Building an edtech company from music, passion, and mastery learning

Executive overview

Most edtech founders come from education. Jeff Gargas came from running a record label. His co-founder Chad was the teacher — Jeff was the entrepreneur who saw an opportunity in Chad's mastery-learning classroom experiments.

Frameworks only work when teachers bring their own style to them — the job is to support and guide, not prescribe.

TeachBetter.com serves school districts across the US, selling professional development grounded in mastery learning. The business is slow-moving by design: government funding cycles, lumpy cash flows, and state-level delays are the terrain, not the exception.

From record labels to edtech

• Ran a record label and promoted shows after his band broke up; learned event production and promotion by necessity
• Taught himself web design and SEO to build artist sites; parlayed that into a small-business digital marketing firm
• Chad (co-founder, former teacher) described his mastery-learning classroom results during a rainy-night phone call; Jeff immediately sensed a bigger opportunity
• Met at a Buffalo Wild Wings, agreed to build an online course and pitch districts — neither had an education background in the traditional sense
• The company name and founding principle came from Chad's rule: "I never want to tell a teacher how to teach. I just want to say this helped me teach better."

The teach better framework and philosophy

• Built around mastery learning: students move at their own pace rather than sitting in rows absorbing a lecture
• Teachers are not information deliverers — smartphones do that faster; their job is to facilitate learning
• The framework is intentionally flexible; TeachBetter does not create curriculum or prescribe methods
• Allows high-ability students to advance while struggling students take the time they actually need
• Most kids in trouble in class are either bored (already understand the material) or lost (missed an earlier concept) — rarely "bad kids"

The hook principle: capturing attention first

• Engagement precedes instruction; if you lose them at the open, covering the material doesn't matter
• In business the same rule applies: every pitch, team meeting, or investor conversation is a teaching moment
• Hook → inquiry → connect to their context → grapple with it → what does this mean for me — this sequence works in classrooms and in sales
• Building a customer from first impression to purchase can take a day or a year; consistency and patience are the machine

Scaling challenges and cash management

• Scaled headcount too fast during a period of strong growth, outpacing margins; had to restructure and let people go
• Government education funding is non-recurring: large checks arrive a few times a year, often delayed at the state level
• Chad went without a paycheck for 45 days when their first major contract's funds were held up at state level
• For the first five years, both founders reinvested profits rather than taking distributions; that reserve kept them solvent through COVID
• When COVID hit, 96% of revenue was in-person; their cash position let them stop chasing clients and instead offer free support — which generated more inbound business than their sales effort had
• Post-COVID ESSER funding created a temporary surplus across education; the drawdown in 2024 hit harder than expected and forced further adjustment
• Virtual delivery unlocked a tier of schools that previously couldn't afford in-person training — a structural improvement that outlasted the crisis