If mobile marketing isn't in your startup's toolkit, it should be. Photo via Getty Images

Consumer privacy is driving startups to immediately begin marketing and data collection. Google and Apple have recently stressed the importance of first-party data collection for businesses. For the last two decades, businesses have had access to cookies to advertise to people who visited their digital assets. Digital advertising has already changed with Apple’s iOS 14.5 alterations, switching the default of ad tracking from yes to no and both Google and Apple expect data privacy to increase.

For startups, when and how to begin marketing their business can feel like a cumbersome task. As a chief marketing officer, I was asked to list services and channels that I oversee, and I came up with 16. For founders of startups who must often take on the roles of CEO and COO in addition to CMO as they look to expand their teams, that time commitment is not reasonable for someone who also has a personal life.

Entrepreneurs need tools that are simple to institute and not cost prohibitive, to meet their respective milestones. First, we need to collect first party data, so that when we get to our minimum viable product we have plenty of people waiting to buy it. Next, marketing must work even when we can’t focus on it. Third, we must focus on revenue generating activities, whether they are marketing or not. Finally, we want to create an environment where successful entrepreneurs have a work and life balance.

Before doing anything else — get a virtual phone number

A virtual phone number is the first marketing tool I would use for any business. This number can be connected to your cell phone during certain hours of the day and disconnected for others. This allows people to reach you on your schedule. Put this phone number on every asset you have, so it can be integrated into future tools, such as customer relationship management and Google My Business. With proper opt-in information, it also creates an immediate list for SMS marketing in the future. A virtual phone number typically runs $1 to $2 a month plus usage fees, so it can be used by any business.

It is important that this is set up first, because without this, you can’t use the following marketing tools effectively.

Tool 1: Missed Call – Text Back

An entrepreneurs’ worst nightmare is missing an important phone call, whether it’s an investor or closing your first sale. Constant phone and email checking causes anxiety, but more importantly, it is a low revenue activity, so you are actively hurting your business.

Missed Call – Text Back, or MCTB, allows a customizable text message to be delivered to a client when you miss their phone call. It moves the caller towards resolution (sales or otherwise) immediately encouraging them to give you more information about their problem. The best part is, that once you have the system in place, it costs you zero time. Imagine walking out of a meeting and instead of 10 missed calls, you have 10 text messages that you can quickly answer. How much time did you just get back?

Pro Tip: In many cases, you can automate your emails in a similar way.

Tool 2: A funnel page

Now that we have a tool that allows us to work productively without constant phone checking, we need to increase our book of business. This is where a funnel comes in.

A funnel is a unique digital experience you would like a specific person — a client or investor — to have. When you start a business, a funnel can be your website because you only have one specific thing you want any visitor to do, like collect information.

Almost every consultant to new businesses is promoting funnel building. Why? Because a good funnel motivates people to act in a specific way. If you are raising funds, you want an investor to have a specific experience to garner interest, not hope they navigate to the correct webpage. If you have a new technology, you want early adopters to learn and then provide a simple way to collect their information, so that you can contact them when your product is ready. Finally, if you’re about to hit the market with your new product, providing customers with a simple purchase method will improve revenue during your important proof-of-concept period.

Funnels, like MCTB, can grow and adapt with your business, providing different groups of people with different experiences, with minimal effort. For instance, suppose I created a dating app and needed early adopters. Instead of creating one funnel, let’s say I created two. The only difference between the two funnels, is the first one’s headline was “The No. 1 new dating app for men” and then the second one said women. Everything else remains the same, but the experience is immediately different for the consumer. The more you can change the funnel to cater to their personal experience, the better it will be, but even simple changes can go a long way.

Pro Tip: Funnels are easiest to keep track of when they are subdomains of your website.

Tool 3: Automated SMS marketing

The final tool I recommend to start is Automated SMS Marketing. Assuming you have people properly opted in from your funnel — review Telephone Consumer Protection Act (1991) to ensure legal compliance — you can make sure they receive a welcome message in the first 5 minutes.

The most important part of text messaging marketing is allowing your customer to believe they are really having a conversation with you. If you can avoid it, never tell a customer that your digital number is automated. If you need, tell them it is automated but overseen by you. You are the owner of the business or the inventor of the technology, people want to talk to you. Customers want to pretend that they know you. Allow them this feeling. Once the customer responds, you should be picking up an organic conversation with them anyway.

Bringing it together

Using these tools, we have created a simple, repeatable method to gather customer data and start their customer journey. Your funnel may also help you gather an email list, but your most active prospects will be more than willing to communicate with you over the phone.

When you can’t take calls, whether it’s because you are in a meeting or with your kids, you can rest easier, knowing that potential customers get an immediate response that helps them get where they need to go, or at the very least, when you get back to work, you can help them quickly.

And the best part for a new entrepreneur is that this can all be done cost effectively. Personally, I recommend a service called HighLevel, a feature-rich cost-effective CRM, that includes all of the tools previously discussed. Most tech savvy entrepreneurs can figure out how to institute all these practices quickly from one platform in a no code environment. If you’d rather have assistance, there are 20,000 agencies that use the platform and just as many YouTube videos.

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Chris Romani is the chief marketing officer for illumiPure, a Houston-based medical device company.

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Study proposes converting Houston's vacant office space into affordable micro-apartments

Innovative Living

Downtown Houston has been fortunate to benefit from a transformation over the last couple of decades. Beautiful green spaces, luxury high-rises and hotels, restaurants, and updated arts and entertainment facilities are home to impressive art installations, farmers markets, major professional sporting events, and more. On the flip side of this, Houston’s central business district has seen a steep decline in commercial occupancy, struggling to bounce back to pre-COVID levels.

Houston is not alone in experiencing this situation. Nationwide, commercial vacancies are becoming increasingly noteworthy as the gap between residential rental rates and stagnant wages widens. Low-income earners, folks making between $20,000 and $30,000 annually (typically minimum wage employees, students and seniors living on Social Security), have been joining the ranks of the unhoused at an alarming rate due to the scarcity of affordable housing. Armchair economists and the like have been arguing for years that cities should repurpose these untapped resources into an opportunity to create dignified affordable housing that would keep those at risk off the streets and close to public transit options.

Pew Charitable Trust, along with international architectural firm Gensler, recently released their findings from a study on the subject — with Houston being one of two markets studied. The “Flexible Co-Living Housing Feasibility Study” found that converting Houston’s empty office buildings to communities of micro-apartments is, well, feasible.

“In the current climate of high construction costs, interest rates, building expenses, and rising rents, this project looks at the conventional office-to-residential conversion in a different way by leveraging the existing building infrastructure to reduce costs on a per unit basis,” Brooks Howell, principal architect at Gensler, tells CultureMap. “The result is a new housing typology, a co-living concept, that can provide affordable housing to the large and growing number of lower income single-person households in an urban context.”

The numbers
HUD reported that in 2024 homelessness was at an all-time high of 770,000 persons, up a staggering 18 percent from the prior year. Houston is on the low end of the national average, with a reported 3,270 homeless persons (4/10,000 Houstonians). CoStar data shows that Houston’s central business district contains 88 office buildings of over 50,000 square feet, 19 of which show reported vacancy rates of over 30 percent. As of November 2024, the median rent in Houston for an apartment was $1,297. The proposed rental rate for a furnished micro-apartment in a converted office building in downtown Houston is $700 — all inclusive, with zero move-in costs, as the units are fully furnished.

“The U.S. has a housing shortage of 4-7 million homes, which has driven rents to an all-time high and made it hard to save to buy a home,” Alex Horowitz, a project director for Pew Charitable Trust and a co-author of the study, adds. “Houston has one of the highest office vacancy rates in the U.S., but office layouts often don't work well for apartment conversions and carry high costs. This study finds that converting offices to dorm-style housing is cost-effective and can enable low rents — about $700 per month to live downtown. That could make a real difference for people struggling with high housing costs while revitalizing downtown.”

Co-living explained
Co-living is hardly a new concept. “Single room occupancy” dwellings, or SROs, were extremely common until about 1950. It’s worth noting that during the height of its popularity, homelessness was rare. The co-living model allows for a private furnished space, while bathrooms, kitchens, and laundry are shared facilities — much like a college dormitory. With 40 percent of renters being single occupants, this model promotes socialization and community, something that has been trending downward since the pandemic.

Wesley LaBlanc, principal analytics director for Gensler Chicago, adds that this elevated dorm situation is a “jumping off point for a number of models,” noting that there are six variations from the one in the study. LeBlanc encourages people to “Think beyond the conventional. A whole world of housing solutions come out of this.”

Office building apartment converstion floorplan rendering genslerIndividual rooms share amenities such as larger living rooms, bathrooms, and kitchens.Courtesy of Gensler


What to expect in a typical converted building
The Pew/Gensler report proposes a prototypical building standard of 24 floors, 19 of which are residential, with 60 micro-apartments per floor, or 1,140 residential units per building. Each floor would offer six shared kitchen areas, five larger shared living spaces, two smaller shared living spaces tucked into interior hallways, two central shower areas with five private shower rooms each. Two shower rooms would include toilets and sinks, plus two additional toilet rooms with four toilets and two sinks. The total comes to 10 showers, 12 toilets, and 14 sinks per floor. Two laundry rooms, each with three washers and dryers, would also be available per floor.

The high cost of converting office buildings into fully plumbed, individual studio apartments can be cost prohibitive, leading a pragmatic Howell to ask: “What if we didn’t demo everything?” The utilization of existing centralized plumbing on each floor saves an average of 25-35 percent in construction costs that would arise from running new plumbing to each unit.

The ground floor would consist of a main lobby, management office, and 10,000 square feet of retail space. Floors two through four would be reserved for parking, while the fifth floor would offer 10,000 square feet of Class B office space as well as amenities like the gym.

While subsidies will be required for the conversion, the same will not be true once the development is out of the construction phase. The co-living model is projected to cost around one-third of the cost of converting an office building to individual studio apartments or constructing new affordable housing.

Office building apartment converstion unit rendering genslerAn illustration of what a bedroom would look like.Courtesy of Gensler

Micro-apartments details
Each individual unit is designed to be 151 square feet, approximately the size of a modest hotel room. Furnishings include one extra-long twin bed (bedding included), a desk, chair, nightstand, standard-depth half-sized fridge, storage shelf, and cabinet. Units would have solid-core wooden doors and appropriate sound insulation — all for a tidy $700 per month.

Pricing has been a key factor in determining this configuration for affordable, urban housing. “Lowering the cost of housing to manageable levels enables residents to spend more on the other financial needs of their lives, which has broad implications for quality of life and well being,” LeBlanc explains.

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This story originally appeared on our sister site, CultureMap.com.

Annual Houston student startup competition names teams for 2025 event

ready, set, pitch

The Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship has announced the 42 student-led teams worldwide that will compete in the 25th annual Rice Business Plan Competition this spring.

The highly competitive event, known as one of the world’s largest and richest intercollegiate student startup challenges, will take place April 10–12 at Houston's The Ion. Teams in this year's competition represent 34 universities from four countries, including one team from Rice.

Graduate student-led teams from colleges or universities around the world will present their plans before more than 300 angel, venture capital, and corporate investors to compete for more than $1 million in prizes. Last year, top teams were awarded $1.5 million in investment and cash prizes.

The 2025 invitees include:

  • 3rd-i, University of Miami
  • AG3 Labs, Michigan State University
  • Arcticedge Technologies, University of Waterloo
  • Ark Health, University of Chicago
  • Automatic AI, University of Mississippi and University of New Orleans
  • Bobica Bars, Rowan University
  • Carbon Salary, Washington University in St. Louis
  • Carmine Minerals, California State University, San Bernardino
  • Celal-Mex, Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education
  • CELLECT Laboratories, University of Waterloo
  • ECHO Solutions, University of Houston
  • EDUrain, University of Missouri-St. Louis
  • Eutrobac, University of California, Santa Cruz
  • FarmSmart.ai, Louisiana State University
  • Fetal Therapy Technologies, Johns Hopkins University
  • GreenLIB Materials, University of Ottawa
  • Humimic Biosystems, University of Arkansas
  • HydroHaul, Harvard University
  • Intero Biosystems, University of Michigan
  • Interplay, University of Missouri-Kansas City
  • MabLab, Harvard University
  • Microvitality, Tufts University
  • Mito Robotics, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Motmot, Michigan State University
  • Mud Rat, University of Connecticut
  • Nanoborne, University of Texas at Austin
  • NerView Surgical, McMaster University
  • NeuroFore, Washington University in St. Louis
  • Novus, Stanford University
  • OAQ, University of Toronto
  • Parthian Baattery Solutions, Columbia University
  • Pattern Materials, Rice University
  • Photon Queue, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  • re.solution, RWTH Aachen University
  • Rise Media, Yale University
  • Rivulet, University of Cambridge and Dartmouth College
  • Sabana, Carnegie Mellon University
  • SearchOwl, Case Western Reserve University
  • Six Carbons, Indiana University
  • Songscription, Stanford University
  • Watermarked.ai, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  • Xatoms, University of Toronto

This year's group joins more than 868 RBPC alums that have raised more than $6.1 billion in capital with 59 successful exits, according to the Rice Alliance.

Last year, Harvard's MesaQuantum, which was developing accurate and precise chip-scale clocks, took home the biggest sum of $335,000. While not named as a finalist, the team secured the most funding across a few prizes.

Protein Pints, a high-protein, low-sugar ice cream product from Michigan State University, won first place and the $150,000 GOOSE Capital Investment Grand Prize, as well as other prizes, bringing its total to $251,000.

Tesla recalling more than 375,000 vehicles due to power steering issue

Tesla Talk

Tesla is recalling more than 375,000 vehicles due to a power steering issue.

The recall is for certain 2023 Model 3 and Model Y vehicles operating software prior to 2023.38.4, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The printed circuit board for the electronic power steering assist may become overstressed, causing a loss of power steering assist when the vehicle reaches a stop and then accelerates again, the agency said.

The loss of power could required more effort to control the car by drivers, particularly at low speeds, increasing the risk of a crash.

Tesla isn't aware of any crashes, injuries, or deaths related to the condition.

The electric vehicle maker headed by Elon Musk has released a free software update to address the issue.

Letters are expected to be sent to vehicle owners on March 25. Owners may contact Tesla customer service at 1-877-798-3752 or the NHTSA at 1-888-327-4236.