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Skills from A Smart Bear

Inciting Events: What makes Carol buy today instead of someday

Map the trigger moments that move a perfect-fit customer from "call back in nine months" to "buying today" — one per keystone, vivid enough to advertise against. Adapted from Chapter 3 of Hidden Multipliers: Speaking Carol Into Existence.

Input
Your honed KEYSTONES.md — plus customer-interview findings, if you have them.
Output
An INCITING-EVENTS.md: trigger events (E1, E2, …) coupled to keystones, each marked observed or hypothesized, with notes on how to find prospects in that condition.

What this is about

The most maddening sales call is the one where the prospect agrees with everything — great fit, fair price, better than the competition — and still doesn't buy. "Call back in nine months." The explanation is that the person with buying power has one to three top priorities, and you aren't one of them. Nobody wakes up randomly deciding today's the day to buy; something happens — a moment of struggle that forces action. The book calls these inciting events, and they're what separate a customer who could buy from one who must buy now: the website got hacked and the owner is still shaken; the traffic spike that should have been the best day of the year crashed the site instead; the SEO consultant said performance is why the rankings won't move.

This skill maps your inciting events, one keystone at a time — because every real inciting event couples to a keystone: the keystone means they could care, the event makes it urgent. Where you have customer interviews, it harvests the trigger stories customers actually told you, marked as observed. Where you don't, it works backward through the book's brainstorm lenses — crises that force action, seasonal and planning cycles, strategic windows, personal life-changes — marked honestly as hypotheses to validate. And for each event it asks the question that makes the file operational: how do you find prospects in this condition — what do they search, where do they post, what public signals give them away? In advertising, the inciting event often outperforms the keystone, because it speaks to what the customer is experiencing right now.

Example invocation

You can invoke the skill like this:

/asb-carol-inciting-events Here's our honed KEYSTONES.md — we also have
a FINAL-REPORT.md from twelve customer interviews. What actually makes
these people buy now?

The skill walks your keystones one at a time, harvesting real trigger stories from your interview findings and brainstorming the rest through the book's lenses, recording each event with its evidence status and findability notes in INCITING-EVENTS.md.

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 (section "Inciting Events: Carol's Motivation") — hiddenmultipliers.com — the inciting-event concept, the coupling-to-keystones rule, the work-backward brainstorm lenses, and the findability question this skill runs.
  • As in Chapter 10 of Hidden Multipliers: A multiplier of one's own — hiddenmultipliers.com — the customer-interview method that produces the observed trigger stories this skill harvests first, before hypothesizing anything.

Supporting sources each supply a piece of the mechanism: