Itwerx is a service-disabled veteran-owned managed IT provider serving businesses in Seattle, Bellevue, Everett, Lynnwood and Snohomish County, founded in 2005. This particular piece is aimed at a different audience than most of what appears here – technology startup founders rather than the established 20-to-200-employee businesses Itwerx typically works with – because the underlying frame, that nobody is deep in every layer, is useful well beyond that audience.
The layers, roughly top to bottom
A fully interactive website, SaaS product or app has, approximately: graphics, UI/UX, layout, client-side code, a server-side public interface (APIs and the like), server-side frameworks, server-side application code, server-side database or other backend service code, the server-side apps that provide those services, the operating system, and the hardware underneath all of it. Wrapped around every layer are bandwidth, load balancing, redundancy, cybersecurity, and ongoing monitoring.
Most people, even with decades of experience, are genuinely deep in only two to four of those layers. That is not a knock on anyone’s competence – it is closer to buying a car versus designing one from scratch: sourcing every part, working with every vendor, and building the support network behind it is a different order of undertaking than picking a finished product off a lot.
Two pieces of advice that follow from that
First: do not look for a single technology partner who can do everything. Very few people in the world can genuinely operate across all of those layers at once, and even the rare person who can is usually far more interested in running their own venture than in joining someone else’s.
Second: expect to throw away a first proof of concept or MVP and rebuild it. This is one operator’s estimate, not a market study, but a properly designed, scalable and secure technology product typically needs a minimum investment somewhere in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars to build right. An MVP put together for a fraction of that, including one built quickly with the help of AI, is a useful way to prove an idea – it is not the product, and treating it as one is the mistake that costs the most later.
AI tooling can genuinely help get an idea from nothing to something rough and demonstrable. It does not currently substitute for the deep, narrow expertise the later layers actually require, and betting the rebuild on it doing so is the same mistake in a new coat.
Itwerx Corp is a service-disabled veteran-owned small business providing IT services across Seattle, Bellevue, Everett and Snohomish County. This is the kind of thing our vendor management work deals with – talk to us about yours.
