hell do I do sales? It's the number one existential thing for every fractional I've talked to."

Fractional CTO

"I'm working at three in the morning. Scheduling emails at two AM. Is that healthy? No. I probably should prioritize sleep."

Fractional COO

How it actually works

Vantum scores your week the way a good chief of staff would.

We don't auto-schedule your calendar. We don't write your tasks for you. We do the one thing nothing else does: tell you what the right next move is, and show the work behind the answer.

Inputs · Connects with what you already use

Google Calendar

Outlook

Gmail

Notion

Asana

Slack

↓

Priority Engine

Decides what your week is worth.

stakeholder_weight goal_contribution goal_starvation effort_estimate timing_pressure uncertainty

score = timing_pressure × (1 + stakeholder_weight + goal_boost + tc_boost)

↓

Outputs

Weekly sprint

Ranked priorities

Reshuffle recs

Tradeoff reasons

Why we built this

I spent 14 years selling at DocuSign — the last few as a regional VP, watching fractional operators on the other side of the table choose between their pipeline and their client work, week after week.

When I went fractional myself, I understood why. No tool tells you what your week is actually worth. So Brian and I built one.

Tabarak & Brian · co-founders, Vantum
Previously DocuSign · Sales and Solutions Engineering

The flow

From Monday morning chaos to Friday "did the right things."

Capture

Brain-dump everything. Vantum sorts it later.

Voice memo on a walk. Email forwards. A screenshot of a Slack thread. Calendar imports from every client account you've got. The capture layer doesn't judge what you throw at it, it just absorbs it.

Why this matters

"I need a single source of truth. If I have to manually update and sync between five different tools and calendars, it just stops being helpful."

Weight

Tell Vantum once who matters, what you're driving toward, and how much capacity you actually have.

Stakeholder weights for each client. Three to five goals with importance and neglect-cost ratings. A real capacity number, not the lie your calendar tells. Set it once; adjust when the world changes.

Why this matters

"How do I know if I had a good week? It's just a feeling. I'm not prioritizing anything. I'm just working on whatever is most urgent."

Sprint

Your week, ranked. With the reasoning visible.

Vantum builds your week from highest-leverage to deferrable, fits it inside your real capacity, and shows you why each task is where it is. No black box. No "the AI decided."

Why this matters

"Overwhelm and decision paralysis about what to do next, I just need something that tells me: do this next." - Dana, fractional operator

Reshuffle

When a client fires off a deadline shift, see exactly what moved and what got cut.

Click "replan." Vantum recomputes the week. The diff view shows what got promoted, what got displaced to next week, and one line for each: why. You decide whether to accept or override.

Why this matters

"When something blows up midweek, I don't have a way to replan. I just push everything to Saturday and hope I have enough weekend left."

Built for you

Built for the operator who's the whole org chart.

Different titles. Same week.

Five clients, five tech stacks, five sets of priorities.

You're not just doing finance, you're managing the relationships, the deliverables, the strategic asks, and your own pipeline. The day a client moves a board meeting, the rest of your week tilts.

See which client's work is actually due, not just loud
Spot when a strategic project has been neglected three weeks running
Reshuffle when a board meeting moves, without rebuilding everything
Get back the two hours you spent on Monday morning replanning

From the field

"When something blows up midweek, I don't have a way to replan. I just push everything to Saturday and hope I have enough weekend left."

See the CFO walkthrough →

Three retainers, no pipeline, and a "coming soon" website.

You're heads-down in client GTM work. Your own positioning, content, and outbound have been "next week" since Q1. You know this. You're tired of knowing this.

Protect a recurring slot for your own pipeline, automatically
See when your own marketing has gone two weeks without progress
Stop client scope creep from eating your unpaid days
Carry context across clients without re-reading your own notes

From the field

"The client could only afford me Mondays and Tuesdays, but they wanted me seven days a week. And I was super flexible, maybe that was my error." - Cameron, fractional CTO

See the CMO walkthrough →

You're the CEO, the rep, the recruiter, the deck-builder, and the bookkeeper.

Every week is product, sales, hiring, finance, ops, and customer calls in the same eight hours. Without a system, the loudest one wins.

Force the strategic work to compete on fair ground with the urgent
See when "always be prospecting" has actually stopped
Get a defensible answer to "what should I do next?" at 9am Monday
Carry capacity, not just calendar, into every yes-or-no decision

From the field

"I think through the list of clients, what's the next deliverable, what's the next value I need to create for each customer, so I know I'm thinking about each one every time I think about what to do next." - Asha, founder-operator

See the founder walkthrough →

Where we sit

We're not competing with your task manager.
We're sitting above it.

Most operators we talked to use 3-5 of the categories below. Vantum is the layer that makes them coherent.

Category	Good for	Where it breaks	Vantum's difference
Task managers	Capturing tasks fast	Everything looks equally important	Scores work by goals, stakeholders, effort, capacity
Calendars	Showing time	Doesn't know what's at stake behind each block	Plans around real absorption, not just open slots
Project tools	Team tracking	Too heavy for a solo operator running 4 clients	Built around the weekly tradeoff, not the quarterly roadmap
AI schedulers	Auto-placing tasks on calendar	Hides why a decision was made	Shows what moved and why, every time

Voices from the cohort

We're early. The operators we built this with aren't.

Verbatim from interviews with the operators shaping Vantum.

Urgent work blows up your week. You keep busy but don't move forward on your bigger business goals. That's exactly what I needed someone to fix.

Rachel

Fractional CFO

4 active retainer clients

I'm not running outbound. I have this conversation with myself weekly. The thing that's going to work is a system that won't let me skip it.

Keira

Fractional HR lead

3 fractional + 2 coaching clients

Without guidance and shape to the week, you can end up putting in a lot of effort without any momentum.

Amara

Fractional CMO

Recently independent

Questions

Questions every operator asks in the first five minutes.

Isn't this just another task manager?

No, and if you treat it like one, it'll feel redundant. Vantum doesn't compete with where you capture tasks. It sits above them and decides which ones deserve this week. You can keep using Todoist, TickTick, Notion, or a paper list. Vantum reads from those and tells you what to do next.

How is this different from Motion?

Motion auto-schedules tasks onto your calendar. Vantum does the layer Motion skips, deciding which tasks are worth scheduling in the first place. We score against goals, stakeholders, and capacity. We also show our work, every time. No black box.

How is this different from a calendar?

A calendar shows time. Vantum shows whether you can actually absorb what you've committed to. Open slots aren't free time when client fires land every Wednesday. The calendar stays, it just stops pretending to know what your week is worth.

How is this different from Linear, Notion, or Asana?

Those are built for teams running quarterly roadmaps. You're running a week. You don't have a PM. The setup overhead alone disqualifies them for a solo operator. Vantum's setup is 15 minutes, clients, goals, capacity, and you're making better decisions.

Do I need a team to use this?

No. Vantum is built for the operator who is the whole org chart. If you're solo at the management layer, even if you have freelancers doing delivery, you're our user. We're actively keeping the product solo-first; team features come later, on demand.

Will an AI auto-schedule my day?

We don't. Direct from one of our early users: "I don't like it when an AI schedules my day. Where you really catch my attention is: I tell it what I need, it goes off and gets it done, and I'm very much in the driver's seat." (Cameron, fractional CTO.) That's our line.

What happens when priorities change midweek?

Hit replan. Vantum recomputes against your current capacity and shows a diff, what got promoted, what got displaced, and one line for each move. You accept, override, or ignore.

Is early access free?

Yes, for the first cohort. You get the product, direct access to the team, and influence over what we build next. We'll talk about pricing later, for now we're optimizing for getting it right with real operators.

Early-access cohort

This isn't a waitlist.
It's a working group.

We're shipping with 10-15 operators. You'll get the product, direct access to the team, and the ability to shape what gets built next.

Full product access during the early-access cohort
A founder/operator capacity-planning template you can use today
Direct line to the team, text or email, no support tickets
First look at the roadmap; veto on what doesn't matter
Optional 30-minute onboarding call

You're fixing their company. Who's fixing yours?

We asked 152 fractionals: what's killing your week?

What this is costing you is measurable.

Vantum scores your week the way a good chief of staff would.

From Monday morning chaos to Friday "did the right things."

Brain-dump everything. Vantum sorts it later.

Tell Vantum once who matters, what you're driving toward, and how much capacity you actually have.

Your week, ranked. With the reasoning visible.

When a client fires off a deadline shift, see exactly what moved and what got cut.

Built for the operator who's the whole org chart.

Five clients, five tech stacks, five sets of priorities.

Three retainers, no pipeline, and a "coming soon" website.

You're the CEO, the rep, the recruiter, the deck-builder, and the bookkeeper.

We're not competing with your task manager.
We're sitting above it.

We're early. The operators we built this with aren't.

Questions every operator asks in the first five minutes.

Your week is going to happen whether you decide what matters or not.

You're fixing their company. Who's fixing yours?

We asked 152 fractionals: what's killing your week?

What this is costing you is measurable.

Vantum scores your week the way a good chief of staff would.

From Monday morning chaos to Friday "did the right things."

Brain-dump everything. Vantum sorts it later.

Tell Vantum once who matters, what you're driving toward, and how much capacity you actually have.

Your week, ranked. With the reasoning visible.

When a client fires off a deadline shift, see exactly what moved and what got cut.

Built for the operator who's the whole org chart.

Five clients, five tech stacks, five sets of priorities.

Three retainers, no pipeline, and a "coming soon" website.

You're the CEO, the rep, the recruiter, the deck-builder, and the bookkeeper.

We're not competing with your task manager.We're sitting above it.

We're early. The operators we built this with aren't.

Questions every operator asks in the first five minutes.

Your week is going to happen whether you decide what matters or not.

We're not competing with your task manager.
We're sitting above it.