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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. This profile missed something. The show's fastest growing fans were young men who loved sharp, character-driven insult comedy. Demographics often describe your market this way. They feel close enough to be right. But they are wrong enough to waste every dollar you aim with them. The book offers a different method: define Carol — your ideal customer — by the circumstances, behaviors, and attitudes that actually predict buying, paying, and staying. Do not use a label like "WordPress users above $1M revenue." Instead, use a person for whom a faster website directly increases revenue, and who can calculate the dollar value of a hundred milliseconds.

This skill is the final step of the find-your-Carol workshop. It reads everything the earlier steps produced: classified strengths and weaknesses, honed keystones, deal-breakers and the anti-market, and inciting events. It combines these into one crisp definition. It tests every marker with the keep-asking-why chain (speed matters — to whom? why?). Each marker must clear a bar. Marketing must be able to target it. Sales must be able to qualify against it. Product must be able to build features that thrill it. Sometimes the keystone segments point in different directions. When this happens, the skill makes you choose one. It does not let you average them into a definition that fits nobody. The file leads with the definition, because that is the point. Brief reference sections on keystones, deal-breakers, and inciting events follow. Positioning, marketing, and product work will use these details later.

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. The definition comes first. Reference sections follow. Then the skill reviews the file with you, section by section. It rejects demographic shortcuts and generic markers. It keeps working until every line gives your team something to act on.

One practical note: tell the skill where you are working. Name a directory, or point to your existing files, when you invoke it. The skill then keeps all method files together in that location. If you do not say, the skill asks before it creates anything.

From the source

Two sources are the foundation for this skill:

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

Each supporting source supplies one piece of the method: