Contents
The Headline
One operator — with zero prior software engineering experience — shipped 10 production systems spanning 7 verticals and 2 geographies in 116 calendar days. Total build cost: $65,054. Replacement value: $795K–$2.9M. Equity retained: 100%.
What Was Built
| System | What It Does | Build Time |
|---|---|---|
| Internal operations platform | Replaced 6 SaaS vendors — CRM, tracking, analytics, comms | 74 days |
| Seasonal e-commerce | Personalized video products with 7 integrations | 28 days |
| Insurance lead gen (Life) | Vertical-specific lead capture and routing | 24 days |
| Insurance lead gen (Auto) | Vertical-specific lead capture and routing | 23 days |
| Insurance lead gen (Annuities) | Vertical-specific lead capture and routing | 25 days |
| Insurance lead gen (Financial) | Multi-vertical financial services platform | 11 days |
| Insurance quoting (South Africa) | Lead gen across 11 sub-verticals | 20 days |
| Insurance quoting (United States) | US market expansion of ZA product | 16 days |
| Legal services lead gen | PRJ-03 vertical | 9 days |
| Business reporting | Customer report generation platform | 5 days |
The Progression
Every metric moved in the same direction over the 116 days. This isn't random variation — it's the signature of a compounding system.
Speed: Build Times Compressed
Days to Functional Product
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Early projects ████████████████████████████████████████████ 23-43 days
Mid projects ████████████████████████████ 11-28 days
Late projects █████████ 4-9 days
──────────────────────────────────
From weeks to days.Cost: External Support Collapsed
External Support Cost Per Project
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
1st project ████████████████████████████████ $7,995
4th project ████████████████ $1,680
7th project ███ $330
8th project █ $90
9th project ▏ $0
From $8K to $0.Dependency: Operator Took Over
Who Did the Work (Monthly)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Oct 2025 ██████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ Operator 30% | External 70%
Nov 2025 ██████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ Operator 44% | External 48%
Dec 2025 ██████████████████████░░░░░░░░ Operator 73% | External 25%
Jan 2026 ████████████████████████████░░ Operator 93% | External 7%
█ = Operator ░ = ExternalQuality: Held Under Acceleration
The portfolio maintained a 12.1% product defect rate — half to one-fifth of the industry norm (20–50%) — while output increased 4.6x over the build period. Speed and quality moved together, not against each other.
The Financial Picture
What It Cost vs. What It's Worth
Build Investment vs. Replacement Value
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Actual cost ██ $65,054
Market value (low) ████████████████████████████████████████████████ $795,000
Market value (high)████████████████████████████████████████████████ $2,900,000
████████████████████████████████████████████████
████████████████████████████████████████████████
████████████████████████████████████████████████
ROI: 23x to 84xOperating Model Transformation
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly operating cost | $6,312 average | ~$825 |
| Contractor spend | $9,046/mo peak | $0 |
| SaaS vendors | 6 platforms | 0 (internal) |
| External dependency | ~70% | ~7% |
| Equity sold | 0% | 0% |
The operator built $795K–$2.9M in replacement value while retaining 100% equity. No investors. No co-founders. No dilution.
Why It Matters
This is solo-operator viability at institutional scale. 10 production systems across 7 verticals and 2 geographies is not a side project. It's an infrastructure portfolio that would traditionally require a funded engineering team of 4–6 people working 12–18 months.
The economics have inverted. The $34,473 in external support investment produced $795K–$2.9M in replacement value. Traditional build economics — where construction is the expensive part — no longer apply.
Compounding is measurable. The progression from weeks to days, from $8K to $0, from 70% dependency to 7% — every stage has numbers attached. This isn't theory.
Key Numbers
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Systems shipped | 10 |
| Verticals covered | 7 |
| Geographies | 2 (US + South Africa) |
| Calendar days | 116 |
| Total build cost | $65,054 |
| Replacement value | $795K–$2.9M |
| ROI on support investment | 23.1x–84.1x |
| Product defect rate | 12.1% (industry: 20–50%) |
| Final external dependency | ~7% |
| Equity retained | 100% |
References
- McConnell, S. (2004). Code Complete, 2nd ed. Microsoft Press. Industry defect rates of 20–50% for typical software projects.
- Rollbar (2021). "Developer Survey: Fixing Bugs Stealing Time from Development." 26% of developers spend up to half their time on bug fixes; 38% spend up to a quarter. Source
- Stripe (2018). "The Developer Coefficient." Estimated $85 billion lost annually to inefficient code maintenance and technical debt. Source
- Coralogix (2021). "This Is What Your Developers Are Doing 75% of the Time." Analysis of developer time allocation to debugging and maintenance. Source
- Keating, M.G. (2026). "Foundation: The Compounding Knowledge Base." Stealth Labz CEM Papers. Read paper
- Keating, M.G. (2026). "Governor: The Sustainable Execution Constraint." Stealth Labz CEM Papers. Read paper
- Keating, M.G. (2026). "Drift Tax: The Measurable Cost of AI-Assisted Errors." Stealth Labz CEM Papers. Read paper