they don't compete, they suffocate

i heard a story today that i can't shake. a company built something that could cut what ordinary people pay by more than half. the incumbent did not respond with a better product. it simply stopped processing for nine months, quietly, to bleed the smaller company out.

that is how incumbents actually fight. not with innovation, with process. the chokepoint is never the product. it is the financing, the approvals, the compliance layer wrapped around the product, where a large player can just slow the flow to nothing.

so the real disruption was not the clever technology. it was removing the chokepoint, routing around the gatekeeper entirely, putting the thing on rails no one could quietly switch off. it filled in a single day.

where is the chokepoint in what you are building, and who gets to close it?