Profit, Clarity and Catalytic Customers

At its core, a business has one job: to generate profit.

That profit can come from growing revenue, lowering costs, or—ideally—both. Everything else we build, optimize, or strategize around is ultimately meant to serve one of those goals.

But in practice, most decisions don’t map cleanly to a line on a spreadsheet.

Product teams launch new features that don’t land. Marketing tries to create urgency where none exists. Leadership pushes for differentiation, even when no one’s asking for it. Somewhere along the way, the real purpose of the work gets buried under KPIs, decks, and assumptions.

To make better decisions, you need clearer inputs. You need a way to separate the work that generates value from the work that just generates motion.

This is where Catalytic Customers come in.

They’re not defined by spend, brand loyalty, or volume. What sets them apart is how deeply they engage with the problem your product is meant to solve. They understand the stakes. They see the gaps. And they’re often already adapting, hacking, or creating workarounds because the market hasn’t met their needs yet.

Spend time with these people, and your priorities get sharper.

When revenue growth is the aim, Catalytic Customers help you identify the kinds of problems that others will pay to solve. They often expose use cases or feature needs that aren’t visible in the data. Their language—plain, specific, experienced—can clarify your positioning better than any brand exercise.

When cost efficiency matters, they help you avoid wasted cycles. You stop chasing low-impact ideas and start building things with real utility. They catch issues early, suggest simplifications, and help focus your team’s effort on what will move the needle.

This kind of input isn’t generic feedback. It’s grounded, directional, and actionable.

You don’t need a thousand opinions. You need a few people who know what they’re talking about and are invested enough to tell you the hard stuff.

That’s what makes Catalytic Customers so valuable. They’re not there to validate what you’re already doing. They help you decide what’s worth doing in the first place. And in a business climate where the margin for error keeps shrinking, that kind of clarity has real financial upside.