A Vertical SaaS Platform, a Decade Before the Category — Built Twice
A full multi-tenant platform for the direct-sales industry — CRM, replicated distributor websites, marketing automation at 22M+ messages daily, compensation-plan management, payments, ecommerce — built from primitives before vertical SaaS had reference architectures.
Multi-tenancy, white-label deployment, and industry-specific workflow automation were being solved from primitives here a decade before the vertical-SaaS category existed. The platform served entire direct-sales organizations as a white-label backend — and was subsequently rebuilt for a second commercial group, validating the architecture twice.
The full write-up will cover:
- The custom mod_perl handler that replaced Apache’s vhost resolution to serve 1,000+ domains from a single instance — the clearest early example of an architectural pattern I still use today
- Multi-tenant data architecture before the patterns had names
- Email marketing automation at 22M+ messages per day on 2003 hardware
- A custom template engine with capabilities Template Toolkit did not have — structurally close to what later became edge-side includes
- What building the same platform twice teaches you that building it once cannot
Full case study coming soon.