How it all began

Back in 2007, Nick Oswald was stuck in a lab doing the same cloning experiments over and over. He wasn’t particularly good at them, but he was brilliant at figuring out why they went wrong. While some people can make DNA ligations work like magic, Nick’s success rate was…variable.

But that’s exactly what made him useful. When colleagues hit problems, they’d come to Nick because he’d already made every possible mistake and learned how to fix it.

One morning, bouncing a two-year-old at 5 AM and realizing he wasn’t getting back to sleep anyway, Nick sat down and wrote his first blog post: “Five Tips to Make Your DNA Ligations Work Better.” It took about an hour. He published it, then started writing something new every day.

People loved it. Researchers were hungry for this kind of practical, honest advice. No one else was writing “here’s how to actually make this work” content for life sciences.

The accidental business

For three years, Nick stayed in his day job as normal, but worked on Bitesize Bio in the early morning hours. This entailed him writing new articles, but also working with other researchers who came forward and asked if they could also contribute articles. The article library, and the mentor, list grew.

The first sponsor came unexpectedly through one of the volunteer writers, Suzanne Kennedy, who worked at a small biotech company and convinced them to buy some banner ads. Doug McCormack, a friend in publishing, showed Nick how to write an actual proposal. Suddenly, this thing that started as a hobby was paying its own bills.

And from there we bootstrapped; every expansion earned first, then implemented. Building the train while it was moving, as Nick puts it. Bitesize Bio remains business run by people who love and believe in what they are doing (and that two-year-old bouncing on his knee now helps with our editorial admin and social media).

What makes us different

Eighteen years later, we’re still tied to that original mission: be the educational resource that’s missing in bioscience. We harvest wisdom from people who’ve been there and make it available to everyone.

When you have a mentor in the lab, that’s how you really learn – from someone willing to share what they’ve figured out through trial and error. Bitesize Bio democratizes that. Instead of passing wisdom to just the people in their lab, we help mentors to reach scientists everywhere.

We hear from people who say they wouldn’t have gotten through their PhD without Bitesize Bio. Professors who send their postdocs to our site first when they hit problems. It’s anecdotal, but it adds up to something that is important and has everyday impact on researchers, every day.

We fill gaps that traditional literature doesn’t touch. The messy, practical stuff. The troubleshooting. The “what do I actually do when this doesn’t work” advice. The soft skills that nobody teaches you but everybody needs.

Still building

After 18 years, we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible. We’ve worked with hundreds of mentors who’ve shared their wisdom, but there are thousands more stories to tell, problems to solve, and careers to support.

The bootstrapped approach means we grow carefully, with a focus on quality. We can stay focused on what matters: making science better, making our community work for everyone who uses it. We’re still essentially a family business in a world where everything else seems to be VC-owned.

Why we do this

Because someone sitting in a lab right now is hitting the same roadblock you hit five years ago. Because there’s a grad student somewhere who needs to hear that yes, this is hard, but here’s how to make it work. Because scientific knowledge shouldn’t stay trapped in individual labs when it could help everyone.

We’re scientists first. This whole thing exists to help scientists. The business model serves that mission, not the other way around.

Looking ahead

Ten years from now, we want Bitesize Bio to be the place where a postdoc can go with almost any practical question about research and find an answer – or at least find a way to get one.

We want to amplify more mentor voices, offer deeper resources, and better ways to connect the people who know things with the people who need to know them. We want to remain the place where scientific wisdom is shared, for the good of all researchers.

As Nick says, “The idea is to create a human-focused resource that cares as much about you as about whether your experiment works.”

Share this story

If this resonates with you – if you’ve been helped by someone sharing their hard-won knowledge, or if you think science works better when we help each other – share this with someone who might care too.

Because that’s how the best things in science have always spread: one person telling another person about something that actually works.