We name the category your buyers can't describe yet, so your reps stop explaining and start closing.
Built on the framework behind Traversing the Traction Gap, applied to medical devices.
Most founders who reach us have already paid an agency. Often two.
The first one produced content. The second rebuilt the website and ran some ads. Both were competent. Both delivered what they promised. And neither moved a single deal forward.
So you're sitting there wondering whether medtech marketing works at all, or whether you just keep hiring badly.
Here's what we think happened. You can judge whether it sounds familiar.
They started at execution, because that's what agencies sell. Campaigns, content, a site refresh.
But execution only works when the market already knows what you are. And in medtech it usually doesn't.
Ask five people in your company what the product does and you'll get five answers. Not five wrong ones. Five different ones. If your own team can't converge, a value analysis committee has no chance.
So the campaigns went out into a market with no frame for your device. Every impression paid to explain the category from scratch. Nothing accumulated between touches, and the spend never compounded.
"You don't have a demand problem. You have a definition problem."
Omar Khateeb, CEO, MarketCraft
That's the sentence most founders wish someone had said to them two agencies ago.
We define the category first, and only then execute against it. The order is the entire difference.
Bruce Cleveland ran product and marketing at Apple and Oracle, then became a founding partner at Wildcat Venture Partners. He kept watching funded companies with working products die between shipping and traction. He named that space the Traction Gap and wrote two books about it. The second is Market Engineering: Because Markets Don't Engineer Themselves, published June 2026, and MarketCraft is acknowledged in it.
Market engineering is the work almost nobody does. Most companies only ever run go-to-market. They run it late, and they run it once the product is finished.
In medtech that ordering is expensive, because your regulator won't let you pivot out of a category you chose badly.
Bring us the one that's stuck. The others usually become obvious inside a month.
Medtech branding. A named category, and a problem framed for both the clinician and the person holding the budget. Then a narrative that makes your position feel inevitable.
Commercial traction. Demand that arrives before your rep does, built from search visibility and founder-led content, plus KOL programs that reach the people signing purchase orders.
Investor and exit readiness. The narrative investors underwrite, and the deck architecture that moves the belief they need to hold.
You've been burned before. So use these on your next call with anyone.
That last one matters most. An agency that never turns down work will happily sell you campaigns while your real constraint sits untouched. And you'll be having this same conversation again in nine months.
Omar Khateeb sold surgical robots into hospitals before he built an agency. So he knows what happens in the room after your rep leaves.
He hosts State of MedTech, now past 400 episodes, and he speaks at the investor summits where the funds and strategics in your space gather. The people you're trying to reach already know us.
A generalist agency will learn medtech on your budget, and you'll pay for that education twice. We already live here.
"MarketCraft joined the board of investors meeting, they were very impressed by MarketCraft's results."
Lloyd Mencinger, CEO, Aqua Medical
We'll say this on the first call rather than take the money.
If you're pre-clearance, you're early rather than too early. That's usually the cheapest moment to define a category, because the market takes longer to form than your device does.
They sold execution. We sell the order of operations. If your category is clear and your narrative already lands, a cheaper execution shop is the right call, and we'll tell you so.
No. They usually end up running the system we build. Most in-house medtech marketers have never been handed a category definition, which is why their tactics feel scattered.
Yes. Bring us the single thing that's stuck and we'll scope around it.
Foundational work lands in six to eight weeks. Commercial traction is a longer curve, and any agency promising you pipeline in thirty days is selling demand generation into a market that hasn't formed.
A monthly retainer, typically across a year, and the number depends on scope. You'll have it on the first call.
Tell us the problem you've got this week. We'll tell you honestly whether marketing is the right spend for it, or whether something upstream needs solving first.
Thirty minutes with a founder who has carried a device bag. No deck.
P.S. If you'd rather see how we think before speaking to anyone, run your deck through the Pitch Deck Analyzer or take the MedTech Exit Positioning Score. Both are free and take a few minutes. Plenty of founders use them and never book a call, which is a fine outcome.