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Issue 006. A week late — but as the saying goes, better late, am I right. Three things this week. First — there's a progression to how people work and how much they make, and most people are stuck somewhere in the chain without knowing it. I'll break down every level and what it actually takes to move up. Second — a scheduling tool we were using for BRISA didn't do what we needed. Instead of switching tools or waiting, I built a Chrome extension in an afternoon. Here's how non-technical operators can do the same. Third — Uber and Lyft are nearly identical products and both are worth billions. If you've been waiting for a clear lane, you're going to be waiting a while.

No fluff. Just signal.

⏱️ THIS WEEK AT A GLANCE

Read time: 6 minutes

I often hear the question — how can you work so much? And I immediately know that person has probably never been in the ugly but exciting middle. The place where you can make money out of thin air. Where every hour you work has a return you can actually quantify. No work is wasted. Why wouldn't you work 18-hour days if every hour was compensated and every hour got you closer to the goal? If I told you it takes 1,000 hours to get where you're trying to go — why waste them? Just get it over with.

The ugly, beautiful middle is a mandatory step for me. But it's just one piece of the chain.

This isn't the corporate ladder. It's more about breaking chains to acquire freedom. Let's discuss.

Level 1: Hourly — Capped

You get paid for the hours you put in. Nothing more. This isn't a bad model in the beginning — but the ceiling shows up fast. You're only allowed to work so many hours, maybe some overtime. Your earning potential is capped by a schedule you don't even control. You have zero leverage here. Your work isn't that impactful relative to the big picture — it needs to get done, and most people can do it.

Level 2: Salary

You shift here when what you do can't really be quantified hour by hour. More cognitive load, more judgment involved. A company pays you for continuous delivery, not minutes on the clock. Still employed. Still in the chain. But the ceiling is higher and the leverage is slightly better.

Here, impact dictates how much you make and what your schedule looks like. There's usually a direct correlation between impact and pay — but the pay is rarely proportional to the value you're creating. You can climb to C-suite and rake in the big bucks. That's peak corporate ladder. Most skilled workers land somewhere in the middle and stay there. Sometimes forever. There's nothing wrong with that — but it's important to know where you are and what your role in the machine actually is.

The moment that changes everything

The real shift happens when you dare to think about how much money is being made off of you.

That's the pivot. Up until that point, you're thinking about what you're getting paid. You're not thinking about the gap between that and what your work is actually worth to the company extracting it. You almost start to see it as losing potential dollars.

The math isn't complicated. In most service businesses, if you're making $X, the company is billing $3X for your work. They cover costs, they keep the spread. That's not exploitation — that's capitalism. But you have to understand it before you can do anything about it.

A good example: a contractor friend of mine accidentally received their billing rate instead of their offer — the actual rate the client was being charged, not what he was getting paid. The difference was the whole point.

Level 3: Contracting

When you understand the spread, some people decide to close it. They go independent. Build their own brand recognition, acquire their own clients — and if you do that, the entire pie, minus what Uncle Sam takes, is yours.

This isn't all glamorous. Why would someone trust you with their business? If you spent your career showing up and leaving, you probably only know your piece of a much larger machine. Now you have to learn the other pieces while convincing people they should trust you with their livelihoods.

The constraint isn't hourly caps anymore — it's capacity and visibility. How much work can you get, and how many hours do you have? If you can land enough work, you can work 18 hours a day and get paid for every one of them. Sleeping and eating are the only blockers. If you can't get work — well, go dance on TikTok or something.

Level 4: Flat Fees

You get better and more efficient — you have to, or you won't sleep. At this point the hourly model stops making sense. Your efficiency can actually work against you: you either charge more per hour and work fewer hours, or you work less and make less per project. Either way, you shouldn't be punished for doing good work fast.

What takes most people 10 hours takes you 3. So you stop billing time. You start billing outcomes.

Now you've removed the time constraint entirely. You charge for the result.

Level 5: The Business

When the results speak for themselves, you could shift into cruise control. You set your deadlines. Income is solid. No real time constraints. This is peak contractor life — good money, complete control over your schedule. But some people don't stop here.

As your name gets bigger, you start having to say no to work. Scale becomes the next question. Your name alone can get you new clients — so why not leverage it? And at the end of the day, as much as time isn't a constraint, it always is. All we have is 24 hours. So why not make money while other people work? For every person you get to work for you, you still earn. No more saying no. You’re literally multiplying yourself!

Very quickly after this shift you're not doing the work anymore. You become what your job once was to you. That's the same model that was working against you in Level 2 — just from the top.

The whole personal brand movement is really pointing at this. Build enough of a reputation that you can land clients on your own — and the company you used to need becomes optional. You're no longer relying on someone else's machine. You are the machine.

It's a progression. Most people are somewhere in the middle. The question worth asking is: do you know where you are? And the hard pill to swallow — one I've swallowed multiple times — is whether you're willing and able to do what's necessary to get to the next stage. The concept is simple. The execution is a different story.

Until recently, I never seriously thought about building my own Chrome extension. There are thousands in the store. Most of what you need probably already exists. So why bother?

In my entire coding experience I'd built exactly one — to get around an annoying issue sharing login sessions between applications. But then another opportunity came up.

BRISA opened.

One of the tools we were using to manage bookings didn't have a combined calendar view. Apparently that just never came up for them. Shocking. The usual options: suck it up, wait for them to implement it, or let the little frustrations accumulate until you switch platforms.

Not here. The thought is always — what are my options, and how can this be solved? A Chrome extension should be able to do it. The data is already there. I just need to grab it and display it. Built one in an afternoon. It extracts all the data and shows every staff calendar at once. Problem solved.

When you're an operator running on tools you don't control, you're always going to hit walls. Chrome extensions are the bridge.

How to actually get started (non-technical version)

This sounds more intimidating than it is. Here's the process:

Identify which platform you need the extension to work with and what you need it to do. Go to that site. Open your browser's developer tools — right click anywhere on the page and look for "Inspect" or "Developer Tools."

Navigate to the Network tab. Clear it. Then log in, click around, navigate to whatever part of the product you're trying to extract or interact with.

Watch the Network tab fill up. Every entry is a request the platform is making to pull your data. Those requests are the map.

Download the HAR file — it packages up everything that happened. Then open Claude, paste the HAR file, and tell it what you want the extension to do. It'll build the Chrome extension for you.

The one thing that trips people up: authentication. Most platforms require you to be logged in, and extensions need to work within that session. The good news is Chrome extensions run while you're already logged in, so you can usually grab the active session token and pass it through. Tell Claude that's what you need and it handles it.

The pattern is repeatable. Any time a tool you're already paying for doesn't do something specific you need — before you rebuild the whole thing yourself, ask if you can just add a layer on top.

Most of the time, you can.

I think about this a lot when I'm sitting on an idea that already has competition.

Open the App Store and look at the cereal aisle equivalent of any category. Ten apps doing roughly the same thing. Some are slightly faster, some have better UI, most are basically identical at the surface level.

Uber and Lyft are the clearest example. I don't see a meaningful difference between them. Same price, same wait time, same car shows up. They coexist. Both are multi-billion dollar companies. Both are still growing.

If the market is big enough to support two nearly identical products at that scale, what does that say about whatever you're building?

The competition problem is mostly in your head. Not entirely — some markets are genuinely winner-take-all. But for most things most people are building, the market is bigger than one player. It has room for multiple operators carving out their slice.

You don't need to win the whole market. You need to win your niche. Find the 1% of users who are specifically your 1%, go deep on what they need, and build something for them.

Life-changing money and billion-dollar exits are different goals. If you're building toward the second one, yes — competitive moats matter in a different way. But if you're building toward something real and sustainable that changes your life? The Lyft-sized outcome is right there. And Uber existing doesn't change that.

If you've been waiting for a clear lane with no other cars, you're going to wait forever. Build the thing. Find your people. Move.

That's Issue 006. If this hit, forward it to a founder who needs to hear it.

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— Isaac