How CatapultX Delivers High-Impact EdTech Insights with Fathom’s Open-Ended Analysis Platform
Turning teacher voices into actionable insight with speed, rigor, and transparency.
Analyze Teacher Voices at Scale
Catapult X is a boutique research firm that helps EdTech companies bridge the gap between what happens in classrooms, and the products being built to support educators.
The classroom experience is changing rapidly, and educator expectations shift just as quickly. Connecting with and understanding teachers has never been more important for EdTech companies — and it’s also never been more complex.
Every product team today needs to understand changing classroom realities, perceptions, and expectations.
This is where Catapult X shines. They are constantly innovating to deliver outsized impact for the sector.
But without effective open-ended analysis tools, traditional market research solutions fall short.
Unlock Open-ended Insights
Fathom is a text analytics and qualitative analysis platform that transforms large volumes of open-ended data into fast, accurate, and transparent insight.
By combining advanced AI-driven thematic coding with researcher control, Fathom enables Catapult X to quickly and easily scale open-ended survey analysis, IDIs, and online community data.
Importantly, the human-in-the-loop solution means the team can leverage their unique domain expertise to analyze thousands of responses, without losing the nuance and detail unique to their sector.
For the Catapult X team, Fathom eliminates bottlenecks in open-ended analysis, empowers the team with powerful insights, and helps them bring teacher voices into product strategy with confidence.
“There is more information than ever, and the real challenge is analyzing it in a way that is fast, accurate, and strategically positioned by someone who understands the domain.”
Analyzing open-ends quickly AND accurately
Catapult X is uniquely capable of collecting high quality data for the EdTech sector. They’ve cultivated relationships, partnerships and trust across the Education and EdTech communities, and have built a powerful pipeline of classroom data to product teams.
Teacher surveys, in-depth interviews, online communities and forums like Reddit, provide an enormous amount of insight about educator experiences and their needs.
So when Catapult X started working with Fathom, there was no shortage of data. Their challenge was analyzing that data efficiently and accurately, bringing their domain expertise to the thematic coding and analysis, in an educational paradigm that’s changing faster than ever before.
Catapult X required a text analytics software that would efficiently scale while incorporating context, capturing nuance, enabling researcher control, and giving full transparency to the research team - so that they could empower their clients to act on teacher voices with confidence.
With Fathom, Catapult X can do just that!
The importance of nuance and researcher control in text analytics
In EdTech research, nuance is everything. Vocabulary is precise, standards evolve quickly, and the smallest shift in language can reflect a major change in classroom practice.
Catapult X holds a wealth of domain expertise that helps them deliver uniquely valuable insight to product teams building technology for classrooms and educators. They know accuracy isn’t just about topic modelling, it’s about understanding this nuanced context.
For Catapult X CMO Daylene Long, Fathom’s commitment to detail, transparency, and control is essential.
Fathom amplifies her expertise rather than replacing it. “AI cannot replace human judgment,” shares Daylene. “Control really matters for me and transparency in methods and conclusions builds trust with my clients.”
By combining automation with researcher judgment, Long can apply her domain knowledge directly, ensuring insights are both rigorous and reliable.
“When it comes to research we need to be ruthlessly transparent in our methods and how we draw our conclusions. Fathom makes that possible.”
– Daylene Long, Founder & CMO, CatapultX
Insights that are timely, transparent and deeply connected respondent voices.
EdTech companies gain confidence that their product and business decisions are grounded in real classroom realities.
For Daylene, Fathom makes it possible to work faster without giving up rigor, to harness automation without losing control, and to deliver research that her clients can trust.
CatapultX had tried other text analytics solutions but then they found Fathom
Before Fathom, CatapultX tried other well-known text analytics platforms. The experience left her frustrated.
Themes were not nested properly, and could not be easily re-coded.
Outputs came in formats that were difficult to use, like JSON files.
The software had a steep learning curve, which drained time and resources from a small boutique team.
Graphics and reporting were limited and not client-friendly.
With Fathom, the team was able to capture time savings, deliver valuable insights and enjoy open-ended analysis:
Theme suggestions are useful, and easy to refine as needed.
The interface is intuitive and flexible, and data export is seamless.
Researchers follow their curiosity, moving between themes and responses, segmenting by demos and running statistical tests.
Graphics and reporting are clean and concise, very client friendly
Fathom delivers the rigor of an enterprise market research solution, with the usability and speed fast moving researcher teams need.
Partnering with Fathom: support and learning for researchers
For Long, the platform is only half the story. The Fathom team plays an equally important role.
As leaders in the sector, Catapult X’s clients expect them to continosly push boundaries to innovate and deliver ever more value for their clients and partners. Fathom helps them do this, with super responsive customer support and robust resources to support continuous learning.
“If I have a question, Jonathan will send me something quickly — an article or a resource that solves the problem.”
“I sit in on all of your webinars. The team knows what they are talking about, and every time I walk away having learned something new.”
That combination of intuitive and powerful software, responsive customer support, and ongoing learning gives Daylene confidence that she is not only delivering insights today but also sharpening her skills for the future.
With Fathom, CatapultX has transformed the way they analyze and activate teacher voices.
By pairing their deep domain expertise with Fathom’s human-in-the-loop text analytics, they can deliver insights that are not just faster, but richer, more nuanced, and immediately actionable. For EdTech product teams, this means decisions grounded in real classroom realities, built on rigorous, transparent methods, and delivered with the speed today’s market demands.
Together, CatapultX and Fathom are ensuring that educator voices truly shape the future of learning technology.
Learn more about Catapult X
Founded by Daylene in 2018, CatapultX helps EdTech companies bridge the gap between what happens in classrooms every day and the products being built to support educators.
With decades of experience in STEM and CTE, Daylene lives and breathes the language of teachers. She builds trusted relationships with educators, translates their needs for product teams, and ensures EdTech companies stay aligned with classroom realities.
Her motivation is personal. As a CTE student herself, she experienced how education can disrupt poverty and build confidence. That perspective informs her mission today: help companies design tools that empower teachers as the catalysts for student success.
