- Great Startups
- Posts
- The Bottleneck Mindset
The Bottleneck Mindset
Why Working Harder Isn’t the Answer (This Is)
In partnership with
Hey — It’s Charlie.
Welcome to the latest edition of Great Startups! Here’s what’s in store:
One Bottleneck at a Time: How Top Founders Crush Their Limits
Guide: What’s working in GTM right now
Solution: Do you have a demand problem?
Question: Why pitches fail (and a template that will fix yours).
Targeting Made Simple: A step-by-step guide to finding your perfect customer.
Hidden Startup Debt: The silent killer that’s slowing growth.
Get ready to dive into these power-packed insights for founders and growth enthusiasts!
Resources
ICYMI
Atlassian acquires DX, a developer productivity platform, for $1B. (LINK)
Netflix is getting into short videos with a new vertical feed for mobile. (LINK)
Cloudflare launches a marketplace that lets websites charge AI bots for scraping. (LINK)
The WordPress vs. WP Engine drama, explained. (LINK)
1X will test humanoid robots in ‘a few hundred’ homes in 2025. (LINK)
Quick Links
Ray Dalio built a $14B empire by following core success principles that took him from humble beginnings to founding the world’s largest hedge fund.
Iman Gadzhi and Pierre de Preux launched a SaaS and hit 7-figure ARR in 9 months by moving fast, using Iman’s audience, and solving a real problem.
Lenny Rachitsky and Jen Abel on how to approach founder-led sales.
Carta shares 50 slides packed with insights for founders from 45,000 startups.
How One AI App Founder Makes $20K+ Monthly—and How You Can Too!
Recently Funded / Raised
Moniepoint raised $323M to expand its business banking, credit, and payments platform for enterprises across Africa and beyond.
Knownwell raised $50.6M to enhance its AI-powered commercial intelligence platform that helps businesses identify risks and growth opportunities.
Alto Neuroscience raised $301M to develop AI-driven precision medicines targeting mental health conditions.
CoMind raised $87M to advance noninvasive neural interfaces that connect the human brain with artificial intelligence.
Anrok raised $109.3M to streamline sales tax compliance for SaaS businesses through automation.
Findem raised $88.3M to grow its AI-powered Talent Data Cloud that automates and unifies enterprise hiring workflows.
Finster AI raised $16.8M to build an AI-driven research platform for asset managers and investment banks.
Africa Finance Corporation secured $6.78B in debt financing to fund large-scale infrastructure and industrial investments across Africa.
Niron Magnetics received a $171.6M grant to develop high-performance, rare-earth-free permanent magnets using Iron Nitride technology.
Cala Health raised $248.3M to advance its wearable bioelectronic therapies for neurological and chronic diseases.
Like these? Imagine getting an xls of 1000 - 2000 recently funded startups every month - with emails - for only $99/mo → https://leadbites.com/funded-startups-list/
Shoppers are adding to cart for the holidays
Over the next year, Roku predicts that 100% of the streaming audience will see ads. For growth marketers in 2026, CTV will remain an important “safe space” as AI creates widespread disruption in the search and social channels. Plus, easier access to self-serve CTV ad buying tools and targeting options will lead to a surge in locally-targeted streaming campaigns.
Read our guide to find out why growth marketers should make sure CTV is part of their 2026 media mix.
The “Weird Not to Work” Method of Growth
Some founders just move faster than the rest of us, not because they’re grinding 24/7, but because they get way more mileage out of their time. The trick isn’t just focusing on one thing, it’s knowing what actually matters in your startup. Think of your startup as a case study factory: every customer interaction is a case study, and your job is to figure out how to repeat it at scale. The key is spotting the bottleneck in your factory—pipeline, sales, or delivery—and obsessing over that, because improving anything else won’t actually move the needle.
Superhuman founders take it a step further. They attack their bottleneck in a way that’s almost guaranteed to work, go full-on Goblin Mode until it’s fixed, and then immediately move to the next bottleneck. Productive work is only the stuff that hits your bottleneck hard with that kind of intensity; everything else is just busywork. Even doing this once a day can make you superhuman, and the mindset shift is everything: treat progress like it’s fully up to you, and suddenly your time isn’t just passing, it’s compounding. (LINK)
Ok that’s it for this week, We keep refining our newsletter content, just hit reply to let us know what you think about this issue.
