Why We Don’t Have Any Sales People

We have now grown the AirGradient team to around 15 people.

Here is the breakdown:

Do you notice anything?

There is nobody specifically dedicated to sales & marketing!

So what’s the thinking behind this?

From the start, AirGradient was built around the mission of combating air pollution. To empower a global audience to create high-quality and reliable air quality monitors, we open-sourced our hardware designs. This allows anyone to build these monitors without needing to pay us directly.

By selling these monitors—either as kits or fully assembled and tested—we sustain our mission without relying on external funding and continue to improve the product.

As a bootstrapped company, we must be meticulous with our spending. One of the guiding principles we adhere to is that every expense must be an investment. We strive to avoid expenses that are quickly consumed and offer no lasting value.

Let’s give some examples of both of them:

Now, if we put job functions in the two boxes, it would look like this:

As you might have noticed, I’ve highlighted our current roles at AirGradient. No one falls into the “short-term effect” category.

Why is this so important?

The primary function of the people on the right side is to make a sale - to convince somebody to buy a product. A sale or a “conversion” is pretty much the main goal. These people tend to think in terms of revenue targets, cost per lead, win rate, customer acquisition costs, etc.
From a company perspective, the costs of these people - to a large extent - do not improve the product or support the company’s mission. But these costs need to be factored into the product and, in the end, make it more expensive without providing additional value to the customer.

We think differently.

We want to maximize our impact, and for this, we focus on spending most of our money as “investments” with long-term effects. We believe this creates much better value for the customer by offering superior products (including awareness and educational aspects) at a lower cost.

Our open-source hardware philosophy enables this approach as it gives a lot of value to the customers and as a result a great community supporting AirGradient has developed and is continuing to grow stronger every day. This community contributes to the products and mission and by doing this also spreads the word about us.

In many ways, our community actually takes on the marketing role that traditional companies usually have in-house. By focusing on our product and consumers more than anything else, we’ve cultivated a loyal group of advocates who spread the word about AirGradient to their friends, networks, and beyond. This organic, word-of-mouth marketing is incredibly powerful and aligns perfectly with our mission-driven approach.

Instead of hiring traditional sales staff, we prioritize hiring scientists, engineers, developers, and community managers. By making our products, science, and knowledge open-source, we build a robust community that promotes our mission. Those who appreciate our work can then purchase our products, which allows us to reinvest in further activities and enhance our impact.

That said, we do see value in marketing roles and acknowledge the importance of sales and marketing professionals. Their skills are undoubtedly critical in many contexts. However, at this stage in our journey, we believe that focusing on impact-first initiatives and long-term investments aligns better with our mission. We don’t want to discount the importance of marketing, but for now, we feel this approach best serves our goal of making a lasting difference in the fight against air pollution.

Do you think our strategy is sustainable in the long term?