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So that last edition got a lot of responses.
A lot of you said some version of “just keep writing.” Some of you said hand it off. A few of you told me to shut up and go build. All fair.
But one response actually changed things.
Chris Lu, cofounder of Copy.ai, reached out after reading the last post. We’re both in Houston, and we actually got connected through a mutual friend at a pickleball game (of course). We met up, and one thing led to another.
He’s joining The Bottleneck as a partner.
Let me explain.
Why we brought Chris on board
A note from Rameel Sheikh, Founder of The Bottleneck
When I sent that last edition, I genuinely didn’t know what I was going to do. The newsletter had been on the back burner for months, and I wasn’t sure if the honest move was to keep going, hand it off, or just let it sit.
Then Chris hit me up.
We got together for dinner, and I basically laid it all out: here’s what’s going on with the gas stations, here’s the sign business, here’s the newsletter, here’s the fact that I have two kids under two and not enough hours.
I wasn’t pitching him on anything. I was just being honest about where I was at.
And what I realized pretty quickly is that Chris was in a weirdly similar spot (just from the other direction).
He cofounded Copy.ai back in 2020. They built it to over $10M in revenue, fully remote, and it became one of the early breakout AI companies. Then in October of last year — exactly five years after they started it — Copy.ai was acquired by Fullcast.
Somewhere in the middle of that conversation, it clicked.
Chris isn’t just smart — he’s been in the arena. He’s built a real company, scaled it, sold it, and is now looking at what comes after. The kind of person I’d want writing about operations, AI, and building is someone who has actually done it. Chris has.
So we’re going to run The Bottleneck together. Both writing. Both building it into whatever it wants to become next.
I’m still going to be here. But now there’s another voice in here too, and honestly, I think that makes the whole thing better.
More on what that looks like soon. For now, I’ll let Chris introduce himself.
A note from Chris
I’ll keep this short because I know you didn’t sign up to hear from me yet.
I cofounded Copy.ai over five years ago with my cofounder Paul. We started it as a simple front-end to OpenAI’s API to help people write better marketing copy, and it kind of took off.
We grew it to over $10M in revenue with over 17 million users, went through the whole startup arc — product-market fit, scaling, enterprise pivot, all of it — and then last October, we joined Fullcast.
So for the past few months, I’ve been in that post-acquisition phase where the thing you built for five years is no longer solely yours to build anymore, and you’re trying to rediscover yourself.
I was reading Rameel’s last edition — the one where he basically said “I don’t know what to do with this newsletter” — and I just recognized the feeling.
Not the exact situation, but the energy of it.
You’ve built something, you care about it, and you’re trying to be honest about whether it still fits.
We met up (shoutout to our mutual friend and a random pickleball game) and I think we both realized pretty quickly that this could work.
Here's what I'm bringing to The Bottleneck.
You already get Rameel's lens on how operators think. I'm going to add a second lens next to it: how to operate, grow, and transform a business with AI, from someone who has shipped it, sold it, and seen enough cycles to call the next one.
Not "AI is going to change everything" hype (you already get that from LinkedIn, and I'm sorry).
More like: here is the actual decision you're staring at, here is what I've seen work, and here is where I see things going.
The goal is narrow. I want you to make better decisions and grow faster. If a piece doesn't help with one of those two things, I shouldn't have published it.
So… you might hate me for this… But I already need a favor.
Just one small request. Think of this as my onboarding week.
You've been reading The Bottleneck for a while and you have opinions about what's useful and what isn't. I'd like to hear them before I start writing into the void.
Answer four questions. Then I'll get out of your way.