(2025-07-15) Chin Improv And The Search For Product Market Fit

Cedric Chin: Improv and the Search for Product Market Fit. Here’s a funny thing that happens with frameworks. If you read a framework first, and then look for cases afterwards, you’ll inevitably start seeing cases through the lens of the framework. Worse, you’ll try to force cases into the shape of the framework.

This doesn’t happen when you have sufficiently variant experiences of your own, though. If you do, you’re going to scrunch your face up when you encounter a framework that doesn’t quite fit the full set of your experiences. “That doesn’t seem right,” you say, and then you reject the framework out of hand.

This is one of the strengths of starting with cases first, and then looking for frameworks to explain those cases. It’s a way to inoculate yourself against overly neat – but ultimately ineffective — models.

In our last email, we told you that the Idea Maze is a seductive but ultimately useless metaphor.

As a concept, the Idea Maze sounds helpful — but if you look at how ridiculously successful real-world products reach PMF, the metaphor disintegrates. There are no clear rules. There is no predictable maze.

So the natural question is: how do you increase your odds of being one of them?

The only answer that fits with the twenty-seven odd cases that we’ve published on the Idea Maze is a thing called effectual thinking. (effectual reasoning)

Effectual thinking is a concept proposed by Professor Saras Sarasvathy in a 2001...

Saravathy didn’t pull this theory out of thin air: she hunted down a list of entrepreneurs who, at the time of her paper, represented a near-complete list of experienced founders (of enduring companies) in the US from the period of 1960 to 1985.

These folk were:

• Repeat entrepreneurs (minimum three ventures, though the average number of companies started in her sample was seven new ventures)
• Were successful and serious businesspeople (at least one of those ventures had gone public, and they had spent minimum 10 years with that company)
• Were filtered from a list of the ‘top 100 most successful’ entrepreneurs compiled by VC David Silver in 1985, and a list of Entrepreneur of the Year awards, compiled by Ernst & Young.

Sarasvathy found that all of them demonstrated a similar style of thinking when given a new venture brainstorming task. She named this style of thinking ‘effectual thinking’.
So what is effectual thinking? In short, effectual thinking is the opposite of causal thinking. (causal reasoning)

Causal thinking is what you learn in business school. It starts with a fixed goal and works backwards to figure out how to get there. (working backwards)

Effectual thinking does the opposite: it starts with opening your fridge and asking, “What can I make with what I find here?” You work forwards from available resources, not backwards from a predetermined plan.

Entrepreneurs who practice this effectual thinking follow three principles, and these are the rules that are actually useful for navigating the Idea Maze:

You structure your life to make survivable bets.
Successful entrepreneurs don’t go all-in on a single idea. They set themselves up — financially, emotionally, and logistically — to take repeatable, reasonable risks. They aim to stay in the game long enough for something to work.

You take action instead of getting stuck analyzing.
In the earliest stages of an idea, competitive analysis is misleading. If a market gap could be spotted through research alone, it’s probably not that valuable (and would likely be quickly exploited by an established competitor). Instead, experienced entrepreneurs take action and attempt to cut deals with relevant people

You treat entrepreneurship as improvisation.
There is no master plan. There’s no strategy that will guarantee success. You take action, learn from what happens, and adapt. This is a game that rewards curiosity, flexibility, and sheer staying power. (strategic context) (for how long is this a good approach?)

In a way, effectuation is quite freeing: there are no rules. There is no playbook to follow. No experts you must listen to. So long as you keep these three principles in mind, you can improv your way to success.