What is a business that looked like a fad and turned out to be infrastructure?

Online ordering for restaurants. In 2015 it looked like a convenience gimmick for lazy diners, and most operators treated it that way: a tablet in the corner, someone's side job to babysit it. Then it quietly became the plumbing. Menus, pricing, inventory, and kitchen throughput all had to restructure around it, and now a restaurant without a digital ordering layer is missing a limb, not a feature.

The product lesson, which is my beat, is how you tell a fad from infrastructure early. A fad changes what people demand. Infrastructure changes how the work gets done. When adopting the thing forces you to rebuild your workflow around it, and ripping it out later would break operations, you are looking at infrastructure wearing a fad costume. QR code menus are the counterexample worth watching: adoption spiked for external reasons, but for many operators it never restructured the workflow, so it receded.

When I write a PRD, that is the question I ask about our own features: if we removed this in a year, would customers shrug, or would their operation break? Build toward the second answer. Fads get engagement. Infrastructure gets renewal.

Slack. In 2014 it looked like a toy: another chat app with emoji, one more place for work to get noisy. I watched it from the support side, and the tell wasn't adoption, it was what happened during outages. When a fad goes down, nobody notices. When Slack goes down, support queues everywhere light up in minutes because whole companies stop moving. That's the infrastructure test from my seat: does an outage read as an inconvenience or an incident?

The pattern I'd tell operators to watch for in their own tools: fads get evaluated, infrastructure gets assumed. When new hires stop asking whether to use the thing and just expect it on day one, when your onboarding docs reference it without explaining it, it has crossed over.

If you're trying to figure out whether something you're building is a fad or future plumbing, don't measure signups. Measure what breaks in your customers' day when you're unavailable, and how fast they tell you. Angry tickets during downtime are a strange kind of compliment. Silence is the scary signal.

From where I sit, the answer is Slack. In 2014 it read like a toy: a chat app with emoji, the kind of thing a serious operator would ban to protect focus. Then watch what actually happened inside companies. Incident response moved there. Approvals moved there. The daily standup, the on-call rotation, the "who owns this" question all moved there. When the place where owners and deadlines get assigned lives in one tool, that tool is no longer a fad. It is the operating cadence itself, and pulling it out would halt the company.

My beat gives me a simple test for fad versus infrastructure: does the business own a recurring decision, or just a moment of attention? Fads capture attention once. Infrastructure sits inside a loop that repeats weekly, so switching costs compound every cycle. Fax machines, payroll providers, and shared calendars all passed the same test.

What I would measure to confirm it for any candidate: how many recurring workflows route through the tool, and what breaks on day one if you turn it off. If the honest answer is "nothing," it was a fad wearing an infrastructure costume.