Validate by Doing with Carolyn Sloan
When founders say they’re “early-stage,” they usually mean pre-scale. But what they’re really missing is pattern recognition.
In our latest episode of The Predictable Revenue Podcast, Collin sat down with Carolyn Sloan, founder of TeachMeTV. They unpacked exactly how she had found it, and scaled real traction in a market that resists disruption.
This post distills the lessons on how to listen to your market, spot genuine demand, and turn early momentum into a growth engine. If you’re still guessing whether you have PMF or struggling to turn wins into repeatability, this is your playbook.
Start With the Pain You Know Best
For most early-stage founders, that “real” isn’t a market gap. It’s something that frustrated them enough to say, “This is broken, and I can’t ignore it anymore.”
That’s the right energy. Not insight from afar. Not research pulled from Google. But something you lived deeply and repeatedly. The thing you saw no one fixing and finally decided to take on yourself.
Carolyn had that kind of frustration. She was in the classroom watching students use well-funded “adaptive” tools that looked impressive but left kids completely confused. They got answers wrong but didn’t know why. The system couldn’t tell them. So, they continued to practice mistakes, building false confidence with no path to correction.
You don’t need a perfect idea to start a company.
That was the wedge. Not a grand vision. A quiet, persistent problem.
If you’re wrestling with what to build or who to serve, start there. What’s the thing you’ve seen up close, so often, with so much clarity, that you’d bet years of your life on fixing it? That’s your edge. That’s the insight that won’t come from a whiteboard session or customer interview. You’ve already earned it.
Validate With Behavior, Not Compliments
You don’t have product-market fit just because people say your idea is great. You have product-market fit when people start asking you how soon they can have it.
Early feedback can be dangerously misleading, especially when it comes from people who like you. Friends, peers, and parents will often say your product is “cool,” “needed,” or “useful.” But most of them aren’t trying to buy. And they’re rarely honest enough to tell you when something doesn’t click.
Founders often mistake approval for demand.
Carolyn nearly did. She originally thought TeachMeTV would be a tool for parents. She showed it to them and got polite, positive reactions. “This looks great.” “I’d totally use this with my kids.” However, weeks passed, and nothing happened. There was no usage, no referrals, and no pull.
Then, she brought it to an educator conference. The difference was instant. Teachers leaned in. Site directors pulled over colleagues mid-demo. Curriculum leads asked for pricing on the spot. One deal closed right after a live call, with multiple decision-makers jumping in unprompted. It wasn’t feedback. It was action.
That’s what validation looks like:
Urgency, follow-up, and interest that comes from them, not from you chasing after them. The people you’re building for don’t need convincing. They need you to keep up.
You can’t fake that. And you shouldn’t settle for anything less.
DIY Until You See the Spark
Before there’s traction, there’s grind. And in the earliest stages, you can’t hand it off.
No one else knows what you’re building well enough to pitch it. No one understands the problem as deeply as you do. And no one else can adapt the message on the fly when the conversation takes an unexpected turn.
Carolyn did everything herself. She created the first content. Led every conversation. Took every demo. Not because she was trying to prove something but because it was the only way to learn. The only way to figure out what landed, what confused people, and what created urgency.
Your first sales process can’t be delegated. It has to be lived.
If you’re not sure what your sales motion looks like yet, you’re not behind. You’re just in the phase where you’re learning the job. Every call is data. Every rejection is an insight. You don’t need a playbook. You need repetition.
You’ll know you’re past this phase when the spark becomes consistent when the questions stop being polite and start being urgent. When people you’ve never met are asking how fast they can try it.
Until then, build it, pitch it, fix it, repeat.
Shift GTM When Traction Tells You To
Founders often confuse good feedback with real traction. They’re not the same. Polite interest doesn’t pay the bills.
Take Carolyn. The original bet was B2C, parents of young learners. Feedback was encouraging, but results were flat. No surge in signups, no viral spread, no pull. That’s weak PMF.
Then came the pivot. At a few education conferences, a new signal emerged: educators lit up. They didn’t just like the product. They needed it. They asked buying questions. They followed up. Demand shifted from hypothetical to concrete. That’s what real pull feels like
The takeaway:
Your market will show you where the fit is if you’re willing to see it.
Too many founders get locked into their original GTM strategy and miss the pull happening elsewhere. Conferences, pilots, and early demos are not just marketing opportunities. They’re diagnostic tools. They reveal where urgency lives.
Strong GTM isn’t necessarily what you planned. But it’s where traction shows up. Pay attention to the sharp edges: where conversations turn into sales, where interest becomes urgency, where prospects chase you. That’s your wedge.
Turn Early Wins Into a Growth Engine
Finding traction is a breakthrough. But sustaining it requires discipline, specifically, turning what worked once into something that works every time.
For Carolyn, traction came through service. Not just software, but support: site visits, classroom coaching, and hands-on implementation. These turned into conversion engines.
Support led to success. Success led to referrals. And referrals turned one-off wins into systemic adoption, district by district, state by state. In North Carolina, advocates on the ground did more than any marketing campaign could.
The lesson:
Early success isn’t the end of the sales cycle. It’s the beginning of your growth strategy.
Too many founders celebrate a sale and move on. However, early customers are more valuable as repeat customers than as revenue generators. They’re your first distribution partners if they get results.
This is where most teams break. They treat support as a cost to minimize rather than a lever to scale. However, in the early stages, support is provided through GTM. It’s how you learn what great outcomes look like. It’s how you build the playbooks, proof points, and referrals that make the next 10 sales faster.
Every pipeline needs a process, not just for closing deals but for turning delivery into demand. That means documenting what great service looks like, systematizing it, and assigning ownership to ensure consistency. What gets repeated is what gets scaled.
When the Vision Comes to Life, Double Down
Every founder chases the moment when the thing they imagined becomes real when it works in the wild, not just in pitch decks or prototypes.
For Sloan, that moment was a classroom in full motion: over 30 kids, each learning at their own pace. Yoga in one corner. AI chats in another. Math drills up front. No certified teacher in sight, but real engagement real outcomes.
That wasn’t just a demo. It was the product’s promise made visible.
These moments matter. They’re multipliers if you act on them.
Too many teams move on too quickly. But when your product clicks in a live environment, you’ve found your leverage. That’s when you double down, not just emotionally, but operationally.
Build around that moment. Capture it. Film it. Turn it into a case study. Use it to train sales reps, to pitch partners, and convince skeptics. That moment is proof, and proof is the most powerful asset in your go-to-market playbook.
Growth occurs when all four funnels, prospecting, closing, onboarding, and expansion, are fueled by the same clear story of value.
When you see the product work as intended, don’t just celebrate. Systematize. That’s how a spark becomes a signal, and a signal becomes scale.
3 PMF Tests You Can Steal
Forget the survey. Real PMF shows up in behavior. Here are three dead-simple ways Carolyn Sloan pressure-tested traction:
1- The Reflective Practice Study: Run two student groups, one with your product and one without. Look for actual improvement. Then, do the underrated thing: ask the students how it felt.
2- The Conference Field Test: Buy a table. Watch what educators do, not what they say. Are they leaning in? Asking real questions? Or just being polite?
3- The Founder-Led Sales Sprint: No pitch decks. Just 10 straight-up conversations. Track how many ask for a follow-up, quote, or intro. Curiosity is cheap. Action is signal.
Conclusion
Every founder hits pockets of traction. What separates the ones who scale is what they do with it.
They know that feedback isn’t signal, demos aren’t proof, and one win doesn’t mean repeatability. They test. They document. They double down when the product clicks and build systems around that resonance.
Carolyn Sloan didn’t “get lucky” with TeachMeTV. She listened hard, ran the plays, and scaled the moments that worked. You can, too.
Start small. Run the tests. Follow the pull. Then, turn it into a process and build upon it.
Want to see what real traction looks like in edtech? Carolyn Sloan’s TeachMeTV is reshaping how students learn, with AI, creativity, and scale.
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