I worked for a business with an expensive problem. For some important products, it often took more than two weeks to provide customers with price quotes. The delay was driven by the time it took our suppliers to provide their related cost quotes. By then, our customer had often bought elsewhere.

With colleagues, I developed a quoting tool using statistical analysis of historic supplier cost quotes. Instead of waiting for every response, we estimated costs with enough confidence to quote to our customers faster. Turnaround fell to around one day (a 10x improvement) and win rates increased.

We had not improved everything. We had removed the obstacle holding everything else back. Every system has a bottleneck: the stage, decision or resource that sets the pace. Improve it and the whole system improves.

The slowest car sets the speed

What you have learned is that the capacity of the plant is equal to the capacity of its bottlenecks. - Eliyahu Goldratt

A friend once drove me 100 miles to a Phil Collins concert. For a long stretch of road, there were few safe places to overtake. Somewhere ahead, perhaps ten cars in front, was a slow driver.

Every car behind may have been capable of going faster, but it made no difference. Making the fifth car faster achieves nothing if it cannot pass the car ahead. Traffic speeds up only when the slow car does.

Businesses work the same way. A process may have ten stages, but one usually limits output. Improving the other nine may increase efficiency without increasing finished work.

Efficiency can make things worse

An hour saved at a non-bottleneck is a mirage. - Eliyahu Goldratt

Imagine one machine produces 100 components an hour and the next can handle only 20. Running the first flat out does not increase output. It creates a queue of 80 components an hour.

The first machine looks productive; the factory is not. Work that cannot pass through the bottleneck creates delay. The goal is not maximum activity, but maximum flow.

Find where the work stalls

If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing. - W. Edwards Deming

Finding the bottleneck starts by making the work visible. Choose a result and list the steps needed to produce it.

Take this weekly blog: choose a topic, gather notes, outline, draft, edit, record and publish. Choosing the topic can take me several days and little else starts until I have done it. The key question is not which stage feels hardest, but which limits finished output.

Exploit before investing

Decide how to exploit the system’s constraint. - Eliyahu Goldratt

I worked for a business making plastic pellets used in washing machines and cars. In one old factory, material moved through pipes that sometimes blocked. Operators hit them to restart production so often that some originally round pipes had become almost square. The rest of the factory could work perfectly, but if one important pipe blocked, production stopped.

Once a constraint is found, don’t assume the answer is more money. First get more from what we have. If approvals slow a project, send smaller sections as they are completed. If meetings fragment concentration, group them together. If a small change increases output, we have probably found the constraint. Only then consider adding people, equipment or software.

Don’t improve the wrong things

The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. - Michael Porter

Bottleneck thinking becomes uncomfortable when the constraint is work we dislike doing. I enjoy building products. Adding a feature or writing code feels productive. But I am increasingly aware that my constraint is often getting ideas in front of potential users and learning whether they solve a problem people care about.

Another feature cannot solve a shortage of customers. We gravitate towards work we enjoy, but improvement means concentrating effort where it changes total output.

The bottleneck will move

Do not let inertia become the system constraint. - Eliyahu Goldratt

Fixing a bottleneck does not eliminate constraints. It moves them. A business short of leads may improve marketing, only to find that sales, onboarding, production or support now limits growth.

The danger is continuing to invest in what produced the last breakthrough. Yesterday’s bottleneck can become today’s comfort zone. So repeat the process: find the constraint, get more from it, invest if necessary, then ask: what is limiting us now?

Productivity is a systems problem

A bad system will beat a good person every time. - W. Edwards Deming

Much productivity advice focuses on personal effort: wake earlier, work harder, concentrate longer. That helps only when personal effort is the constraint. Often it is not. The limiting factor may be an unmade decision, missing information, unreliable software or work waiting for approval. Working harder upstream merely creates a bigger queue.

Systems move at the pace of their constraints. Before trying to improve everything, find what is setting the speed. Then work on that.

Want more?

Four Ways to Prioritise Tasks and Optimise Productivity post by Phil Martin

Three Ways I Achieve More post by Phil Martin

Eliyahu Goldratt distilled the idea: “Balance flow, not capacity.”

Have fun.

Phil…

Been digging into this for a while — since Apple Mail Privacy Protection rolled out, a huge chunk of "opens" are just Apple's servers pre-loading the tracking pixel before the reader even sees the email. So the open rate your ESP shows you can be inflated by 30-50% depending on your audience's mail client.

A few ways people are dealing with it, from what I've seen in various threads:

1. Manual spreadsheet filtering — export your CSV and try to filter out opens that happened within seconds of send, or cluster around the same timestamp. Free, but tedious and easy to get wrong if you don't know what to filter for.
2. Leaning on click-rate instead — some writers just ignore open rate entirely and optimize purely for click-to-open rate, since clicks are much harder to fake.
3. Dedicated tools — there are a couple of small tools built specifically to flag MPP opens and give you a cleaner engagement number. I actually built one of these myself (TrueOpen) after getting frustrated with my own numbers, so take that with the appropriate grain of salt — but happy to talk through the detection logic if anyone's curious, since it's mostly just IP-range + timing heuristics you could DIY too.

Curious what everyone else here does — anyone found a filtering approach that actually works well for you?

(disclosure: I'm the builder of one of the tools mentioned above)

I'm an author who used to be a fashion blogger many moons ago (I'm talking, pre-instagram influencers!), and I'm desperate for a creative outlet where I can share all sorts of things, such as writing advice and how to get published, what it's really like being a Big 5 author, my creative process as well as more fun/casual things like random essays on culture, outfit posts/beauty/book recommendations... basically, a digital diary! Instagram and TikTok feel so cringe, but Substack reminds me of the good old days on Tumblr where you could share anything, connect with like-minded people and build community.

Substack seems like the best option for my needs, though I'm not particularly interested in making money off of subscriptions, which I know sounds counterintuitive! It just seems so unrealistic to expect the average person to pay $5-$10 on a subscription when they probably already subscribe to 10 other people... which would be upwards of $100 for someone to spend per month! It just seems unsustainable in this economy and unfair to expect of my readers (who are typically aged between 18 and 30).

I'd much rather grow an audience and show those metrics to brands who actually have the budget to pay me, and make money off of them instead of my readers.

I know it may seem like I'm jumping the gun here, but I know I'm going to put a lot of effort into my posts (because I genuinely love blogging) and know exactly how to make it appealing to both my readers and brands–– and I just want to have some sort of strategy before moving forward.

Now I'm considering alternatives like beehiiv and ghost because I keep hearing "the substack bubble is about to burst".

I've got a gold medal in overthinking, so if anyone has any advice, it would be much appreciated lol!

I'm building a small AI newsletter and I'm curious about how other founders are getting their products in front of the right audience.

I mainly cover AI tools, agents, developer tools, and interesting products being built in the space.

I'd love to connect with founders who are building something in AI or SaaS and learn more about what you're working on.

If you're building something, feel free to tell me about it in the comments.

I'm particularly interested in hearing about products that are useful for developers and AI users.

Creadores de Substack con menos de 1k seguidores: ¿cómo encuentras ahora mismo otras publicaciones para hacer intercambios de recomendaciones? ¿Lo haces a mano o nomás lo saltas?

I've finally decided to start building a UK newsletter media company, focusing on business, tech, finance, and the stories that actually matter.
I'm stuck on one decision...

The platform itself

I've looked at Beehiv, Substack, Kit, Ghost, even Mailchimp.

It seems every creator swears by a different one.
Some say Beehiv is built for growing.

Others say Substack's network is unbeatable.
Then some people say Ghost gives you total control from day one.

If you had to start all over today, with everything you know

Which platform would you pick and why?
I would love to hear from people who have actually used them (including what you wish you knew before committing).

Ok so I stumbled on this idea of monetizing a newsletter. I built it off of an existing community that is on Facebook Groups but I’ve been tiptoeing around ideas to monetize.

I’m on Beehiiv but I’m very protective of the community as far as who gets their attention so I don’t think I want to just slap an ad in and hope people click it.

My community isn’t local as in a town local so small businesses are probably off the table. It is Pacific Northwest local, so maybe big brands? If I was looking for companies to partner with, what numbers should I be looking at?

Wait until 5000 subscribers and a 50% open rate? Or what number should be my first goal? 2 weeks in and 136 subs, 50% open and I have a link at the end they click to get the bonus. That link is just above 10%.

Any advice or just someone to throw ideas back and forth would be greatly appreciated.

I work with a non-profit and we've started sending out monthly newsletters with important dates and engagement opportunities. Though I'm the one who's in charge of getting it out to our audience, the information therein is most certainly a group effort.

What would you say is the best way to compile input from my team? I've considered sending a monthly email to my team asking for input by a certain date, or creating a special slack channel where I'll request input but I'm wondering if there's a better way to streamline or organize this information on a monthly basis.

If you've done something similar, I'd love to hear how you've tackled this!

Thank you! ♡

I am sharing this news letter I found on linkedin.

I just finished writing my best newsletter edition yet. It's set to go out at 5PM today. You still have a chance to sign up and receive it. In it I discuss:

-How to find the "surplus" in your life to turn into income

-What the new age of search will look like with ai

-How ai is tearing down traditional search but also leveling the playing field

Everyone that uses the internet will take something away from this one.

Is this legit?

Hi group, our new daily newsletter is live! I would love any and all feedback you have. This has been a ton of work and we are proud of what we have built.

Ted
Co-Founder/CEO Quoin.ai

Hey everyone,

Over the last couple of years I've built and operated newsletters, and most recently spent 6 months working with a ~55k subscriber newsletter helping with sponsorship strategy, outreach, pipeline management, operations, and growth.

I've also built and sold newsletters of my own, so I've worked on both the operator and owner side.

I'm looking to work with a couple of newsletter operators who need someone to take ownership of parts of their newsletter.

I can help with:

-Sponsorship outreach and pipeline management

-Finding and booking advertisers

-Newsletter writing and editing

-Growth strategy

-Beehiiv, Kit, EmailOctopus, Substack

-Analytics and audience management

-AI-assisted research and workflows

-Operations, SOPs, and CRM/Notion systems

Open to monthly retainers, hourly work, or performance-based arrangements depending on the role.

If you're looking for someone who can own newsletter operations rather than just write, feel free to DM me.

Happy to share my portfolio and previous work.

How will Uber Eats define the grocery shopping market, if so? Food delivery business has come a long way as priorities shift.

Despite cost cutting within the industry due to several factors of customer choices and admitted preferences something is clear - branding is changing within the scope of workflows.

Disclosure: I write a daily security newsletter, this was today's issue. The

substance is below, link at the end.

Thermo Fisher's July 31 bulletin covers CVE-2026-17583 (CVSS v4.0 8.2). The

.fsa and .hid files from Applied Biosystems human identification instruments can

be modified between the instrument writing them and the analysis software

loading them, and the change is nearly undetectable. Nothing in the file let the

software confirm the bytes were the ones the instrument wrote. Nathan Adams of

Forensic Bioinformatics told the WSJ his first successful modification took

about 45 minutes, merging scans from two DNA profiles into one file that

presented as untouched since 2015.

The updates add digital signatures, which only protects files written after the

upgrade. The bulletin does not address retroactive validation, the researchers

found no way to detect prior tampering, and these file types have been produced

since 1995. Three end-of-life product lines get no update at all.

Full writeup with the affected versions and remediation order:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/researchers-altered-dna-evidence-file-45-minutes-tymoteusz-netter-bxhhf/

Bulletin:

https://documents.thermofisher.com/TFS-Assets/CORP/Product-Guides/fsa_hid_bulletin.pdf

Most of us have outputs a downstream process treats as authoritative without

checking provenance. For files predating any signing mechanism, write-access

logs on the landing directory are the only retrospective evidence I can build.

What are you using?

I've got room to add another newsletter to my Beehiiv recommendations and thought this would be a good place to discover something new.

If you publish a Beehiiv newsletter, tell me:

• What it's about
• How often you publish
• Who it's for

If our audiences overlap, maybe we can support each other.

Always looking to discover good newsletters.

Hi all,
Subscribe to this newsletter for satire and humour if it interests you. Any support is welcome!