Fried Kielbasa

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.