The Customer Forces Canvas captures why customers do what they do.

In the beginning, we use the CFC to essentially discover how people are currently operating:

• What's their worldview?
• How are they currently using products?
• Where are their struggles?

We are studying all the ways to find problems so we can introduce our new ways.

Customer Factory vs Customer Forces

Both the Customer Factory and the Customer Forces have a set of stages. But those of the Customer Factory are more metrics driven. They are milestones that your customers go through. They are a great dashboard once you have launched your product or a great forecasting model when you are doing your traction roadmap. (e.g. When we begin to estimate what people will pay us and what those conversion rates are, that's when we use the Customer Factory).

• The Customer Factory is about what customers are doing in their lifecycle
• The Customer Forces are about the behavioural science behind why they are doing what they are doing at each stage

So for every arrow of the Customer Factory there is a Customer Forces Canvas.

• In Acquisition, people are going through a battle of forces to pick your product, and if your forces win out, then they buy your product.
• Same thing happens with Activation (on-boarding). When they start using your product, they are going through other forces that are pulling them the other way saying "Don't use this product, use what you were using before".

At each stage there are customer forces at play. That's why beyond the problem discovery and initial launch you are still gonna be using the CFC but for a different purpose.

Once people start using your product, there are going to be other triggering events (not the same kind of switching triggering events you encounter during demand generation, but just usage-based triggering events. What's triggering them to use your product).

As they are going to use your product, they are going to have some problems. There is no such thing as a perfect solution, every solution has problems, and so the opportunity for competitors is to switch your customer away from you.

When people buy your product and start using it on a regular basis, they'll keep doing it unless you give them a reason to live.