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 frustrating sales call is one where the prospect agrees with everything. The fit is great. The price is fair. Your product beats the competition. But the prospect still does not buy. They say, "call back in nine months." The reason is simple: the person with buying power has only one to three top priorities. You are not one of them yet. Nobody wakes up and randomly decides to buy today. Something happens first — a moment of struggle that forces action. The book calls these moments inciting events. They separate a customer who could buy from one who must buy now. Examples: the website got hacked and the owner is still shaken. A traffic spike that should have been the best day of the year crashed the site instead. An SEO consultant said poor performance is why the rankings will not move.
This skill maps your inciting events one keystone at a time. Every real inciting event links to a keystone. The keystone means the customer could care. The event makes it urgent. Where you have customer interviews, the skill finds the trigger stories customers actually told you. It marks these as observed. Where you do not have interviews, it works backward through the book's brainstorm lenses: crises that force action, seasonal and planning cycles, strategic windows, and personal life-changes. It marks these honestly as hypotheses to test. For each event, the skill also asks a key question: how do you find prospects in this condition? What do they search for? Where do they post? What public signals reveal them? In advertising, the inciting event often works better than the keystone. It speaks to what the customer feels 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 through your keystones one at a time. It finds real trigger stories from your interview findings. It brainstorms the rest using the book's lenses. It records each event with its evidence status and findability notes in INCITING-EVENTS.md.
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 the method's files together there. If you do not do this, the skill asks before it creates 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 concept of inciting events, the rule that links them to keystones, the work-backward brainstorm lenses, and the findability question this skill uses.
- 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 uses these stories first, before it forms any hypotheses.
Each supporting source adds one piece to the method:
- The Iterative-Hypothesis customer development method — how to validate hypothesized inciting events: ask customers what made them start looking. Ask right after purchase, while the answer is still fresh.
- Specificity: A weapon of mass effectiveness — why "a hacked website is a personal violation… you pay a consultant $300 per hour" works as an advertisement, and "customers get frustrated" does not. The event must be vivid. The customer must recognize themselves in it.