🌊 Bottleneck Thinking: A Framework to Prioritize What Matters For Founders

👋 Hello! I’m Ivan. I write monthly about the playbooks and hidden tactics of the top 1% of founders and investors. Subscribe to stay ahead of the curve:

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Summary

1. 🌊 Bottleneck Thinking: a growth framework.

2. 🌊 Fundraising: you summer reading list.

3. 🌊 Fundraising: 6 universal laws.

4. 💵 Iberian Deals: 24 deals in Spain (>€500M).

5. 🍫 Meme of the month: bring back Math.

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🌊 Bottleneck Thinking

I found a framework that’s had a big impact on my first half of the year.

Results:

• Top Funnel Audience (LI/X/SS): 30K → 50K+

• Bottom Funnel:

  • JME.vc: 8 deals closed in H1.

  • Revenue Squared: c.3x H1-YoY revenue growth.

  • Startup Pitch Deck GPT: 1K → 10K+ conversations.

I found this framework through Dickie Bush (worth a follow).

It is simple (not easy), and effective. Especially for founders.

Bottleneck thinking

The people who move the fastest aren’t doing more work, they are continuing to apply the right efforts to the right bottlenecks faster than anyone else.

—Dickie Bush

Business bottlenecks seem to be everywhere.

But the truth is there’s only one that should really matter at any give point in time.

If you are not working on the most important thing, the rest doesn’t really matter.

Of course, life and business are games of endless bottlenecks.

And there’ll always be one after the other.

But the order in which you solve them matters.

For early-stage startups, having this muscle memory often dictates life or death.

Sounds obvious. It isn’t. Especially considering human nature.

Let me give you an example (from “The Goal”, by Eliyahu Goldratt).

Imagine a group of boy scouts in the woods.

You are leading them during an overnight trip, getting to camp.

You notice that the group is uncapable of following a consisten pace.

The leader is always far out of sight, the rest are spreading out.

Night-time is coming up fast and things are getting dangerous.

You notice the group as a whole can only move as fast as its slowest member. In this case poor Herbie, a chubby scout who’s clogging the line.

What should you do?

Stick Herbie at the front of the line and distribute his backpack stuff to the rest of the group to lighten his load. Now the front moves faster and everything follows.

Take the same model, apply it to a factory - if all machines are running smoothly, but one of them breaks down. No matter how much your team puts into other parts of the production line, if you don’t fix your bottleneck, your business will tank.

The problem comes when more complexity enters the picture.

Often, we know what the bottleneck is, and we know the levers to fix it.

But we’re human. And somehow we end up procrastinating problems away. We decide that fixing the website is worth attending to, our attention dilutes, and voilá.

Moral of the story?

When you are attacking the right bottleneck systematically, every gram of effort is being used with maximum leverage - and in business, whoever does this most consistently and fastest (execution) tends to win:

So, how do you systematically find and attack the right bottleneck?

Here’s a framework:

1. Goals: have clarity on where you are going. OKRs help.

2. Identify bottlenecks: Generally, this takes place across one of these:

   1. Get more leads

   2. Convert those leads

   3. Run tighter operations

   4. Improve value and retention

3. Prioritize the key bottleneck: which problem is upstream from all the others? which one will lead to the most impact when you solve it? which one unlocks the most value for the business right now?

4. Inhale: take in as many resources as you can to remove that single bottleneck.

5. Iterate: figure out if the right bottleneck is removed. You’ll know because your OKRs will move if you’ve done step 1 and 4 right (execution). Rinse and repeat.

And remember, always ask yourself - what’s my key bottleneck right now?

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🌊 Fundraising Summer Reading

Don't reinvent the fundraising wheel.

Here are the Top 10 assets I keep coming back to:

Fundraising

1. Startup Pitch Deck GPT - Startup Riders

2. Data Room template - Creandum

3. Story Branding - Donald Miller

4. The Idea Maze - Balajis Srinivasan

5. Fundraising guides - Y Combinator

6. Fundraising wisdom - FirstRound

7. Series A Deck Template - Creandum

8. Business Plan - Sequoia

9. Front Series A Deck

10. SaaS Fundraising Playbook - IVP

Metrics

1. Operational efficiency metrics - Iconiq

2. B2B benchmark metrics - a16z

3. What is good retention - Lenny Rachitsky

4. Top 5 SaaS metrics VCs look at - Jon Ma

5. Cohort analysis template SaaS - Point9

Equity & Compensation

1. Equity grants per round - Balderton

2. Founder’s compensation - Creandum

3. Option Plan Tool - Index

𝗕𝗼𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗠𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁

1. Lessons from Keith Rabois

2. The Art of Board Membership

3. How to run a board - Samuel Gil

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🌊 6 universal laws of fundraising

1. Wi-Fi quality tends to be inversely proportional to the importance of the meeting.

2. The probability of rescheduling a call increases exponentially after rescheduling it the first time.

3. The chances of finding a critical error in your pitch deck increase dramatically just minutes before presenting to investors.

4. The probability of a "quick meeting" turning into an hour-long discussion is directly proportional to the number of people attending.

5. The probability of sending an email to the wrong recipient increases with the explosiveness of the email's content (via Marek Fodor).

6. The greater the number of email recipients, the higher the probability of forgetting to add attachments (via Cesar @digitalnexen).

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💵 Iberian Deals

You love startups and want to enjoy a Spanish lifestyle?

Come join the Spanish startup ecosystem. Here’s a list of recently funded startups:

• Zunder (EV charging infra) secured a €225M loan.

• Citibox (smart mailbox) raised €80M.

• Exoticca (travel) raised 60M.

• Civitatis (activities platform) raised €50M.

• PLD Space (spacetecg) secured a €31.2M loan.

• RavenPack (data analytics) raised $20M.

• Integra Therapeutics (gene therapy) raised €10.5M.

• Essentialist (travel tech) raised $10M.

• Nearby Computing (edge computing) raised €6.5M.

• Payflow (YC S21) (fintech) raised 6M.

• Shalion (data analysis for retail) raised €5M.

• Kenmei Technologies (network) raised €4M.

• MOA foodtech (foodtech) raised €3M.

• Catcher (last mile B2B marketplace) raised €3M.

• Widhoc Smart Solutions S.L. (agritech) raised €2M.

• SQRUPS (stock liquidation) raised €1.5M.

• Viva In Vitro (biotech) raised €1.3M.

• Nomade Nation (travel) raised €850K.

• inBiot Monitoring SL (air quality) raised €500K.

• billdin (cost control software) raised €430K.

• TOTEEMI (sports gamification) raised €440K.

• Lawwwing (legal tech) raised €360K.

• FlamAid (personal safety) raised €250K.

• Directo - Free Travel Chrome Extension raised $1M.

• Paack (logistics) is finalising a sizeable round.

• Ikualo (neobank) raised an unspecified amount.

• Bit2Me (crypto) received investment from Unicaja.

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🍫 Meme of the month

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If you enjoy Startup Riders, I’d really appreciate a share - see you next month! 🤙

P.s. I founded a private tech sales community for spanish-speaking GTM teams called Revenue Squared. Apply here.