I came across a post a while back that I could not stop thinking about. The idea was simple: almost every successful product is just a wrapper around something that already exists.
It stuck.
GitHub is a wrapper around Git.
Supabase is a wrapper around Postgres.
Resend is a wrapper around Amazon SES - so you do not have to read AWS documentation at 11pm.
Every time someone ships one of these, someone else asks: "But is it just a wrapper?" As if that disqualifies it. As if finding something to wrap is the easy part.
It is not.
Git existed for years before GitHub. Postgres has been around since 1996. Amazon SES has been sending email at scale for over a decade. The raw materials were always there. The wrapper is what made them usable.
That is the actual product.
The best wrappers are not thin. They are opinionated. Vercel does not just deploy to AWS - it has a specific opinion about how frontend deployment should feel. Stripe does not just move money - it decided what the API should look like, what the docs should say, what the dashboard should show.
The opinion is the product.
So if you are building something, ask yourself one question: what am I wrapping?
Not as a criticism. As a clarity exercise. Because if you can answer it clearly, you understand your actual value proposition. You are not competing with the thing underneath. You are making it available to people who would never use it raw - and making decisions they do not want to make themselves.
The hard part is not finding something to wrap.
The hard part is wrapping it well enough that people choose you over just reading the documentation.
That is the whole game.