(2025-05-13) Chin The Heart Of Innovation Why Most Startups Fail

Cedric Chin: The Heart of Innovation: Why Most Startups Fail. The Heart of Innovation: Why Most Startups Fail — This week's essay is a summary of the 2023 book The Heart of Innovation, and gives us the answer to the mystery we set up about Vanguard in the previous instalment of the Understanding Customer Demand Series.

The demand framework explicated in this essay is also the first framework I’ve seen that doesn’t rely on ‘pain’, ‘desire’, or ‘progress’. It therefore gives us interesting new levers for finding and creating demand.

It is much easier to ask: “is our prospective customer ok with not buying our solution?”. If the answer is no, you have PMF (contingent on finding more customers in situations like this); if the answer is yes, you do not.

Why is this useful?
To founders, this is obvious: it is useful because it gives you clear guidance when you’ve found PMF.
For VCs, defining PMF in this way means that you have a method of picking startups who have found PMF just a bit before the adoption curve becomes clear to other investors

if you have the clarity of the ‘not not’ razor, you could verify PMF qualitatively — months before signs of PMF shows up in a startup’s adoption curve

Product Purgatory: When they love it but still don't buy — Jason Cohen has a wonderful essay that rhymes with the Commoncog essay this week... founders who are (rightly!) infatuated with their ideas. They yearn so desperately for validation—nominally product validation but actually personal validation—that they interpret these kindly social white lies as confirmation. Cohen's solution is to look for urgency.