The pitch was the whole technical operations department.
Not another hosting company. Not a consultant who showed up, fixed one thing, and left. A startup would hand us the systems behind its product and we would keep them running.
The list got long quickly: web servers, load balancers, authentication, storage, firewalls, deployment, source control, monitoring, backups, and support when something broke at a terrible hour.
Most of those pieces already existed. The problem was making them work together without hiring a room full of specialists. We thought the answer was software. Build the glue once, use it across customers, and give every company a cleaner way to see what was happening.
The target was a company stuck in the middle. It had outgrown one developer and a cloud account, but it was not ready to build an enterprise infrastructure team. It needed grown-up operations before it had grown-up headcount.
That was a problem I knew. Beatport had lived through it. Peek had lived through it. Reality Check was selling pieces of the answer in a more traditional way.
Monk Networks would package the whole thing.
The working plan still had too much in it. We had a market, a pile of services, a support model, a software layer, and enough spreadsheets to make it look official. We did not yet have the one sentence that made a customer immediately understand why it mattered.
The idea was big because the problem was big. That did not mean the first version should be.