Part 2: The Workaround Economy

// the extraction followed us here.

log 07.05.26

I’ve been watching something happen.

The workaround economy has gotten big enough to be noticed.

And now the same people who built the systems that made the workaround necessary are selling tools to the workaround builders. Premium tiers. Analytics dashboards. "Growth" subscriptions. Monetization unlocks. Things that feel like infrastructure but function like a tax on the people who already couldn't afford the original system. The creators in the workaround economy.

The door was always just the beginning. But somebody put a toll on it.

I don't think this is a conspiracy. I think it's just what capital mentalities do when they see something working...something evolving. The guides and the newsletters and the creator communities started to move real money — not platform money, not VC money, human money, community funded and sourced money — and the platforms watching said: that's interesting. How do we get inside it? How do we extract?

So now there's a creator economy inside the creator economy. And a lot of the tools built for workaround builders are designed by people who have never had to build in the margins. They understand the market. They don't understand the constraint, the drive or the mission.

Here's what that looks like in practice.

The food vendor I mentioned last time — real food, loyal customers, no digital infrastructure — isn't just unaware of the tools. She's the target market for about forty different SaaS products she can't afford, doesn't need in that configuration, and would have to spend six hours learning to set up. The tools exist. The intentional support doesn't.

The extraction model adapted. It just put on a friendlier face.

And I've been sitting with the question that follows from that: what would a tool actually designed for the workaround economy look like? Not designed for the creator economy as a market segment. Designed by someone who is inside it. Who knows what it costs to build in the margins and isn't trying to add to that cost.

That question is live for me right now. More on that soon. // thoughts before dawn

In the meantime, here's what I know.

The workaround economy doesn't need more tools that extract. It needs tools that combine. The vendor with the loyal customers and no website, the vendor with the drop-ship inventory and no marketing, the person who knows how to troubleshoot the Bluetooth speaker — they are, together, something a platform could never manufacture. Separate, they're three small tables at a market. Together, they are infrastructure. Together, they are community. They are a village.

The ones building small aren't building alone because they want to. They're building alone because the tools that would let them combine never got built. Or they got built for someone else and then sold back to us at a markup.

That's the next constraint after the door opens.

Not the system that said no. The isolation that followed the yes.

// The extraction followed us here. The next move is intentional support by combining efforts.

I would love to hear more about your experiences in the creator economy. What is working and what is not?