…and i need the right team to take it from a great idea with proven traction to a business that changes how women work in the age of AI.

i’m a single mom turning 40. I built a tool on top of existing tech (that’s just too hard for 99% of the population to use). yes I built the tool, but more importantly I built the brand and the distribution that is actually gaining momentum with one of the most valuable cohorts of people on the planet: women ages 35-55.

The Cohort: Women ages 35-55

We’ve got a decade or two of experience, executive thinking, overachieving level organization and planning skills, and most importantly the DESIRE to do something more.

“I essentially build other people’s businesses,”

“constantly making money for other people,”

I want to build something for myself because I want it, not a request from a client.”

These are real responses from my survey.

We want to make our own money. We want to have something to think about other than our corporate handcuffs and making sure we have enough uncrustables in the freezer to last the week. We want to make a difference for our family, and for all the other families we touch.

i’ve gained traction that some 5 year old brands never reach, in just a couple months, by myself, vibecoding and promoting it on an instagram i started from scratch.

Here’s the deal: I’m not technical. I’m not Type A. Most of my bills for Aura are coming out of my personal bank account and while i know that’s not what investors want to see, all of the decisions I’ve made have proved to be the right ones. I don’t have a deck. I have receipts. This is for the people who are investing in a NEW type of founder, a new wave of emerging businesses.

The stats, that prove more than my own musings above:

• 1,299 app signups since July

• 22% freemium-to-paid conversion rate in the most recent week

• 816,141 people viewed my content about the app in 30 days

• 444 —> 7,391 followers on Instagram in 30 days

• 99 buying-intent comments on a $1500 version of the product in 1 day — near 100% women who are 40+

• 2,000 women on a free survey I published as a lead gen tool with 6 meaningful trends in the data:

  1. “I build everyone else’s brand and have nothing of my own” - The single biggest pattern.

  2. They trade hours for money

  3. Client acquisition is a bottleneck

  4. They’re in corporate cages with no autonomy

  5. They haaaaate showing up on camera

  6. They don’t have a clear lane and can’t articulate their own most valuable skills outside of terms you’d find frequently on Indeed.com

The tech needs to take a huge step forward, and I’m not the person to lead it. I know how to build something interesting, I know how to go to market, I know how to get people excited and hand over their credit cards, AND after 20 years of working: I KNOW WHEN TO DELEGATE.

The tech I have is a great start, but it needs more.

AI twins are everywhere, you can make them yourself on higgsfield, you can buy courses or digital downloads teaching you the steps to build them, but everything available right now is so technical that it’s not accessible for the audience I’ve mentioned. What I’ve done on the technical side so far isn’t rocket science, what i’ve done on the brand building and audience development side, IS.

I saw a gap in a market and a huge opportunity to help other women like me succeed. In just 6 weeks I’ve proven that my idea has traction, people will pay me for it, and I genuinely believe I’m the one to bring this to market.

Aura is female founded, fully vibe coded, and already has caught the attention of over 800,000.

That’s why I’m officially putting aside my hopes of completely boostrapping a full blown tech company as a solo founder (and solo employee, to be real). I’ve turned down a handful of people who wanted to talk about investing, but I realize now that if I want to make a difference, if I want to show other women like me that they can do this too, I need to think bigger.

I know what I need to build, and I know who I want to build it.

My first hire is a technical lead, and with them we’ll be truly changing the way women build brands and businesses in record time.

The demand is there, the time is right, and I know I’m the woman for the job. So if this reaches you, and speaks to you, let’s talk.

about three thousand women filled it out. it got passed around enough that i ended up on the today show explaining it. it worked because it answered a question everyone was carrying around privately and nobody would say out loud.

that spreadsheet answered what women were paid. it never answered the other question, which is what they’re worth.

i’ve been sitting with that for a while, and the way in is smaller than i expected. it isn’t a career change and it isn’t a new skill.

there’s work you’re already doing that is

n’t in your job description. it isn’t in your title. it isn’t on your review. nobody ever costed it. and it’s often the thing you’re better at than almost anyone around you.

you do it because you’re the only one who can, and because saying no would take longer than just fixing it.

so here’s the five-minute version. three questions. answer them fast. don’t clean them up.

• what do coworkers come to me for when the official process has already failed?

• what do friends outside work keep asking me for help with?

• what can i do in twenty minutes that takes someone else a week, because i’ve already done it four hundred times?

if the same shape shows up in all three answers, pay attention. that may be the business. it has already been operating for years, at volume, for free.

(this is the same question ourpotentialgap.com asks, just slower and with more coffee.)

what this looks like on a real person

i’ll call her dana. she’s a composite: forty-three, twelve years in marketing operations at consumer brands, currently a senior project manager making $95,000.

her three answers:

• coworkers come to her when a launch is two weeks out and falling apart. they don’t want her to run it. they want her to save it.

• friends ask her to look at their timelines: a wedding, a kitchen renovation, a sister’s bakery opening.

• she can read a project plan for ten minutes and tell you exactly where it breaks. that is why people call her.

her job description says senior project manager. what she actually is, and has been for twelve years, is the person who can look at a plan and see where it breaks before anybody else can.

her employer gets that skill bundled into a salary, along with the status meetings and all the other things she is technically paid to do. dana has never thought of it as something she could sell on its own. nobody pays separately for it where she works, so she assumes it has no separate value.

it does.

sold to small teams that are about to ship something consequential and have no operations person, that skill could become a six-figure business. not immediately. not passively. and not because an ai tool magically does her job for her.

the useful part is the twelve years in her head. the software just lets her package it.

what’s below

below, i’m taking dana’s unofficial job and building the company around it: the positioning, the copy, three paid offers, actual prices, the margin under each one, the one-week build, the free tool that finds customers, the working prompts, and the first thirty days.

the model does not require a giant audience. it works with twenty recurring clients. everything else in the plan exists to find and keep those twenty.

paid subscribers get this complete build—and a new one like it every week. the point is not that you should copy dana’s business. the point is to show you what becomes possible when you stop treating your most valuable skill like a favor.

Read more

Over the last few weeks the photos Aura was making stopped looking as much like you as they used to. That was a product issue I couldn’t get behind, so I paused everything until I could fix it. It was mostly due to trying to switch technologies to improve speed, but it backfired. So, I switched back to the engine that made the shots people were totally wow’d by in the first place.

While I was in there I fixed the other thing people kept hitting: the screen that builds your first preview used to hang and look broken, so people uploaded their photos over and over. It now comes back in about a second and finishes on its own in around a minute, no matter how many photos you upload.

Here’s what to expect, depending on where you are:

• You already have a face model with us. Nothing to do. Your model is intact and works again the moment shoots come back on.

• You have a shoot that never came through. It’s still queued and it will run automatically when we reopen. You don’t need to request it again.

• You were waiting on a face model that never finished training. It’s queued too. It’ll train when we reopen, and we’ll email you the moment it’s ready.

• You signed up recently and never got a working model. We’re rebuilding your face model for free, no charge and nothing for you to do. These go out in small batches over the days after we reopen so we don’t overload the system, so it may be a day or two before yours lands. We’ll email you when it’s done.

• You’re on the waitlist. We’ll open signups back up when shoots come back on and email you then.

• You’re brand new. As we power through the waitlist, you will be able to upload or capture your photos, and you’ll see a free preview right away, no card needed. If you like it, it’s $5 once to train your actual face model. That training takes somewhere between 25 minutes and 3 hours, and we’ll email you when it’s ready. Then your first 3 shoots are free.

NOW SOMETHING FUN, BECAUSE I OWE YOU SOMETHING FRANKLY.

monday’s new business idea listing was free so you could see what these are..:

…a complete plan for a business that doesn’t exist yet, built with the exact playbook i used for Aura and this newsletter. from here on, the listing is free and the build is paid. here’s number two.

open position: founder, handled
reports to: no one
location: anywhere
salary: $125,000 to $185,000 (from your current $78,000)

requirements: fifteen years as an executive assistant. you have run three people’s lives at once without dropping a ball, and their peers keep trying to poach you. your friends who own businesses keep asking if you’d “just take a quick look” at their inbox.

start date: the week after labor day. prep starts now. posted by: a company that doesn’t exist. that’s the job.

she’s a composite, like all of these. fifteen years as an EA, currently for two executives who could not find their own calendars with a map. the thing she does that nobody puts on the job description is running the operating system of another person’s life: what gets time, what gets a template, what gets declined. and the tell is the same tell as always: people she doesn’t work for keep asking for the thing. founders in her group chat send screenshots of their weeks like they’re showing her a rash.

the salary math is the same believable-numbers rule from monday. at $78,000, the model behind ourpotentialgap.com is allowed to promise 1.6 to 2.4 times current income and nothing more, so the listing says $125,000 to $185,000 and i can stand behind it.

the business: handled. solo founders and two-person companies pay her to rebuild the way their week runs: inbox rules, calendar policy, scheduling, templates for the twenty emails they write over and over. built once, properly, then handed over. she sells the system, never hours, which is the whole trick, because hours are what she’s escaping.

why now: september. every founder comes back from summer to a calendar that looks like a crime scene, and there are about four weeks to be standing there when it happens.

below the paywall: her six-piece positioning kit, the price ladder with margins (including the $499 product that carries the whole company), the brand system, the one week build with the itemized software bill, the free viral tool that markets it, the first 30 days of content, and the five things she must not build in month one. the whole company runs on about $120 a month of software and zero employees. i know because that’s my bill too.

The full business plan and details are below.

Read more

• the positioning kit

• the prices and the margins behind them

• the branding system (with visuals)

• the one week build with the actual software bill

• a free tool concept that markets it and develops a funnel for the paid product

• and the first 30 days of content.

you could start executing it the day you read it and be charging money inside a month. the idea is a good one on purpose, the kind only a specific person could build, which is why every “listing” starts with who this founder is.

the playbook is proven, because it's the exact one i used to build Aura, and every number in it is mine.

this first one is free all the way down, so you can see exactly what these are. the next listing goes up wednesday, and it goes behind the paywall, along with two more weekly series launching this week. the rhythm from here is four posts a week, three paid and one free.

the free one is the story of what i’m building. the paid ones are how EXACTLY you can too. if you want the how, this is the week to upgrade.

Here’s #1 - you’re the founder of a company called Plain English Benefits

so… she’s a composite, this woman. nobody’s real idea, no one specific. but you know her, and honestly you might be her.

she’s been in HR for eighteen years and the thing she does that nobody put on her job description is translation. an employee comes in panicking about a bill, and she reads the plan, and she says “you’re fine, here’s why,” and the panic ends.

the salary line comes from the same math i make the AI at ourpotentialgap.com use when it tells someone what their thing could earn.

the business: plain english benefits.

• small companies with 10 to 50 employees, where the owner is also the HR department, pay her to translate their benefits into something a human can read.

• one document per plan, in english

• plus the five questions employees will actually ask, answered in advance.

• ….and the timing is the whole reason she’s this week’s listing, because open enrollment starts in about ten weeks, and every owner in america is about to spend three weeks answering questions they can’t answer.

below (this is where the paywall will go on Wednesday) is the full build:

• her positioning kit,

• the price ladder with the margins,

• the brand system,

• the one week MVP and the software bill,

• the free tool that feeds the whole thing,

• and the first 30 days of content.

• plus the five things she’ll want to build in month one and must not, which is the part i learned the expensive way.

the whole company below runs on about $120 a month of software. i know because that’s my bill for aura.

the positioning kit

six pieces, written once, pasted everywhere (landing page, checkout, emails, bio), never rewritten casually. mine took an afternoon and drove every surface after it.

• headline: “benefits your people actually understand.”

• subhead: “every plan, explained in plain english. no jargon, no 40-page pdf, no pretending you read it.”

• tagline: “finally, in english.”

• brand promise: “if your team can’t explain their plan back to you, they don’t have benefits. they have paperwork.”

• product thesis: “the bottleneck was never the plan. it was the pdf.” (you’ll notice this rhymes with my line about the camera roll. the structure is the point. name the thing standing between your customer and the value, and aim everything at it.)

• ethical stance: she translates, she doesn’t advise. not a broker, not selling plans, no commissions. that independence is the trust, the same way “this is not deception” is mine.

the price ladder

margin-positive from the first sale, priced so each rung is an impulse next step:

• free: paste one confusing paragraph, get it in english. the demo is the marketing.

• $19: your full packet, decoded, plus the five questions doc.

• $299: the open enrollment package for a company. every plan decoded, a Q&A doc, done in a week.

• $99/mo: year-round “ask the translator” for companies, launched later, sold in-product only.

her cost on a $19 decode is one AI call and maybe twenty minutes of review, so call it a dollar and change. when i did this, my $19 pack cost about $3.40 to serve. the rules that came out of my version: show only two prices publicly (free and $19; the $299 gets sold in the product after someone experiences a decode), and enforce the wall on the server, because my free users walked straight around a paywall that only existed on the screen.

the brand system, one afternoon

two colors, two fonts, one format thesis. the benefits category is corporate blue, gradients, stock photos of people pointing at laptops. she inverts it: cream background, ink text, a serif, generous margins, so every page looks like a well-set book. the product is legibility, so the brand is legibility. small enough to memorize, which is why it survives busy weeks. mine is two hex codes and two fonts and it has held for months.

the build, one week

form —> AI call —> results page —> datastore.

that’s the mvp, and it’s enough, because that’s exactly what my free tool shipped as and it worked.

• a no-code app builder for the body of it (form, accounts, database)

• Claude as the product brain: she describes the decoder in plain english and it gets built. the one non-negotiable habit: when something breaks, the AI investigates read-only first and reports back, and only then fixes. never both in the same breath.

• Stripe for the $19 and the $299. Netlify for a public landing page, about $9.

• the bill: roughly $120 a month all in.

the AI call itself is the product, so she writes it carefully: plain english at an eighth grade reading level, keep every number exact, flag anything ambiguous as “ask your provider this exact question” instead of guessing.

the flagging is the trust feature. my app failed 42% of the time during one 48-hour stretch and told everyone things were fine, and i can tell you the lie was worse than the failure.

the free tool that feeds it

the top of the funnel is a free tool that asks the question the business answers. hers: the jargon jar.

Here’s what it is: anyone can paste the worst sentence from your benefits packet, get it translated free, and every anonymous submission feeds a public, live leaderboard of the most confusing sentences in american insurance.

for the user it’s useful and a little funny. collectively it becomes a dataset people cite and share.

zero selling on the page. i’ve run this pattern twice, once in 2020 with a salary spreadsheet that put me on the today show, once this year with ourpotentialgap.com, and the purity is the mechanism.

the email ask sits at the reveal, not the door.

the first 30 days of content

she films herself talking. no production, no graphics. i spent months posting polished content that did a few hundred views, and one raw talking-head reel about who i am and how i build gained over 175K views and brought 2,939 followers, so she skips my detour.

her version of that reel: “i’ve read hundreds of benefits packets. here’s what your HR person can’t tell you.” identity plus method, because that combination makes people follow to learn how.

then, repeatable formats so there’s no blank page: one jargon term in english each week, one anonymized plan teardown, one leaderboard update from the jar.

what not to build

the five things she will want to build in month one, because building with AI is frictionless and nobody tells you no:

1. a plan comparison marketplace - do this later for sure, offers enterprise plan options for businesses ($$$$$)

2. a broker referral network - smart if you’re thinking of an additional revenue stream

3. an employer analytics dashboard - offers more value to enterprise

4. a mobile app - only do this after you prove the concept

5. a course - don’t do this, maybe not ever.

i built my versions of all five, basically, and it cost me the only thing customers were paying for, which was the core thing working.

her core path is: packet in, english out, $19. until that path is boring and reliable and people she’s never met have paid for it, everything else waits.

order of operations, so the ten weeks are real:

Week 1: positioning kit and brand

Week 2: mvp

Week 3: jargon jar live, seeded to her own network first

Week 4: first reels the same day the jar goes live.

Week 5-6: first $299 open enrollment package sold, delivered by week 8, right as enrollment opens.

that’s the whole company. the next listing goes up wednesday, and that one sits behind the paywall. if this was useful, that’s the button.

Subscribe now

i ran the numbers on chatgpt to see what the normal version would have cost. the same product, built by a real team, comes out somewhere between $175,000 and $325,000 and six to ten months of work. i did it for the price of two subscriptions and a few weeks.

that sounds like a win. it mostly wasn’t. because the thing i built kept failing, over and over, in ways i couldn’t see and couldn’t fix, and the reason i thought i didn’t need an engineer is exactly why i REALLY DID NEED ONE.

here’s what building this way actually looked like day to day, because “i made an app with AI” makes it sound a lot more straightforward than it was.

my build history with Base44 is 642 pages long. 143,000 words. 769 messages back and forth, 977 separate changes it made on my instruction, 154 tests, 107 full builds. i was writing every spec, catching every bug i was capable of catching, testing on live customers, and running support for a product who’s code i cannot read. all day, most days, for weeks.

and people used it. around 1,000 profiles, 199 trained face models, 719 images made, 32 free users who used up every shoot they were given. a real product with real customers.

it also kept failing them.

seven people paid me five dollars and got nothing back. stripe took the money, but the code was checking for the wrong thing and never recorded the payment, so it fell through. i only found out because one of them complained (rightfully so). everything on my end said it was fine.

the problem with AI is that building feels so easy you don’t know when to stop.

there’s nobody telling you no and nothing slowing you down, so i kept saying yes.

• referrals

• teaser campaigns

• founding members

• two separate image engines

• four kinds of email

each one built in an afternoon. and all of it came at the cost of the one thing people were actually paying for… the app working!!

i had chatgpt audit a 48-hour window. 42% of the shoots people asked for had failed, and the app reported every one as fine.

below is the full breakdown of:

• what was broken under the hood

• the scorecard of where vibecoding is incredible and where it falls apart

• …and the exact method i’m using to cut Aura back down to the one thing it does well without breaking the customers i already have.

Read more

this is the other half of that sentence.

because here’s what nobody told me about going viral when you built the thing yourself, in hindsight it seems obvious, but i was too excited to think logically: the exact moment thousands of people finally show up to try your thing is the exact moment your thing has to work perfectly, in front of all of them, at once. and mine didn’t.

let me back up.

the reels kept going. they crossed six hundred thousand views, thousands of new people came to try aura, and for a few hours it was the single most exciting thing that has ever happened to me. i kept walking into other rooms just to breathe.

and then it started breaking.

the engine my whole app runs on (a company called higgsfield, the thing that actually makes the images) quietly stopped working on the evening of the 21st. first the face training stopped. then the photo generation. one person at a time, the thing i had just told the entire internet to go try was handing them nothing.

the part that still makes me a little crazy: their status page said “all systems operational” the whole time. it was not operational. i was watching it not be operational in real time, with a front-row seat and no way to fix it, because it’s their servers, not mine.

so it was the best week of my life and the worst week of my life, and they were the same week. i had finally gotten the thing i wanted, everyone was looking, and i couldn’t control whether it worked.

if you know me, you know my first instinct was to close the laptop and pretend none of it was happening. that is how i handle most good things that come to me.

i didn’t do that this time. what i did instead is the part i’m actually proud of, and it’s also the part with the real numbers in it, so it’s below.

here’s where it stands as i write this: the engine is still down. i’m sitting here waiting on another company’s infrastructure to come back, refreshing a status page that lies to me. and separately, i found something that is my fault, a bug that was quietly shortchanging the people who paid me, and i have a decision to make about it that i haven’t made yet.

that’s the cliffhanger, and it’s a real one, because i don’t know how this ends yet either.

below, for founding members, is the actual war room: how many people showed up, how many of them got a broken shot, the money, the exact things i built in 48 hours to make sure this never takes me down again, and the decision i’m stuck on. it’s the real version, numbers and all, the stuff i can’t say out loud to the whole internet.

Read more

you’re here for one of three reasons:

1. you signed up for the app i built called aura

2. you saw a video of me building it and you stuck around

3. you subscribed to my old newsletter back when it was called no gender gap.

whichever one it is, i’m really glad you’re here, and i owe you the real story of what this is now.

here it is.

i taught myself to build an app. i can’t code, i’ve never been able to code, i just sat at my kitchen table with claude open on one screen and a thing called base44 on the other and somehow there’s a real product now that real people pay for. it’s called aura and it makes the photos your personal brand needs when you don’t have the time or the money for a shoot.

then i made a reel about it.

and here’s the part i keep turning over, because it’s the opposite of what everyone tells you. i had posted basically that same reel once before and it did nothing, and then one day i was frustrated after putting up something like 20 trial reels that all flopped, and for some reason in my little lizard brain i reposted that one, barely changed, as a trial reel i almost didn’t bother with.

it’s been watched 115,000 times.

i can’t fully tell you why. my most honest guess is that people responded to the before-and-afters i made inside aura, and to the fact that it was just me at my table not performing.

but i’m not going to sell you a formula, because i’ve tried every reel formula those accounts push and they never work, and i think most of that content is fake and won’t last. the truth is i got a little lucky with a thing i’ve been quietly working at for months, and i’d rather tell you that than pretend i cracked some code.

the morning after, i did two things at the exact same time. i kept obsessively opening instagram and refreshing it for the little hit off every red notification, and i also started to quietly panic, because the app was breaking under all the new people and i was overwhelmed and a real part of me wanted to hide and pretend none of it was happening.

i went viral with the messaging that the app is free, and quickly realized after i went into over $3,000 of credit card debt that it’s a lot more than I thought to do this. so now, i’ve got a $5 payment gate on any new users. I’m still giving them their 3 free shoots though because thats what i promised. hopefully this helps me keeps the lights on…

which, if you know me at all, speaks volumes about how i handle most good things that come to me.

so. it’s me. nauraissues.

same me, finally pointed at the thing i actually do all day instead of the thing i thought i was supposed to have a bigger opinion about.

what this is now is the real version of all of it. the building, with the actual numbers and the actual bugs. the part where i’m 40 and starting something new with no plan and no permission. the things i love and cannot stop buying. and the stuff i usually keep off the internet, the doubt, the wanting-to-hide, the 6am math about whether any of this is real.

some of it will be free, right here, for everyone.

but i’ll be honest with you, the bulk of it is going to live on the paid side, and i’d rather tell you that up front than pretend otherwise.

some of you have been here since the beginning, and some of you showed up three weeks ago and haven’t left, and i want to build a smaller room for you.

it’s called founding members.

$120 a year, locked there forever, and it’s where i put the things i won’t post out loud: the prompts that actually worked, the numbers i’m too exposed to share publicly, the real behind-the-scenes of building this thing while it breaks in my hands. plus a direct line to me while this is still small enough that i answer.

i’m turning it on today, because you’re the reason there’s anything to be a member of.

anywayyyyyyy.

i’m 40, i can’t code, the app is held together with (very expensive) tape, and i’m somehow doing this in front of everyone now.

thank you for being here. more soon.

<3,

lizzie aka naura

if you don’t want emails from me just reply and say so and I’ll take you off!

• 2020 $90,000. A tech startup, a real title, a badge that got me into good rooms. Comfortable, and completely someone else’s ceiling. I thought that was the top.

• 2021 $25,000. And that number is generous. I quit my tech job in the middle of a postpartum depression I never saw coming, and leaned on my husband while he bootstrapped a startup. The $25k wasn’t a year of earning. It was the leftovers of the job I walked out of.

• 2022 $75,000. I left my first husband. I’d started picking up freelance work on the side, so I rebuilt the income and the whole life in the same twelve months. Not gracefully. Just necessarily.

• 2023 $110,000. The year it clicked. My ex-husband let me go from the company we’d been building together. I didn’t see it as a gift at the time, but it forced me to go build a client base that was entirely mine. More clients, more energy, a divorce behind me instead of in front of me.

• 2024 $175,000. Consulting. The year I quoted a client $15k when the most I’d ever charged was $3k a month, then almost closed the laptop out of pure shame. We landed at $8k. Still more than double my old ceiling, for one project. Nobody laughed me out of the room. Nobody ever does. You just have to say the number out loud.

• 2025 $185,000. Steady. This is the year the luxury stopped being money and became control over my own time. Not more free time, to be clear. I work more than I did freelancing, closer to six focused hours a day instead of the three I used to get away with, plus the 7pm meetings, the travel, and the fact that I now think about the work constantly. The difference is I choose the hours. I take the middle of the day, work out at 2pm, and pick it back up at 9 because I want to, not because someone’s counting.

• 2026 I stopped counting this by the year. Last month alone, the businesses I built brought in $35,000. Not from one job, from several things that are entirely mine, on my terms, for my upside instead of someone else's. ONE single boss sets the number or the calendar now - moi!!!

None of it works without my spouse. I get to build like this because someone at home is building with me. Worth saying out loud, because the internet loves a story where a woman does it all alone, that’s not my story.

Once I stopped working for other people and built my own path that felt authentic to me, I opened up the real gains. What could read as a woman who fell apart in 2021 and spent five years gluing herself back together, is actually me understanding that it wasn’t too late to start again.

If you take one thing away from this, give yourself the gift of figuring out what your “thing” could be.

Use Our Potential Gap. A few questions, and it reads back who you are at the core, the one offer only you could build, and what it could realistically be worth.

Nothing to buy, no email required.

I want you to know know what you could do if you take a chance. It’s worth it, for real.

Best case: you get a good idea.

Worst case: you use my tool and think it’s cool enough to tell a friend to use too.

Anyway. It’s a Tuesday and I’m taking the afternoon. I’ll answer your replies at 10pm, happily. That’s the trade, and I’d make it every time.

Lizzie

The Edit: exactly what I bought on Amazon after a $35k month.
(millennial, cozy, skincare edition)

The neck cream that fixed my tech neck. U Beauty The SCULPT Neck + Décolleté Concentrate, $138. I did not believe a skincare product could actually does what it says it will do until I bought this (and retinol). It saved my tech neck and I am not being dramatic. 10/10.

The $13 tank I bought in bulk. Organic Basics Flex Tank. New favorite shirt, and there are five more sitting in my cart because I refuse to learn moderation. 100000/10.

The cooling comforter for people who sleep hot. Buffy Cloud eucalyptus comforter, $249. Machine washable, temperature regulating, incredible reviews. Exactly the kind of deeply unglamorous purchase you make when the money is finally yours.

The Chloé dupe jelly kitten heals. RJYLP clear jelly mules, $54. The Chloé’s are over $600 so I’m testing if they’re worth it with these. 7.5/10.

A sheer mock-neck top that makes me feel young again. RoseSeek mesh crop tank, $19.99. Yes, I’m an elder millennial buying going-out tops off Amazon. 10/10, no notes.

The milk-glass pendant for over the desk. SIYGANK vintage ceramic pendant light $69. Going straight into the home office, because if I’m working in there it should at least look pretty.

Some links above are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small amount if you buy, at no cost to you.

Please Restack if it resonates. This is me growing my brand in public and it’s embarrassing. you get it. :)

Good morning, everyone.

Here’s the thing I’m actually good at. I can look at someone else’s business, someone else’s brand, someone else’s beautiful mess, and see the move in about ten seconds. I’ve done it for employers. I’ve done it for clients. I’ve done it for friends over dinner and never once sent an invoice. The one business I could never see clearly was my own. Not for lack of judgment. I’d just never aimed it at myself.

I took the photo up top on the subway platform this morning, waiting for this train. The sign said watch the gap. I loved it for reasons obvious to me (and you?).

Today I’m on a train to an Auberge property because my best friend, who is also my client, is doing a hosted stay and told me to come work and play. Most mornings are much less cinematic and fancy. When my kids are with their dad I’m up at 8:45, out to feed the chickens and the dogs. If kids are home, it’s a 7am start time straight into packing lunch and harassing little kids to put their socks on. Either way, no Auberge involved.

All of these women are me, which is sort of the whole point of what I want to talk about today.

Today’s issue includes: a 7-signal test for whether you’re actually too late (you’re not), the pants that ended my relationship with hard pants, and a bud vase quietly outperforming my productivity apps.

If you’ve been circling the idea of building something that’s finally yours, and the thing in the way is a quiet voice going “later, not now, you missed the window,” here’s a cleaner read than the one that voice is giving you.

Score yourself on the seven signals below.

Zero means not true at all. Three means that’s just your life now.

1. You redesign other people’s businesses in your head, uninvited. You can’t walk past a badly run thing without fixing it in your mind, at the table, in the shower, at a party you were supposed to be enjoying. (0 to 3.)

2. People come to you for the read, not the résumé. They don’t want your title. They want your take on the person, the deal, the decision. (0 to 3.)

3. The title in your email signature stopped feeling like you a while ago. It’s accurate. It’s also not the answer to “what do you do” you’d give if nobody was keeping score. (0 to 3.)

4. You’ve been gathering string and not admitting it. Saved links, voice memos, a half-named idea in your notes app you open more than you’d ever tell anyone. (0 to 3.)

5. You are more useful now than you have ever been, and less visible than you were five years ago. The judgment went up. The profile went quiet. (0 to 3.)

6. You could name the one thing only you could build. If I gave you ten seconds and no exit, a real answer would come out of you. (0 to 3.)

7. What’s stopping you is a story about timing, not ability. “Too late.” “Younger people already own this.” “I should have started years ago.” (0 to 3.)

Add it up. Put your number in the comments.

0 to 7. The itch is real but quiet. You’re earlier than the noise in your head is telling you, and that is not a problem. Early is the whole point. Keep gathering string and stop apologizing for the timeline.

8 to 14. You’re not deciding whether to build. You’re avoiding admitting you already started. The evidence is in your saved links and in whatever came out of you on signal six. The missing piece is permission, not readiness.

15 to 21. You’re not early and you’re not late. You’re overdue. The judgment is built. The usefulness is peaking. All that’s left is a name for the offer and the decision to aim twenty years of taste at yourself instead of everyone else.

Wherever you landed, the only number that really matters is signal six, the offer only you could build.

That’s the whole game.

If you want the full version of that read (who you are at the core, your unfair advantage, the one offer that’s uniquely yours, and what it could realistically be worth), that’s what Our Potential Gap does. It’s free, there’s nothing to buy, and you don’t have to hand over your email to get the result. [Take the read here → Our Potential Gap]

I’m building all of this in public, as a non-technical operator who spent two decades reading rooms and is now, finally, reading her own. More on that next week, including the parts that aren’t working yet.

Lizzie

The Edit: five things I’m loving as a woman mid-rebrand.

The pants that are comfortable but feel fancy. Reformation Aven Pant, white. I’ve decided the version of me I’m building does not white-knuckle through stiff trousers to look serious. These read elevated and feel like nothing, which is the entire brief for this chapter.

A $16 Amazon vase that resets the whole desk. Blue and white ceramic bud vase. One flower, tiny footprint, and suddenly it looks like someone who takes herself seriously works here. The Monday ritual of putting a fresh stem in it does more for my head than my last three productivity apps combined.

The planner that makes me feel legit. A5 croc-embossed leather ring binder. There’s something about a real object with a satisfying snap that turns planning the business into a decision instead of a chore. I live in this thing like I live Claude. Claude is my house, my planner is my pied-à-terre.

The podcast I put on before I’ve committed to being a person in the morning. The Daily Motivation with Lewis Howes. Short episodes, which is the entire point. Three minutes to get my head pointed the right way while the coffee works, not a 90-minute lecture at 7am.

The perfume that smells like hose water, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. D.S. & Durga Steamed Rainbow. It drops me straight into a 90s backyard, running through a sprinkler all summer with grass stuck to my shins. I did not expect a fragrance to relax me into myself, but this one does. It reminds me who I was before I had a title, which turns out to be exactly who I’m building toward now.

Some links above are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small amount if you buy, at no cost to you.

Now i have a better question: not what you’re paid, but what you could be earning by building the one thing entirely unique to you.

I adapted the spreadsheet into ourpotentialgap.com which asks you a few strange, quick questions, nothing about your resume, then it names the one venture only you could start right now, realistically, in 2026.

It also:

• Tells you what it could realistically be worth (a real number based on research)

• Shows you, anonymously, the gap between what women like you earn today and what we are quietly sitting on.

Being yourself is the only thing that has ever actually worked. Most of us just lost track of who that is.

Be brutal, it is completely anonymous. The more honest you are, the clearer the picture gets for every woman who comes after you.

ourpotentialgap.com

P.S. If it names something that makes your chest go tight, that is the point. Send it to one woman who needs to see hers.

You’re on this list because we did something most people won’t: we put our salary numbers on a grid and refused to pretend the gender gap wasn’t there.

The AI gender usage gap is roughly 25 percent. You already know what a 25 percent head start does when it compounds.

This is why I’m sending you details on EARLY: a plain-spoken AI playbook and 65 copy-paste prompts, built for women who want real leverage behind the expertise they already have. AKA US.

Launch pricing is $8 for the first 72 hours only, then it goes up to $47. (Like the multiplier of how much more men make than us 😂)

GET IT NOW

FREE EXCERPT AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS

This is LEVERAGE, not a confusing course on the difference between Claude Cowork and Chat.

The difference this time: no one is setting this gap from the other side of the table. There’s no band, no committee, no approval. It’s the rare gap you can close yourself.

AI doesn’t reward the youngest or most technical person in the room. It spits out a thousand generic options and waits for someone with the judgment to know which one is right. That discernment is the thing you’ve spent your whole career building.

What you get (instant download):

• 65 expert AI prompts, ready to copy and paste

• A 10-page playbook that shows you how to actually use them

• A Notion template you keep and reuse forever

• Works with any AI you already have. Run the setup in one sitting.

It covers five places AI actually moves your life:

1. your voice

2. your authority online

3. your business or side venture

4. the email-and-admin grind

5. …and your biggest decisions.

It’s a one-time download. No course you’ll never finish, no subscription.

EXCERPT FROM THE PLAYBOOK:

04 T H E F R A M E W O R K

The five leverage points.

AI helps with almost everything, which is exactly why most people drift and quit. Force it into the five places it actually moves your life. Every prompt in the library lives under one of these.

1 Voice

Make AI sound like you, not like AI. Protect the taste and point of view that are the whole reason anyone listens. This pillar comes first because it makes every other pillar yours.

2 Authority

Show up online with substance. Turn what you know into a point of view, content, and visible credibility, without dancing for the algorithm or performing for strangers.

3 The Venture

Build and run the business. Positioning, offers, pricing, marketing, sales, clients. Your expertise, productized and sold without the hustle-culture theatrics.

4 The Machine

Reclaim your time. Email, meetings, decisions, the admin that quietly eats your week. The least glamorous pillar and often the one that gives you your life back.

5 The Edge

Use AI as a strategic thinking partner. A board of advisors on call: pre-mortems, devil’s advocates, first-principles teardowns. Leverage on the one asset that’s uniquely yours: your judgment.

SAMPLE PROMPT FROM THE LIBRARY:

V5 Capture My Spoken Voice

Use it when you talk better than you type. Record a voice memo, transcribe it, paste it.

Below is a raw transcript of me talking through an idea. Turn it into clean written prose that keeps my exact phrasing, energy, and order of thinking. Remove filler (”um,” “like,” repeated false starts) but change nothing about my word choices or personality. Don’t make it more formal. The goal is that it still sounds like me, just readable. Transcript: [PASTE]

Push it This is the fastest way to a high-volume, authentic feed: talk for five minutes, get a week of posts in your real voice.

GET IT NOW

(that’s my AI clone I built. I can show you how.)

And unlike the last one, this gap closes from your side of the table.

A while back, we did something simple and a little radical: we wrote the numbers down. Women in tech put their real salaries in a spreadsheet, in public, and the pattern that companies had spent years calling “complicated” turned out to be very legible once it was on a grid.

It was so appalling that Business Insider covered it. The TODAY Show invited me on the air to interview me about it. That sheet is why most of you are here. You don’t want to be managed. You want the data.

So let me show you a new number.

Right now there is a measurable gap in who is using AI, and it breaks along the same line as the last one. A 2024 New York Fed survey found that about half of men had used generative AI in the prior year, compared with roughly a third of women. Pulling together studies across countries, Harvard researchers put the aggregate adoption gap at around 25 percent. A global analysis found women about 20 percent less likely to use tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.

If you spent the last few years watching a wage gap compound, you already know what a 25 percent head start does over time.

The part that should make you angry

Here is the finding I can’t stop thinking about. When researchers asked why, one of the biggest reasons women gave was that using AI felt like cheating.

Read that again. Not “I don’t have access.” Not “it’s not useful.” A significant share of women are sitting out the most important productivity shift of our careers because they’ve absorbed the idea that getting leverage is somehow dishonest, while their male colleagues quietly use the same tools to do in twenty minutes what takes the rest of us all morning, and call it being efficient.

We have seen this movie. It is the same instinct that tells women to be grateful for the offer instead of negotiating it. The same one that calls a man “decisive” and a woman “aggressive” for identical behavior. The hesitation itself is gendered, and it is expensive.

Why this one is different

The pay gap was largely set on the other side of the table. Someone else owned the budget, the band, the promotion. You could push, and you should, but the lever wasn’t fully in your hands.

This gap is the opposite. No one is gatekeeping AI from you. There is no committee, no headcount, no approval. The only thing standing between you and the leverage is the decision to pick it up and the time to learn to use it well. That makes it the rare gap you can close yourself, this month, without anyone’s permission.

And here is the part the hype crowd gets exactly backwards. AI does not reward the youngest or the most technical person in the room. It produces a thousand competent, generic options and waits for someone with the judgment to know which one is right. That discernment is the thing you have been building for your entire career. The people fluent in the tool but starved of taste are about to be very busy making things nobody needs. You are positioned better than almost anyone tells you.

What I built

I got tired of watching smart women hang back, so I made the thing I wished existed.

It’s called EARLY. It’s a plain-spoken AI playbook and a library of 65 prompts, built for women who are done being underestimated and want to put real leverage behind the expertise they already have. No hustle culture. No bro energy. No 25-year-old explaining prompts to you.

It covers five places AI actually moves your life: writing in your own voice, building authority online, growing a business or a side venture, clawing back hours from email and admin, and using AI as a strategic thinking partner for the decisions that matter. You get the playbook, all 65 copy-paste prompts, and a Notion template you keep. It works with whatever AI you already have, and you can run the setup in a single sitting.

It is a one-time download, priced to be a yes. Not a course you’ll never finish. Not a subscription. Just the thing that gets you off the sidelines.

Get EARLY here →

The salary sheet worked because we refused to pretend the gap wasn’t there. Same move here. The gap is real, it’s early, and for once it’s the kind you can close on your own terms.

You’re not late. You’re early. Act like it.

Sources:

• Women Are Avoiding AI. Will Their Careers Suffer? — Harvard Business School

• Women and generative AI: the adoption gap is closing fast — Deloitte

• The AI Gender Gap Paradox — Stanford Social Innovation Review

• AI’s Gender Gap — UC Berkeley Haas

I created the No Gender Gap newsletter to help the female-identifying workforce to better understand their worth. My name is Lizzie Kardon and I am an advocate for working women, a deep thinker, and a digital marketer working in technology with over a decade of experience.

I proudly send this first issue to 209 subscribers (that’s you!) who have trusted me with their contact information to provide value in their inbox.

I don’t take that lightly.

Thank you for being here and for helping me to evolve this process of sharing my thoughts and content selections that I’ve deemed valuable to our community.

This week, paid subscribers can also:

• Get job listings from progressive companies that I have vetted, with the ability to request jobs specific to their area of expertise. 

• Send specific questions for women in leadership. Interviews begin in next week’s newsletter with Allison Esposito Medina, CEO of Tech Ladies.

• Share a link, article, or press mention with my network, approved by me in advance of sharing.

• Ask me for a specific data insight from the Salary Transparency Project.

I’m keeping the below content free for the bulk of my audience base so far. I hope after reading you will consider a paid monthly or yearly option. If that’s you, subscribe below.

I don’t get paid for this otherwise. But, I see the value in putting in the 15+ (an rapidly increasing) hours each week outside of my normal workday, and time spent with my husband and babies.

Subscribe now

Always know your worth,

Lizzie Kardon

*Compared to their male counterparts

Data points have been normalized and adjusted to reflect USD based on the exchange rate on February 28, 2020. Averages are rounded down.

These insights come from a self-reported sample of over 1,750 in the Women in Tech Salary Transparency Project 2020.

Quick Tips for Negotiating from an Expert

Alexandra Carter is a Columbia Law professor of mediation and negotiation and the author of the upcoming book Ask for More (which I can’t promote with a link because I haven’t read it yet). She has great, quick advice for negotiations that are easy to implement and take into your next meeting, even if it’s 20 minutes from now.

1. The greatest source of strength in negotiation is knowledge. When you know yourself, and understand the person across the table, you negotiate from a position of strength and clarity.

2. Leading each negotiation with questions helps your bottom line & helps you connect to people in a way that can transform relationships.

3. [When it comes to a new job], by treating the entire interview process as one large negotiation, by the time you get to talking about money or telework you will have already laid the foundation for how they think about you, your value and your potential.

The Conversations We’re Having 

“Girl, have the babies.” Amy Nelson, founder and CEO of The Riveter, asked working women for advice to their younger selves. Thousands responded with pure gold insights. She also wrote about it for Inc. The advice you need for what currently ales you is probably in the Twitter thread.

“…the first few times I was in a board meeting I thought, ‘Why is this my career? Where I put myself in harm’s way every day and I have to present in front of people in high stakes?’” Judy John, global CCO at an A-list ad agency is interviewed on AdAge’s podcast and shares how she handles social awkwardness as an introvert in an industry full of extroverts. V relatable. 

Dismantling the Funloving Fantasy of Being a Girlboss

Audrey Gelman, CEO of The Wing approached her recent op-ed in Fast Company differently than many other founders have before. Instead of pumping her brand’s larger-than-life wins, she drew back the curtain on what she’s gotten wrong as a female in a leadership role. 

“As more women, people of color, and other marginalized groups continue to step into positions of leadership, it seems necessary to project an image of flawlessness, knowing that we won’t be allowed to fail in the ways that our white, male, cisgender counterparts do—stupendously and repeatedly.”

Brands like The Wing, along with coined terms like Girlboss were born out of intentions to empower females. Instead, I believe, they have at times given off a sense of fun-loving, fancy, and effortless growth or success with college-style “girl’s nights out” along the way. I know feminism is at the core of these brands, but they have continued to support the longstanding stereotypes of women in business and thus, have made it less comfortable for us to admit and grow from our failures. 

It seems we still haven’t cracked the code on balancing the fine line of standing up for ourselves as women without continuing to stereotype ourselves and our professional efforts. 

Women in the Headlines

Hulu’s Marketing Chief, Kelly Campbell promoted to President after her male counterpart stepped down.

Erika James will be both the first woman and African-American to lead Wharton, the 139-year-old Ivy League business school.

👏👏👏

I’ve created this newsletter to help women in the workforce to better know their worth. Follow me on Twitter and always feel welcome to message me directly on LinkedIn.

Header image is from Open Peeps.

Please share this newsletter with anyone who could benefit.

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Now, I’m putting the data I collected from thousands of women and all the conversations I’ve had with our community to meaningful use by starting the No Gender Gap Newsletter. 

As an advocate for working women I’ll help us all examine and answer these questions:

• Am I getting fairly compensated for my work? No Gender Gap provides deep insights into real salary and benefits data, across many roles, regions, and experience levels

• How can I learn to successfully negotiate raises and other challenging situations at work? No Gender Gap provides advice and best practices on how to achieve the best results

• How can my approach to work and life benefit from mentorship? No Gender Gap provides interviews with women on leadership teams

• Where can I find progressive companies with the best people practices? No Gender Gap provides only-the-best job listings from tech companies that treat their employees right, vetted by me

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As I’m starting this newsletter I am also packing tomorrow’s lunchboxes, Slack messaging with my team, responding to LinkedIn connection requests, working on a strategy plan for PR promotion for my boss, trying to solve the ant infestation issue in my house (yes, it is February), and waiting to get the blood results back from my OB in hopes that I can get pregnant with #2 soon.

In a few words: I have a lot going on. Just like you. That’s why I promise to only send you the most useful and high impact content, keep it short, and never email you just for email's sake.

The income I make from this newsletter allows me to keep fighting for equal pay for women.

Always know your worth,

Lizzie

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