It’s important to note that whether we sell a product or not has nothing to do with how we cover it. If you look at our body of work, you’ll notice many positive reviews of products we don’t carry and negative reviews of products we do carry.
@Resolve, @Precogvision, and the rest of the reviewers on our team have far too much integrity to work with a company that forces them to comprise their ethics.
We have a simple business that we love and we want to be doing this for the rest of our lives. We can only see that happening if we focus 100% on building long-term trust. That is our north star and we know if we focus on that everything else will fall into place.
If we ever let ourselves think “hey, we’ve got a bunch of those in the warehouse, let’s try to sell them by getting our reviewers to make a positive review.” We would kill the trust, not only with our community but also with our own team. We go to great lengths to make sure we’re not even subtly influencing the content with sales incentives.
Heck, ask @Resolve how many hype trains he’s killed for us 
The thing is, that’s the job we’ve asked him to do… To tell the absolute truth about his subjective and objective experience with a product regardless of the short-term impact on our business.
Here’s the thing, it’s WAY harder to build trust when you also have a store. That’s because there IS a misaligned incentive and if you want to understand behavior you can generally follow the incentives.
The key difference is short-term vs. long-term incentives. The short-term incentive is to try to sell the stuff we have today, and that’s a powerful incentive that many stores follow.
The long-term incentive is to build trust that will make people feel good about doing business with you for decades. That’s the incentive we follow.
We do it because it feels way better, it allows us to work with incredible people and it gives us the stable feeling of knowing we just need to keep putting one foot in front of the other and not kill the goose (the “goose” of course, is long-term trust).
I know this is an unusual way to do business, but we think it’s the right way.
In a lot of ways, we think our model is better than the accepted reviewer model. There are many bad incentives floating around the industry. If someone loves reviewing headphones enough to want to make it a full-time job they’ll need to make money and they’ll need continued access to products.
They generally make money through a combination of affiliate links, advertising, donations and sometimes selling the review units they’ve been given by manufacturers.
Affiliate links have the same bad incentives as having a store, however I think they’re worse because the reviewers revenue is directly tied to the video with the affiliate links in it. There’s no separation between content and revenue.
Let’s look at access to gear. Manufacturers are MUCH more likely to send review units to reviewers they know will give them a positive review and reviewers are MUCH more likely to give a positive review if they know a negative review would strain the relationship and make it harder to get products in the future…
We’ve removed those stresses from a reviewers life and we completely separate their ability to make a living doing what they love from having to think about their own access to gear, brand relationships and revenue per video.
