Leveraging Catalytic Customers to Reach the Mainstream

When a product team talks about “the mainstream,” it’s usually in vague terms: a future state where growth is steady, retention is high, and your user base looks more like a cross-section of the broader market than a tight circle of early believers.

But the path to that mainstream is rarely straight—and it’s almost never obvious. You can tweak onboarding flows, run lifecycle marketing campaigns, or launch a dozen AB tests and still end up plateauing. That’s often because teams treat the mainstream as a single audience, instead of what it actually is: a layered, uneven mix of users with different levels of engagement, commitment, and context.

At CoinJar, we find it more useful to think in terms of three distinct segments:

• Convertible Customers, who are promising but not yet fully invested

  
  

• Casual Customers, who are using your product but don’t rely on it

  
  

• Conditional Customers, who engage intermittently or opportunistically

  
  

Each of these groups matters—but none of them will tell you what to build next. That’s the job of your Catalytic Customers.

Why Start with Catalytic Customers?

Catalytic Customers are the ones already pushing your product to its limits. They go deep, use it in real-world contexts, and often modify or adapt it to fit their needs. They’re not just power users; they’re often ahead of the curve in how they think about the category itself. What they care about today tends to signal what the broader market will value tomorrow.

And here's the thing: most product teams already have Catalytic Customers—they’re just not listening to them in the right ways. Their feedback is often buried in support threads or brushed off as “edge case” behavior. But if you study what these customers are doing—and more importantly, why—you begin to see patterns that are highly relevant to those larger, less vocal segments.

Let’s walk through how Catalytic Customer insight can help you move each of the other groups forward.

From Catalytic to Convertible: Creating Momentum

Convertible Customers are curious. They’ve signed up, maybe even kicked the tires on some advanced features. But they haven’t yet integrated your product into their routine or invested much social or cognitive capital in it.

These users don’t need generic onboarding. They need a reason to go deeper.

That reason often comes from observing what your most committed customers are actually doing. What features do they use most consistently? What workflows have they built? What do they say about the product in their own words?

Use that as your guide:

• Surface real-world examples, not hypotheticals.

• Invite Convertibles into user groups or communities where Catalytic Customers are already active.

  
  

• Design nudges around specific, aspirational behaviors—not just “next steps.”

  
  

Think of Catalytic Customers as your advance scouts. They’ve already mapped out the terrain. Your job is to build clearer paths for others to follow.

From Catalytic to Casual: Making Value Obvious

Casual Customers are a different story. They’re not unengaged—they’re just not particularly invested. They use your product when it’s convenient. It helps, but it doesn’t stand out. If a better option came along—or if your product broke—they’d shrug and move on.

This is where Catalytic Customers can help you understand what turns “helpful” into “essential.”

Look for recurring behaviors: Are there certain features that Catalytics use daily? Are there integrations or workflows that keep them coming back? What pain points does the product solve for them in a way nothing else does?

Then ask: can that same value be delivered in a more lightweight form?

Casual Customers aren’t looking for bells and whistles. But they will respond to clear, simplified expressions of value—especially if it saves them time or reduces effort. So, take what’s working for your Catalytics and translate it:

• Reduce cognitive load

  
  

• Flatten learning curves

  
  

• Strip a five-step workflow down to two

  
  

You’re not diluting your product—you’re scaling its relevance to your target.

From Catalytic to Conditional: Timing and Targeting

Conditional Customers aren’t uninterested; they’re just situational. They show up when a need arises—a seasonal project, a budget cycle, an urgent problem—and then disappear again. You can’t turn them into daily users, but you can design for their moments.

Catalytic Customers can show you where those moments are.

Watch what they rally around. Is there a spike in activity after product launches? Do they cluster around specific events, deadlines, or seasonal shifts? What triggers their engagement?

Once you identify these signals, you can build campaigns and touchpoints that speak directly to Conditional Customers’ context:

• Time-limited offers that align with known peak periods

  
  

• One-click versions of features that usually require setup

  
  

• Clear, narrowly framed value propositions (“Use this to do X in 15 minutes”)

  
  

The key here is frequency over precision. Conditional Customers aren’t a loyalty play. They’re an activation opportunity.

Bringing It All Together

Product strategy often defaults to solving for scale: “How do we serve the biggest group?” But that question skips a step. The better one is: “Who already understands this product best—and what can they teach us about everyone else?”

Catalytic Customers are, almost by definition, not your biggest cohort. But they are your most strategic. They can help you:

• Prioritize what to improve, not just what to add

  
  

• Translate expert use into accessible value

  
  

• Spot inflection points before they appear in the data

In short, they provide the leverage to make smarter decisions for a much broader audience.

Mainstream growth doesn’t come from dumbing things down. It comes from decoding what matters—and making it matter to more people.

If you're not sure how to find your Catalytic Customers—or how to use their insights to shape broader strategy—we can help. Let’s talk.