In the startup world, marketing is not just lead generation. This Houston expert explains. Photo via Getty Images

Until recently, the concept of marketing within the startup sphere was often equated solely with lead-generation. It's not entirely inaccurate to say that "marketing is lead-generation," as revenue generation is undeniably the end goal of marketing efforts.

However, what tends to be overlooked by founders is the intricate path to achieving revenue generation and how marketing can pave the way. I firmly believe that a similar paradigm exists in the realm of B2C marketing.

Distinguishing "Marketing" from "marketing"

I'd like to start by establishing a distinction between Marketing and marketing. This distinction might not be perfect, but it encapsulates how I conceptualize these concepts. When I refer to Marketing with a capital "M," I'm alluding to the overarching strategies that companies employ to drive revenue through marketing and advertising activities. This is the domain of the chief marketing Officer. The role of a CMO entails overseeing marketing and advertising efforts to ensure their alignment and efficiency in achieving the company's broader strategic goals.

Given this concept, where should a startup begin when figuring out their marketing strategy?

The role of brand

There is a common tendency amongst startups to create a product, establish a name, and swiftly attempt to enter the market. While the initial step for a startup involves achieving product-market fit, I advocate that once this milestone is reached, startups should pause to invest time in crafting their brand identity. Branding serves as the facet of a company that sets it apart and defines itself. This encompasses articulating a vision, mission, and values. Founders have the opportunity to shape their company's voice, articulate how they add value to customers, and delineate the organizational culture they aspire to foster. This phase is pivotal because it establishes the foundational elements that necessitate internal alignment for efficient scalability.

Once the brand is established, it can be handed over to a skilled marketer to start driving revenue growth. However the path to revenue growth goes straight through brand awareness.

Distinguishing marketing from advertising

This distinction can be perplexing, as the activities described here largely fall under the Marketing umbrella. However, I find it beneficial to differentiate between marketing and advertising within the broader context of Marketing strategy. Marketing revolves around cultivating brand awareness. Marketing is about building brand awareness. In marketing campaigns the wording can be about the company and its team. While I don’t recommend the old visuals of people in a boardroom having meetings, it’s ok to talk about the people and goals of the company in marketing campaigns. What does your brand represent? What is your product? What do you do? Who are your people? What are your values? It’s ok to share all of these things, and depending on the channel a company is marketing on, their marketing person will be well equipped to display this.

Advertising has a different tone and purpose. When advertising a company is talking to their customer, and offering the customer a solution to their pain and problem. This is a company’s what. I assume that a company that has made it this far offers a solution that is a cure, and not a nice-to-have.

Most advertising campaigns follow a simple formula, “are you suffering from X?” with a clear answer of “our company can solve that with Y”. If the answer to the pain question is yes, there is a good probability that the person will click on the ad they are seeing. That probability improves when the advertising campaign is layered on top of a well executed brand awareness campaign.

The significance of brand awareness

Although I'm not a psychologist, I do recognize the potency of the subconscious mind. This isn't about psychological manipulation, but rather an acknowledgment that the subconscious retains more than the conscious mind is capable of. Unlocking this potential might be challenging for individuals, but for marketers, the process is comparatively more accessible. Present information to an individual, and as long as they see it, their subconscious mind will register and retain it. This underscores the importance of brand awareness in revenue generation. By exposing a target audience to the company’s messaging through brand awareness campaigns, enhances the likelihood of engagement.

This fundamentally reshapes how companies connect with their ICP.

The nuance of timing

When an individual encounters advertising, a part of their brain will recognize the brand and might even associate it positively. This underscores the criticality of brand awareness, as it allows companies to focus on their target audience and continuously engage them until they are ready to make a purchase. Determining the precise moment when a customer is ready to buy is nearly impossible. However, this moment invariably arises, usually propelled by a pain point. When that decisive moment arrives, the goal is for the company’s brand to be the first that comes to their mind or that they see. This necessitates an ongoing investment in brand awareness campaigns.

So what does this mean in the context of startups?

A capital-efficient marketing approach

A key component of any Marketing strategy is capital efficiency. Founders must familiarize themselves with crucial metrics, such as:

  1. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): What is the expense of acquiring each customer?
  2. Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV or LTV): What is the anticipated revenue generated from engaging this customer?

While it's acceptable to commence with assumptions, any shifts in these assumptions warrant corresponding adjustments in a Marketing budget.

In the initial stages of a company’s lifecycle, a significant portion of sales might stem from direct, personalized selling efforts. This entails founders engaging in activities like providing software demos for enterprise sales or conducting face-to-face interactions within the target market. However, as revenue grows, capital is raised, and founders transition from selling to leading, this selling strategy should be phased out. This also marks the moment for founders to begin contemplating their Marketing budgets.

A starting point for figuring out your Marketing budget can be based on a CAC to LTV ratio of 1:3, where CAC is a third of your LTV. Once you have determined your CAC to LTV ratio, you need to determine what your revenue goal is, and then set your marketing budget based on that. Finally, you need to divide your Marketing budget between marketing and advertising activities. Depending on the stage the company is at, the division should be around 60% for marketing and 40% for advertising to start. This is to enable brand awareness to work its magic to build an audience for retargeting.

If you’re unsure about how to proceed, we can talk.

In the upcoming months, I intend to delve deeper into several topics:

  1. Founder-Led Storytelling
  2. The Imperative of Building Brand Awareness
  3. Delineating the Distinctions Between Marketing and Advertising and How They Synergize
  4. The Necessity of Outbound Email Marketing
  5. The Power of Marketing Email Automation in Nurturing Your Endeavors
  6. Embarking by Selling Your "What"

I hope these insights contribute value to the founder journey.

Should you have any questions I can help with, please don't hesitate to connect with me on LinkedIn.

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Yosef Levenstein is the chief marketing officer and venture partner at Golden Section Ventures.

The music industry has adapted to the digital age — so should financial securities. Getty Images

The financial industry needs to digitize not tokenize, says this Houston expert

Guest column

One of my favorite movies growing up was Empire Records. It was the mid-1990s, and the closest we got to Instagram feeds was who had the best mixtapes. If you're not familiar with Empire Records (or what a mixtape is), I recommend watching the movie, but you don't have to worry too much about mixtapes any more.

Since Empire Records was released in 1995, the way we purchase and consume music has fundamentally changed. The physical music store was displaced by iTunes, and then the music industry evolved even further into a streaming economy. It took 24 years, but music evolved and it now operates in a fundamentally different way. Digitization of music was initially viewed as an existential threat to the industry, but in the end, music was digitized globally and the music industry very much survived.

The music industry has evolved and adapted to the digital age. The same happened across countless other industries, including financial services. Today we can invest in publicly traded stocks through a mobile app for free. However, a critical segment of capital markets has not evolved yet. The private securities space.

Transactions in private securities are still done on paper (no, DocuSign does not count as securities digitization.) Administrative costs are kept high due to the amount of paper that is processed and pushed through this system. As long as the foundation of private securities is paper, there is no amount of administrative technology out there to create an efficient market.

Public markets took the plunge into digital long before music did, and digitization of public markets enabled exponential growth globally. Trading volume, access to capital, and liquidity have all increased, and a large part of that can be attributed to the efficient and transparent nature of most public exchanges.

Efficient markets rely on price transparency and information equality. Currently, the private securities markets do not offer either of these characteristics. This is nothing new to people in the alternatives space, but how to reach these lofty goals, to create liquidity and reduce costs, is what I am excited about.

The reduction of cost does not relate only to commissions. There are administrative costs associated with private securities. Information distribution is slow and unilateral, forcing investors to depend on antiquated systems in order to track their investments. Nearly all of these costs are absorbed by the investor, and most efforts to date have not helped address the core issue, analog private security transactions.

Digitization of private securities is fundamentally different than tokenization. Tokenized securities are considered bearer securities. A digitized security, on the other hand, maintains its original status as a registered security, as long as its digitization is implemented in a manner that fits current regulatory requirements. Until recently, that had not been possible in a scalable way. Blockchain changed all of that.

Initial attempts at utilizing blockchain for private markets applied tokenization. Essentially, this configuration took securities that had clearly defined ownership records, anonymized them and put them on a public blockchain such as Ethereum. While there are some benefits to this approach, it also opened doors to significant fraud and securities regulation violations. Tokenization may provide liquidity, but the long-term risk far outweighs the value of liquidity for any prudent investor.

Blockchain does provide a framework that supports compliant digitization of private investments, it's simply not tokenization. The solution lies in using private permissioned blockchains that allow an appropriate degree of technical security while also ensuring transparency and accountability.

Blockchain enables us to maintain a statement of record that is both compliant, and scalable. Across the financial services industry, and across most other industries, blockchain is being deployed to help solve problems that were previously unmanageable. The blockchain is even helping farmers track their crops through IBM's blockchain. iownit has integrated blockchain at the core of our technology, proving that compliant digitization of private securities is possible and scalable.

The United States has a free market economy, so in the end, winners are determined by the market. It is our belief that the digitization of private securities is the responsible way to help this industry evolve. If you're still skeptical, just look at how the public securities markets have evolved since the '70s when electronic stock trading was enabled and the first digital public security trade was placed. Now try and imagine how private security markets will look in four years.

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Yosef Levenstein is the head of marketing at iownit, a Houston-based financial technology firm that is democratizing how investors and private companies transact.

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6 Houston health tech startups making major advancements right now

meet the finalists

Home to leading hospitals, universities and health-focused incubators, Houston is a breeding ground for innovative medical technology and breakthroughs that can improve outcomes and lead to a better quality of life for patients.

The Health Tech Business category in our 2025 Houston Innovation Awards will honor an innovative startup within the health and medical technology sectors.

Six forward-thinking businesses have been named finalists for the 2025 award. They range from an end-of-life care company to others developing devices and systems for heart monitoring, sleep apnea, hearing loss and more.

Read more about these businesses, their innovative founders, and how they're shaping the future of health care below. Then join us at the Houston Innovation Awards on Nov. 13 at Greentown Labs, when the winner will be unveiled at our live awards ceremony.

Tickets are now on sale for this exclusive event celebrating all things Houston Innovation.

Bairitone Health

Bairitone Health is bringing anatomy imaging for sleep apnea to the home environment. The company's platform maps users' anatomy during natural sleep using a facial patch to determine the root cause of airway obstruction. It then offers effective therapies for each patient. The system is currently in the research and development phase and is being used in clinical trials and studies.

The company was founded in 2022 in the Texas Medical Center's Biodesign program by CEO Meagan Pitcher, CTO Onur Kilic and chief medical officer Britt Cross. It was a member of Activate Houston's inaugural cohort and has participated in numerous accelerators and incubators. It raised a pre-seed round last year of $435,000.

Corveus Medical

Corveus Medical has developed a novel catheter device that allows cardiologists to perform a splanchnic nerve ablation, restoring the pressure balance in patients with moderate heart failure. Its pre-FDA-approved, minimally invasive solution deactivates a nerve that has been demonstrated to be a root cause behind heart failure progression, which allows physicians to treat patients who have traditionally had few options.

The company, formerly known as Caridian Medical, was founded in 2021 by CEO Tyler Melton and CMO Ishan Kamat. It has participated in incubators such as TMC Biodesign, Y Combinator, MedTech Innovator and Fogarty Innovation and was named one of the 10 most promising life science companies at Texas Life Science Forum in 2022. The company says it will move toward validation and verification testing for its device in Q4 of this year.

FibroBiologics

Regenerative medicine company FibroBioligics uses fibroblasts, the body’s most common type of cell, rather than stem cells, to help grow new cells to repair tissue and modulate the immune system. The cell therapies offer treatments for chronic conditions such as degenerative disc disease, multiple sclerosis and non-healing wounds.

The publicly traded company was founded in 2021 by CEO Pete O'Heeron. It opened a new 10,000-square-foot Houston lab earlier this year to scale up research efforts and pave the way for in-house manufacturing. The company says it plans to launch its first clinical trial for diabetic foot ulcers soon, representing the transition of its fibroblast technology to the clinic setting.

Koda Health

Koda Health has developed an advance care planning platform (ACP) that allows users to document and share their care preferences, goals and advance directives for health systems. The web-based platform guides patients through values-based decisions with interactive tools and generates state-specific, legally compliant documents that integrate seamlessly with electronic health record systems. The company also added kidney action planning to its suite of services for patients with serious illnesses last year.

Koda Health was founded out of the TMC's Biodesign Fellowship in 2020 by CEO Tatiana Fofanova, chief medical officer Dr. Desh Mohan, and chief technology officer Katelin Cherry. The company raised a $7 million series A earlier this year, and also announced major partnerships and integrations with Epic, Guidehealth, Medical Home Network, Privia Health and others.

NanoEar

NanoEar has miniaturized hearing aid technology so that it can be implanted across the eardrum, allowing adults with age-related hearing loss to enjoy better sound quality than they would with behind-the-ear hearing aids.

Dr. Ron Moses, an ENT specialist and surgeon at Houston Methodist, developed the technology, and the company was founded in 2016 with CFO Willem Vermaat and COO Michael Moore. The company participated in the TMC Innovation Institute in 2016. It has issued nine U.S. patents and performed successful human cadaver and animal proof-of-concept experiments. Its next step is developing a prototype.

Wellysis USA

Wellysis USA Inc. works to detect heart rhythm disorders with its continuous ECG/EKG monitor with AI reporting. Its S-Patch cardiac monitor is designed for extended testing periods of up to 14 days on a single battery charge. The device weighs only 9 grams, is waterproof and designed to be comfortable to wear, and is considered to have a high detection rate for arrhythmias. It is ideally suited for patient-centric clinical trials to help physicians make diagnoses faster, cheaper and more conveniently.

It was established in Houston in 2023 and participated in the JLABS SFF Program the same year. It closed a $12 million series B last year. It was founded by CEO Young Juhn, CTO Rick Kim, CFO JungSoo Kim and chief strategy officer JoongWoo Kim.

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The Houston Innovation Awards program is sponsored by Houston Community College, Houston Powder Coaters, FLIGHT by Yuengling, and more to be announced soon. For sponsorship opportunities, please contact sales@innovationmap.com.

Houston university is at the top of the class in new college ranking

Top of the Class

Rice University is maintaining its reputation as one of the top colleges in the U.S., according to a new batch of rankings from WalletHub.

Rice topped WalletHub's 2026 lists comparing the best colleges and universities in Texas and the best universities in the South. The private institution also ranked as the 9th best university in the country, three spots lower than its 2024 ranking.

The personal finance website's experts analyzed nearly 800 colleges and universities in the U.S. using 30 key metrics, including factors like student-faculty ratios, graduation rates, campus safety, and many more.

Rice was ranked across seven major categories in the report and scored highly for its faculty resources (No. 10), student educational outcomes (No. 12), student selectivity (No. 16), student career outcomes (No. 26), and campus experience (No. 46).

The only two categories Rice lagged behind in were campus safety (No. 576) and cost and financing (No. 700). U.S. News & World Report says tuition and fees at Rice can add up to more than $65,000 per year for in-state students, with the total cost soaring to nearly $84,000 when factoring in the price for housing, food, books and supplies, transportation, and personal expenses.

In addition to topping WalletHub's rankings, Rice has also claimed top spots in other prestigious lists by U.S. News, Forbes, The Princeton Review, and more. Rice's revered graduate schools – including the MBA program at the Jones Graduate School of Business and Brown School of Engineering and Computing – are also among the best in the country, according to U.S. News and The Princeton Review.

Locally, University of Houston also ranked among the statewide top 10 and ranked as the 268th best university in the U.S. for 2026. In the regional rankings of best universities in the South, UH ranked 52nd on the list

The 10 best colleges and universities in Texas for 2026 are:

  • No. 1 – Rice University, Houston
  • No. 2 – The University of Texas at Austin
  • No. 3 – Trinity University, San Antonio
  • No. 4 – Texas A&M University-College Station
  • No. 5 – Texas Christian University, Fort Worth
  • No. 6 – Austin College, Sherman
  • No. 7 – Southwestern University, Georgetown
  • No. 8 – University of Dallas
  • No. 9 – The University of Texas at Dallas
  • No. 10 – University of Houston
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This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

Port Houston reports emissions progress as cargo volumes climb

Greener growth

Port Houston’s initiatives to reduce emissions have shown some positive results, according to new data from the Port of Houston Authority.

Pulling from the Goods Movement Emissions Inventory (GMEI) report, which tracks port-related air emissions, Port Houston cited several improvements compared to the most recent report from 2019.

The port has seen total tonnage and container volumes increase by 16 percent and 28 percent, respectively, since 2019. However, greenhouse gas emissions have increased at a slower rate, growing only by 10 percent during the same time period, according to the data.

Additionally, emissions of nitrogen oxide fell by 7 percent, and emissions of particulate matter fell by 4 percent, despite adding 280 more pieces of cargo handling equipment.

“These results show that our emission-reduction efforts are working, and we are moving in the right direction,” Chairman Ric Campo said in a news release.

The Port Commission also recently approved items related to the $3 million U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Clean Ports Program (CPP) grant, which it received last year. The items will allow the port to work towards five new sustainability initiatives.

They include:

  1. An inventory of the port’s Scopes 1, 2, and 3 for greenhouse gas emissions
  2. A Port Area Climate Action Plan for the area and surrounding communities
  3. A CPP Truck Route Analysis
  4. Creation of the CPP Trucking Industry Collaborative
  5. Design of a customized website for Port of Houston Partners in Maritime Education, which is a non-profit leading maritime workforce development effort in local schools

Port Houston aims to be carbon neutral by 2050.