Pulse by Fractionl
Pulse is the independent market instrument for fractional leadership. It publishes the Fractional Working Index (FWI), a free 0 to 100 composite showing whether demand is expanding, which C-suite roles are moving, and how strong the evidence is.
Live product · Current FWI JSON · Corporate strategy · Technical specification
Product scope
Pulse covers fractional CFO, CMO, CTO, COO, CRO, and interim CEO roles. Current role-demand collectors are US-scoped; English-language cultural inputs can include UK material but do not create a UK market benchmark. Twenty tracked inputs contribute to three pillars:
FWI = (Demand × 0.50) + (Supply × 0.20) + (Culture × 0.30)
Pulse recalculates after each successful scheduled ingest. DataForSEO job tasks are prepared at 05:00 UTC, Vercel calls the main ingest at 06:00 UTC daily, and Monday has redundant ingest coverage. Weekly describes the briefing cycle and the seven-day role windows, not the score calculation frequency. Pulse is a private composite published by Fractionl, not an official or government index. It is not real-time, peer-reviewed, academically validated, backtested, or a promise of future market performance.
Who it serves
Free public audience
- Fractional executives reading market and role movement
- Companies considering a fractional leader
- Researchers and journalists citing the public instrument
- Developers and AI agents using the public REST API or MCP tools
Fractional executives are an important audience, but they are not the primary payer. The public index, role pages, brief, REST API, and MCP tools remain free.
Primary paying ICP
The first commercial hypothesis is a specialist fractional-executive marketplace, staffing or placement firm, or collective in the United States or United Kingdom that:
- Places several C-suite functions
- Completes at least 50 engagements per year
- Is typically around 5 to 50 staff or £1 million to £30 million in revenue, used as a targeting heuristic rather than a hard gate
- Stores structured engagement data in an ATS, CRM, or marketplace
- Lacks an independent market-intelligence function
- Can contribute privacy-safe anonymised engagement records
The economic buyer is usually the founder, CEO, managing director, or COO. They are not buying a larger quota for the public score. The proposed paid value is a private comparison of their book against a verified, multi-partner cohort.
Explicitly not the ICP
Pulse is not an adtech product and is not for publishers as a paid product. Advertising buyers, media outlets, journalists, individual executives, single-hire companies, generic staffing firms, and AI-agent builders may use the public instrument. They are not the primary economic buyer.
Problem and positioning
The fractional leadership market still runs on anecdotes.
Specialist firms see their own pipeline but struggle to separate company-specific performance from market movement. Pricing, supply allocation, expansion, and client advice are often based on a small internal sample, public job searches, peer conversations, and generic staffing reports.
Public promise:
Read the fractional leadership market like an instrument.
Partner promise:
Benchmark your book against the market before your pipeline tells you too late.
Go Fractional already publishes free role, demand, and compensation benchmarks. Pulse must not claim to be the first or only fractional index. The paid thesis becomes differentiated only when Pulse combines the transparent public instrument with privacy-safe first-party engagement data from several independent partners.
Offers and pricing
Paid prices are strategic hypotheses until customers pay. Conditional plans are not generally available.
| Offer | Price | Status |
|---|
| Public instrument | £0 | Live, including score, history, role pages, brief, REST API, MCP tools, methodology, and source health |
| Founding Benchmark Partner | £1,500 for 90 days | Application-only validation offer, maximum ten organisations, subject to data and privacy review |
| Benchmark Membership | £6,000 per year | Conditional on ten active partners, 500 verified trailing-12-month engagements, and safe cohorts |
| Enterprise and portfolio | From £15,000 per year | Conditional on 1,500 verified engagements and sufficient cohort coverage |
Every displayed partner cohort must meet the approved minimum record count and contain data from at least three independent organisations. Exact privacy and suppression rules must be approved before partner-data ingestion launches.
See docs/CORPORATE_STRATEGY.md for the evidence matrix, assumptions, ICP, go-to-market plan, and validation gates.
What is live
- Current FWI, demand, supply, and culture components
- Twelve months of mixed-frequency history, with daily observations accumulating since June 2026
- Six role-demand pages and cross-sectional role movement
- Weekly market brief, Ask the Index, and machine-readable discovery surfaces
- Public REST endpoints and four hosted MCP tools
- Data completeness and per-source health
- Supabase Auth for saved account context
- Daily scheduled ingestion, Monday backstops, and pipeline alerts
Historical coverage is not uniform. Supply and culture do not have live coverage across the entire displayed period. Role pages measure demand, not role-specific supply.
Agent and developer access
Public reads require no authentication:
curl https://dtlcprcpvdomrehbejhw.supabase.co/functions/v1/fwi-api/current
curl "https://dtlcprcpvdomrehbejhw.supabase.co/functions/v1/fwi-api/history?months=3"
curl https://dtlcprcpvdomrehbejhw.supabase.co/functions/v1/export-brief
Base URL: https://dtlcprcpvdomrehbejhw.supabase.co/functions/v1
| Endpoint | Purpose |
|---|
GET /fwi-api/current | Latest composite, components, prior-period change, movers, source details, and completeness |
GET /fwi-api/history?months=N | Historical score observations, with N clamped to 1 through 12 |
GET /fwi-roles | Demand readings for the six covered roles |
GET /export-brief | Weekly brief as Markdown or JSON |
POST /fwi-api/trigger | Service-role-only ingestion trigger, not public |
Optional API keys support operational rate controls. They are not a paid generic-data tier.
Hosted MCP server:
https://dtlcprcpvdomrehbejhw.supabase.co/functions/v1/mcp
Tools:
get_fractional_working_indexget_fwi_weekly_briefget_content_radarget_content_brief
Discovery surfaces:
/product-truth.json/llms.txt/.well-known/ai-plugin.json/sitemap.xml/feed.xml
Methodology and integrity
The weighting is Demand 50%, Supply 20%, and Culture 30%. If a pillar has no live data for a reading, its weight is redistributed proportionally and the response exposes the effective weights and completeness.
The tracked inputs include job postings, search interest, company-financing context, professional profiles, GoFractional's published operator-network size, public discourse, news, podcasts, self-employment, and macro context. Context signals enrich interpretation but are excluded from the composite where documented.
Integrity controls include:
- Per-source provenance and health status
- Anomaly checks against rolling history
- Weighted completeness in each score response
- Prior-period comparisons based on observed records
- Idempotent signal writes
- Pipeline execution logs and failure alerts
- A read-only weekly pipeline audit
The SEC Form D input is treated as a financing-context signal that may precede some fractional hiring. Its predictive relationship has not been validated, so Pulse must not attach a forecast-accuracy claim to it.
Architecture
| Layer | Stack |
|---|
| Frontend | React 18, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui, Framer Motion, Recharts, React Query |
| Backend | Supabase Postgres and Edge Functions |
| Auth | Supabase Auth |
| AI summaries | OpenAI model invoked from server-side functions, with caching and rate controls |
| Scheduling | Supabase pg_cron prepares DataForSEO Jobs at 05:00 UTC; Vercel schedules the main ingest at 06:00 UTC daily and a Monday backstop; Supabase retains a Monday ingest backstop |
| Deployment | Vercel at pulse.fractionl.ai |
Core Edge Functions:
| Function | Responsibility |
|---|
prepare-dataforseo-jobs | Submit six idempotent async DataForSEO Google Jobs tasks at 05:00 UTC, record task IDs, and leave retrieval to the 06:00 ingest |
ingest-signals | Collect and normalise tracked inputs |
calculate-fwi | Produce the composite and movers |
fwi-api | Serve current, historical, and protected trigger routes |
fwi-roles | Serve role-demand readings |
export-brief | Produce the weekly market brief |
generate-pulse-insights | Produce cached summaries grounded in the index pipeline |
fwi-verdict | Answer a scoped index question with origin, rate, and prompt controls |
mcp | Expose the hosted MCP server |
send-pipeline-alert | Send operational alerts |
Local development
Requirements: current Node.js LTS and npm.
git clone https://github.com/krishanraja/fractionl-pulse
cd fractionl-pulse
npm install
Copy-Item .env.example .env
npm run dev
The browser bundle requires:
VITE_SUPABASE_URL
VITE_SUPABASE_ANON_KEY
Server routes and scheduled jobs use:
SUPABASE_URL
SUPABASE_SERVICE_ROLE_KEY
CRON_SECRET
See .env.example for the complete integration list. Never commit private keys or service-role credentials.
Verification
npx tsc --noEmit
npm run build
npm run lint
npm run docs:audit
npm run audit
npm run audit:json
npm run smoke:release -- --skip-site
The audit is read-only. It checks schedule adherence, source health, completeness, and provenance against the committed baseline. A degraded audit is an incident to investigate, not a result to hide. smoke:release exercises the public APIs, MCP compatibility, security boundaries, Ask the Index stream, discovery files, and live site routes; set PULSE_URL to verify a preview before production.
Documentation map
| Document | Purpose |
|---|
| Agent entry file | What a coding agent reads first: routes to NOW.md, then this repository's own rules. Carries the marker-delimited canon block rendered from krishanraja/ai-harness |
| Where it is right now | Current-state router: lifecycle, the main commit it was reconciled against, recent changes, what to read next, and what not to trust |
| History log | Append-only record of reconciliations, decisions, and superseded documents moved into docs/history/ |
| Corporate strategy | Canonical ICP, buyer pains, positioning, pricing, evidence, and validation gates |
| North star | User outcome, buyer outcome, moat metric, and near-term gate |
| Monetization strategy | Packaging, price tests, and commercial rules |
| Sales playbook | Qualification, discovery, pilot, objections, and outreach |
| Agent briefing | Current claims, offers, and prohibited language for AI agents |
| Autonomous GTM playbook |
Contact
