As a former academic scientist it is hard for me to comprehend how many scientists there actually are. When I was in graduate school I was surrounded by scientists. My friends were scientists, my colleagues, the friends of my friends were. I had lunch with scientists, got hammered out of my gourd with scientists and had sex with scientists. The only people I interacted with that weren’t scientists were the bartenders at The Cove Lounge and my family.

With the ‘rona pandemic scaring the shit out of people we all hope the scientists are there to save us. Ya’ know like some Outbreak bullshit. Last minute, save your lover. Where is Dustin Hoffman when we need him? There are so many articles about scientists and companies doing their part that it seems like everyone in the world is working to save us. I have long pondered the question of how many scientists there actually are. If we were to conjure up all biomedical scientists and pay them to work on the ‘rona exclusively how many would that be? I imagine alot but only 2% of the US(~6 million people) has a PhD in anything. That number seems low to me. I guess I know too many PhDs and it skews my estimate. When I actually started to figure out how many scientists there are it was even more shocking.

Trying to quantify the number of scientists that are working to save us from disease is tough as there really is no data on it. Instead, what we can do is use the data that is available to indirectly infer how many scientists there are out there working in biomedical research.

According to the NSF there are around 200,000 employed PhD biological scientists in the US. If we try and narrow down the number to those engaged in biomedical research the number drops closer to 50,000–100,000. Understand, scientists aren’t just PhDs. PhDs are actually the smallest group of scientists. There are about twice as many people receiving Master’s degree so if we assume similar employment rates for Master’s degrees as we do with PhDs that adds another ~200,000 people to the biological researcher workforce. For bachelor’s degrees ~2 million have been received in Biological sciences since 1990. It is difficult to find the numbers of people with Bachelor’s degrees who are employed in biomedical research. If we use Indeed.com, a website which includes many or most job postings, and look for entry level job openings in biomedical research in the US the number is somewhere around 6,000. If we can assume most jobs stay on the market for 3 months that is about 24,000 entry level jobs a year. If we assume the number of jobs available is proportional to the number of people who obtained degrees (which isn’t always true but is our best bet) we have around 300,000–400,000 total employees with Bachelor’s degrees. If we add up those numbers we have a total of around 450,000–700,000 active biomedical research scientists in the US.

That number is just so much smaller than I imagined. The crazy thing is that many of these people are teachers, managers or work in non-research roles so even 450,000 is probably a high estimate. But the world is a pretty big place and the US is small in the whole scheme of things. Right? I mean…

Finding data on how many biomedical scientists are in every country is near impossible but fortunately (unfortunately?) most countries contribute so little to the total that we can just ignore them. According to the NSF, China awards around twice as many science and engineering bachelor’s degrees as the US but only 85% as many PhDs. The Euro8(Germany, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Sweden, and Romania) awards around the same number of bachelor’s degrees as the US while also awarding about 1.5x more PhDs. If we can extrapolate the job numbers from the US we are looking at around 800,000 bachelor’s + 200,000 masters + 85,000 PhDs and around 1.1 million biomedical researchers in China, 400,000 bachelor’s + 300,000 master’s + 150,000 PhDs and around 850,000 in Euro8. I know it seems weird to just choose these countries but from the data the number of biomedical researchers in other countries not mentioned do not significantly contribute to the worldwide total from all the numbers I can find.

An estimate of the worldwide total number of individuals actively employed in biomedicine in any capacity is around 3 million.

Being hands-on in science is essential to being able to plan out research experiments and perform research. When you aren’t using equipment you lose your touch and sense of intuition for what is possible and on what time scale. There is a phrase in science that people use for someone who knows their way around a lab and can make things work. Scientists say that the person has “got hands” or has “good hands”.

Most scientists you have heard of or revered don’t have good hands. Nobel Prize researchers generally didn’t do the actual experiments that lead to the Nobel Prize. People say it is the process of science and that everyone moves away from doing lab work but it really doesn’t make much sense. Scientists at the prime of their career and ability, generally quit doing actual hands-on science.

In an average research lab of 10 people there are around 3 people who participate in a support role and not active research. These positions would be the lab Principal Investigator(PI), the lab manager, administrative roles and roles like dishwasher. If we subtract that 30% we are at around 2.1 million biomedical non-support role researchers worldwide. At MIT, the typical lab is under 10 people and I imagine that number is even less elsewhere. I have worked in labs with one or two others and those other two were in support roles and not active in research. These numbers are probably an underestimate.

Our final worldwide total is around 2.1 million biomedical non-support role researchers who can do hands-on work.

Around 50% of US research funding is for applied research which is considered research that can contribute directly to a product or outcome. I know, I know but basic science research will contribute to helping us _eventually_. While I don’t necessarily share that sentiment and my own published research is evidence of that fact, I am talking about research that can contribute now. Like, if say, a virus was spreading. From the NSF we know that 25% of researchers work at for profit institutions and let’s just say for profit institutions are generally doing applied research. Drug companies got to make drugs amirite? That leaves 50% of the other 75% as those doing applied research that can contribute directly to a biomedical product or outcome now. If we use these numbers to extrapolate to our global number

This leaves us with around 1.3 million people worldwide doing applied biomedical non-support role hands-on research.

If around 7% of those are PhD researchers, as from the initial numbers above, that is only 91,000 PhDs doing applied biomedical non-support role hands-on research worldwide!!!!

The lack of experienced scientists doing hands-on research hurts us all. One of the goals of my company, The ODIN, is to train up people who can do hands-on scientific research. In the past year we have trained nearly 2,000 people to do so. The problem isn’t schools not letting in enough people, it is the simple problem of marketing. Convincing people that they are capable and then training them.

The World Health Organization(WHO) has a system that provides codes and nomenclature for over 33,000 diseases. If no one researched anything in biomedical science but diseases that would be less than 3 PhD scientists per disease in the world.

Here is the problem, when new threats come around like CoVid-19 the number of scientists with actual knowledge and skill to be able to work towards developing a treatment is tiny. If you imagine that vaccine development for viruses is a subset of a field in virology and then factor in familiarity with coronaviruses you are down to very few people. In 2016, coronaviruses were listed by the World Health Organization as in urgent need of R&D. Using Pubmed, I found 12 scientific publications in 2017 that mention (coronavirus or CoV) and vaccine in the title, 6 in 2018 and 16 in 2019.

Despite multiple previous coronavirus pandemics why wasn’t there more research on coronavirus vaccines done?

It’s not funding. The NIH alone invests $41 Billion in medical research a year. The top 20 Pharma companies invest around $100 billion. China, Europe and Japan add near another $100 billion. Bringing the total Biotech R&D investment per year to somewhere near a quarter of a trillion dollars.

Honestly, I imagine it is because there just aren’t enough scientists to go around.

We should be afraid and not because of CoVid-19. There are so many diseases that humans suffer and die from on a daily basis that have no treatment or cure. That shit needs to change and change fast. We need more scientists that can do hands-on research because what we have just ain’t cutting it.

I’m 39 years old and all my friends are dying.

The medical system is failing us. Poor and wealthy, those with and without insurance. We suffer at the fate of a system that optimizes for revenue instead of alleviating human suffering. Regulatory bodies that care more about protecting pharmaceutical company profits than human lives.

It takes around 10 years for a drug to get approved by the FDA and only 48 drugs were approved in 2019. This isn’t even 48 drugs for unique illnesses that have never had a drug. In fact, a recent study showed that around 65% of FDA submissions are just reformulations or improvements of existing drugs. I mean, there are at least 10 different approved heart-burn drugs that aren’t antacids. Regulation is killing us, literally. As we don’t get drugs we need to help us fast enough.

Not only does regulation slow drug development but it allows for high drug prices and little competition. US drug prices are almost four times higher than economically similar countries throughout the world. Pharmaceutical companies make billions, averaging 15%-20% profits when the average for non-pharmaceutical companies is 4%-9%. The government allows this despite over 80% of Americans believing that prescription drug prices should be lower!

I’m not writing to be unbiased because I am not unbiased. It’s no secret that I think that individuals should become more independent of the medical system. I have experimented medically on myself numerous times including a fecal transplant and a few gene therapy experiments. I buy my contacts on the internet from Canada without a prescription. I order blood tests online and draw my own blood. My advocacy for medical freedom, body autonomy and genetic engineering accessibility has brought about a lot of heat. The FDA, the California Medical Board & California Department of Consumer Affairs have investigated me. The state of California has passed a law that specifically targets my company. Why is the system fighting so hard against me? Someone who has never sold a drug, except maybe weed to a friend in high school.

The system is scared and afraid of people functioning on their own. You don’t know enough they say. You’re going to hurt yourself and others. They make trying to help people illegal even when there are no approved treatments.

As I become more well known the number of emails and messages I receive from people suffering from disease and looking for help is becoming insurmountable. I rarely respond anymore. I can’t because I usually end up becoming friends with people and I can’t keep watching my friends die. There was a time in the beginning when I did respond. That’s how I met L and D and how we became friends.

D was diagnosed with Non Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC). She was in her 30s and a never smoker. I quit smoking after I started talking to them. I couldn’t handle the guilt. There are no approved treatments that could cure D’s NSCLC and so she decided to try something radical, something illegal, she wanted to try individualized peptide immunotherapy. It was either that or wait to die.

My PhD in Molecular Biophysics taught me how easy it is to order peptides from companies on the internet. You can have them shipped to your home. If companies won’t ship to you then you create a fake business name, website, sign your emails “Ph.D.” and get a PO Box. You can even get an Employer Identification Number from the IRS without any requirements. Having drugs made for you is within the realm of possibility for anyone even if you have no scientific knowledge. We thought people should know this and so together with L, other PhD scientists, medical doctors and people with cancer we developed a DIY guide on how to order peptide immunotherapies. AS, a friend and medical doctor who helped us with this guide passed away in March 2020.

S was on our cancer email list and we became friends. S also had NSCLC and eventually acquired some illegal immunotherapy peptides. The chances these peptides could help were small but that was better than the nothing that was available. That was better than waiting to die. In Summer 2018, she told me she was going to be in the Bay Area visiting family and she wanted to meet up.

I almost backed out at the last minute because l was scared. But what excuse do you give to a dying person? How do you look them in the eye and refuse them anything? I don’t understand how a government can tell someone dying that they can’t try unapproved treatments because, get this, they may die. Cowards.

The thing I remember most about spending time with S was her smile. The purist smile I have ever seen. S never injected any illegal peptides before she passed away. I don’t know why she wanted to meet. Maybe she just wanted to say goodbye. That’s her hands in this video she created shortly before her death. She passed away in January 2019.

I never met M but he loved to workout and would even do so in his hospital bed. I think it helped him to have something to focus on other than the cancer. We were bros. I remember when he told me he didn’t have long. I told him how much of an inspiration he was to me and that’s the last conversation we had. M passed in December 2018.

The number of friends with cancer I have watched pass away is more than anyone should need to endure.

It’s not just cancer either. K, contacted me because she had muscular dystrophy and could barely move, she couldn’t gain any weight, was frail and close to death. There are human tested gene therapies that have shown promise in Becker muscular dystrophy. For Duchenne muscular dystrophy something as simple as gentamicin sulfate has increased dystrophin levels by as much as 15% when tested in humans. A DIY infusion regimen similar to the study would cost an individual around $600 for the compound. I couldn’t help and she passed in June 2018.

If you have the knowledge, million dollar gene therapies like Glybera can be recreated for under $50k. The patents and regulatory filings provide all the details even down to the DNA sequences used, the dosages needed and administration protocols.

Most any drug can be made by a company in Asia. Just make a post on Alibaba and you will get a quote in less than a week. If you want premade, prepackaged drugs there are many websites that sell from the same manufacturers that are used by US pharmaceutical companies, same packaging and all. You can find these sites pretty easily after searching Reddit for a few minutes.

I hate telling people that the biggest thing between them and a self-administered treatment option is just their own lack of knowledge. That the government makes it so that those like me with knowledge can’t help them order and administer drugs they want to try.

Would you risk going to jail for trying to prevent someone’s death? I feel guilty about that question every day.

According to the government it is ok for an approved medical treatment to kill me. Ok for a self-treatment to kill me. Ok for me to suffer and die without any treatment. If however someone helps me with a treatment, even if the drug has been tested in humans, it is against the law.

People don’t contact me because they are looking for an approved drug. Every single one of them would be willing to try a risky treatment if it meant even a small chance of alleviating their suffering. I have thousands of emails and messages. The husband who has stage 4 cancer, his wife telling me she and her kids can’t live without him. The couple who are drug addicts and would do anything for their daughter to not suffer the same fate. The family that has two kids with muscular dystrophy. The younger brother watching the older deteriorate knowing it won’t be long till he suffers the same fate. Neither child will live past 25.

D passed away in January 2020 and many others die each day without any hope.

See, it’s not money or knowledge that keeps people suffering, it is greedy corporations and the regulatory system that supports them. The system is so set on avoiding blame for someone getting hurt trying something risky that we would rather just let people suffer and die with no chance.

Now cultured meat is said to have advantages over normal meat in that it is technically vegan(no animal is hurt in the process), requires less resources to manufacture and is better for the environment. That sounds great! I mean, who wouldn’t support eating a hamburger that tastes just like a hamburger from a cow except you don’t need to kill the cow and you get to help the environment in the process!

There are a number of start-ups in past few years that have raised a bunch of money on hype. It’s not unreasonable to imagine one day we will all eat cultured meat. The problem is that most people tell you that it is only 2 or 5 years away(Memphis Meats says they will sell cultured meat by 2021) I want to let you know that it is probably much much farther away than that, maybe even 20 years or more.

See, there are few things in our world like food. Human beings constantly eat so the amount of food that needs to be produced to feed everyone is massive. We don’t see it and so are oblivious to the scale and infrastructure required to get us our meat. According to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association 25 billion pounds of beef is grown, butchered, distributed and sold in the US. Think about that scale, the average semi truck can hold maximum 80,000 lbs. It takes around 390,000 semi trucks packed to capacity to move that meat around. Think about the number of people employed in the beef industry. According to the bureau of labor and statistics around 131,000 people working in Butchering and Meat cutting alone. There are 728,000 cattle ranches in the US! The infrastructure and job training around meat and food is at such a scale it is not even really fathomable. The craziest part is that USDA Choice Beef is sold for the average price of $5.96 / lb! AND people make money off this whole process!

What this tells us is that meat takes more than just cattle and cultured meat takes more than just being able to grow some cells or giving a company tens of millions of dollars.

But why not? It’s not hard to grow cultured meat cells. I mean I have grown up cultured meat in my garage and you probably could too. Just get some freshly butchered meat, sterilize it, and throw it in a petri dish with the proper growth media to feed the cells and some will grow. You can find instructions here on how to isolate and grow mouse myoblasts(A myoblast is a muscle cell. It is what meat is made from).

Ok great but if it is so easy to grow then what’s the problem?

The main problem with cells is that they don’t scale well outside of organisms. It’s easy to grow cattle, you just feed them. In cells, once you try to move from a petri plate to a 1 liter bioreactor to a 100 liter bioreactor to a 1,000 liter bioreactor things become exponentially more difficult each step. Making lots of meat cells is so much harder than making just a little meat cells.

Cultured Meat Needs Antibiotics

Yeah, remember when people told you that these cells are antibiotic and growth horomone free, weeelllll they lied.

Animal cells grown in culture are severely prone to contamination. So much so that most research labs have laminar flow hoods and separate rooms dedicated solely to this purpose. Growing cells can not only get obvious contamination but also contamination that is not detectable by visual inspection or microscopes, the dread of the cell culture world is a teeny tiny bacteria called mycoplasma. Theoretically, you can always just add more antibiotics and anti-fungals. Still this isn’t even mentioning viruses…

From this paper they say you can get about 1gram(g) of myoblast cells per liter(L) of culture media under optimal conditions and the process to grow them takes around 10 days. I have heard that people can get more than 1g / L but not of myoblasts alone. Anne Specht, Ph.D. from the Good food Institute, a pro-cultured meat institute, say that it will take 44 days to grow a single batch at scale. So let’s say 1g / L is an underestimation and 44 days is too long. So let’s overestimate and say we ca grow 10g / L in 10 days. That means it takes 45L of growth media per pound(lb)(~450g in a lb) of cultured meat. So one hamburger, a quarter pounder(~110g) would need 11L of media and cells! To produce 1000 quarter pounders you would need 11,000 liters of cells!! Imagine trying to keep all the liquid, all the cells, all the air, all the pipes and connections, everything that helps run this bioreactor sterile and clean. Basically, the only way to do this will be with antibiotics. Sterility is going to be an expensive and hard learning curve. Bacteria survive even in NASA clean rooms how much more for this?

Cultured Meat is Not Vegan

To grow the cells at more than a snail’s pace you need to use FBS. FBS is Fetal Bovine Serum, literally, the filtered non-red/white blood cell part of blood from fetal cows! This is pretty far from vegan. The reason fetal serum is used is because it contains all the growth factors that are needed and fetal cows don’t have all the immunological parts that would cause them to kill or inhibit the cells you are trying to grow. Theoretically, you don’t need to use FBS you could possible use Newborn Calf Serum(NCS) which is the serum from newborn cows, much easier and less expensive to obtain but it doesn’t work as well and is still not vegan. NCS is also more immunogenic and so is less likely to work well. Adult serum is not usually used because it has lots of immunological factors that make it difficult for cells to grow but maybe we can eventually figure out an easy way get adult serum to work and harvest it from humans? Would that be vegan?

*Disclosure I donated plasma in college for money when I was a poor undergrad so it’s not an unreasonable idea

Are there good cheap vegan alternatives to FBS that work as well? There are plenty of non-serum based alternatives but none that work well enough to make people switch over.

Structuring those Infras

When you think about meat we tend to think about the animal and the grocery store because that is all we really know and see. The biggest problem with cultured meat is not whether you can make a meatball or a hamburger, that’s the easy part. The hard part is how to scale it to be able to produce enough to sell to consumers and make a profit.

In order to get your meat to the store first, you start with the farmer or cattlehand. The average feedlot(let’s call it a farm) has 40 head of cattle. There are around 728,000 beef farms and ranches or about 15,000 per state if they were divided equally. This produces 25 billion pounds of beef. Say a cultured meat company aims to take 1% of the market or 250 million pounds of beef. At traditional prices($5.96 / lb) that beef is worth about $1.5 billion.

Let’s just say for argument sake that a company like Memphis Meats really only needs to make 1 million pounds of cultured meat a year. Just a note, 1 million pounds a year is tiny, Impossible Foods, a plant based meat start-up just started scaling up to 1 million pounds a month and they aren’t even selling in grocery stores. Ok, still, how would a cultured meat company do that? You need to start out by building a warehouse filled with giant vats to grow cells called bioreactors. Now, most bioreactors are around 2000L or smaller. For reference, a chinese company that grows massive amounts of cells for other purposes, WuXi, created a 14 tank 2000L system for $150 million. Now, this warehouse has a max output of 28,000L, let’s imagine they run it flawlessly at our overinflated production numbers from above of 10g / L of cells and a new culture every 10 days. From that you could make only around 23,000 lbs of meat a year. Cattle take around three years to grow to full weight. Even with these inflated numbers cultured meat is definitely more time efficient. Still, even if you could make 10x (100g / L) more cultured meat cells, way above and beyond what anyone can reasonable do at this time, it would still only be 230,000 lbs of meat a year! That is still not alot, remember 1% of the market is 250 million lbs so this is only 0.001% of the market. At $10 / lb which is almost twice the going rate you would only make $2.3 million!!! Ok, so, what if every liter produced 1 kg or 2.2lbs of meat even though this is a theoretically impossibility because (1kg)1000g of cells per (1L)1000g of water, i.e. there is no water left only cells, but let’s just see how the math turns out.

Every 10 days you would make around 62,000 lbs of cultured meat and you can do that 36 times a year so you have a total of 2.2 million lbs of cultured meat a year. Also, understand that the animal serum industry only produces around 700,000 L of FBS media to grow the cells each year and to run the bioreactors that much would require over 1,000,000 L! So even if you could produce an impossible number of cultured meat, you would need an unyet accomplished amount of media and all to grow only 2.2 million lbs of cultured meat, which is less than 0.01% of the 25 billion lb beef market. Even using theoretical impossibilities and a state of the art bioreactor system one could only make less than 0.01% of the current market in a year. Are you skeptical yet?

It gets worse though, at consumer prices reasonably comparable to cattle beef say $10 / lb, that 2.2 million lbs of cultured meat would only be $22 million a year. If the media to grow the cells only cost $22 / L you would still make no profit. Unfortunately, it costs a lot more!

The Cost of Making Cultured Meat

FBS is the media used to grow cultured meat cells and it is expensive. You are talking about $1000 for one liter. Yes, one liter. Maybe that price can be driven down by greater demand but fetal cows aren’t exactly the easiest thing to come by. So that 45L / lb of cells is going to cost you $45k. There are definitely bulk discounts so I am sure the price is lower but go back and compare that with the $5.69 / lb of USDA choice beef charged to the consumer. Even if you get a 75% discount at bulk a full pound of cultured meat would cost $11k!!! This is also without replacing the media. Generally during cell culture the media will be replaced multiple times to help the cells keep growing at a good rate.

It is true that there are other ways to grow cells that don’t use FBS. Memphis Meats claims that they can get the price down to $2400 / lb, which seems great when previous prices were in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But this number is ridiculously high even if it is true. To produce that impossible ~0.01% market share of 2.2 million lbs of cultured meat it would cost around $5 billion. While at market rate that 2.2 million lbs would only produce around $22 million in revenue.

But let’s theorize again. Cells can grow in many many different types of media. In reality, all you need to grow these cells is some carbon source, a nitrogen source and the proper pH. Newborn Calf Serum(NCS), cost about 20% of FBS at $174 / liter and while that seems like a great deal it doesn’t work as well so that 10g / L of cells is probably much lower but let’s say it is not. So 45L x $174 is about $7.8k / lb using NCS. Even if you can make 100g of cultured meat per liter you are still talking $750 / lb for just the growth media alone.

But hey start-ups just wing it sometimes so let’s say you just use something like Gatorade with a cheap nitrogen source. Six gallons(22L) worth of gatorade mix costs $18 on Amazon. So using something as cheap as Gatorade mix would still cost you $36 / lb at 10g of cultured meat per liter. Of course this is without paying anyone, purifying, packing, processing and shipping. So a bottom number for cultured meat is probably above $36 / lb. Anne Specht, Ph.D. of the Good Food Institute calculated that unless significant advances happen the lowest you can recreate culture media at scale is for $377 / L. So it’s going to be ridiculously hard to make cultured meat at a comparable price but even if someone does they can’t just sell it. They still need to deal with the FDA.

FDA

The FDA will probably regulate cultured meat. What exactly does this mean? At the moment no one knows. Does it mean a lengthy process in order to get the product approved for safety or does it mean just simple tests to show that the product is not contaminated? To me this seems to be almost as scary as the scaling problem. The FDA is notoriously lengthy to work with and so you can imagine approving the use of cultured meats possibly taking years.

The Future of Meat is Plant Based

Let’s be honest. In order to create a food product that can scale it needs to fit inside the existing ecosystem of infrastructure. The best bet for something like this would be a plant/fungal based replacement. I have no connection to Impossible Foods but have eaten their plant based burger a few times. Their burger is composed of plant based products and then uses a plant hemoglobin(blood) mimic called leghemoglobin. This leghemoglobin is produced in yeast using genetic engineering so it can be made at scale. It is purified from yeast and added to the plant based burger to give it a “meaty” taste. Their “fake” meat is no different than countless others on the market and so can be processed and made in mostly the same way besides one ingredient. The Impossible burgers tastes pretty burger like. The texture is not completely perfect and generally the restaurants that serve it will sear the burger to give it some texture. I enjoy it.

Selling a new food is all about scaling and Impossible Foods knew that. The next big food start-ups will also know that. Make a staple with mostly plants/fungus say pork, chicken, bacon? And add something completely new to it like a little bit of cultured fat cells. Not too much that it costs alot but enough that it is a unique product that people will want to try. This makes it so the infrastructure investment is minimal and once you create the product your path to market is clear.

Finally, let me take a minute to apologize. I’m not saying that cultured meat is a bad thing. I am not saying don’t invest in it or try to do it. If no money is ever invested in cultured meat then it will never become realized. My biggest problem is that people either can’t do basic maths or don’t care to and so make wild exaggerations about how cultured meat is so much more amazing than cattle beef when it really is just a more expensive, antibiotic laden replacement that can’t scale well.

Alot of VCs and people and competitions and grants and most everyone get caught up in the whole Market Size dogma. I feel it is one of the most misleading ideas in Start-Up culture. I mean, if I am selling Tesla car wax my market size is less than 100,000 but that’s probably more due to bad marketing than a bad company idea or product. What people miss is that the better question is, “Who is your market?” If I see instead that I am selling a car wax to high-end car owners I can begin marketing to those people also(don’t ask me why I chose car wax as an example).

“Who is your market?” is actually not very difficult to figure out and can help you target audiences you want to grow or those that you are not reaching.

If you have a company and you haven’t tried to use Facebook ads yet, I am disheartened, because one of your main jobs is to spread the word of your company and that means experimenting with all the ways to spread the word.

Facebook ads are interesting because they most likely suck for what you actually want, product purchases, but are good for stuff you didn’t know you needed them for, Page Likes, Post Engagements and figuring out who your market is or who your current pitch targets.

Using Facebook ads is the best way to grow and understand your audience and market. In my opinion there is no other better tool for a Start-Up to understand who is interested in their product. Where else are you going to get detailed information on the thousands or hundreds of thousands of people and what they think of your company? From likes to comments to shares the data can all be broken down.

So you need to get started by first building an audience.

It is a not too closely guarded secret that Page Likes can be bought. You didn’t really think that Coca Cola has over 100,000,000 organic Facebook likes did you? The question is less “Should you purchase likes?” and more “How should you purchase them and who are you targeting?”. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that a post that “goes viral” did it without anyone investing money into it. With so much content on the internet these days virality is just as much pocket book as it is actually having something cool or interesting.

The so called “legit way” and honestly, the best practice is to build an audience using Facebook ads and pay per like or engagement with your Facebook page. This will grow your audience. You can even target the likes to your country or state or a demographic though it gets more expensive the more specific you go. This can give you an idea of who your audience is but can be biased if you are targeting certain demographics. Generally, if you have a good ad and your targeting is not very specific you will be charged $10 or less per 1000 likes or $0.01 per like.

After you have run a few ads and figured out what ads work best you should create an ad or posts on your page that are targeted to your country or the country you are targeting and leave out all other specifics and optimize for engagements. What this does is place the ad in the Facebook feed of a general audience to see who interacts with it. It is like a survey about your company without asking anyone any questions i.e. the people who interact with it are generally people who would be interested in your product. You can literally get people to comment exactly what they think of your company and product. They do it without you even asking! You can then use the Facebook ads dashboard to understand what exact demographic is interacting with your company. You can break it down to extreme detail, Age, Gender, Location, what device they used, what time of day they engaged! How awesome is that?

For The ODIN, we went so far as to run ads and connect it to our website and figure out who was purchasing from us and when. We saw who the people were that purchased from us and how to optimize that and expand our audience beyond just the median individual.

So now when people ask me “What is your market size?” I shake my head. I think this question is silly and near impossible to answer, especially for new products on the market. Our theoretical market size is everyone who can purchase our product but that is not who is purchasing our product or how to target the people who aren’t. Market Size gives someone little to no insight into a company.

Imagine when Facebook first started, if someone were to ask them their market size they would have said, “The Harvard student population.” that was their market size not their market. Then if stories are to be believed they might have said “Our market size is all Ivy League schools.” or “All schools”. I remember when I first joined Facebook it was for college kids only. Eventually they understood that their market was people, consumers, anyone who had a device that could connect to the internet and so began targeting everyone. If you are a company you can use Facebook to promote, if you are a Mother you can share baby pictures with your family, if you are a college student you can connect with friends, &c., &c.

At The ODIN, we think more about who our market is rather than what our market size is. We then understand who we are appealing to and can increase our marketing efforts to support that or to target new markets. Initially, our company was targeted to Biohackers, people who are trying to do Science independently outside of a normal lab. Then we began to see that educational institutions were purchasing from us so we targeted teachers. Now we see that our real market is people interested in Science or people who use technology or anyone who can afford our product because we imagine it will make their lives better.

As per the Tesla car wax example, if you understand at the end that the people you are targeting are consumers, people who want to take care of their things, you could easily start marketing your car wax for non-high-end cars or even motorcycles or stoves.

How do you expand your market size by understanding who your market truly is?

It is always good to have an initial market in mind when starting a company but don’t limit yourself to the idea of market size. Instead think about who your market is and use that to your advantage so you can reach as many people as possible.

One of the first things I realized as an individual was that if people don’t know about you or the work you are doing then… People don’t know about you or the work you are doing! I had the viewpoint that people will always be able to pick out the awesome and amazing work I am doing and separate it from the crowd without me needing to tell them about it. I thought I was being humble, yeah, that’s what I told myself.

When I started to become disillusioned with graduate school I spent time building things and one of the first things I built was The Chromochord.

This video was created about a year after I made the Chromochord. I received a grant to collaborate with a composer(Francisco Castillo-Trigueros) on developing the instrument further. But all of that only happened after I realized I needed to tell people about it.

The Chromochord is a musical instrument I built from scratch that used the chemical.quantum mechanical state of a protein to control the notes being played. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. It was one of the first beautiful things I felt I created. I played it during the infamous UChicago GSS(Grad Student Seminar) but was disappointed that no one really thought it was as cool as I did. Blah, whatever.

It sucked spending a year creating something like this and not have people appreciate it. In a desperate act for an ego boost I did something I didn’t normally do at the time, I posted about it online, on the DIYBio mailing list. I was proud of it dammit and was hoping maybe someone online would like it also. Unfortunately, the mailing list was equally as disinterested as graduate students. I thought no one really cared and so I just kind of moved on.

Then, one day I was sitting there in lab being my grumpy self and I receive an email from a reporter asking me if they could write an article about this musical instrument. Whaatttt!!!! Someone read my post and actually thought my idea was cool? Of course I agreed to the article and it ended up in Scientific American. And then someone saw that article and then wanted to write about it and it ended up on The Verge. I ended up playing the instrument at NY MoMA PS1!

This blew my mind!

If I thought something was interesting it meant that other people might also find it interesting but I need to be able to find those people and put my content in front of them.

The first rule or marketing is that if people don’t know about you or your company or your product, how will they purchase it or tell others about it?

If you are a company that has an interesting product, an individual that has a unique perspective or even a Scientist that has done interesting work, if you don’t put it out there for the world to see, how will anyone know about it or appreciate it like you do?

It’s funny how Start-Ups and even individuals don’t appreciate marketing. More like crazy!

In a world where anyone can put any content online for the world to see, do you think that people are going to magically find the product or company or individual that is not being talked about? That has no online presence and.or little to no content? I did, hahahaha and I was so wrong.

About a year ago I was talking to a person who ran a DNA synthesis company(Names have been withheld to protect the innocent) and they were doing pretty ok for themselves but not great. They made some hardware and other companies purchased it. This person was complaining that their company wasn’t as widely known or making as much money as a competitor who they actually sold _their_ equipment to. I asked him if his company used social media or reached out to journalists, “No”, he replied. I asked him if they did marketing or tried to develop a community, “No, we aren’t really into that stuff.” he said.

Their competitor on the other hand had a strong social media presence.

It doesn’t matter if you are into social media or not because the rest of the world is into it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like Twitter, no one does, but lots of people use it!

If people don’t know about you, how can they, well… know about you? How can investors find you? If someone has heard about your company before you even pitch them or email them don’t you think they are going to be more responsive? Let me tell you what the answer is: YES THEY WILL BE!

When you realize that everyone is marketing things whether they realize it or not you see how pervasive it is. When I was at NASA, I learned that they always wait till around the time that the budget is going to be voted on by congress to release some amazing results. They hold press conferences and hype it up. That’s because if the voting population thinks NASA is exciting and useful then the government has a harder time defunding them because it pisses of their constituents. Ask yourself, why does NASA have a huge social media department? Why does the Curiosity rover have a Twitter account? It’s not for fun because the government doesn’t pay people to have fun, HAH!

Even universities like MIT are marketing experts. I mean MIT has really great Scientists but even better they are great at presenting work to the world, dear all-father Odin, they have their own media organization MIT Tech. They have their own awards TR35 that regularly goes to MIT faculty or alumni.

Disclaimer, I know this is totally biased as I talk up my alma-mater here but UChicago is regularly ranked as a better University than MIT. More Nobel Prize Winners have been associated with UChicago than MIT. I am not arguing that UChicago is better than MIT but before you read this you might not have even heard of University of Chicago or never imagined it was in the same league of School as MIT. There are probably a number of reasons for this but the biggest one is that UChicago’s media department sucks compared to MIT’s.

Perception is everything and social currency is the most valuable currency you can have in the world today. Posting about your company to your friends on Facebook doesn’t count either. You need to reach the people who need to be reached. The ones who actually care about your product because they love it and appreciate what you do. The people who are as dedicated to your cause as you are. 99% of the time this won’t be your friends unfortunately.

You need to reach them by any method necessary.

Ads on Facebook, Adwords, (don’t use Twitter for ads or maybe do, I don’t know, they sucked for me and were way overpriced.), Magazines, Podcasts

Spam People(yeah SRSLY)

Post on Reddit, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter

Post in the comments section of news articles related to your company

Answer questions on Quora plugging your company

Create YouTube content and SnapChat content

&c., &c.

After The ODIN hired it first employees we went around Silicon Valley and put stickers of our company everywhere. Probably a terrible marketing idea but we also Bar hopped.

You need to do everything possible to get the name of your company out because you need to know that if you can’t reach people you can’t sell your product. It’s that simple. But if you can reach people, then you will find people to purchase your product even if it is terrible.

Think about how many terrible products you have purchased in your life? Not saying you should sell a crappy product but just that crappy products sell if they are marketed. So how much more should your good product sell if it is marketed?

Understand, once you have a company there is a brand you are creating, even if you don’t have a product yet. As founders you will be intricately linked to that brand, you are that brand. Building a Start-Up is a lifestyle and it should be to the place that when people see you they think of your company.

This is harder than you think because the secret is selling people your product without actually pitching them the product.

And it all starts with the question. What is your story?

I bought into the practice of overwork during graduate school and pushed it. Who knows how hard I worked(It’s probably over-exaggerated in my mind)but in graduate school at UChicago people regularly worked everyday of the week and I remember not taking a day off except for Christmas holidays for the first 3 years. I will be honest here, it made me sloppy, prone to mistakes and I often couldn’t think clearly and was suffering from emotional and physical distress. The body and mind can’t handle it. There was a running joke in the lab that if Josiah hasn’t said something mean to you yet today you just needed to check your email. I was grumpy(I don’t blame you if you didn’t like me during graduate school). It was terrible and a terrible way to live. I thought I was proving something to myself and others. That I cared the _most_. I was naive. I had more to give than just sloppy messy work and being grumpy and mean to everyone. You have more to give.

I fell into the same fallacy trap many other people also fall into, that hard work can make up for less experience or lack of skills or any other number of issues. The problem is that it can’t. Hard work is not a cure-all. It wasn’t just me, I knew many other hard working graduate students who toiled and bled and it was sad to see that most of us only did _ok_ but none of us did amazing. The expected return on investment was terrible. We published papers in medium tier respectable journals that others who spent half as much time in the lab also did. We commiserate on this now. In fact, most of the people who published high tier Scientific papers weren’t considered by many or any as the most hard working or hard core. This really pissed me off. Everyone told me that hard work brings success. Where was my Nature or Science paper? or even Baby Nature paper, come on.

Honestly, even after graduate school it took me awhile to figure it out. When I started at NASA I continued to work on weekends and it definitely upset alot of people. No one wanted to be shown-up but also people understood how life and “The Game of Thrones”(will come back to this at a later date) works. I didn’t. I still believed naively that hard work was all I needed. I didn’t know that the government, and the business world, is more about networking and making well thought-out choices and decisions. That spending time aligning and collaborating with the correct people was just as or more important than what your project even was. This was hard for me to grasp, that in life and work, working hard was sometimes the least important skill and *gasp* I might need to do networking.

My naivety pissed off alot of people at NASA as I didn’t play by the same rules they did and it made me an outsider. (Though I will say many people did go a little too far on the “not working thing” as much as I went too far on the working thing) But after I left NASA I learned my lesson. I figured that there could be a balance between these two things. Work and non-work.

I get it. At a Start-Up there are times when you need to bust your ass. You have deadlines to meet or alot of orders to fulfill. And of course the ever present tons of emails that need to be answered. I am not writing this saying that you shouldn’t do these things. What I am saying is that there is a tomorrow and next day and next day. In my opinion, short-term thinkers overwork themselves(that’s what I was) because they can’t see how important it is to plan and do well in the long-term and business is all about the long-term.

The company I run, The ODIN, is a retail company when it comes down to it. And that means cycles. Some days revenue is low and then some days it is high. If I tried to maximize for daily revenue I would be silly. Two $5000 sales a week would require me to make 67 individual sales of our CRISPR Kit! Hustling each day to make individual sales for people might help short-term but can be destructive long-term because I can’t invest that time in making the revenue more passive. Learn to optimize for growth and scale so that running the business becomes easier everyday. That gives you more time to invest in other things in the long run. And everything in business and life is about time investment and managing that investment.

So I stopped working hard one day. I started taking days off. And surprisingly my business didn’t fail. It got better. I can’t tell you how traumatic this was to my view on the world.

I started taking more time to do whatever I want, I learned that being a complete sloth and sitting around doing nothing for one day a week(not hungover either) helped me start my week excited and energized. One day is just for me and no one can tell me what to do. If I don’t want to answer emails I don’t. My productivity has increased more than I could ever imagine. My thoughts are clearer, I have better ideas and am more creative.

So let’s do a thought experiment. How do you imagine an organism that has a life-span of millions of years evolves? Probably not with DNA. I mean we get cancer in tens of years. What would it be like? Look like?

Maybe you stopped for a second and thought about the question?

Constantly doing things prevents you from having the ability to stop and think. For me personally, all my best ideas happen when I have stopped, maybe on a walk or in the shower or laying in bed. I have a reminder every day that tells me to take some time to stop and think and do nothing.

In business, making the best decision on a problem can be the difference between success or failure. If you don’t take time each day or week to stop and think, many times you will only be able to derive a sub-optimal answer to the problems you face. I keep a list of ideas or problems to think about. It’s crazy how little time we dedicate to problem solving through thinking. Don’t let that happen. Be well rested, be relaxed, be comfortable, think and develop great ways to solve problems.

If you look at the opposite end, have you ever been really nervous or stressed? It made it difficult to concentrate and think, didn’t it? Don’t let that be you. Your company depends on you functioning at your best, not on you working your hardest. Athletes definitely understand the importance of rest and it is not just for physical recovery. Constantly being in stressful situations deteriorates your ability to perform because mentally you have difficulty making the correct decisions.

So you get to this point of reading and think “I have so much work that I can’t possibly work less!” What do you do? I thought the same thing early on. Then I understood I needed to outsource work, hire people, learn to automate things or find programs or apps or websites that help you. Things only get worse. If you can’t scale your email now how do you plan to deal with it when you are receiving 10x more emails? Most of the problems you will run into running a Start-Up others have dealt with also, how did other people respond?

Stop and think and sometimes forget to start back up again. At least for a bit.

Back then I thought running a business was easy. How hard could it be? You have a product and people buy it. I thought people who went to business school were lame and that running a business took little more than common sense. Now, in 2017, after running the business part-time while working at NASA, raising over $70k in a crowdfunding campaign, getting employees and making The ODIN a full-time endeavour and trying to stay afloat without any VC funding. I have found that in truth, running a business is hard.

Maybe alot of that is on me. I never ran a business before or had someone to teach me. I don’t have rich parents or a savings. I don’t have a wealthy significant other or friends. No co-founder to this day yet, because all of the people I pitched thought I was crazy or weren’t willing to leave their job to help. I own 96.7% of my company(I gave my amazing mother 2.5% because she does all the accounting and George Church 0.8% for his advice and DNA and other things). I owe alot to many people who have helped and supported me and believed in me along the way but maybe I never asked for enough help.

The ODIN is now a self-sufficient company that runs off of revenue and blood, sweat and tears. It got that way through lots of failure and mistakes. I’m an amateur. But don’t get me wrong I have tried to overcome my lack of knowledge. I read(and by read I mean audiobook) all the books they tell you to read and more, Zero to One by Peter Thiel, The Hard thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, The Start-up checklist, The everything store, Steve Jobs Biography, Elon Musk’s Biography, The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump, Paul Grahams blog, &c., &c. I read and continue to read alot. There are some small tidbits of insight in some of these but 99.9% of the material just didn’t apply to me or I felt can’t really be applied to Start-Ups. I mean, I know I should hire only the most amazing employees evar but yeah, I have a budget… Most of these books or websites tell stories of people who were either stochastically in the correct place at the correct time(some call it luck) or who had extensive support networks and connections(i.e. hundreds of thousands invested from family and friends) but one thing is common, most all blame the successes on themselves. They tell you that they know how to make a Start-Up succeed when most of them never even ran a actual Start-Up, never were involved in marketing or sales or logistics. Never slummed it and struggled like most Start-Up founders.

I usually write about Science and Biohacking but I like talking about my other life as a Start-Up founder so I figured I might also enjoy writing about it. Not only will it get me to really figure out and understand what I have learned but also I hope to learn alot from others who are also actually in the arena now through comments and suggestions. I hope to give actually applicable advice that people can use on how I have grown and continue to grow my company.