Happy Friday! Hope you had a great week and that you enjoyed last week's F2F #46: Creating an audience: the good, the bad and the ugly, by Iñaki Arriaga, the first issue of F2F written by a guest!

This week, it's Ivan Landabaso, Partner at JME (a VC! 🙀) and founder at Startup Riders (Wow, that was close! 😮‍💨), a publication you ought to follow. Jokes aside, Ivan is one of the most talented, optimistic, generous and overall great person you can find in the startup secene. Everyone loves Ivan.

This is an article he's written for founders, and, unbeknownst to me, I've been doing this my entire entrepreneurial career, so I hope it'll be useful for you too!

🌊 Bottleneck Thinking

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 consistent 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.
2. Identify bottlenecks: Generally, this takes place across one of these:
   1. Product (value + retention)
   2. Get more leads
   3. Convert those leads
   4. Run tighter operations
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. Track it. Rinse and repeat.

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