Extant 2000: Building a Product Family Solo
How one person maintains hosting, HR, CRM, e-sign, accounting, and more.
Extant 2000 is my umbrella for a family of products: hosting, HR, CRM, systems engineering, e-signatures, accounting, a helpdesk, and more. Building that breadth solo sounds absurd. Here's how it's possible.
Share the foundation
Every product sits on the same foundation: a common auth and data layer, a shared component library, one deployment pipeline. A new product is a new app on rails that already exist, not a new stack.
One box, many fronts
They all run as containers on the same infrastructure (the stack), each routed by hostname. Adding a product is a compose service and a subdomain, not a new server.
Boring on purpose
The only way to hold this much surface area solo is to be ruthless about consistency (same patterns, same libraries, same conventions everywhere) so switching between products is cheap. The interesting work goes into the products; the plumbing is deliberately uniform.
Shared foundations turn "ten products" into "one platform with ten faces."