A ZSA keyboard is an investment. If you are researching our keyboards online and trying to figure out which reviews you can trust, here are some things you should know (and a bit about my experience that led to these principles):
- ZSA does not pay influencers.
- ZSA does not pay reviewers.
- ZSA does not pay for any sort of coverage, period.
- ZSA does not work with a PR firm.
- ZSA does not run seasonal coupons, ever. No Black Friday here — we price our keyboards fairly all year round. Read my thoughts about Black Friday.
- ZSA does not have an affiliate program.
- ZSA does not have resellers.
- ZSA does not sell keyboards on Amazon or via other third parties, only our own sites (zsa.io and ergodox-ez.com).
- ZSA is privately owned and does not have investors, and is not seeking to raise capital.
- ZSA cares about the people who make our keyboards. You can read more about our commitment to sustainability and working conditions here.
- ZSA does offer review units to certain reviewers, subject to consideration (see below).
In other words, ZSA uses no tricks or “growth hacks”.
Why we work like this
The rules above are not optimized for making money. We could probably be making lots more money if we advertised our keyboards, ran crazy Black Friday sales and had an army of affiliates pushing our keyboards.
We are not going to do that.
We got our start with a crowdfunding campaign. A few days after we started, Indiegogo got an email saying we were scammers. That accusation nearly tanked the campaign. It was intense.
But we didn't let that distract us. We pushed through, shipped the ErgoDox EZ, and have been growing ever since. But I never forgot that experience. Trust is everything.
You should be able to research our keyboards without wondering if people were paid to say all those nice things.
Also, we like to talk to people directly. We don't want affiliates and distributors raising the price and creating a distance between customers and ZSA. We want you to be able to reach us directly — we even wrote a whole ode to email.
The idea is that if our keyboards are good enough, and if we treat our team and our customers right, people will find us on their own and decide to support us. This has been working well for us since 2015.
Working with reviewers
From time to time, established publishers (like the NY Times/Wirecutter, The Verge, and Linus Tech Tips) email us to ask for a review unit. If you seem like a good fit, we may be able to offer you a review unit. Even more rarely, we sometimes reach out ourselves to people we like (Hi, Ben Vallack!) and offer them a unit to look at — but we don't accept pitches like that (we're the ones who reach out) and such reviewers will always disclose that they got a unit to look at. As noted above, we will never pay for coverage, and we will never ask to preview your content prior to publication.
In other words, when you see a review of one of our keyboards online, we didn't pay for that review. Many reviewers actually purchase their own units, because only certain reviewers qualify.
Honest reviews matter. I feel so strongly about honesty in online reviews that we started our own series of reviews on our blog, called ZSA Loves. We buy those products on our own, and the posts don't even link to the products, so you can be sure there are no affiliate shenanigans going on.
Thank you for reading — and if you have any questions, remember, just email us. :)
All the best,
