Why do niche, vertical-specific accounting tools succeed where broad QuickBooks replacements struggle?

The view expressed is that many new general ledger tools are fighting a losing battle against QuickBooks/Xero because those incumbents can simply bolt on competing features and retain market share. A more durable strategy is building narrowly for a specific vertical (in this case, real estate investors) rather than trying to replicate QuickBooks. The approach described started with designing the right data schema and database, then focusing on getting data in via PDFs, email, Plaid, CSV scraping, and even screenshotting a CSV into Claude. Once data sits in a real database with a clean schema, you don't need to know upfront everything you'll do with it — you can expand later. Staying narrow (no accounts receivable, no payroll, no payment execution) allowed building a clean, structured database focused specifically on real estate investor pain points, offering portfolio-wide visibility that QuickBooks doesn't provide, rather than competing head-to-head with QuickBooks on its own terms.