Hire,
outsource,
or prompt?
Aprena checks your next milestone against your team's proven skills and finds the one hire worth your runway.
Free 15-minute exercise to start.
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Anna K.Core billing & ledger API
94% fitchecking
TypeScriptStripe
No gap
In-house
Anna leads it. Two payment APIs shipped; AI drafts test suites.
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Lena M.Self-serve customer UI
84% fitchecking
ReactCursor
RBAC screens
AI + team
Ship with AI coding tools and Lena's review. Skip a frontend hire.
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Pavel S.Outbound & CRM pipeline
68% fitchecking
PythonWebhooks
outbound ops
AI + team
Automate lead research with AI scripts. Founders still close deals.
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Omar R.AWS & SOC 2 readiness
56% fitchecking
AWSTerraform
SOC 2 audit
Fractional
Omar runs AWS. Book a fractional security lead 1 day/week till audit.
- No matchApplied AI evaluation 0% fitchecking Nobody on the team evals & retrieval Hire first Your core differentiation. Spend your one full-time salary here.
4 of 5 workstreams covered by your team, AI and 1 day/week fractional help. Spend your full-time hire where your moat lives.
Where AI works, and where experts pay off
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Lena M. · Self-serve UIAI + review
AI coding tools build the admin screens. Lena has four years of React to review every PR before merge.
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Pavel S. · Outbound opsAutomate
Pavel wires up AI account enrichment in two days. Founders keep running discovery calls themselves.
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Omar R. · SOC 2 readinessFractional · 1d/wk
Omar owns Terraform. A fractional security lead guides the audit for €2,500/mo instead of a €10.5k/mo hire.
You stop paying salaries for tasks AI can draft, and stop trusting AI with what makes your product defensible.
See what each hire does to your runway
- Lean plan runway
- 11.3mo
- Wishlist hiring runway
- 6.3mo Out of cash before Series A
- Burn saved a month
- €29k
Extra runway to hit traction
1 core full-time hire + 1 fractional day/week instead of 4 full-time salaries at once.
Investors see a hiring plan tied directly to milestones, not a generic headcount wishlist.
Startups burn runway in two ways: hiring for everything, or trusting AI with everything.
- Seed round lands
You have twelve urgent roadmap items, aggressive growth targets and budget for maybe one or two salaries.
- Week three
Half your feed says “build a €10M company with three people and AI.” Investors ask why you haven't hired four seniors yet.
- Month three
You either hire full-time people for CRUD and ops AI could draft in hours, or ship unreviewed AI code nobody on the team understands.
- Month eight
Runway drops under seven months. One wrong hire ate €90k, or your product stalled where real domain expertise was missing.
AI made output cheap, not expertise. What makes customers pay and investors back you is still deep judgment in the right spot. Early teams usually draw that line wrong in four ways.
- Hirefull-time salaries for UI, glue code or ops that AI plus your lead could ship.
- Promptyour way through security, compliance or core architecture nobody can verify.
- Paya permanent payroll where a fractional specialist one day a week unblocks you.
- Overlookskills your current teammates already proved two jobs ago.
Test your next 6-month roadmap before you hire.
We map your current team, run your next milestone plan through Aprena, and hand you a concrete split between AI tools, fractional experts and the hire that moves growth.
We map your founding & core team
- Verified skill profiles for up to 15 teammates from LinkedIn, CVs, repos and shipped projects, mapped to ESCO, the EU's open skill standard.
- 3 to 5 quick async check questions only where a skill or AI workflow is unclear.
- Under 45 minutes of founder time so nobody slows down shipping.
We stress-test your roadmap & burn
- Every roadmap workstream matched to your team, marked for AI + review, upskilling, fractional help or a full-time hire.
- A focused job spec for the hire you actually need, plus an investor-ready hiring rationale tied to runway.
Ready to start? Pay for the sprint
Julia Ti, founder and CEO of Aprena
Julia has spent twelve years building products around people's skills and careers, leading product and engineering teams across EdTech and software companies. Working with early-stage founders, she kept seeing both extremes fail: hiring full-time people for every routine task until cash ran out, or trying to build everything with AI alone and stalling where real technical or domain depth was missing.
Five ways to close a roadmap gap before spending a full-time salary.
For every capability your milestone needs, Aprena checks your team first, then tests whether AI tools, focused upskilling or a part-time specialist can close it before telling you to hire full-time.
Example: 5 capability gaps on a 6-person Seed startup's Q1–Q2 roadmap
| Roadmap capability | Coverage | Added burn | Best move |
|---|---|---|---|
| Self-serve admin & RBAC screensLena shipped three React products. With Cursor and UI primitives she only needs 8 hrs/wk to prompt and review. | team + AI | €0 / mo | Cover with AI |
| Outbound lead enrichment & draftsPavel knows Python and webhooks. AI scripts handle research while founders keep running sales calls. | team + AI | €150 / mo | Automate |
| Hybrid search & chunking pipelineAnna built Postgres full-text search before and needs two focused weeks on vector retrieval. | upskill | €0 / mo | Upskill |
| SOC 2 Type I & AWS hardeningOne-off enterprise sales blocker. Book someone who has passed ten audits instead of hiring full-time DevOps. | fractional | €2,500 / mo | Go fractional |
| Applied AI evaluation engineerCore product moat. Nobody in-house has built domain evals, and enterprise buyers test accuracy first. | core moat | €10,500 / mo | Hire full-time |
You leave with one clear job post to open now, one fractional brief for four days a month, and three salaries crossed off your burn.
What hiring by wishlist does to your runway
Plug in your cash, burn and the roles you think you need next.
Adjust your numbers
Runway with a lean human + AI plan
11.3 months
1 full-time hire · 1 fractional · 2 covered by AI + team
- Wishlist hiring runway
- 6.3 months (€64,000/mo)
- Monthly burn saved
- €28,700/mo
7-day Startup Hiring & AI Sprint (up to 15 people): €490 flat
You gain +5.1 months of runway and keep €344,400/year off fixed payroll.
Pays back in under 1 day of saved burn.
What founders ask before a sprint
We only have 4 to 10 people. Don't we already know what everyone can do?
You know their current role, not every system they shipped two jobs ago or where their depth stops. Founders regularly pay outside contractors for skills a teammate already proved earlier, or hand mission-critical security and data work to a generalist who loses two months learning on the job.
Why can't I just paste my roadmap into ChatGPT or Claude and ask who to hire?
A generic prompt takes titles at face value and suggests a textbook org chart built for a Series B budget. Aprena checks each teammate's real project evidence against ESCO, factors in their weekly build hours and how they use AI tools, and only recommends hiring where proof and review capacity are missing.
We want to stay a lean AI-first team. Will Aprena just tell us to hire more people?
Usually the opposite. Most startup sprints cut two or three planned full-time roles by showing where your existing team can pair AI tools with qualified review, or where a fractional specialist four days a month clears a one-off hurdle like SOC 2, billing compliance or data pipelines.
How do you decide whether AI can cover a workstream safely?
Two checks: can current AI tools produce reliable drafts for those skills, and does someone on your team have proven experience in that domain to review the work and catch subtle failures? When nobody in-house can tell a solid answer from a dangerous one, leaving it to AI turns into expensive rework.
How much time does the 7-day sprint take from founders?
About 45 minutes total. You share LinkedIn links or CVs, repos or product links, and your 6-month roadmap. Teammates only answer three to five short check questions asynchronously where a skill is unclear, and we walk through the finished plan together on a call.
Can we use the output in our fundraising deck or board updates?
Yes. Investors push back hard on vague “we'll hire five engineers with the round” slides. You get a milestone-by-milestone breakdown showing what your current team and AI cover, where fractional budget goes, and why each full-time hire directly unlocks revenue or product defensibility.
What does it cost after the €490 sprint?
The sprint report is yours to keep with no subscription required, backed by a 100% money-back guarantee. If you want ongoing roadmap checks as you ship, pivot and grow, plans are €190 a month for teams up to 20 and €490 a month up to 50. Larger teams above 15 people can start with our 14-day pilot at €1,200.
Where does our roadmap and team data live?
Files are stored on European servers we rent from Hetzner. Profiles and roadmaps are processed through the OpenAI API, which does not train models on API data. We sign an NDA before you share your roadmap or team files.
Bring your roadmap to a 30-minute founder call.
No slide deck. Tell us your team size, runway and next milestone, and we'll unpack one hiring-versus-AI decision live on the call.
Book a founder call