How to Launch in 4 Verticals with 79% Lower Costs Using Shared Software Architecture

Key Takeaways

Most operators who want to enter multiple business verticals face a brutal math problem.
According to a 2023 McKinsey analysis, 70% of digital transformation projects fail to reach their stated goals, with fragmented infrastructure cited as a leading cause.
The shared architecture provides everything a new product needs except the business logic specific to that vertical.
If you are considering entering multiple verticals, the decision is not "can I afford four builds?" It is "can I afford to build the first one correctly?" The shared architecture model means your first product carries the full infrastructure cost.

The Setup

Most operators who want to enter multiple business verticals face a brutal math problem. Each new vertical means a new build: new database, new user management, new admin tools, new deployment setup. If one build costs $30,000-$50,000 and takes 3-4 months, four verticals means $120,000-$200,000 and a year of work before any of them generate revenue.

The conventional approach treats each vertical as an independent project. You hire a team (or an outsourced firm), scope the work, build it, test it, deploy it. Then you do the whole thing again for the next vertical. Each project starts from zero. Each one carries the full startup cost.

This is why most operators stay in one vertical. The expansion math does not work unless you are well-funded. But the math changes completely when you stop building each product from scratch and start deploying from a shared architecture.

What the Data Shows

According to a 2023 McKinsey analysis, 70% of digital transformation projects fail to reach their stated goals, with fragmented infrastructure cited as a leading cause. Standish Group's CHAOS Report consistently finds that multi-project environments see cost overruns of 45-65% when each project is managed independently.

Inside the Stealth Labz portfolio, operator Michael George Keating built four insurance-vertical products -- life (PRJ-08), auto (PRJ-09), annuities (PRJ-10), and financial services (PRJ-11) -- from one shared software architecture. The cost trajectory tells the story:

PRJ-08 (first product): $7,995 in external support
PRJ-09 (second product): $4,005
PRJ-10 (third product): $4,080
PRJ-11 (fourth product): $1,680

That is a 79% cost reduction from the first product to the fourth. Total across all four: $17,760. A traditional approach -- four independent builds at even a conservative $30,000 each -- would have cost $120,000 or more.

The build timelines held steady too. PRJ-08 shipped in 24 active days. PRJ-09 in 23. PRJ-10 in 25. PRJ-11 -- the most complex of the four, covering five sub-verticals -- shipped in 11 active days. The fourth product was the fastest despite being the most complex, because each sibling deepened the shared foundation available to the next.

Quality did not degrade. The first three products hit nearly identical rework rates: 3.8%, 3.9%, and 3.7% respectively. Industry norms for software rework sit between 20-50% (McConnell, Code Complete). These products came in at roughly one-fifth of that floor, because when the infrastructure underneath is clean, everything built on it starts clean.

How It Works

The shared architecture provides everything a new product needs except the business logic specific to that vertical. Authentication, database structure, admin interfaces, deployment pipelines, API routing, error handling -- all of this was built once and deployed four times. Each product received only what made it different: the vertical-specific questionnaire flow, the provider matching rules, and the compliance requirements unique to that insurance type.

This is not copy-paste. Each product is a full production deployment with its own codebase, its own hosting, and its own configuration. But 80% of the underlying work -- the infrastructure layer -- was inherited from the shared architecture rather than rebuilt from scratch. Development started at the business value layer on day one, not the plumbing layer.

The result is that each product simultaneously benefits from and contributes to the shared foundation. PRJ-09 inherited the dashboard patterns from PRJ-08 and refined them. PRJ-10 inherited the refined version. By the time PRJ-11 was built, the foundation was deep enough that an 11-day build produced 127,832 lines of production code spanning five sub-verticals.

What This Means for Business Operators

If you are considering entering multiple verticals, the decision is not "can I afford four builds?" It is "can I afford to build the first one correctly?" The shared architecture model means your first product carries the full infrastructure cost. Every product after that inherits the investment and pays only for the vertical-specific work.

The 79% cost reduction between the first and fourth product is not a projection. It is the measured outcome from four production deployments built between October and November 2025, with all metrics verified through git records. For operators who need to test multiple markets without committing six- or seven-figure budgets to each one, shared architecture changes the expansion math from prohibitive to practical.

References

McKinsey & Company (2023). "Digital Transformation Report." Failure rates and infrastructure fragmentation in multi-project digital transformations.
Standish Group. "CHAOS Report." Cost overruns in independently managed multi-project environments.
McConnell, S. Code Complete. Industry baseline rework rates of 20-50% across software projects.
Keating, M.G. (2026). "Case Study: One Scaffold, Four Products." Stealth Labz. Read case study
Keating, M.G. (2026). "The Compounding Execution Method: Complete Technical Documentation." Stealth Labz. Browse papers