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Key Takeaways Testing real market demand before committing can reveal opportunities that planning alone won’t surface.
Long-term growth comes from aligning expertise, values, and systems rather than chasing speed or scale.
Rather than guessing what the market wanted, Jacqueline DeStefano-Tangorra decided to test it. The result surprised her: $33,000 in her first month in business — before hiring a single employee. Today, she has scaled her firm to more than six figures in monthly revenue.
In her twenties, she was immersed in complex data and AI work, including time as a Big 4 technology consultant advising large organizations on enterprise systems, executive decision-making and technology at scale. The work was demanding and formative. But alongside it, she began asking a different question: could her expertise create value outside a traditional, structured role?
Instead of overplanning or making a dramatic move, she turned to Upwork to test her assumptions about demand.
“At one point, I saw the market shifting dramatically in the expertise that businesses were seeking,” DeStefano-Tangorra says. “Upwork gave me a live market. If clients paid, renewed and referred, I knew something was there. If not, I adjusted.”
Rather than scaling quickly, she focused on patterns. Which problems appeared repeatedly? What clients were willing to invest in solving more than once.
“Most founders fall in love with ideas,” she says. “I wanted to fall in love with tangible evidence.”
As the signals became clearer, DeStefano-Tangorra shaped her offerings around consistent demand. She built repeatable frameworks, shifted from selling time to delivering outcomes and focused on long-term partnerships. Those early tests evolved into a consulting firm that has now worked with more than 200 clients, from national franchise operators to Fortune 500 enterprise organizations navigating data and AI solutions.
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