The playbook is the same in every vertical:
1. Identify the highest-value primitive inside a bloated bundle.
Not every feature is worth extracting. The right primitive has five traits: high bundle tax (customers overpay for the suite to access this one capability), human glue (specialists or consultants currently perform this operation manually as an integration layer), deterministic requirements (the operation must be exactly right — payroll to the penny, compliance pass/fail, legal signatures binding), recurring frequency (weekly, biweekly, continuous — not one-time), and an existing buyer (real companies already spending real money on this exact problem).
2. Ship it as a standalone, agent-native API.
No dashboard. No seat-based pricing. Versioned API contracts, structured inputs and outputs, MCP-discoverable, priced per operation or per unit. The product is the primitive — nothing more.
3. Distribute through the power users who currently do the work by hand.
This is the key insight. Every high-value primitive has a class of human expert who currently performs it: Workday consultants, compliance analysts, legal administrators, construction PMs, freight brokers. These experts are already in the room when the buyer has the problem. They don't need to be sold — they need to be armed. A tool that makes them 10x faster at the repetitive 80% of their job gets adopted through professional networks, not ad spend. The expert becomes the channel because the primitive serves their economics: more clients, same billing rate, less tedium.