Case Study

One Scaffold, Four Products

Entering 4 Insurance Verticals Simultaneously — From One Shared Infrastructure

4
Products from 1 scaffold
3.7%
Best defect rate
79%
Support cost reduction

The Problem

The operator identified four insurance sub-verticals worth entering: life, auto, annuities, and financial services. Traditional approach: four separate builds, four budgets, four timelines. That's expensive and slow.

The Approach

Build one core infrastructure. Deploy it four times. Customize per vertical.

The shared infrastructure — lead capture, qualification engines, routing logic, admin interfaces, database architecture — was built once. Each product received only what made it different: carrier matching rules, compliance requirements, and vertical-specific content.

The Results

Four Products, One Infrastructure

Build Timeline (Active Days)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Life Insurance      █████████████████████████  24 days
Auto Insurance      ████████████████████████   23 days
Annuities           ██████████████████████████ 25 days
Financial Services  ███████████  11 days (3x the complexity)

Quality Held Across All Four

Build Quality (lower = cleaner)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Industry norm    ████████████████████████████████████████  20-50%

Life Insurance   ████  3.8%
Auto Insurance   ████  3.9%
Annuities        ████  3.7%  ← Portfolio best
Fin. Services    ███████████  11.3%

                 ─────────────────────────────────
                 All four at half to one-fifth industry average

The first three products hit nearly identical quality numbers (3.7–3.9%) because they share the same foundation. When the infrastructure is clean, everything built on it is clean.

External Support Cost Dropped 79%

Cost Per Product
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Life Insurance      ████████████████████████████████  $7,995
Auto Insurance      ████████████████████              $4,005
Annuities           ████████████████████              $4,080
Financial Services  ████████                          $1,680

                    1st product built the scaffold.
                    Each subsequent product inherited it.

Why It Matters

Economies of scope are real. Four products from one scaffold cost less than two products built independently. The shared infrastructure eliminates the per-product startup tax that makes multi-vertical expansion expensive.

Quality scales with the scaffold. The 3.7–3.9% quality cluster across three products isn't coincidence — it's the scaffold's quality propagating into every deployment.

Each product accelerates the next. The fourth product (Financial Services) was the most complex but built in the fewest days. Each sibling deepened the foundation available for the next.

Entering a fifth vertical becomes trivial. With the scaffold proven, a new insurance vertical requires only the vertical-specific customization — days, not weeks. The infrastructure investment was made once; the returns multiply with each deployment.

Key Numbers

Metric Value
Products shipped 4
Best build quality 3.7% (portfolio best)
Fastest build 11 active days
Support cost reduction 79% (first → fourth)
Shared infrastructure 142 common components

References

  1. McConnell, S. (2004). Code Complete, 2nd ed. Microsoft Press. Industry defect rates of 20–50% for typical software projects.
  2. Keating, M.G. (2026). "Scaffold: Deployable Architecture as Execution Accelerator." Stealth Labz CEM Papers. Read paper
  3. Keating, M.G. (2026). "Bridge: Connecting Knowledge Domains Across Projects." Stealth Labz CEM Papers. Read paper