Tactical insights for first-time founders to outsmart the burn, the churn & the breakdown.

Hey Founder,

We’re taught to read busyness as progress. Calendars are full, Slack is buzzing, dashboards are green, every team is at capacity.

And yet, growth can still feel painfully slow.

I see the obsession with getting every team to 100% utilisation hurt more mid-stage companies than laziness ever could. It creates motion, but often hides the one problem actually holding the business back.

Because your company doesn’t grow at the speed of everyone’s effort. It grows at the speed of its biggest constraint.

This issue is about why busy companies still grow slowly, why we keep working around the real bottleneck instead of on it, and how to find the constraint setting your pace.

Let’s dive in. 

Think about what you approved this month: a campaign, a sprint, maybe a hire.

Each one may improve some part of the business, but if revenue looks exactly the same three months from now, what did you actually improve?

They weren’t necessarily bad calls; they were just aimed at parts of the business that weren’t holding it back.

Eliyahu Goldratt explained this with a Boy Scout hike: The troop moves at the speed of Herbie, the slowest kid. The faster kids can race ahead all they want; the troop still arrives when Herbie does.

Your company works the same way. Somewhere inside it is a Herbie: the constraint setting the pace for everything else. 

For Titan, the Indian watch company, Herbie was tax.

Titan had bet on quartz and built a brand people across South India knew. Showrooms were packed, campaigns were landing, people talked about Titan at weddings, in offices, on trains.

But in the states where awareness was highest, sales were strangely weak.

So Titan did what good teams often do: doubled down on what it was already good at. More campaigns, new models, more creative for the South.

None of it fixed the problem because none of it was aimed at the real bottleneck.

Different states had different tax rates, which meant the same watch sold at different prices across cities. Smugglers bought cheaply in low-tax states and resold in the high-tax South, undercutting Titan’s own showrooms.

Titan paid for the marketing, while the smugglers took the sale.

The fix was almost embarrassingly simple: one national pricing system that removed the gap and killed the arbitrage.

Months of great marketing had moved very little. One boring pricing decision moved everything because it was aimed at the actual constraint.

Founders do versions of this all the time.

The CRM migration that eats a quarter while deals die at the demo stage.
The redesign nobody asked for while onboarding leaks signups.
The second SDR hired into a pipeline your delivery team already can’t clear.

Being efficient everywhere doesn’t make you fast if the constraint is untouched.

Under $500K ARR, you are most of the business. You feel the constraint because you’re standing in it: you’re doing the demos, onboarding customers, chasing the follow-ups.

Past $1M, that starts to change.

You now have teams with their own roadmaps and metrics. Everyone can be hitting their numbers while the company stays stuck, because those dashboards measure individual teams, not the bottlenecks between them.

And you’re no longer close enough to feel where the constraint is. Worse, it moves as the company grows, so the thing that held you back last year may be completely different today.

That’s when Herbie gets expensive. You start putting real payroll, tools and quarters of work behind problems that were never setting the pace.

At this stage, you can’t feel your way to the constraint anymore.

You have to go find it. 

#1. The constraint has no department.

Marketing wants the rebrand. Product wants the rebuild. Sales wants another rep. Each has a roadmap and someone pushing for it.

The constraint usually doesn’t. It often lives in the handoff between two teams, in the seam nobody owns.

So the bets with owners get funded, while the real constraint gets ignored. 

#2. You see the problems that feel like yours.

Every founder carries an identity: engineer, closer, product person. That identity quietly shapes what you treat as important work.

Problems inside it get your best hours. Problems outside it are easier to dismiss as too small, too boring, or someone else’s job.

But the constraint often hides there, because the parts you care about most are usually the parts you’ve already made strong.

In 2008, Dropbox had an elite engineering team and a product people struggled to understand. The constraint wasn’t technical; it was comprehension. Their fix was a plain three-minute demo video, and the waitlist reportedly jumped from 5,000 to 75,000 overnight.

The constraint is rarely hiding in the part of the business you’re proudest of. 

In a healthy system, only the constraint should run at 100%.

Max out every other team and you create work that doesn’t improve throughput: more queues, more motion, same bottleneck.

Some idle capacity is healthy. It gives the business room to respond when the constraint moves.

“Everyone at 100%” isn’t efficiency. It’s usually a sign you’re optimising the wrong thing. 

Every constraint leaves evidence.

The wait is usually more revealing than the volume.

“Sales is slow” isn’t a constraint.

Break it down: leads → calls → demos → deals.
If demos are the problem, go again: scheduling → prep → pitch → follow-up.

Keep zooming until you find the specific step where work stalls, then name it plainly: “Our constraint is demo follow-up.”

The more specific you get, the harder it becomes to hide behind another initiative.

Once you find the constraint, resist the instinct to hire, spend, or build around it.

First ask what is making that step slow. Often it’s a rule rather than a lack of people: an approval that adds three days, an unnecessary onboarding step, a process nobody remembers creating.

Ask what problem each rule originally solved and whether that problem still exists.

Delete dead friction before buying more capacity. Otherwise, you’re paying people to push harder against a constraint you created yourself.

When Intel was bleeding cash in memory chips, Andy Grove asked Gordon Moore: “If the board fired us and brought in a new CEO, what would he do?”

Moore’s answer was immediate: get out of memories. So they walked back in and did it themselves.

Ask the same question about your constraint.

The uncomfortable part is how quickly you’ll probably know the answer. Once you do, put your time behind it. If the constraint is genuinely setting the pace of the company, it deserves your calendar before another team’s roadmap does

A founder asked me:

Longer than you should. Most of us do.

But you don’t need a gut call. You wrote the answer down when you signed the contract.

1. Start with the contract.

Check the terms you agreed to: Net 15, Net 30, milestones, retainers, late fees.

If it says payment is due in 30 days with a 1.5% monthly late fee after that, that’s your baseline, not how patient you feel that week.

2. 15 days late: yellow flag.

Slow down work, send a clear reminder, and get a payment date or plan in writing. Assume good intent, but don’t keep sprinting for someone who’s already behind.

3. 30 days late: red flag.

At this point, I stop new work until the money lands or a signed payment plan is in place.

For software, that can mean suspending access. For agencies and consultants, pause deliverables. This is no longer a minor delay.

4. 90 days late: it’s over.

Terminate the account and, if the amount justifies it, send the balance to collections.

Anything softer and you’ve become their bank: an interest-free lender with your own payroll to make.

Don’t wait for them to make the decision for you. In a way, they already did when they stopped paying and stopped explaining. 

Send it my way, just hit reply.

Reads worth your time this week: 

Before you go…

Every company has a Herbie. The difference is that most spend years optimising around it instead of removing it.

So the next time growth slows, don’t ask what else you can improve. Look for the evidence - pile, starvation, or leak - and find the one thing setting the pace.

Then point the company at it.

That’s the real moat.

See you next Thursday,

— Mariya

Hit reply and let me know. I read every single one (for real).

Hey, I’m Mariya, a startup CFO and founder of FounderFirst. After 10 years working alongside founders at early and growth-stage startups, I know how tough it is to make the right calls when resources are tight and the stakes are high. I started this newsletter to share the practical playbook I wish every founder had from day one, packed with lessons I’ve learned (and mistakes I’ve made) helping teams scale.

Mariya Valeva

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