Part 3: The Workaround Economy
// the guide was never the vision. it was the vision compressed to fit the capital available.
log 07.12.26
There’s a builder I’ve been watching for a while now. He goes by Ryan AI, and what he does, on the surface, is simple: he offers free technical help to small businesses. He researches them first. He shows up consistently. He makes real recommendations to real people who could never afford a consultant.
But, if you look closer, something else is potentially happening.
What if, he couldn’t afford a marketing department, so he became the value instead of advertising it? The free help is the funnel. The research is the credibility. The consistency is the brand. He collapsed marketing, lead generation, and portfolio-building into one activity that also happens to be genuinely generous and regenerative. A funded company would hire three departments to do what he does in a single gesture. And he does all of this while making it look effortless.
The think pieces would call that hustle and celebrate it as such. But I recognize patterns, and it’s not hustle. It’s integration — the kind most funded companies couldn’t replicate if they tried, because they’ve never had to make one action do four jobs.
This is what I keep coming back to about the workaround economy — also known as the creator economy. The people building in it are not scrappy. They are some of the best systems designers alive. Constraint didn’t make them resourceful. It revealed how much design talent was already there, waiting for a problem worthy of it.
So here’s the question that follows, and it’s the one this whole series has been circling: if the ingenuity is this obvious, why doesn’t anyone fund the bridge?
For a long time, I assumed the answer was rejection. Someone looked, evaluated, and declined. I no longer think that’s what happens. I think nobody looked at all, and that is the core issue.
The people in a position to fund don’t pass through this economy. Not out of malice — out of orbit. Maybe they were born into wealth, went to wealthy schools, moved in wealthy circles, and now they do things with their wealth alongside people who also have wealth, because that’s the room they’re in. The result is a closed loop. As I thought recently, while tired and lamenting the challenges of being a founder with zero traditional backing, and I’ll keep it plain: it’s hard to get capital, funding and support, and we put the brunt of the effort on the person actually trying to build something. It’s a double whammy. Investors already have a portfolio, and they’re streaming out more capital because they have access to it. It’s just recycling the same money in the same spaces. Every now and then someone new might get a little attention. But that doesn’t seem like the norm, and it doesn’t support the estimated $205–323 billion in revenue being driven by the “workarounders” of the creator economy — a market Research and Markets puts at ~$323B this year, up 26.5% year-over-year1, that Goldman Sachs projects will roughly double from its 2023 baseline to ~$480 billion by 20272, and that long-range forecasts have crossing $1 trillion by the early 2030s. More than 207 million people worldwide identify as creators3.
A thousand tiny cuts. And every now and then, someone brings you a Band-Aid.
I don’t say any of this to assign guilt. Guilt is a dead end, and critique of someone’s wealth converts exactly no one. What’s missing isn’t shame. It’s exposure. I sometimes imagine it as a ride-along: come spend a day inside a lifestyle that isn’t yours. The local BBQ restaurant. The grocery store without the premium prices. The hours at the braiding shop. Not a panel, not a pitch event where the small builder performs for the funded room — an actual exchange. And it goes both ways. Maybe you introduce me to the $89 bottle of wine I’d never have considered, and it turns out it’s only forty dollars past the one I’d have bought. There could be something beautiful in sharing across those lines.
But there has to be an avenue. And I’ll be honest about a limit: I can see both sides of this divide, and seeing is not the same as carrying. I’m not sure I have the capacity to be everyone’s bridge.
But, here’s what I know instead.
If creators had more capital, they wouldn’t just be making a guide. They’d be starting a school.
The healer selling a PDF would be running a clinic. The teacher selling a Notion template would be running an academy. The vendor from the market I wrote about — real food, loyal customers, no infrastructure — would be running the neighborhood institution her cooking already deserves.
And me? If capital weren’t the constraint, Cielo Studio wouldn’t be a catalog of guides and sessions. It would be a network of local hubs, one in every major city, each building applications for the people around it, gathering real research on technology access, holding rooms where everyone — everyone — learns how technology works and how to make it better. Teams of developers building the apps while I lead the community work. The hubs feeding what they learn back to a center, so we could finally see the difference between technology access in China and technology access in Chicago and start closing the gap, instead of everything staying siloed while people in both places try to accomplish the same things and suffer the same costs.
That’s the visionary-sized version. What ships today is the version compressed to fit the capital available.
And the compression is everywhere once you see it. I’ve spent recent weeks trying to do something as basic as reset and upgrade my home network, and it has been a nightmare — not because networking must be this complex, but because the barriers stack: access, education, hardware, security, encryption. Layer on layer. And nobody with real support has been allowed to sit down and streamline it. Or they tried, and their work was stolen, or silenced, or starved.
So the vision compresses. The school becomes a guide. The clinic becomes a PDF. The academy becomes a template. Genius, everywhere, shipping at a fraction of its intended size and potential impact.
Which brings me to the question I actually can’t stop asking.
Why doesn’t any of it compound?
Every builder I’ve described is brilliant alone. The ingenuity is everywhere. The pooling is nowhere. Each one solving the same problems solo, marketing solo, absorbing the same platform tax solo — hustling toward twenty thousand followers because a mega-following is the only conversion path anyone left them.
And it’s not just exhausting the builders. It’s exhausting everyone. On the other side of the screen, nobody wants to follow a thousand creators to find the one thing that works for them. Nobody wants to be guilted into boosting someone to twenty thousand followers and be rewarded with more notifications, more content, more noise they can’t keep up with. Both sides of this economy are tired. The whole arrangement, to use a professional term from a former life, is whack.
But imagine it differently. Imagine the vendor with the loyal customers, the builder with the drop-ship setup, the one who can fix the Bluetooth speaker — pooling what they have instead of paralleling it. A bundle three people market together instead of three people hustling alone. Representatives who surface the creators underneath them, so the audience gets fewer, better doors instead of a thousand competing ones. Effort that adds up instead of running side by side.
That’s not a marketplace fantasy. That’s a village. The thing modern life quietly deleted and never replaced. The thing whose few remaining forms are gatekept so hard that access to them is, if you really think about it, shameful.
We don’t need to reach across the aisle. We need to reach next door.
What would it take to build that on purpose?
I’ll show you soon.
// the guide was never the vision. it was the vision compressed to fit the capital available.
Between Code & Conscience is written by Crystal A. Chubbs — founder, technologist, and The People’s CTO. I write about building technology that doesn’t extract from the people it serves.
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Research and Markets, Creator Economy Market Report 2026 — projecting growth from $205.66B (2025) to $323.48B (2026) at a 26.5% CAGR. researchandmarkets.com/reports/6226071/creator-economy-market-report
Goldman Sachs Research, creator economy total addressable market analysis — projecting the market roughly doubles from its ~$250B 2023 baseline to approximately $480B by 2027.
Creator population estimates cluster around 207 million worldwide as of 2026, with some counts running as high as 303 million depending on methodology.