Comment by muzani

You need a crowbar. Enter at an angle, then pry it off.

Slack is my favorite example. It looked like chat. It had a hash, like IRC channels did. But it was actually email! It cut down back and forth in email. You can just give someone an emoji callback instead of emailing them, "Noted." You can send documents. You have a history of conversations and it was easy to CC the boss if someone didn't cooperate. People no longer spent the whole day replying emails.

Or Amazon. Instead of selling everything online, they started with books. Books were annoying to buy and easy to "ship".

A modern example might be Cursor. People already use VSC. They kept the exact same interface, added a few extra features, and end up selling agents. There's lots of agents out there which are great like Aider, but many are too far from someone's workflow.

Most of these are in the form of "create a channel people use, then sell things down that channel".