I was skeptical of marketing and looked down on people who used it. “If only people would choose products through rational criteria, marketers wouldn’t exist”.

I’ve spent a bit of time learning about marketing and advertising in order to cure myself of my affliction. The first part of this article will be a defense of marketing to the engineer-brained. The second part will be an overview of the various kinds of marketing that I’ve personally studied and tested.

What is marketing? Marketing is good distribution. What that means is presenting things in a way that appeals to a given audience.

Unfortunately, marketing has a bad reputation. You think of pushy sales people, bad TV ads, and massive internet spam. You think of luxury brands, liquor billboards, and telemarketing.

Marketing is a tool to encourage people to care about your product. What this implies is that if you don’t do marketing then people won’t care about your product. Yes, you may get lucky, or someone else may do the marketing for you, but generally you need to do some marketing in order for the world to hear about your better product.

Marketing is generally effective. The best proof for this is that marketing is heavily used by businesses that make money. While I have no doubt that in particular cases marketing may be ineffective, the concept as a whole has proven to be extremely lucrative, and therefore can be assumed to be effective.

Imagine the inverse. You make a product 2x better than the market leader. If you don’t do any marketing, will you win? You won’t because while your product may be better, nobody knows about it.

Of course, marketing is a broad concept. Talking to people is marketing! Running demonstrations is marketing! Building a blog is marketing! Helping your customers is marketing!

Marketing is not necessarily good, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Marketing tends to draw grifters who use marketing to sell you crap. For better or worse, marketing is a neutral tool. You can use it to ensure that your great product gets the success it deserves, or to push crap that won’t actually solve the problem you claim it will.

The general promise of marketing, however, is to give you something you want. I’d like to separate this into two parts. Marketing may be selling you a product because of the functionality, or it may be selling it to you because of the story.

Good products don’t appear out of the aether and drop into the store. There’s a cutthroat competition for every single product that makes it onto store shelves, or onto the first page of search results. Viewing this competition as a waste of resources is something I had previously done. Why don’t we just have products that are good enough? Why are there a million products, each incrementally better with differing features? Wouldn’t it be more efficient and satisfying if there was only one product available in a given category? Fundamentally people decide what should be purchased. The drive to create better products which is spurred by the free market does result in products which people are more likely to pay for and which make their lives better. If people didn’t demand it, it wouldn’t exist.

A thornier issue is that of non-functionality based purchasing. This was something that I fought with for a long time. Modern marketing is built upon the idea that you’re not only selling a product, but you’re also selling the ideas and feelings associated with that product. I think this disturbs you and me because it suggests a model of humans which is hackable and highly suggestible. I don’t think this is strictly incorrect, but I also don’t think this is as bad as you may think.

Marketers aren’t doing some evil mastermind manipulations. They’re mostly playing judo around people’s pre-existing ideas, desires, and insecurities. It’s not possible to sell something to someone that they just straight up don’t want. What marketing is really about is engineering a way to convince people already looking for a solution that your product is best for them.

People are quite rational in their purchasing habits, it’s just that their preferences may not be yours. Consider Beats headphones. They’re quite mediocre, except for their enchantment with the mystical power of Dr. Dre. Why would someone buy sub-optimal headphones at a high price? Buying them to associate themselves with Dr. Dre seems to be an odd reason to overpay. The twist is – what if they don’t care about headphone quality? What if they don’t care how the music will sound? What if they care more about looking cool? Let’s take a pause to consider that there’s nothing wrong with preferring to look cool instead of having perfect audio quality.

Luxury branded things may appear to be irrational things to buy. Why purchase a handbag from a well known brand like Hermes when you could have gotten a better deal on a similarly crafted bag from a lesser known company? You’re purchasing the social positioning of being someone who owns a luxury bag – of course people are free to perceive that how they’d like. You’re making a bet that joining that particular social club will improve your life. On top of that, maybe you have a ton of money and you’re looking for certainty that you’ll get quality. Without any effort or research on your part, you can be confident that your luxury purchases will meet a certain baseline of quality.

Hard liquor is another great example. Vodka is a fantastic good to study marketing through since most brands are almost completely identical. It’s a natural marketing experiment. Each brand creates an image associated with the vodka and the consumer can choose to be associated with it. People will pay for the privilege of participating in and showing a story that they vibe with. Do you drink Svedka because you’re a party animal? Or do you drink Ketel One since you want to party with your banker bros? You’re purely buying into the story, which is absolutely worth something in and of itself.

Empathy is important here – just because you may not want something doesn’t mean that someone else shouldn’t.

Ok, you say, marketing may work on those chumps, but not on me. I buy products based on rational understanding of their benefits and drawbacks. Sure, I say, but look at why you chose those products. More likely than not they were marketed towards you somehow. When good marketing is targeted towards you it doesn’t feel like marketing, it feels like someone solving your problem.

A great example of this is DigitalOcean. Their marketing is their extensive documentation of various technical topics. I use them as a hosting provider. Why? I needed some help with Git and their documentation popped up. I went on to check out their hosting and found they had a wonderfully documented WordPress setup process. They provided me with value, which implied they would provide similar value for their paid products. A marketer would say they had a great content marketing strategy.

Stripe Press is another form of this. Stripe is a payment processor, otherwise known as the most boring business known to mankind. So why are Stripe and the Collison brothers so popular? They’ve associated themselves with the concept of growth. Stripe Press and Works In Progress appeal to the people who could potentially become customers of Stripe. They’ve provided free value to a specific group of people and in exchange they’re gaining good will and customers.

Lil Nas X got his music into people’s hands by creating meme videos on Twitter and overlaying his own music. He gave people value in the form of funny videos and this enabled his music to spread much faster than if he hadn’t marketed it at all.

It’s not that you’re unaffected by marketing, it’s just that you’re not noticing the marketing that’s affecting you. You may say, well I do deep research on products, searching far and wide to understand what the specs are between various Aliexpress electronics lab products. In this case, yes, you win, you’ve successfully avoided being marketed towards. I would bring to your attention, however, whether you do that for every product you interact with? Sometimes marketing doesn’t work or isn’t very good, but that’s generally not the case.

You may say “well I don’t like it that marketing takes advantage of people’s social/irrational desires”. Fair enough, that part can get exploitative. In general, products sold do tend to resolve the issues people have, if only temporarily. Buying a new car will make you happier if only for a little bit.

You may say that this is a waste and people should spend their time making themselves happier using insert technique. They could do that, but by what mechanism will you transform society in order to get people to stop seeking short term fixes? For better or worse, people will seek to solve their issues through quick fixes and products will give them a quick fix. What’s funny is that if you come up with a social technology that will eliminate people’s drive to buy products you’ll still have to market it.

I chose to look deeply into a few forms of marketing in order to understand the field better.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is something we’re all familiar with, if also a bit tired of. It pains me to say that the incessant pop ups prompting you to give your email work really quite well. For better or worse, prompting users to give their email to a site is very effective, and with the promise of content or discount, the success rate skyrockets. For better or worse the average popup will have a success rate of 11% at capturing emails.

Email lists are incredibly powerful. Email rounds to ~free and is guaranteed to be sent to people who are at least slightly interested in what you have to say. For the discerning marketer there’s a massive opportunity to build an audience without paid advertising.

Once you’ve captured the email of a potential or past customer there are two ways you can utilize them.

First, there are email flows, which are email sequences that are sent based on the customer’s behavior. As you can imagine, there’s big alpha in marketing directly to a customer depending on what they’ve previously done. You can segment the email list based on whether they’ve purchased anything, how long ago they’ve signed up, what their email open rates are, what purchases have previously been. You can then define the exact flow, or set of emails, that they will receive. The flow can actually get quite detailed, with many nested conditionals (image shown below).

By communicating effectively with the customer and understanding who they are, the email list can effectively increase revenue without meaningfully affecting costs. A decent rule of thumb is that a well crafted email marketing system can result in 20% more revenue for an ecommerce store.

The most popular email flow, for good reason since it has exceptionally high success rates, is the abandoned checkout flow. In case you’re unfamiliar, if a customer abandons a cart during checkout the store will send an email reminding the customer about the products they were looking at, usually with a small discount attached. This can encourage around 10% of recipients to complete their purchase.

The new customer flow is similarly important, since this is the set of emails that a customer will see after signing up for the email list. With this flow, they’ll be introduced to the business, given the full story of why they should care, and then introduced to the most popular product lines, after which they’ll be shunted into the appropriate following flows based on their behavior.

There are other email flows that are popular. The VIP flow targets people who are high spenders and offers them exclusive events, deals, or early access to product releases.

The second form of email marketing is campaigns. These are emails based on time, and not behavior – and are comparable to your conception of an ad campaign. You send out a few timely emails about a new product release, without regard to the current status of the customer. While still essential for communication, they don’t quite have the power of flows, yet are much easier to construct.

SMS Marketing

Text messages are something that everyone will check. SMS marketing is more powerful than email marketing because you’re guaranteed to get eyeballs on your content. The other side of that coin is that it’s exceptionally dangerous for the exact same reason. SMS marketing, unlike the other forms of marketing, is regulated heavily by the government. This is the reason why you can unsubscribe from every automated SMS message by texting back “STOP”. If a company texts you without your express consent, you’re free to file suit and likely win. With such a tough playing field, why would anyone try to market through SMS?

The average open rate for text message marketing is 98%. Not only that, but these are people who expressly signed up for text messages, so you’re guaranteed at least some level of interest.

If you manage to dodge the laser beams involved in growing an SMS marketing list, you’ll be able to enjoy extremely high engagement and build a responsive audience with campaigns and flows like in email marketing.

Supergoop is a big winner of the SMS marketing game. Their SMS marketing campaign have had an ROI of 29x and each marketing SMS converts at around 11%.

Their intro flow – the Sun 101 series educates potential customers about skin sun damage and sunscreens. This, of course, builds the consumers trust in the company. Supergoop also uses abandoned cart flows, which send a text when a user leaves a cart. The SMS reminder has a 20% higher conversion rate compared to an email.

A key part of their strategy is that they absolutely don’t spam. They only message their list twice a week. The result? Their average revenue per text subscriber is double that of their email subscriber.

SEO

If you’re doing content marketing on the internet, search engine optimization (SEO) is essential. In short, you’re trying to rank higher on search results than your competitors. In order to optimize your site for search engines, you need to understand how they’re ranked. The more sites link to you the higher you’ll rank. The catch is that not all links are the same. A link from CNN is worth far more than a link from a blog started yesterday since it’s seen as more trustworthy. The number of links the site linking you has influences their power in boosting your site.

The fundamental concept is that you build really great content and then try to get people to link back to you – this is why they’re called backlinks. The most efficient way to build backlinks is through guest posting. You contact the owner of a reputable site and offer to write an article for their site. In exchange they’ll link your site from theirs, which will boost your ranking. Frequently, they’ll ask for some money, depending on how trustworthy their site is. You’re not obligated to pay for backlinks of course, but waiting for people to naturally find your site will take a bit.

There are deeper aspects to SEO of course, but creating great content and building links is 80% of it. You can create long articles that rank highly for uncompetitive queries. You can pepper important keywords throughout your content. You can put the important parts of your article at the very bottom, forcing users to scroll through the entire page, thus artificially boosting rankings (looking at you, recipe sites).

Great examples of SEO being used well are Grammarly or Nerdwallet. These companies provided tons of great online content that was useful to people. This meant that their sites ranked much higher on Google, which brings viewers, who can then potentially become customers if the product is useful to them.

Paid Internet Advertising

The old bugbear of the internet. The thing everyone hates. Well, let me just get this out of the way real quick. Paid internet ads work. Maybe not everywhere, or for everyone, but it does fundamentally make people money. Google, Facebook, and the like are fundamentally advertising companies and one look at their stock price shows that the concept is fundamentally sound (sorry Tim Hwang).

I’ve tested both Facebook and Google ads, and both were pretty decent at getting me leads. For better or worse (likely for better) the era of hardcore tracking is over, and I could no longer target my ads to a terrifyingly specific audience. As a funny side note, signing up for the ad service was an absolutely terrible user experience.

I actually don’t have that much to say about paid advertising since I didn’t do too much of it (it gets expensive). I wasn’t skilled enough to generate a profit off of it, I blew right by the rule of thumb that the Customer Acquisition Cost should be ⅓ of Customer Revenue.

Tracking pixels is an interesting technique that I learned about though. An ad or site will have a 1×1 pixel transparent image. When a user clicks on the given ad or site, the pixel will be downloaded and the server will note who downloaded that image. Using that information the user can be retargeted for more advertising of a similar type. If you click on a mattress ad, you’ll likely see more ads for mattresses even across platforms.

Copywriting

I have a lot to say here. I think it’ll be part 2 to this article.

Many thanks to Ulkar for her detailed review

Imagine if someone told you that lead is healthy. Leaded gasoline, lead paint, and lead pipes give us vital micronutrients. They tell you lead isn’t just healthy, but it’s actually necessary for proper development.

Not only that but the entire approach of removing lead from products was counterproductive. It’s been making humanity sicker and sadder.

It may seem absurd, but it’s not that far off from what’s happening with bacteria.

After a long path of seeing them as pathogens beginning with Pasteur, people are well acquainted with the dangers of bacteria. Modern society has declared war on bacteria, with weapons like Lysol to modern food regulation to antibiotics. This is fine, since, like lead, some bacteria are still a grave threat. However, other bacteria have been unfairly targeted with the same zeal, to our own detriment.

Bacteria not only produce yogurt, cheese, kimchi, salami, tetracycline, insulin, and biofuels – they also coexist with our bodies. They live on our skin and in our gut. Bacteria help construct our immune system and ensure our body can respond properly to dangerous microbial invaders. They prevent our bodies from developing autoimmune diseases. They’re essential to a healthy life.

Bacteria, The Culture We All Share

The bare minimum you need to know is:

• Bacteria aren’t inherently bad, many are essential for our health.
• A balanced gut with the right bacteria is crucial; imbalances can lead to illness.
• To promote a healthy gut, consume probiotics and eat fiber-rich foods.

The gut microbiome refers to the diverse community of microorganisms that inhabit the human gastrointestinal tract and is composed of bacteria, archaea, viruses, and fungi. Bacteria are by far the largest component of the microbiome and therefore the most studied. Around 100 trillion bacteria live in the human gut, composed of between 100 and 800 species. This is around 5 lbs – the equivalent of a brick.

The composition of gut bacteria can vary greatly based on individual factors like diet, region, and genetics. However, when the DNA of the bacteria is examined, there’s often a high level of similarity in their genetic sequences (Turnbaugh et al. 2009). What this means is that while people might have differing gut bacteria, these bacteria often perform similar functions within the body. It’s widely accepted that gut bacteria have evolved alongside their host organisms, whether human or not. Many of these bacteria are adapted specifically for life within the gut, with some even relying entirely on byproducts from other bacteria for sustenance.

Fiber Is Your Friend

Historically, African Americans have exhibited higher rates of colon cancer. A striking illustration of the influence of diet on gut health was seen in a study in which African Americans and rural Africans swapped diets for a two-week period. Post-diet switch, the African American participants exhibited reduced gut inflammation markers, whereas the rural Africans displayed an uptick in gut bacteria associated with colon cancer (O’Keefe et al. 2015).

Most of the bacteria in a healthy gut are focused on digesting complex carbohydrates, as opposed to proteins and fats. In general, the result of this metabolism is the production of Short Chain Fatty Acids (SCFA). These are used by the body as an energy source, a signaling mechanism to the immune system, for hormone regulation, and more.

In addition to this, gut bacteria also digest non-nutritive plant metabolites like polyphenols (more popularly known as antioxidants). These nutrients are frequently locked in plant cell walls and so are indigestible until bacteria break the cell walls apart. The chemicals that are well known to cause positive health effects, like equol, are highly dependent on the varieties of gut bacteria available in the gut. Equol is a chemical known to reduce risk of cancer, as well as being a xenoestrogen. The gut biome determines the response to equol, meaning that while ~60% of Asians receive the benefits of equol, only ~ 30% of Westerners do (Magee 2011).

This brings up the question of the validity of nutritional studies, considering how different health effects can be. Someone may be a complete non-responder to a nutrient based on their gut biome. The gut microbiome’s reaction to diet is profoundly individual, primarily because the current composition of one’s gut microbes largely determines how the body will respond to food. A study illustrated this point when participants were given barley kernel fiber supplements to examine its effects on glucose metabolism (Zeevi et al. 2015). The outcomes varied considerably among subjects. Researchers hypothesized that individuals with a higher abundance of Prevotella copri might have experienced a more pronounced effect, possibly allowing for increased glycogen storage in the liver. On the other hand, subjects with a diminished presence of P. copri in their gut did not exhibit any significant metabolic response to the fiber supplement.

High protein diets can be harmful since bacteria may degrade the protein into Branched Chain Amino Acids (BCAA) which is associated with diabetes (Pedersen et al. 2016). The BCAA’s may even be further fermented into more carcinogenic compounds.

High fat diets can be similarly harmful. Consuming too much fat can lead to excess bile salts being released in order for your gut to break down the various fats. What this means is that some of the bile will make its way down to the large intestine, where it will then be consumed by bacteria. The bile salts are then transformed into secondary bile salts, which are inflammatory and potentially carcinogenic (Ocvirk & O’Keefe, 2017).

Recognizing the profound connection between our diet and gut health is essential. Diets with higher fiber intake have been found to significantly promote gut well-being (Agnoli et al. 2011). The higher fiber intake is useful for enhancing the quality and diversity of gut bacteria.

Diet changes are great, but in the short term the gut ecosystem is resilient to change and it tends to rapidly return to original profiles. When mice were fed a diet low in complex carbohydrates, it eventually caused a lasting change in their gut microbes (Sonnenburg et al. 2016). This change only took place after four generations of mice. It shouldn’t take that long for humans, but it illustrates the point that bacteria don’t tend to vary that quickly.

Disease Defence

Not having the correct bacteria in your body can cause serious health problems. I took a look at Reddit for examples of the issues that people are suffering from which could be triggered by issues in the gut biome. The struggles of living with gut-related issues aren’t just statistical. They’re deeply personal. These users have shared experiences that highlight the severity of their situations.

“Fast forward about a year and a half and my symptoms are at an all time worst. I’m having to go to the bathroom 8-10 times a day, exhausted, cramping, feeling like a zombie, etc.” – Inside-Music-637 on Reddit

“Every morning I examined my hands and feet and was dismayed that there always seemed to be new blisters. When the blisters would crack and ooze, the skin underneath was extremely tender and raw. I got used to wearing bandages on my hands and feet at all times. I work with the public at an environmental education center, and obviously having continuously bandaged hands wasn’t a good look.” – kishbish on Reddit

“i’m wheezing and asthmatic, sneezing and congested, alternating rubbing my eyes and staring out into space as my immune system fired on all levels. i spent all night outside with my allergy attack and only came inside around 5 am to attempt to go to sleep, i woke up at 8 am wheezing again and called an uber to take me to the train and left my boyfriend and my friend without waking them up”. – bananaramaboat on Reddit

Although the gut and its associated bacteria have been studied for years, they are often overlooked by mainstream medicine and the public at large. This could be due to the gut biome being invisible, slow to change, and typically resistant to quick fixes such as taking pills, which leads to a widespread lack of interest.

An unhealthy gut microbiome can be involved in

• Acne
• Antibiotic-associated diarrhea
• Asthma & allergies
• Autoimmune diseases
• Cancer
• Depression and anxiety
• Diabetes
• Eczema
• Gastric ulcers
• Inflammatory bowel diseases
• Obesity
• Non Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease
• Parkinson’s

The good gut bacteria primarily produce short chain fatty acids (SCFA), which are essential for human health. SCFA are used widely across the body, both for energy and signaling. A particularly important signal they are used for is in order to raise the threshold for inflammatory activity by the immune system. This directly prevents auto-immmune disease. It doesn’t, however, simply downregulate the immune system, it also ensures that it’s properly calibrated. The white blood cells can either be in pro or anti-inflammatory states depending on factors in their environment, such as SCFA availability.

Irritable Bowel Disease

As developing nations climb the economic ladder, a dark side emerges – a distinct and alarming rise in Irritable Bowel Disease (IBD). Autoimmune diseases of the intestine like Crohn’s and Ulcerative Colitis are triggered by environmental factors in genetically susceptible individuals. Genetic factors contribute around 30% to the prevalence of intestinal inflammation, which means for most it’s a preventable disease (Bennett et al. 1991). Unfortunately, the environmental factors include in large part the standard Western diet.

Bacteria and a high fiber diet are fantastic as a preventative measure. Unfortunately, trials of bacteria-related treatments for IBD, such as antibiotics, prebiotics, probiotics, or fecal microbiota transplantation haven’t been conclusive.

Skin Disease

The skin is influenced more by the internal gut biome than the skin microbiome. This can be deduced from the remarkable stability of the skin microbiome to the environment, and the influence of changes to the gut bacteria onto the skin (Oh et al., 2016; De Pessemier et al., 2021). Eczema can be frequently triggered by immune dysfunction and gut dysbiosis (Biedermann 2006). Eczema is a condition where the skin’s immune response is out of balance. Normally, the skin produces anti-microbial peptides (AMPs) to help defend against microbial pathogens. In patients with eczema, however, studies have shown an imbalance in these protective molecules: certain AMPs are found in significantly lower amounts in affected areas, while levels of other AMPs are significantly higher (Ong et al. 2002, Schröder 2011). This irregularity contributes to the skin’s inability to effectively defend itself and maintain a healthy state. This implies that the skin is more poorly defended from infection, yet also more inflamed. Allergic inflammation and sensitization to allergens can result from this, but it can also weaken microbial defense and lead to microbial imbalance.

Bacteria may prove to be a treatment option for eczema. Probiotics given orally were found to be effective in children post weaning with eczema (Penders et al. 2013) Treatment with probiotics pre and postnatally, as well as to infants has been suggested to be effective against eczema as well (Panduru et al. 2015). On the other hand, some studies have found no effects at all (Brouwer et al. 2006). Applying probiotics to the skin can have positive effects – when good Staphylococci were applied to eczema affected areas, the load of S. aureus (bad bacteria) was decreased and symptoms improved, likely by decreasing the inflammation in the area (Nakatsuji et al. 2017). A similar study that applied Vitreoscilla filiformis to the skin significantly improved eczema symptoms (Gueniche et al. 2008).

Allergies & Asthma

Allergies are developed and modulated by the gut biome. Allergens are introduced to the intestine – if there’s a high state of inflammation in the gut cells the white blood cells will then react to that allergen as a threat. The gut bacteria are what modulate the inflammatory status of gut cells through SCFAs, so an unhealthy gut biome leads to allergies. Asthma is caused in a similar way – the most common form of asthma is an allergy to airborne irritants. After repeated exposure the immune system becomes hyperreactive.

The role of SCFAs in asthma links the role of the Western diet to illness. Foods more prevalent in industrialized countries are associated with higher risk of asthma – as an example unpasteurized milk has much higher levels of SCFAs than pasteurized milk (Velez et al. 2010). Similarly, Western food is less likely to contain high amounts of fiber. Severe asthma sufferers are known to consume significantly less fiber than healthy controls (Berthon et al. 2013).

All conditions known to reduce the risk of developing allergies and asthma are based on increasing exposure to microbes.

I’ve listed activities below that are known to improve the gut microbiome.

• Vaginal Birth (Kolokotroni et al. 2012)
• Breastfeeding (Oddy 2009)
• Close contact with dogs and farm animals (Ball et al. 2000)
• Living with multiple older siblings (Ball et al. 2000)
• Raw milk consumption, but probably be careful with this one (Waser et al. 2007)
• Early day care attendance (Ball et al. 2000)
• Growing up in a rural environment (ISAAC 1998)

Food Allergies

In a nutshell, food allergies are caused by an inflammatory reaction to food antigens in the gut. The root cause of this is an inflammatory state in the gut caused by an unhealthy microbiome. If an allergen is eaten and the gut immune system is primed towards attack, the body will develop an allergic reaction, rather than tolerating the food.

Improving the gut microbiome may lead to less allergies. Introducing baby formula with a probiotic based on Lactobacillus rhamnosus led to infants becoming more tolerant of lactose (Berni Canani et al. 2012). Similarly administering L. rhamnosus to children with a peanut allergy induced tolerance in over 80% (Tang et al. 2015).

Food allergies, however, are a more complicated story than asthma and eczema. The rise of asthma and eczema are associated with industrialization and its higher hygiene standards, smaller families, and urban environments. On the other hand, food allergies can only be partly explained by the Western lifestyle. From a public health perspective, the general rise in food allergies happened more than 30 years after the rise in asthma. The gut microbiome can be a partial cause, but there must be another factor which led to the massive rise in food allergies over the last two decades.

Note: I’d love to include a graph of this but I haven’t been able to find good datasets for asthma and allergy prevalence. Please send me a link if you find any.

C-Sections

The ripple effects of a Caesarean section may extend far beyond the delivery room. They are notably linked to long-term impacts on a child’s gut microbiome, often leading to a diminished diversity of essential gut bacteria. When a baby isn’t exposed to the birth canal and the bacteria therein, the child will grow up to have a poorer gut microbiome (Azad et al. 2013). This brings with it the health outcomes generally associated with poor gut health, including asthma, allergies and autoimmune issues.

A study investigated replacing the effects of a vaginal birth by using Lactobacillus johnsonii on mice to protect them from Allergic Airway Disease (asthma in mice) (Aagaard et al. 2012). The success of the treatment implies that the protective effects of vaginal birth may be replicated through the application of bacteria. Similarly, breastfeeding transfers bacteria such as staphylococci, streptococci, lactobacilli, and bifidobacteria, which are protective against asthma (Gomez-Gallego et al. 2016).

There is a theory that the reason C-Sections have an association to asthma is because of the antibiotics given during the procedure. There are, however, a number of large observational studies that compare siblings that report no relationship between asthma and treatment with antibiotics (Örtqvist et al., 2014). This suggests that the antibiotics themselves may have varying effects – the authors point to a mouse study that showed vancomycin but not streptomycin lead to reduced gut microbe diversity (the source for this is missing – I’ve emailed the authors and I’ll update when I get a response).

Bacterial Invasion

You walk into a sketchy restaurant. Stomach growling, you order the safest looking item on the menu. Eating it you ponder the consequences which will come tomorrow.

The next day you wake up, expecting the worst, but instead you feel totally fine. You dodged a bullet! Thank your gut bacteria. They were crucial in preventing your stomach illness by attacking the invaders.

Pathogens that invade the gut need to temporarily outcompete the good gut bacteria in order to cause disease. Salmonella, as an instructive example, has specialized mechanisms that allow it to sustain an infection – such as consuming the metabolites that are produced during intestinal inflammation (Spiga et al. 2017). Another mechanism is the flagellum. Salmonella has multiple flagella that it uses to mechanically push through the thick and sterile inner mucus layer of the gut to reach the epithelium. Salmonella also is resistant to antibiotic treatment since compounds that are released through treatment will feed it (Faber et al. 2016).

Friendly gut bacteria protect the gut from invasion by pathogens through directly attacking the incoming microbes, as well as by supporting the human immune system. The bacteria can release various chemical compounds to defeat the invaders and consume all available nutrients, leaving none for bad bacteria.

There are, however, studies that looked into ways of augmenting the microbiome through targeted intervention with friendly bacteria to protect against pathogens (Brugiroux et al. 2016). This is, of course, still only experimental in mice but may eventually progress to providing a preventative against pathogens in humans.

Antibiotics: A Hard Pill To Swallow

Antibiotic treatment will kill pathogens, but will of course also destroy friendly gut bacteria, even after only one or two courses. The changes inflicted by the antibiotics can be pervasive and permanent, especially if administered in childhood (Buffie and Pamer 2013).

Antibiotics may also induce diarrhea through microbiome imbalance, which is usually benign and self limiting (Barbut & Meynard, 2002). In some cases however, the antibiotics may do such a good job of killing off all bacteria in the gut that bad bacteria take the opportunity to repopulate. This is what causes a Clostridium difficile infection, which can be very difficult to treat.

There is evidence that antibiotics can influence weight later in life but it’s still very individual because it depends on the treatment. The length, type, and environment of antibiotic therapy can all influence the long term effects. Adverse antibiotic effects are strongest early in life, a study of antibiotics taken in adult life found no impact on metabolic health. After 7 days of amoxicillin or vancomycin there was no clinically relevant impact on insulin sensitivity, postprandial hormones, inflammation, or gut permeability in obese prediabetic men (Reijnders et al. 2016).

Gut Feelings

As you may have noticed, you intelligent reader, there are a lot of mouse studies being cited. The field is still understudied and relatively new, so there isn’t a whole lot of definitive proof. Of the disease discussed above, the sources I read were most confident about the involvement of the gut microbiome in asthma and IBD.

The limitations of mouse studies are many. Lab mice are housed under hygienic conditions which is an issue when studying the influence of microbes. Feral or pet shop mice have a profoundly different gut microbiome. When lab mice were housed with pet shop mice, they developed a much stronger resistance to bacterial and viral infections, as well as had a much lower rate of inflammation induced cancer (Rosshart et al. 2017). This in itself, however, goes to show the power of a healthy gut microbiome. Translating findings in lab mice to human applications is also difficult, considering the differences in biology. I’m also curious why there are so few gut microbiome studies of monkeys? Is their gut biology so different from ours that mice are preferable?

Disentangling the role of genetics from the microbiome on illness is difficult. The hypothesis that shifts in the microbial makeup may act as a trigger does not account for the microbiome changes being caused by existing immune dysfunction. Is the changed microbiome driving the disease, or is it being changed by the body being prone to disease?

In the next part I’ll cover the role of the gut microbiome in colon cancer, obesity, neurological disorders, as well as potential treatments, including fecal transplant and microbiome analysis. I’ll also offer some of my thoughts on potential methods for improving gut health, but I encourage you to treat these ideas with the same skepticism you would apply to any opinions found online.

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I have almost no experience in business but these are the resources that I’ve gathered over time for myself. Hopefully this is helpful to you. Please take this all with a grain of salt because I am not some super successful business owner, just some dude also trying to do this. My big wins so far have been $500 from flipping a blog about Hawaii and $250 from making Youtube Shorts for people.

This is all fairly marketing heavy because I’m assuming you’re engineer-brained like me. This is a condition where you entirely understand the technical aspects of making a product, but don’t have the first clue about how to get people to pay for it. If that isn’t you, then apologies!

A lot of people that are featured in this are definitely on the grifter side of things, but don’t hold that against them. Unfortunately they’ve turned themselves into a marketing vehicle for their product!

Examples of successful ‘regular’ software business owners

What it says on the tin. He sells onions on the internet.

I like Pieter Levels because he’s like if you took the phrase “the best code is no code” and just ran with it. This is enlightening because you understand how little tech is required and how much marketing can accomplish. I view him as a sort of living koan.

Website which is absolutely full of stories about businesses people have started. Seems like you need to be a member now to search and filter? but previously it was interesting and useful.

This dude runs a bootstrapped SAAS.

Pinboard is run by one dude

Plenty Of Fish was run by one dude on a shoestring budget. Truly life goals out here.

A couple runs this budgeting software. Other than that don’t know much about them.

Not really regular any more, but at some point they were.

Useful Content

This probably is the most important thing in this document. Exactly what it says – how to make sure your idea is good.

Useful postmortem of a software business

Classic video by patio11 about running a software business

Microconf (the conference which the above video is from) is gold. Lots of content to choose from which is all related to running small software businesses.

Indiehackers is a community of bootstrapped software business creators. It’s super useful because you can very very clearly see the failures of engineer-brain at creating a product that sells. Note the issues that people have with distribution and marketing.

This is also important in understanding the failures of engineer-brain. Make sure to read the comments.

Microacquire, a marketplace for small software businesses, useful for reference to understand what’s selling and for how much.

One tweet of many explaining how to market things, just throwing this in here for reference. There are so many tweets of this variety lol, it’s pretty easy to find ‘em.

This hackernews comment was a bit of a mindblow for me. I’m only now beginning to understand how important having an audience is. The links in the comment are good too.

If you’re looking for an actual understanding of marketing stuff – I’m not an expert but 80% of what I know is from Googling around. I kind of went through a few of the usual marketing channels like email marketing, SMS marketing, Google ads, etc and learned how to do them. I also tested them out to see how they worked.

The classic @visakanv post about distribution. Highly influential in convincing me why I need to take distribution more seriously in every part of my life.

In a general sense, the sort of “marketing agency” crowd on Twitter has been super valuable because they gasp actually make money. The median marketing agency grifter makes SO SO SO much more money than your median techbro with a SAAS, simply because they’re okay with selling it. It took me a long time to get with this idea… There’s a lot to learn there.

As an example of marketing agency type dude – 7 figure agency setting up email marketing for people.

The Dungeons & Dragons Economy system is bad. The economy is made up and the prices don’t matter. Prices are information, they should incentivize player actions, allocate scarce items, and provide another facet of immersion and interaction with the game world. D&D 5e is meant to be more accessible than the previous versions, which is great, but clearly a lot of detail is lost in just looking at the price chart in the back of the player’s handbook . The price of a health potion wouldn’t reasonably cost the same in a ransacked village as it does in the imperial capital. Moreover, what about those of us who want to know how much goblin armor is really worth? If a party comes through a farming village, how big is the demand for looted weapons, especially if you just sold them some last week? If you sneak into the King’s treasury, how much money will you find? This level of detail is obviously left out of the official release because it is rather difficult to keep track of a large and ever dynamic world for a tabletop game. The goal of this project is to provide a program that will open this new dimension of gameplay for dungeon masters with minimum bookkeeping.

Ideally, the first version of our program will tell you realistic prices in various parts of your world. Events that you can create will affect the market, as will player actions. A mockup of the UI is below. The ideal use case of this is to have the DM update the program with player actions between sessions and then print off a price list for the next session. This is probably a good trade off between usability and having the dynamic price functionality.

We’re going into this project blind. The idea is to create a reasonable simulation of the economy, and then compare that to other models. Our preliminary idea is to have an individual based simulation, with grain production heavily influencing the prices of all other goods. This is because grain is a good proxy for labor costs during this era. We’ll be using this blog post at Bret Devereaux’s blog, as well as Fernand Braudel’s works as inspiration. The historical setting closest to D&D in our estimation is 16th Century Europe, so we’ll be using that as a base. Magic is assumed to be uncommon enough to not have an influence on general prices, so that will be handled through events.

Grain prices are difficult to model because the market is illiquid and inefficient. Grain spoils, it doesn’t travel well, and is essential for human life. Sounds like an interesting combination! The way we began to model it is by considering the mechanism of price discovery. A merchant travels around various towns, carrying grain. Merchants will always purchase grain when a town provides a lower price and always sell to towns providing a higher price. In essence merchants will buy low and sell high depending on how much they have in their current inventory.

This is a reasonable heuristic for bootstrapping the rest of the market characteristics. Meanwhile the seller has a minimum price to sell for determined by the labor cost. They will never sell below that and always sell if above that.

Using this, we can generate prices for grain at various locations based on what price the merchant last purchased at. These prices are, of course, naively calculated but they give some indication of what prices in various locations are.

In terms of simulating something like trade between merchants, the current algorithm is somewhat of a placeholder, as I need to consider how to implement my thoughts on pricing. The merchant currently does make money through selling food. The chart below shows the amount of money a merchant has. In this case, the merchant buys the food from one manor at week 30, then sells it to another at week 40 for a profit.

We’ll be documenting this through blog posts as well as releasing our source code on Github.

General background

In researching the pre Industrial production of grain, I realized that this would be a case where Reality Has A Surprising Amount of Detail. In very broad strokes — Peasants would grow various kinds of grain. There is a seasonal pattern to growing the grain, in which there is plowing, sowing, and harvesting. The harvest happens once a year, but the family needs to eat constantly.

All resulting complexity results from this. Storing grain, for example, was incredibly difficult and non obvious. Trying to bank grain was almost impossible. Hence, a lot of a peasant family’s thinking was geared towards avoiding hunger, rather than trying to achieve any sort of excess.

Large landowners would have a symbiotic, if somewhat parasitic , relationship with the peasant farmers. They would provide capital in the form of manure and plow teams, while the peasant farmers would provide extra labor. Large landowners also were the last line of defence against starvation, as they would offer loans to the farmers, which were usually predatory.

Accurate reenactment of peasants being opressed.

Thoughts on pricing

A pricing formula can consist of a function in two terms as shown below

Price = demand value + supply cost

Which is unimaginative but seems to have a few nice properties in describing prices. Developing further, the function can be expanded to the following.

Price = (social value + personal value) + (cost to produce)

The influence the supplier has on the price is the cost to produce an item. In a simplified world (ignore friction, assume cow is spherical), he is unwilling to sell under that price and infinitely willing to sell above that price. Costs include transportation, profit margin, actual product cost, etc.

The other method by which the supplier can influence the price is through the number and availability of a product. If you’re the only seller in town, you can charge more. If there’s another seller right next door, without colluding, you won’t be able to charge as much.

Put into words, the value a product has to someone is based on the value it has to them personally, meaning in relation to their needs, as well as the value it has socially, in relation to others’ needs.

Another aspect that affects the value of a product is the time there is to use it, the expiration date. Expiring products can be interpreted as having a change in the quantity of usable time. The time you get to use and store a product has value. If you buy mushrooms that’ll go bad in a day, they’re worth less than if they expire in a week. You’re paying for the option to use mushrooms farther into the future.

Quantity of time value can be explained as the value of having a certain quantity of item for a certain time. What characteristics does this have?

• If there is no time left to use an item, clearly it has no value.
• If you have very little time, the value will be very close to zero regardless since you can’t do much with it in the meantime.
• If you have a lot of time, the value is quite high to you, but it’s asymptotic — the difference between having mushrooms that expire in 14 days and 15 days is minimal.
• In the middle, we can expect a somewhat linear increase in value with increasing time.

Putting this together, we get the below function.

An intuitive explanation of this is that time value doesn’t stack. 7 mushrooms expiring in 1 day is not the same as 1 mushroom expiring in 7 days.

Applying this concept to grain prices — Price = (quantity of time value)*(social value + personal value + cost to produce + supply constraint)

Of these terms, the two likely largest and most difficult to determine will be the social value and supply constraint.

Social value will require disentangling the web of relationships between the large landlord and the farmers living near them. The landlord is usually the one who will be purchasing grain for hungry farmers during a famine. How badly do the farmers need the grain and how willing is the large landlord to part with his money to provide it? Are they willing to ration grain or will they buy as much as it takes?

Supply constraint goes hand in hand with the difficulty in modeling this inefficient market. How likely is it that another merchant will stop by soon? How far can grain travel? Is the grain shortage local?

The pricing algorithm I’m currently using is based on the following.

• Quantity of time value: The previously shown distribution
• Social value: I’m assigning a random normal scaling factor to represent the benevolence of a lord to their peasant farmers. I then multiply by an exponential factor based on how close the farmers are to starving.
• Personal value: Ignored. I’m assuming that the lord has almost no chance of personally starving to death.
• Cost to produce: Used as a minimum value, currently I’m just hardcoding it as a minimum, but I’ll change that in the future to be based on the labor cost and land productivity.
• Supply constraint: I have no ideas on how to model this even semi realistically without looking at it globally. I’m modelling this as a linearly increasing factor based on time since the last merchant visit for now. This is an inefficient method because it disregards some important factors such as probability of merchants arriving or chance of local crop failures. This is a sticky mess to be addressed in future steps.

Thoughts on project structure

Currently our project is structured as a Java command line interface program, using Java 8 and JFreeChart for graphing. I would love to know how to make JFreeChart extensible, so I can reuse code for graphing various charts without needing to write a new custom class every time. Ideally I could simply feed in the data into a generic line graphing class. Unfortunately, the documentation isn’t clear on how to do this, so I’ll keep experimenting.

In a similar vein, we may switch to JavaFX. Considering that this program may need to run with a GUI at some point anyways, it may be worthwhile implementing graphing currently using JavaFX, rather than JFreeChart.

Currently, since the bulk of the work is in generating prices and writing the skeleton of the simulation, these concerns aren’t pressing, but it’s worth thinking about.

A big issue is considering how to convert these concepts such as grain production and merchants trading with each other into code. Abstracting these concepts in the right way where the important detail remains but we don’t overcomplicate is proving to be a challenge. We have abstracted grain production into giving each household a certain amount of grain based on land holdings, weather, and labor capacity. I’ve gotten a recommendation that learning about design patterns may help with this.

Going a bit more in depth into issue — the trading algorithm is currently a static method which takes the two trading participants as parameters. It’s then overridden for various participant types like merchant or lord. The function then directly modifies the member variables of each participant like the inventory. It also returns the price that the item was sold at. I’m unsure of whether this is the code architecture that is the most useful interpretation of this.

Thoughts on abstracting history

A big part of this project so far has been interpreting the history and determining how best to abstract it. I’ve of course been reading the ACOUP blog, as well as Fernand Braudel’s work on capitalism in that time. Unfortunately, while I think Braudel’s work is extremely useful and informative, it’s not exactly right for the stage of the project I’m currently on. His work seems to be exceptionally useful in understanding the general trends of global trade at the time, and not so much the in depth mechanics of trade between individuals. My hope is that The Peasants of Languedoc by Le Roy Ladurie is going to give a bit more down to earth mechanics of pre Industrial life and trade. Questions that have come up in the course of creating the simulation are

• If there’s an insufficient amount of labor to complete the sowing in one week, what is the likely outcome? Would they take help from other households or just sow later?
• How best to model the inefficiency in trade? Merchants visited infrequently and markets were small
• What were large landowners likely to be farming? What population did the manor usually contain?
• How did the process of plowing actually work? What downsides were there to plowing off peak? What if you plowed without a plow team?
• Would 3 field crop rotation fields be equivalent size?
• How much food would a lord have on hand vs wealth? How much would his household consume?

Shonel & Fred

I read Dormin’s post on Napoleon and wait… what does it MEAN that Napoleon was good at logistics. He didn’t go around farming and delivering food to people after all. What was so special about him that he deserves such high praise as

In order to find this, I looked for some of Napoleon’s letters online. It looks like there’s a fairly exhaustive compendium, but it’s only in French. I was lucky enough to find an old collection of Napoleon’s letters on archive.org though. Unfortunately it was less than exhaustive, but helpful. This is only a small sample, but I skimmed through and here’s what I found.

Napoleon really did micromanage that much

This guy had too much energy. He has a letter detailing the exact specifications for a new unit he was raising, down to the height of the cavalrymen and their horses. He specified what the horses should eat and when.

A few of the letters concerned book orders.

“The volumes should contain 5 or 600 pages each, and should be bound with loose back, so that they open flat, and in the thinnest possible boards. This library would be composed of about 40 volumes on religion, 40 of epics, 40 of plays, 60 of poetry, 100 of novels, and 60 of history.”

“The Emperor wishes to have a descriptive catalogue of the library, with notes pointing out the best books, together with a memorandum saying what would be the cost of printing and binding these 1000 volumes, what proportion of an author’s works each volume would contain, what each volume would weigh, how many boxes of what size would be needed to hold them all, and how much space they would take up.”

He also details precisely which authors he wants to have books of, and which he does not. There are multiple of these letters ordering book sets. These are not the words of a man who goes with the flow.

He gave a shit about money

Some of these letters reminded me of John Rockefeller’s attitude towards money. When writing to order clothes, he specified precisely the budget of each article of clothing, as well as how long it should last. When ruling Elba, he had the following to say about gardening.

“reprimand the gardener for employing three men all the month on a garden the size of my hand, and 11 grenadiers for loading up a few cartfuls of earth. I disapprove of the proposed expenditure on turf during October: I would rather have grass seed. The gardener must bargain with the grenadiers to load earth at so much a cubic metre, and use just enough carts to keep them constantly employed. I don’t think this ought to cost more than 80 francs. Similarly, the O.C. Engineers must bargain with the grenadiers for the excavation of the gardens. I estimate the cost at 400 francs. I therefore allow 480 francs for the Supplementary Estimates for the gardens during October.”

Also, later in the same letter.

“I refuse to pay the 280 francs demanded by the Stores department for petty cash. I can only allow 40 francs. Have an estimate made out for the ordinary expenditure of the Stores during October.” _____

Between these two factors, I think it’s reasonable to say Napoleon’s talent in logistics was nothing more than an obsession with detail. Where another would choose to focus on a different, more glamorous aspect of running an army, Napoleon managed to squeeze pleasure out of arguing with merchants about prices. He really did seem to like this stuff…

“I advise you to take a pleasure in reading your muster rolls. The splendid state of my armies is due to the fact that I spend an hour or two every day doing this; and when they send me the monthly return of my troops and fleets, which take up about 20 big files, I give up every other occupation to study them in detail, and to see what difference there is between one month and another. I get more enjoyment out of reading these returns than a young girl does out of reading a novel.”

As an aside, it’s funny to see that he really didn’t “get” the navy at all. There were few references to it at all, and the following is an excerpt of a letter to his Minister of the Navy.

“If it is really necessary, these ships can carry bronze guns, which weigh much less.

You are to submit the engineers’ report to me personally”

I didn’t see anywhere else that he expressed any doubt or asked anyone’s opinion of anything in the other letters.

Napoleon’s Letters Translated and Edited by J. M. Thompson Good pages to see (numbered wrt pdf) – 49, 121, 167, 169, 238, 255, 292, 309, 369