“About”
I’m Sam Petrenko — a fractional CTO for AI startups and SaaS, and the founder of LeadCognition.io. I work with founders who need senior technical leadership before hiring a full-time CTO: product architecture, AI system design, technical hiring, and the judgment calls that shape whether a company builds the right thing or burns time on the wrong one.
Seventeen years and four companies give me a specific lens. I have been the operator, the engineer, the product owner, and the GTM builder — not in theory, but in practice across companies that had real clients, real revenue pressure, and real consequences for bad decisions.
Four chapters that connect
Webinse (2009–2016) was where I learned to run a company. We built Magento and WordPress projects for international clients — Gavriele Brands, KKL Luzern, ATO24, others — and I had to figure out hiring, delivery, operations, and how to keep a 70-person organization producing at a high level. I built Webinse Academy from scratch because the market was not giving me the engineers I needed, so I trained them myself.
Fruitfulcode (2014–2020) was where I learned to productize. We turned engineering capacity into WordPress themes and plugins — real products with documentation, support flows, analytics, download funnels, and SEO. The question stopped being “can we build it?” and became “can people find it, understand it, and pay for it?” That shift in thinking is what separates a technical co-founder from a contractor.
Mates Marketing (2020–2025) was where I applied the same operator muscle to growth. We built lead-generation systems for US home-improvement companies: TCPA-compliant landing pages, paid media, ZIP targeting, API integrations, and CRM workflows. The product was pipeline. We crossed $1M in revenue and documented 25–50% lead-to-appointment conversion ranges across campaigns.
LeadCognition.io (2026–present) is where all of it converges. I am building an AI GTM agent for developer-led sales: public GitHub activity becomes account signals, account signals become buyer context, buyer context becomes sharper outreach. It is CTO as a service thinking applied to my own product — AI systems, API/SDK design, developer data, and revenue operations in one place.
What I Work On
- Fractional CTO for AI startups — product scope, architecture, model selection, and technical hiring before the team gets expensive
- Fractional CTO for SaaS — roadmap, delivery reviews, AI feature decisions, and engineering team design
- CTO as a service — ongoing senior technical leadership on a flexible basis for founders not ready to hire full-time
- AI GTM consulting — GitHub intent signals, developer data pipelines, and AI-assisted outbound research
- Fractional GTM and RevOps — ICP, account scoring, CRM structure, and pipeline systems for AI SaaS teams
- Full-stack TypeScript, Node.js, React, Astro, and modern web systems
- Hiring, team design, and engineering operations
Background
- Architecture of Complex Systems & System Thinking at MIT
- Economics at Kyiv-Mohyla Business School
- Master’s in Software Development from Zaporizhzhya National Technical University
- Languages: Ukrainian, English, and Russian
Connect
The fastest way is email — sam@petrenko.cv. If you want to understand the kind of work I do before reaching out, the consulting page is the right place to start.