The bowtie: the recurring-revenue lens

Winning by Design re-drew the funnel as a bowtie precisely to fix that under-weighting. Released in its updated form in October 2023, the bowtie extends the traditional funnel to cover the full recurring-revenue journey: acquisition on the left, onboarding at the centre, and retention and expansion on the right. The shape is the argument. The right half is as large as the left, because for a subscription business the post-sale half of the relationship is as large as the pre-sale half, and a left-only funnel optimises the smaller side of the picture.

This is not a niche academic model. It has been adopted as a standard data model, with thousands of go-to-market executives certified against it and a benchmarking dataset of hundreds of companies behind it. When lifetime value and net revenue retention drive your valuation, the bowtie is the truer map, because it puts the stages that move those numbers in plain view instead of off the end of the diagram. It is the lens that makes net revenue retention and customer lifetime value first-class citizens rather than afterthoughts.

The bowtie is the natural lens to graduate into once your product retains. A worked example: a productised-service founder runs the pirate funnel for their first year, obsessing over leads and trials because that is where the bottleneck genuinely is. Eighteen months later, churn is low and a handful of accounts keep asking for more. The growth lever has physically moved to the right half of the relationship, growing existing accounts, and a funnel that ends at "Revenue" can no longer see it. Switching to the bowtie is not a rebrand of the same numbers. It is changing which numbers are even on the dashboard, so that today's work bends the stage that now drives the business. You can pressure-test the switch against the single ratio in the LTV:CAC calculator: if your ratio is healthy because customers stay and expand, the bowtie is already describing your real economics.