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Skills from A Smart Bear

Define Carol: The ideal customer your whole company can aim at

Synthesize strengths, keystones, deal-breakers, and inciting events into a crisp, behavioral definition of your ideal customer — one Marketing can target, Sales can qualify, and Product can build to thrill. Adapted from Chapter 3 of Hidden Multipliers: Speaking Carol Into Existence.

Input
Your four working files: STRENGTHS-WEAKNESSES.md, honed KEYSTONES.md, DEALBREAKERS.md, and INCITING-EVENTS.md.
Output
A CAROL.md: the definition first — behavioral and attitudinal markers, not demographics — with reference sections on keystones, deal-breakers, and inciting events for the positioning, marketing, and product work that starts from it.

What this is about

"Women over forty-five" was the demographic profile of a certain beloved sitcom's audience — and it missed that the show's fastest growing fans were young men who loved sharp, character-driven insult comedy. Demographics usually describe your market the same way: close enough to feel right, wrong enough to waste every dollar aimed with them. The book's alternative is to define Carol — your ideal customer — by the circumstances, behaviors, and attitudes that actually predict buying, paying, and staying: not "WordPress users above $1M revenue" but a person for whom a faster website directly increases revenue, and who can calculate the dollar value of a hundred milliseconds.

This is the capstone of the find-your-Carol workshop. It reads everything the previous steps produced — classified strengths and weaknesses, honed keystones, deal-breakers and the anti-market, and inciting events — and synthesizes the crisp definition, pressing every marker through the keep-asking-why chain (speed matters — to whom? why?) until it clears the bar: Marketing can target it, Sales can qualify against it, Product can build features to thrill it. Where the keystone segments genuinely diverge, it makes you face the choice instead of averaging them into nobody. And the file it writes leads with the definition — because that's the point — followed by brief reference sections on the keystones, deal-breakers, and inciting events, because those details are exactly what the positioning, marketing, and feature work downstream will consume.

Example invocation

You can invoke the skill like this:

/asb-carol-define All four files are done — strengths, keystones
(honed), deal-breakers, inciting events. Write our Carol.

The skill drafts the complete CAROL.md — definition first, reference sections below — then reviews it with you section by section, refusing demographic laziness and generic markers until every line is something your team can act on.

One practical note: say where you're working. Name a directory (or point at your existing files) when you invoke, and the skill keeps the method's files together there — if you don't, it asks before creating anything.

From the source

Two sources form the foundation of this skill:

  • As in Chapter 3 of Hidden Multipliers: Speaking Carol Into Existence (sections "Beyond Demographics" and "Meet Carol") — hiddenmultipliers.com — the behavioral definition standard, the keep-asking-why chain, the qualifier/disqualifier questions, and the five-step summary this capstone assembles.
  • As in Chapter 2 of Hidden Multipliers: Carol Loves You for You — hiddenmultipliers.com — the Carol/Diana/Eddie bullseye: why targeting only Carol wins a market ten to one hundred times her size, which is the strategic case the definition file states.

Supporting sources each supply a piece of the mechanism: