#54 - Joakim Lindh: Revolutionizing Indoor Air Quality – Strategic Growth, Health-Centric Environments, and B2B Challenges

What if the air you breathe indoors is affecting your health more than you realise?

Join us for a discussion with Joakim Lindh, Airthings' Head of Strategic Growth, as we uncover the evolving priorities in indoor air quality monitoring.

Explore how Airthings is pivoting its strategy in 2024 to create environments centered around people rather than just buildings. From post-COVID interest shifts to the impact of wildfires in the US and specific regional focuses like CO2 monitoring in the Netherlands, the conversation highlights the vital role of industrial hygienists and centralized facility management in maintaining safe indoor air quality.

The transition from energy efficiency to prioritizing health and productivity outcomes within building management. We address the challenge of transforming technical jargon into relatable health metrics, guided by standards like GoAQS, and the necessity of impactful communication in less automated environments.

With insights from Airthings' extensive data collection, we reveal striking inefficiencies and the importance of continuous monitoring to optimize building performance. The narrative also touches on the nuanced dynamics of transitioning from a B2C to a B2B focus, exploring the unpredictable growth and competitive landscape in the B2B sector.

Finally, we spotlight the critical issue of radon exposure, underscoring the need for broader awareness and adoption of modern monitoring technologies. Through captivating case studies, discover how advanced sensors have been pivotal in mitigating this invisible threat. As we look to the future, the integration of industrial hygienists and advancements in wireless technology and AI promise a healthier indoor environment. Listen in for insights on fostering long-term customer relationships and ensuring the integration of sensor data into organizational processes, all while navigating the intricate global market of indoor air quality monitoring.

Joakim Lindh - LinkedIn
Airthings 

Chapters

• 0:00 Indoor Air Quality Monitoring Market Trends
• 9:34 Indoor Air Quality and People
• 20:52 Building Efficiency Through Data Analysis
• 29:39 Global Air Quality Monitoring Market Trends
• 39:15 Challenges in B2B Indoor Monitoring
• 55:12 The Future of Indoor Air Quality
• 1:05:54 Future Trends in Indoor Air Quality
• 1:16:12 Customer Success and Long-Term Value
• 1:30:59 Radon Monitoring in Buildings

Transcript

Simon: 0:00

Welcome back to Air Quality Matters, and I believe we already have the tools and knowledge we need to make a difference to the quality of the air we breathe in our built environment. The conversations we have and how we share what we know is the key to our success. I'm Simon Jones and this is episode 54. Coming up a conversation with Joachim Linde, head of Strategic Growth for AirThings. Joachim has been in connected devices from the very beginning, starting his career in Texas Instruments and, since 2019, with AirThings today as head of strategic growth, someone with a deep insight into the sector and working with a global leader in indoor air quality monitoring. Airthings was founded in 2008 with a focus on radon and today is a global player straddling the B2C and B2B indoor environmental monitoring space. I was keen to talk to Joachim about his and Airthing's perspective from this viewpoint the differences, similarities, challenges and opportunities of this fascinating and dynamic sector. We discussed this Joachim's journey to here and how they and he sees the next few years playing out. This is an episode full of insight and experience and not one to miss if you have an interest in indoor air quality monitoring at scale. Thanks for listening. As always, do check out the sponsors in the show notes and at airqualitymattersnet.

Simon: 2:07

This is a conversation with Joachim Linde. What I thought would be fascinating to chat to you about, joachim, because for me, I think air things are quite unique in the sector in that they straddle very effectively both the B2C and B2B market when it comes to air quality monitoring, and I think that's quite unusual in the sector and, I think, born out of your history. We'll definitely come on to that, but I think we're close enough now to the end of 2024 to kind of pose you the question what's 2024 been like for air things in the air quality and ventilation space? What's your sense of where we are today when it comes to the marketplace for air quality and monitoring air quality when it?

Joakim: 3:05

comes to the marketplace for air quality and monitoring air quality. So we started off in a quite unique position in the start of 2024 in air things with a new strategy where we put the customers more in focus. We put the people more in focus rather than building. So we have, throughout 2024, engaged into this new strategic way of going to market where people are in the focus and that's both for homes, for schools, for commercial buildings, where people genuinely get interested in indoor air quality.

Joakim: 3:48

Beyond the impacts we had from the COVID. Right During the COVID they had a huge spike of interest when it comes to indoor air quality. Then that kind of big interest sort of faded out a bit but now it's become more interesting. It's very regional, space based. Right In Norway we have a big focus. In Netherlands they have a big focus on CO2 monitoring. In US we have these local things happening like wildfires. That is driving the indoor air quality discussions up. That is driving the indoor air quality discussions up. But still the biggest struggle is the awareness right, the awareness of the importance of indoor air quality. That's still the biggest competitor for all the players in the industry. There seems to be some sort of ignorance on the real need for it.

Joakim: 4:49

Now we're starting to see some of the bigger companies investing heavily in indoor quality, really seeing that benefit where also I think from Airthings' perspective, we have been focused on or really in 2024, figured out that it's the centralized facility management perspective that really drives this effort forward in the market.

Joakim: 5:10

But now I see this new it's a favorite type of role for me out there in the industry it's the industrial hygienists, because they're the people who comes into these larger corporations, larger companies, and they really really, really care about the people right From a facility management perspective. You care about the building, you also care about the people, but now you have the industrial hygienist where the center of its core of its role is to keep people safe, right, and I really love that. So I think that's really where we see a bit of shifts in the market. We've been seeing that in 2024, both facility management becoming more centralized facility management. In order to do so they need the proper tools, solutions, technology to become more independent from a remote perspective to monitor these large portfolios. So we've seen that for the centralized facility management. But then we've seen these industrial hygienists coming into the play as well and really adopting indoor quality, to understand how the air, how the different aspects of a building is fronted towards the people that reside in them fronted towards the people that reside in them.

Simon: 6:30

I think that's a fabulous introduction to the conversation, because I think in that kind of opening statement you've really laid out what it is in 2024 to be an air quality monitoring business, because in there I've noted what two, three, four, five or so areas that I think really paint a picture of where we are. I think the first thing you said which I thought was really interesting was a shift in towards people at the center of this conversation. Um, and I and you I just had a conversation there with a couple of people towards people at the centre of this conversation, and I just had a conversation there with a couple of people on the podcast over the last few weeks where we really started to look at this kind of to coin a medical term patient-centred care that we're really starting to have to shift the narrative to people-centred built environments. You know that we build buildings for people and that shift in perspective is critical. The other thing you said I thought was really interesting was the fact that there's such wide regional differences that if you're a global player, the narratives are different from region to region, and I think that's very important to understand. We'll definitely come back onto that.

Simon: 7:48

There's, without question, this awareness piece where this journey of awareness of air quality is going, because we've had this artificial blip of the pandemic which we hope is artificial and not too frequent going forward, but definitely it's been upsetting. Upsetting, I think, for the built environment to re-figure out where it stands with everything, and then you've got this interplay as to where the who, the players are in the built environment, you know, outside of the b2c market, within the b2b market, trying to figure out what place does fm facility management have in this space, and the constant friction between hard and soft services and fm and low, low profit margin businesses and all of that stuff you know is I think it's a really fascinating space and the professionalization of that space, with industrial hygienists and other types of roles that are now focusing more and more on healthy buildings, where that's going. I think that's a fabulous picture we've painted for the start of the conversation. So let's go back to the beginning piece, then people at the center. Beginning piece, then people at the center.

Simon: 9:11

Um, how do we start to from a, from a data perspective and an air quality monitoring perspective for a company like air things? What does that shift in focus to people at the heart of the built environment look like. Is that a shit? Is that a shift in the entire narrative for you, in how you present what you do? Or is it more subtle than that?

Joakim: 9:32

It is a shift to some extent. So my part, there are things that have been primarily involved in the B2B, the commercial perspectives. Today, I'm also a bit more involved with the consumer perspectives as well, but if you go back and look at from a commercial perspective and the B2B, so one of the shifts we've done this year is really, as I said, towards people, and what that really means is some of the aspects of the solution that we provided in the past was to make buildings smarter, right? So we have these wireless battery operated devices that you slap onto the wall. You spread them throughout the entire building. The idea is that it's going to tell you what's going on in the building and the next step is connecting that data through your existing BMS system if you have a BMS system to control the building in a demand-based manner, meaning that you increase the airflow when the airflow is needed or you reduce the airflow to save energy when there's no people in the building, and so forth.

Joakim: 10:37

Now, that part was something that AirThings was focused on, like in 2023, and built up this whole concept around energy efficiency and all that stuff. We focus more towards people right now, which means that whenever we go into a discussion with a client or a customer. The discussion is more about the people. It's more about the productivity, more about the absenteeism, more about the healthy perspective rather than making the building more energy efficient. It doesn't mean that the energy efficiency perspective isn't there, it just means as of 2024, and right now we have selected partners that drives that discussion, that owns that. You know. Let's optimize the building for energy without compromising on indoor air quality, While we at AirThings of shifting perspectives, and not directly towards buildings and people, but more specifically towards the people in a building.

Simon: 11:52

Yeah, that's interesting and within that, I think there's this balance between automation and the presentation of data and information that provides people with the agency to have impacts on their own space. And if you're focusing on people, that's an interesting area. Um, I know you've worked quite hard on the automation side of things integrating with hevac systems and and being able to automate spaces that are capable of being automated but the big challenge remains, doesn't it? When it comes to the presentation of data and information in a way that enables people to act, you know the actionable insights that mean something. That must be quite a hard space to look into.

Simon: 12:39

When we're starting to look into people focus, because energy has always been quite binary. You either save energy or you don't. It's quite a straight line between efficiency and ROI. But, as you noted when you were talking there about trying to present this kind of human-centered benefit, we've got things in there like absenteeism and presenteeism and well-being and all of that kind of stuff. Is that something you're really focusing on? Is how you package that and present it in a way that it's meaningful for people, that they can act on it.

Joakim: 13:15

So that's what we're currently looking at right now. And just to go back a bit as well, the reason we went for the whole energy efficiency perspective in the first place was that people didn't really grasp the ROI. When we were talking about productivity and absenteeism, people didn't understand how much that was in money, even though we could refer to studies. So it became much more simpler to start to talk about energy efficiencies, because there you could actually say well, the ROI is paid back in six months or whatever. But again, we've moved slightly away from that because we really, really believe in and really think that it should be about the people. It should be about improving the healthy perspectives of the people in the buildings. And, as you say, I think one of the things that we've learned throughout 2024 as well is presenting things to users such as VOC, pm, radon, all these things that we measure.

Joakim: 14:20

The technical terminology is what we presented as the value to the users. Most of the users we have in everything. They're familiar with this, even both in consumer and in business, because we have a lot we actually need to, I think, move away from the technical terminology. We need to move more towards health metrics and more towards what it really means. So go away from selling the value to selling the outcome, if you will, and I think that's also something we've seen getting adopted in the industry as well, like the new GoAQS standard that Soterios is driving is really trying to manifest that.

Joakim: 15:17

There's a score that tells you what the indoor air quality is. There might be a link to the dominant pollutant and there is an ability to drive even deeper if you really want to know the technical terminology. But you really need to figure out that high-level score or sentence that tells you what, in 2024 and moving into 2025, is how to actually present the right value to get as close as possible to the outcome. And the outcome is obviously fixing and making sure that you have good indoor quality to empower people to breathe better.

Simon: 16:02

Yeah, people to breathe better, yeah, and and I think it's interesting if it's automated and and the outcomes are great that a lot of that presentation of data is that you're doing great, well done, keep it up. You know, and you see a lot of that within spaces that have been set up to succeed. You know spaces that have gone for well buildingbuilding standards and things like that, that have got the money and investment into decent spaces. What I think is interesting is the rest of the built environment, or the rest of real estate, which has a very long tail. As you know, that isn't a headquartered Deloitte building in London or a LinkedIn headquarters in New York. It is your classic office above an industrial estate somewhere in Midwest or a solicitor's office above a high street in the middle of Belgium.

Simon: 16:55

That's the built environment, and those spaces are anything but automated and gold standard places. So when we get into that world, where everything isn't rosy and we're trying to present information in a way that people can act on it, that's where the low-hanging fruit is, isn't it? It is if we can start to present information to people where, because, let's face it, if you're providing data to Deloitte's headquarters in New York, you're really just tinkering. At that stage the incremental improvements are going to be tiny. But if you're dealing with a 1990s office above a warehouse on an industrial state, there's a good chance. There's some really big impacts you can have on that office if you can present information in a way that's usable to people.

Joakim: 17:43

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the building certification perspective, this concept of collecting logos whether it's Bream or Lead or Well or Airted or Smart Score, all these different logos that comes or have come into the industry lately, where you really get the stamp of approval on your building and you can potentially increase the rent and things like that One of the challenges we've been seeing there is that it is exactly like that. It's a checkmark item and when it's done, it's done and nobody really follows up or continues to do potential necessary investments or assessments. Actually, there was this article in Norway a couple of weeks back where this company opted out from LEED certification. I think it was LEED, leed certification. I think it was LEED because they wanted to. Instead of using the money for the certification, they actually wanted to use that money to actually do improvements instead.

Joakim: 18:51

And I think there's been a lot of discussions around that whether, if you're not one of these top fortune companies, whether it's worth doing the investments in these type of building certifications.

Joakim: 19:06

And I definitely agree to you that the majority of the opportunity out there in terms of improving indoor quality is in existing and old building mass, for sure, what we refer to as brown buildings, in-air things.

Joakim: 19:23

That's where we have the biggest potential impact, just because of the fact how easy it is to install our products, and this is something that you see in general, also in the real-world industry that more companies go towards these wireless, battery-operated sensors.

Joakim: 19:44

That is affordable so that you can do the investment even though you might not have the right financial backing, because you're not one of these fancy big corporations. There is an opportunity to have a very low investment to do a quick diagnosis or assessment of the building so you can actually do the improvements where it's needed. Right, because one of the challenges for these building owners or facility management companies is, first of all, to know where to do the improvements, if there are any improvements to be done, where to do the improvements if there are any improvements to be done, and and you know, making sure to address the right type of problem, because you have a limited budget. Right and doing a minor investment in in placing out these sensors would give you a pretty good picture of where in the buildings or where in your building portfolio you need to further invest to improve the indoor air quality.

Simon: 20:52

Yeah, and I think the challenge therein in those brown buildings, I think, is to roadmap this for people, is to provide foresight into how this can be done, because sometimes it isn't about major reinvestment, it's about understanding the tools you have available in an existing space and managing them more effectively. I mean, you know, you've seen, as I'm so sure I have, time and time again, where you deploy environmental sensors and someone's looking at the data and goes hang, hang on a minute. This building's at design temperature at three o'clock in the morning. But how comes, you know? And it's not until you see that data in front of you that you realize crikey, you know somebody set the heating to go off when people go home and this place is still at design temperature five hours later. There's an efficiency that we could hit there just by having that information available to us. We've never seen that before on a report. So there's enormous value sometimes to be eked out in let's call it dumb spaces, just by being able to see those environments properly for the first time.

Simon: 22:01

And I think that's what's misunderstood sometimes is that sometimes this isn't that complicated. It's often about going hang on a minute. That meeting room there is dreadful. Why is that? And somebody realizes that a damper got shut at some point and they didn't figure it out, or really simple things that you can have really big impacts on a large swathes of the built environment.

Joakim: 22:25

Yeah, it's. That's actually uh pretty funny that you mentioned it, because we have so many cases where uh customer have invested in in neural quality monitoring, uh to to look at whether it's co2 or radon or or whatever, and they and they find these anomalies, as you say, they find find that the VV damper is not working correctly. Or you know they've done some refurbishment and built a meeting room and they don't have any proper ventilation into that meeting room. Things like that that you cannot really use in your sales pitch, right? You cannot say, like, buy our products and you're going to see where everything is wrong in your building, because typically when you, the person you talk to, is the person responsible for things not being wrong right.

Simon: 23:08

So it's a bit interesting how most of the really cool stories where there's been improvements is finding anomalies in the existing HVAC setup, which I find is is is very interesting, of course yeah, and the challenge is finding people within those organizations that care enough to look at that data and understand enough about it, or that it's presented simply enough with actionable insights that they can use that as a tool. You you know, ziggy-zaggy lines are interesting to people for a little while when they see their meeting rooms for the first time, but that fades pretty quickly.

Simon: 23:53

So unless you're providing genuine insight for people. The value of data erodes quite quickly in reality, doesn't it?

Joakim: 24:02

Yeah, exactly, and usually everything starts with some sort of problem. Right, it could either be that tenants complain about the meeting rooms not being ventilated or tenants complain about the temperature. A lot of things is around complaints when it comes to talking about the productivity and absenteeism and those kind of improvements and just the fact that you can get sensors in and then you can get a report. If you're the tenant, you can use that report to get improvements, but as a facility manager, you can also use that report to say, hey, the temperature is actually set to whatever it's said to be. But we also had cases where you know there is an existing BMS system and you have these people saying that, no, we don't need an IQ system, we have the BMS system, we have full control of everything. And then you have somebody coming in from the top which could be an industrial hygienist or workplace experience manager or whatever that you know invests in these products regardless and they put up these sensors and they see that. Well, why is? Why is there a six degree difference in in? You know what you report compared to what this iq monitor is actually showing? And then you find out that, oh yeah, you hadn't calibrated those temperature sensors for 15 years or whatever. So it's interesting how these side things come up as being detected.

Joakim: 25:30

We also had a big I wouldn't say skyscraper, but a pretty big building in the US where we installed a lot of devices, a lot of sensors, and we saw VOCs in one of the cantinas, very high VOCs, and this was a completely new built building or refurbished, and they had different cantinas. It was the only this cantina that actually showed these super high VOCs and it turned out that they had done something wrong during the installation and was actually not properly taking the air out from the cooking. And that's where you can see one of the benefits. Voc in itself is not really useful, but using it as a proxy to understand that something is off, something isn't really right here.

Simon: 26:20

That's where the key benefits of continuous monitoring comes in and that's where we've seen the most interesting stories as well, um, throughout the last years yeah, and when we were talking at the beginning of this conversation, you also said one of the things that's become very clear are the regional differences in perception around air quality and ventilation as a global player. What are those key differences? Are they driven predominantly by environmental conditions and political conditions and so on? So, for example, we've seen a lot of talk about wildfire smoke in North America and Canada, for example, and in Southern Europe, whereas we might have a focus on CO2 monitoring in some parts of Europe like Belgium, and so on. What are the kind of narratives that you're seeing develop in the different regions?

Joakim: 27:19

So I think post-COVID, measuring CO2 has become relevant in schools. First, it was driven by the fact that it is a proxy to tell you something about the air exchange right. Co2 is a perfect proxy to tell you how much fresh air or how much you actually dilute the air when people are present. Dilute the air when people are present, and I think that's what drove the big wins we had in the Netherlands and also in the US, various places in Europe, in Norway specifically, we had the big rollout in schools in Canada or Quebec a few years back, with 10,000 classrooms more or less. So we have these big surges when it comes to CO2, but then it's more of a proxy.

Joakim: 28:14

I think particulates in the US has really become interesting after the wildfires and I think this is primarily driven by the different building certifications predominantly. What I really would like to see more is the radon right. That's one of the core unique value propositions from everything, so that's what started the whole company, and radon isn't doesn't have the same pull in the market, it seems. Canada just recently actually gave out a survey that more or less says that there's radon everywhere. There's not a single place in Canada that doesn't have radon, and in most of the buildings you have radon levels that goes beyond the threshold of action.

Joakim: 29:11

So you have these different particulates CO2, radon and in UK, I think the biggest topic there right now is mold, which is you can look at temperature and humidity to look at what kind of environment you have for mold growth, and I think there's been a lot of discussions in the UK around mold growth and those things as well. So there are different interest areas in the world where this becomes hard from an air things point of view. Right, who are air things and what are we trying to do and what's our focus? Who are we in the US? Who are we in Canada? Who are we in the Netherlands, in France, in Germany, in Scandinavia? So we've always taken the approach that we have these multi-sensor type of devices that can measure everything, but then you typically tune the messaging towards which region you actually go into and if it's for residentials or if it's for commercial buildings.

Simon: 30:24

Yeah, I suppose you know it's a good problem to have. If you're a multinational you're going to have to reframe in different regions depending on what's hot or not really in those spaces. That's the reality, yeah.

Joakim: 30:38

I think there is definitely some truth in what you're saying, because in the end, it is the same device, right? It is the same device from everything's perspective. It is the same device. If you're using something to monitor for particles or if you're using something to you know, it's still the same solution that you invest in. And I think that's also one perspective that is beautiful about where we are today with the technology is the fact that you know you buy this system of products, you install them and they're all connected to the cloud. They all send off data. There's even more you know new virtual sensors being created in the cloud, which is presented to you as a user. But then, as you move forward, you get new features, you get new value. Your existing solution that you had for three years no-transcript you can get these benefits from when legislations or these different IEQ trends change over time right, so you can pivot your own focus because you have the solution up and running. You have the continuous monitoring. You have the history as well that you can go back to.

Simon: 32:22

Yeah, and I suppose AirThings. Now you're really starting to get into a position where you've got an enormous amount of data to work with. You know a lot of data points in a lot of different regions from a lot of different devices. I imagine it's a data scientist's dream at this stage, working within AirThings, to be trawling through that lot and starting to identify the big data potential of all of this information.

Joakim: 32:54

Absolutely. And we had this interesting side quest where, as an example, when there were wildfires in the US, we could see day by day how the particulates moved throughout over the US and over the Atlantic Ocean and also how it's passed into Norway and Sweden, which was quite an interesting perspective where it actually just validated how because this was used through indoor quality monitors right. So it validated how poorly these buildings actually were to filtering out these particles, and it wasn't like the Norwegian newspapers started to talk about how much bad particles there was in the air outdoors. This was just us seeing how much of that leaked into the buildings. So there's definitely a lot of cool things to explore there.

Joakim: 33:46

And we also have this radon map, which is our way to present an aggregated view of where there's radon in the world.

Joakim: 33:53

And when the Canada survey came out a few weeks back, we actually took, we looked at our data and overlaid it with the map.

Joakim: 34:01

That was part of this survey in Canada and it showed highly correlation between the measurements there and our measurements. One of the bigger differences was, of course, that we had lower readings, and the reason for that is typically, when you invest in an earthing sensor, you see that there's rayon and you do something about it as well. But we could see those different trends in the different geographic areas, different trends in the different geographic areas which kind of validated that, yeah, our devices is actually showing where there's more radon compared to other places, and we did the same with there's this map in Germany as well, and then it becomes interesting because if you can do these validations on your geographical regions, then you can make also assumptions on other parts in the world where we have sensors right. So I think, as you're saying, I think it's a dream to be one of the data science members that we have in AirThings today. I think they're having quite fun at work.

Simon: 35:03

Yeah, and I think that's the interesting thing about big data and big data science is it's actually sometimes hard to imagine the potential of the big data until you start seeing the patterns and the modal impacts of certain things or the clustering of certain data sets. How long ago it was now, but whenever the bird flu was coming up through south america up into north america, so I think that was maybe 15 years ago, something like that. 10 years ago it was the first demonstration I saw of big data tracking the movement of something. So google was able were effectively two days ahead of local um public health, based purely on search terms that were coming into their platform yeah, I remember that basically a wave of people going.

Simon: 35:59

I feel terrible. I've got these symptoms and they could actually track the bird flu coming up through the states two days ahead of public health.

Joakim: 36:08

Yeah, we actually had this. Uh, there was this and I'm sorry, but there's so many disasters that happens in the world, that becomes interesting from a from a data perspective. But there was this earthquake in in in turkey a few um years ago, uh, and and we look at some of the indoor air quality data around sensors, you know, in the not the close proximity, but in the areas around, and we saw a huge spike in radon, right. So there are these interesting aspects of global events happening. There could be earthquakes or wildfires, or these disasters have a huge impact on indoor air quality, because indoor air quality is a function of the outdoor air quality, right. So it's super interesting to look at these data points.

Joakim: 37:02

And I think we have a unique position, as you say, because we have both the consumer devices out there in the world and we have the business devices as well. So we do have the commercial buildings, we have the residential homes and together it's more than a million devices. So there's a huge opportunity for us to create some really good stories. But there's also the perspective of privacy. We are very strict on how we can use this data and how we can share the data as well. So both internal restrictions, but also what we can share externally. But there is of course a lot of cool stories to be told, that's for sure.

Simon: 37:46

If reflect on your your latest statements as a business.

Simon: 37:52

I think it tells a really interesting picture of where the industry is right now that we see continued growth and continued interesting interest from a consumer segment perspective on buying sensors and under understanding air quality. But we see a difficult business market out there at the moment and a market that's trying to figure out where its place in the world is at the moment. Could you speak to that a little bit? What your sense of where that is, why you think the consumer side of the business, the B2C side of the business, is seeing this consistent growth year on year and interest in air quality, yet that's not translating necessarily to the business side of it. I mean, we've seen a blip of COVID and I think that's been a challenge for everybody, but that awareness that the consumer segment isn't translating to business quite in the same way. Yet consumers are at work in business. So you'd think it would, wouldn't you? Yeah, yet there's a difference there somehow. Have you got a sense of where that's coming from, where or why that difference exists?

Joakim: 39:09

where or why that difference exists. Well, first of all, fundamentally, b2c and B2B businesses is very different, right? My focus is primarily in the past, more towards the B2B side of things. I'm more familiar with the dynamics there. First of all, I think that AirThings has had a huge benefit of our brand in the consumer market and our ability to take a firm position in the market and the way we've designed our products. I think that helped when we introduced our solution towards the commercial industry or the commercial market. It helped that it has a lot of inheritance from the consumer kind of design, the way of doing it, the simplicity of it, so that kind of helped us to really boost sales in the start.

Joakim: 40:05

We've been very successful with the B2B deployments. And here's the thing and this is where things become a bit weird because we are growing in the consumer business, we're growing in the B2B as well. So the company is growing. But we've done a lot of investments as well, a lot of heavy investments, and obviously if you invest more than you're growing, the financial turns out the way they are. But the unique part in B2B is that you have steady growth but then you have these huge wins, like the Quebec case in 2020, where we won 10,000 classrooms. That was a huge win, and we had a few of those big, big deployments where a school district or a larger entity purchased a large amount of devices to deploy in their building portfolios. But nevertheless, most of these cases are either worked at or for one, two to three years.

Joakim: 41:14

So in order to actually have that go through and if you work with the private sector, it can go faster, but it's still you need to build relationship, you need to build trust, because nobody's going to buy 30,000 devices from you unless they really trust you. It shouldn't be relationship-based, but as many things in the commercial world it is. Then, when it comes to the public sector or school districts, it's quite the opposite. There you shouldn't have the relationship. In some cases there is a need of relationship anyway, but officially it should be a pure spec and cosplay, right? What do you get out of the money that you need to purchase? But still, it's super long cycles, super long cycles.

Joakim: 42:07

So it's very hard to predict in the B2B world and it's interesting to follow some of our competitors, because a few years back maybe there were 50 or 30 IEQ players. Today it's over 200 companies creating IEQ sensors and going out either in consumer or in the commercial business world. So there's a lot of players and everybody's taking different approaches. Some are doing big custom projects towards big enterprises. Some of them have low cost products without the software as a service fees. Everybody's trying out different things and still the culprit or the problem is still the same.

Joakim: 42:53

Ieq isn't always on top of the agenda. There's always other things, other investments that can be done. That kind of puts IEQ a bit down and that's super unfortunate, but that is the case. But as soon as you again, if you can drive the question about energy efficiencies, if you can actually sell something that earns you money eventually, that's been super beneficial for us and in the US, where some of these bigger, larger enterprise wins we've had is residing. I think here it should be noted that AirThings is not only an IAQ company. We are an IEQ, meaning indoor environmental quality, because in the US it's equally important for some of the other sensing aspects we have, like light, noise, space utilization. So there's more to it in terms of improving the workplace experience for people. So to go back to your initial question, it's super hard to forecast in B2B. Yeah, did I say growth, but it's super hard to forecast in in b2b um, yeah, there is.

Simon: 44:13

That is a growth, but it's super hard and I think that's common in you know I've been in industry and you know the the more successful you are with the bigger projects, the the the bigger peaks and troughs there are in in business sometimes and if you're just unlucky on when those deals land, it can make projecting really difficult you know, because you get an artificial peak you know, and there's one thing as well which is kind of interesting, and it's AirThings is creating wireless battery-operated devices that doesn't need any wiring.

Joakim: 44:54

So what we're essentially doing is we're trying to go into an existing, established industry where there's a lot of relationship and contracts and setups that create this ecosystem of you know, that's my electrician, that's my plumber, that's my. You have this whole network of pre-established relationships and now we're coming in and say, yeah, here's the products and oh, yeah, whoever can install them, you just stick into the wall, you can take an intern or whoever can just do the installation, and all of a sudden you're cutting away some of these established connections that you have. So we're kind of also disrupting the industry a bit and create this friction, because then you have these established actors that comes in bad-mouthing the wireless technology, because the whole cabled industry is huge. There's a lot of costs involved with going to cables through the walls and that stuff. So there's a lot of frictions as well. It's not friction-free to enter this market.

Simon: 46:04

No for sure. And one of those frictions, as you said at the beginning, which I thought was interesting, is around big companies, big FM businesses, centralising of that sector as well. Working with FM that isn't finding it challenging to work with Because it's big business. It seems, on the face of it, to be customer facing. They are the people managing the built environment, you know so they would seem like a natural fit, but it's a very particular business, isn't it? Fm business? It's going through its own changes. There's this constant friction between hard and soft services. It's a fascinating space, a huge potential, but it seems to be grindingly slow to yes, and you have to have an impact in you have these different levels as well.

Joakim: 47:03

I mean in in norway you have the lowest level of a person who managed the building is more or less a I think we use the word janitor here that's definitely not the right word in the US but you have these facility managers who more or less go around with a key chain and some tools and they basically fix things you have from that level and now you have up to somebody sitting with a suit centralized facility management looking after 200 or 400 or 1,000 buildings, and all of them is in facility management kind of category.

Joakim: 47:45

So when we started out, we went for the people in the bottom, the people we knew could go out there and fix the problems. But that's also one of the things that switched when we went into 2024 is that we realized that these people typically don't have time to sit in these systems. They're out there fixing things. So then we shifted and instead of having the solution centralized around this is your building, this is what needs to be improved we went for this is your building portfolio, this is the building you need to focus on right now. So that's kind of the way we transitioned the model going from facility management to centralized facility management and targeting the larger more kind of I wouldn't say use the word academic. But there's a different approach to modern facility management today where a lot of the things is done remotely right. And going back to what we discussed earlier with brown buildings, installing these products can make your brown offline building actually a connected building, so you know when you need to go out there and do potential improvements.

Simon: 48:58

Yes, I mean sometimes the automation isn't necessarily automation in live time with a HEVAC system that exists or doesn't in a building. The automation can be in works order management and maintenance management and all the kind of things that, because you don't have visibility of that building, you're not currently getting um. So just having access to that data and centralizing that and understanding the patterns of spaces or the deterioration in performance of spaces over time and all of these kinds of things can be enormously powerful to big centralized organizations that are managing large swathes of assets effectively.

Joakim: 49:42

Yeah, absolutely, and that's more or less what our partners are doing with our products, so they have this. Obviously we want our devices to be fully deployed in buildings. That's not always the case. This is always the budget.

Joakim: 49:57

Some buildings are very large products that they sell as a test kit, and then you start off at some part in the building you start to diagnose and figure out where the improvements, where the investments can be made in order to improve the building. And I think they've been very successful in doing so, because our products are designed in an easy way to just put them up and get the instant readings and figure out where to focus and where to start doing the investments to improve these buildings. Because one of the, I think, problems today in buildings is, if you want to improve the building, you don't necessarily know where to start and you don't just want to go in with, you know, make a deal with one of these huge BMS providers, because that can be super expensive, because they're going to sell you everything right. So where do you start to focus first? And I think that's where the beauty lies. It helps you identify where you can do those minor improvements to get to that end goal in a staged approach.

Simon: 51:14

As a whole, as a business. What's the pattern of supply chain for you? Typically I mean B2C, is it direct sales off of websites or through third parties like the Amazons and what have you of the world? And in the B2B market, are you predominantly a partner model effectively to deliver your services, or does it tend to differ region to region? What does it kind of look like as a structure perspective?

Joakim: 51:34

so this ties into the complexity of different regions in the world. Uh for b2c. Uh for b2c. We have three main channels we sell through amazoncom, we sell through retailers retailers across North America and in Europe and then we sell on our own webpage as a direct manner. Then, from the B2B side of things, if you go back, we have been testing a lot of different business models, a lot of different distribution models, and it turns out that different models are successful in different parts of the world. So we today, everything we do with indoor air quality monitoring, we typically sell direct or through partners, but when it comes to automating or introducing demand-based or controlling your buildings smarter using our sensors, then we always have a partner in between.

Joakim: 52:33

So we have an example, in Norway we have this company called Energy Control. They basically take our devices and they control buildings smarter using our devices. So they introduce demand-based control to reduce the energy efficiency. So we have partners in certain regions that sort of is our be able to access affordable, high quality wireless battery operated you know, indoor quality monitors wherever you are in the world. But we have some specific key markets and today it's North America and Europe more or less, and UK of course.

Simon: 53:24

Yeah, and I also saw interestingly I think it was this year anyway you started to develop partnerships with the likes of Lindab, for example. So direct integration with HVAC or ventilation organizations, combining sensor technology with things like demand controlled ventilation, so you were starting to have some relationships above the national level where you're partnering with delivery. You're actually starting to develop some partnerships with industry as well. Yeah, exactly.

Joakim: 53:56

So we have Lindab is a great example. They have this VAV damper that has a radio on it. So they already had this and we had our products that also had a radio on it, right, so the wireless communication perspective was there and since both were using software configurable radios, the effort to make these two talk to each other was very small. So we went into this partnership and, interestingly enough, it's super cool that when you have buildings and I mean I'm not from the HVAC industry, I'm from the IoT world in the past I didn't realize this was so interesting. But they had this VAV damper where, if you don't have a proper BMS system maybe you have mechanical, traditional, just mechanical channels in schools and stuff you can just put in this local VAV damper, our device, and then you're going to have local, decentralized, demand-based control of the air, which is super cool. So that was super interesting. It is a super interesting partnership we have with them. But then again we have this third-party partner that actually takes these two solutions and sell it out to the world.

Simon: 55:12

Just going to grab your attention for a minute. I wanted to quickly tell you about Lindab, a partner of this podcast. For over 60 years, lindab has been dedicated to improving the climate of buildings. I have known them and some of the great people who work there for as long as I have been in this industry. Lindab offers a broad range of products, from individual components to complete indoor climate solutions. Their systems not only promote better indoor environments, but also deliver economic benefits. If you're working on a new building project, lindab's high air tightness products and demand-controlled ventilation systems are designed to meet the stringent energy efficiency requirements of today and align with environmental certifications. If you're renovating, lindab's smart units can upgrade existing systems, reducing energy consumption by up to 70%, with minimal impact on the building structure. Lindab's products meet the certification standards for BREEAM, leed, dgnb and many more, ensuring optimal environmental performance. And if you're looking to simplify your design process, their range of ventilation software and tools make product selection, calculation and performance evaluations quite straightforward.

Simon: 56:41

Creating healthy spaces is at the core of Lindab's mission, which is why at Air, at air quality matters, we are so pleased to have them as a partner with this podcast. Do check them out in the podcast notes at air quality mattersnet and, of course, at lindabie. Back to the podcast. Yeah, no, absolutely yeah. And one of the things just to kind of finish up, finish off our list from the very beginning, was this increasing integration of industrial hygienists, or that top tier of professionals of the built environment, into this healthy building space. My general perspective so far has been that it's been a bit of a missed opportunity for that sector to really latch on to this healthy building space. And in that gap, in that void, we've seen the development of standards like Well and APs into the space and so on.

Joakim: 57:45

So what I'm seeing right now is industrial hygienist as a key person in an organization is predominantly in the US. We have workplace experience managers. We have something similar, but we don't have with the same academic background in the Europe region yet. But it's super interesting to me. I mean we had just a few weeks back. We have one of our favorite industrial hygienists, Sophia, who's working for Amazon. She was on stage at a conference talking about how they pulled in 30,000 devices into the buildings, using everything's devices, and how, from her perspective, could do things that she couldn't do 10 or 15 years ago because the technology wasn't there at the time, but now all of a sudden she can. You know, both work reactively with problems in their deployed portfolio, but also work proactively to see you know what kind of trends or what kind of portfolio, but also work proactively to see what kind of trends or what kind of, where is their indoor quality going, and so forth. So I think just having her on that scene also together with Dr Joseph Allen, which is really cool, and talking about the importance here I mean the book that you're referring to is one of my favorite books and I think there's a statement around your facility manager has a greater impact on your health than your doctor, which I think is straight on point, and I mean just the fact that he is on the 60 minutes shows and he's out there, and Sophia is also out there and talking about this.

Joakim: 59:27

So some of these bigger companies are taking the lead to show which way we're going, but still the market is too slow, it's not adapting fast enough and I think it's super frustrating that things take so much time, even though now you have these successful cases that tell you that, look, they invested in indoor quality monitoring.

Joakim: 59:55

Here is the ROI, here's the outcome. It's, I mean, why aren't more people investing in these type of solutions? And it is kind of frustrating. But at the same time, there's a lot of things happening in the world the macroeconomy, politics, wars, so there are things in the world that also somehow takes away the urgency of indoor quality, unfortunately, but still, I mean it is a growth in the industry and I think it's going in the right direction. I just wish it's going even further and I really hope that industrial hygienists becomes more of a required type of role in organizations, not only these big ones in the US, but also as a function in smaller organizations and smaller building portfolios as well, because I think it's super important that you have somebody that is responsible for the people in a building. That's the reason you have buildings in the first place, right?

Simon: 1:01:05

So why wouldn't you? And I think that will come. My gut feeling is that the more information we have about our built environment and the more complex we recognize that it is, at some point you're going to be looking for somebody to determine a position for you or a roadmap or to to make a statement about something, and I use this analogy all the time. You know that the environmental iot sector are a bit like health wearables. You know we've seen an explosion in them. We can we can gain an awful lot of information about patterns of health and trends and find new ways of presenting that data usefully. And we've seen that sector really established in the same way that we've seen the environmental monitors start to establish. But a bit like with health wearables, at some point you need to go to your doctor to get a blood test or to do your blood pressure and actually tell you how you're doing, need to go to your doctor to get a blood test or to do your blood pressure and actually tell you how you're doing and to give you your roadmap for health.

Simon: 1:02:10

And I think similarly within the built environment, the environmental monitor is a little bit like health wearables they define the patterns, they show you the areas of concern.

Simon: 1:02:20

They'll present information that you can use day to day and what have you. But at some point, if you care about people in your building, you're going to want a professional to look at that information in combination with other things and determine the right course of action for you and I. And I think that's where, if occupational hygiene and those types of professions don't step into that space, it will be increasingly filled with to use the medical equivalence again the alternative medicine crowd. And we're seeing that a little bit. And it's not to say that well-building standards and resets and air rated are equivalent to the alternative medicine. But in the absence of those types of people, you will find labels and organisations stepping in to fill that void and it's a different level of competency. You know I've done my well AP. By no means does it make me an occupational hygienist right. It's a totally different thing and I think that's kind of where we are in the built environment to some degree.

Joakim: 1:03:32

Yeah, and I think it still helps a lot. With all these different building certification standards, all these different IEQ players around the world, we're trying to do something together. Many people often ask me who is your biggest competitor, and so forth, and it's like, yes, we have some companies who you know are the same battlefield as us, but in terms of the war, in terms of what we're trying to do in the world, we're trying to change the, you know, the respect for indoor air quality and and I want to make indoor quality sensors, you know being as common as smoke detectors, and and if we're going to be able to persuade people to understand that this is super important, we need, we need, we need all the players in the world. We need all kinds of building certificate. We need everybody to join as an effort to try to lift this topic.

Simon: 1:04:30

I agree completely. I had Tim Sharp on the podcast Actually, he's on this week as I'm talking to you today and the very first question I asked him was because he was part of a very big survey in the uk about where we are with ventilation in the uk and I said, similar to you, where do you, where are we? As of today? And he went well, as of today, we have no idea, frank, quite frankly, we we're monitoring and we have information on such a tiny, tiny fraction of the built environment that, honestly, we just don't know. We have an idea, but there's so much more to learn and I think you're absolutely right.

Simon: 1:05:13

You said earlier that there's quite a lot of players, but I would say, from my perspective, there's probably quite a lot of manufacturers globally, but out in the built environment, you can probably count on two hands the brands that are making an impact in that space in one way or the other, and, combined as as big as you all are together, you're not even scratching the surface yet of the built environment, not even close. Um, so, as you say, there's enormous potential there for that sector and I think that's what's very exciting about it. Where do you see this going? Hopefully you know, with your yeah, your wish, hat on. But and also realistically, what do you kind of see the trajectory of this space over the next four years looking like?

Joakim: 1:06:11

I think uh, in this space it's going to be, first of all, from a technology perspective. It's definitely going to be uh, wireless, it's definitely going to be products that outlives, um, the batteries meaning, meaning that the source of energy to power these devices will not be questioned. So I think it definitely, from a technology perspective, is going to be more devices, smaller devices, more capable devices, for sure, and I think, as this technology is moving forward and as the cost of production goes down and become even more affordable, I think we're TV remote controls, smartwatches, phones. Honestly, I think we need some sort of adoption. I really liked when IKEA came with their indoor quality monitor. I really was like, yes, now the common people are going to understand the importance and we're going to grow the awareness, but it just wasn't enough. But I think we need these big players to actually make big rifts in the market to truly penetrate with indoor quality awareness. But I think it's going to be wireless. I think we're going to reside or rely more on AI computing. So whether it's edge computing, so more smartness in the actual devices out in the field, or if it's this centralized ability to not only react on what's happening in a building but also be more proactive.

Joakim: 1:08:10

As we sort of remove more and more people from the whole system of sort of the infrastructure of the data flowing between these devices and to actuators sort of the infrastructure of the data flowing between these devices and to actuators, I see no reason why the market would decline, because the awareness is growing. The amount of articles writing about outdoor quality and indoor quality are more and more. More and more people position themselves on social media, on LinkedIn. There's more articles, there's more videos, there's more content. So it's going in one direction.

Joakim: 1:08:56

I think the big change is going to be when because right now it's more towards monitoring and doing something about the indoor air quality right the big change is going to be when there's no human in between there. You know, when you have these really demand-based systems where you remove the person from the equation and whatever the problem is that is detected by the indoor quality monitors is being actuated by if it's a VV damper or if it's the BMS system or if it's I don't know even if it's a robot walking around and fixing problems. Whatever it is, I think the human involvement in that perspective is going to be reduced. But one thing is for sure I mean we. We are growing, our competitors are growing, the awareness is growing. So it's going in one direction and, and I think it's positive for the indoor quality awareness yeah, and how did you end up in this space?

Simon: 1:09:58

you're kim, like you say. If you came from an iot background more recently, like have you found yourself here? I suppose is the question.

Joakim: 1:10:08

Yeah, it's not a weird story, but it is a bit odd. I mean, I finished my studies in Sweden in 2011 as an electrical engineer. I would focus on wireless connectivity and hardware design. As I was going to be a hardware designer, I ended up starting at Texas Instruments in Oslo, norway. It's a global semiconductor company that, at the time, had this new technology with wireless MCUs that had a software configurable radio and it could run this new super cold protocol called Bluetooth low energy. It's a subset of the Bluetooth standard. So this was in 2010.

Joakim: 1:10:51

And I took part of a journey there that was quite interesting, because what happened with this early technology was that everybody was talking about this cool technology where you could transfer information wirelessly from this device that run a coin cell battery and it could run on the coin cell battery for two years. This was really the kicker for the Internet of Things, and a lot of companies that I worked with at that time started to take this technology into their products, but it wasn't until Apple decided to natively support Bluetooth low energy in their iPhone. This is where things really took off, and I remember still today when we did this. We made the first video in the world that actually demonstrated this feature, where you had one small little PCB printed circuit board with buttons on it and you press the button and you can see something flicker on the iPhone. And you press a button on the iPhone and you can see the LED lit up. This was like this hallelujah moment because all of a sudden you could actually, you know, remotely control things from your iPhone locally. So it kind of I took part of that IOT way where you can control anything from your from your smartphone. This is, you know, smart trackers and all kinds of weird stuff, even adult toys, which is a separate podcast you and me can do but all of these cool things where you can control things with your phone, and that kind of took me on this journey of IoT and wireless communication and I worked there for I think it was eight years or something like that.

Joakim: 1:12:29

And then, obviously, texas Instruments big corporation still, the best place to start your career is in a corporation, I believe. But I grew tired of it and I started to look for local companies and at at the time, airthings was a customer of Texas Instruments, used the technology, so I was familiar with architecture, with the way everything was built up, and I felt confident that this product is good stuff, it actually works. And at that time in 2019, the AirThings for Business. So the commercial department of AirThings just started, so it was called Healthy Building Solution. There was this one business line manager and one salesperson and I came in to be the technical person and one salesperson and I came in to be the technical person. We started AirThings for Business and we kind of started to grow it and I basically went from running the technical support team as a field application manager to then grow the base to a point where we needed customer success. But customer success was still a very technical type of approach. So I started the customer success team and then we grew even larger and the technical problems weren't that technical anymore. So I grew a bit tired of the sales perspective so I moved into the product team. So I was in the product team for two years running the development of new products, managing the product team for the commercial everything's for business segment.

Joakim: 1:14:19

And then this year I moved into a different role, which is the head of strategic growth, where I work more with the strategic approach. And I know that from Airthings' point of view, they think that I'm supposed to grow Airthings. But I'm trying, like growing the awareness, growing the understanding of all these different things. It's from the comfort perspective to the productivity perspectives, to even the dangerous stuff, right Radon, particulates, vocs. I think that's what kept me at Airtix, right, waking up every morning and feeling that you're doing something good for the world. So I've been through a couple of roles. I've seen a lot of strategic pivots and today I moved from B2B into sort of a B2B B2C cross space where I look more strategically into the future.

Simon: 1:15:24

So that's how I ended up with.

Joakim: 1:15:25

AirThings.

Simon: 1:15:26

And I think one of the things that comes out of the last quarter financial report is you are seeing an increase in repeat business, and I think that's important. The question I had for you on that was how big a part does customer success play for you within that b2b segment as of today? Do you end users? Are they engaging directly with, with their things? When it comes to things like customer success, you know, interpretation of dashboards and reports and helping people get the most out of the actionable insights is that still a a key piece of what you're doing?

Joakim: 1:16:11

so it's, it's. We've had different approaches. So, um, when we had a big focus on partners, then, um, that customer success focus was more obviously on on helping out expanding existing installations. But the customer success focus was also to aid and advise in terms of explaining what the values mean. That's what we refer to as the technical support which is under the customer success function, because, on that perspective, as I mentioned earlier, most of our customers they understand what PM, particulates, vocs, what it means and what they should do in their building to improve it. But a lot of our customers don't and we're not at a point today where we specifically tell users in our dashboard what they need to do. So in those cases where they have a problem, they reach out to us and then we have to elaborate on potential remedies or who they might contact to mitigate radon and so forth. It is a sort of advisory function as well as helping and growing the installations out there in the market.

Simon: 1:17:32

Yeah, I think what's fascinating about AirThings is the time you've been in this space, and my experience of this sector is that you get this initial wave of interest through deployment of environmental sensors into spaces and you may even sign people up to a two or three year SAS model type approach. But at some point, two or three or four or five years down the road, cfos and supply chain people are sitting around tables looking at what's still providing value or not. Enough that you've been part of those second wave of conversations now, where organizations are sitting down and going right. What were those little white boxes on the walls again like? Are we getting value from those still? Who? Who's looking after that? Oh, that's steve.

Simon: 1:18:35

Well, he left in 2020. Who's in charge of that? I'm not sure. Um, oh crap, does anybody do anything with that? I don't know who do we talk to. You know, those conversations happen down the road and I think what's interesting, a lot of the newer players in the market haven't been part of those conversations yet conversation where people that had no interest in that original purchasing decision are sitting around the tables deciding whether to renew a sas contract with somebody or not, and that's a very different space to be in. Isn't it that that part of the the world, yes?

Joakim: 1:19:18

and it's, it's in in the start. Um, the whole point of everything's for business was to bring in so many customers as we possibly could. So in the start the sales team didn't. When I say in the start, I'm talking about 2019, 2020. The sales team didn't really care who was the end user. If somebody seemed remotely interested in indoor air quality, they were getting our devices.

Joakim: 1:19:45

Yeah, Obviously we ended up with a lot of different situations where it could be a tenant that purchased this and the result was well, the indoor air quality is great. Why do we need to pay for this? Because the indoor air quality is great, and that's one of the reasons why we started to focus on facility management instead of tenants, specifically because facility management can do something about it. But it is as you say, when these masses of customers grow, some of them churn because they don't see the value anymore. They don't understand what they're getting. And one thing we are very aware of today when we approach clients is to make sure that the various problems are identified and the path towards mitigation is identified early in the sales cycle, because we do not want customers that potentially don't see the value after six months or one year. We really want customers who see the benefits.

Simon: 1:20:59

So we're not trying to push something onto customers just to sell, which might have been the case in the start and tom robbins, I think from switchy, who are in a slightly different space, but that's environmental senses of social housing and again that they would have been around from, you know, 2018, 2019 scaling.

Simon: 1:21:22

So it's very similar to air things in a lot of ways and, as he said, what they've come to learn is that if you're not having the tough conversations as part of that sales process at the very beginning, everybody's just kidding themselves.

Simon: 1:21:39

You might get the win, you might sell a bunch of sensors into a big pilot for the first building or whatever it is, but unless you've figured out what value this is genuinely going to bring to people, how you systemically embed that within the processes of that business or organization, you're really just kidding yourself as an organization, because what will happen inevitably two or three years down the road is that that value won't have been realized and you run the risk of the evaporation of that customer base. And that's the challenge, I think, is the more mature businesses, the more confident and stable that they get, the more sophisticated that sales conversation becomes, because you realize that the value isn't in the white box. The value is in what you do with the data and if you can't embed that in an organization, you might get the win, but you're not going to get a 10-year business relationship out of it. Yeah.

Joakim: 1:22:40

No, it's exactly as you say. And we've had cases where somebody contacts us with like what's this invoice for? And then we need to. And it's exactly as you say. And we've had cases where somebody contacts us with, like what's this invoice for? And then we need to. And it's as you said, like somebody took it in. He was an early adopter, he took the devices in and now he left the company and you need to do the whole pitch again. Most of the cases, we are able to continue with the software as a service model with this client, but in some cases there's no incentive and then we need to just accept the fact that this is not a customer that we're going to be able to be a successful customer. Be a successful customer Because it's super important that you actually are able to use the data to an outcome that makes it better for your people in the building. Otherwise, we don't really want to be there.

Simon: 1:23:40

Yeah and maybe that's a lesson that the industry will have to learn over time is that you often within organizations only get so many passes at this stuff and if you deploy too early and when you really want that customer, two or three years down the road they're looking at white boxes from somebody else, even on walls and going well, we've tried that, we've got absolutely no value from that. You damage everybody's chances downstream. So so I think the more mature the sector becomes and and the more it's able to recognize when you can deliver value to a customer, the more chance we've got of making a success of it, because at the moment there are probably millions of little white boxes on walls globally that probably were put in too soon or companies have gone bust or that they've not really delivered value and damaged the chances downstream of something meaningful.

Joakim: 1:24:41

They also have this sustainability perspective right? Yeah, for sure. We really don't want to have products sitting out there just not in use. I mean, we design products to last for 10 years and we hope to have clients under subscription for those 10 years. But even though if customers opt out, they opt out on key features. They can still use and see the live data and things like that. But it's super important for us that clients see the long-term cycle here and the long-term usage of the products, because we're not making products that should stick on the wall for two years and then you toss them away. They should be there for the long run, for sure.

Simon: 1:25:23

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I've got an AirThings product in my house. I can't remember where I put it now, but I've got one of the original Radon sensors from AirThings still kicking around. You know like it has value. You know these things do continue to work and Radon we must come on to actually. So I don't want to forget because it's both a passion of yours and mine radon, but we also mustn't forget that that's where air things come from originally, isn't it? Was the development back when? Was it Like 2008 or something?

Joakim: 1:25:59

Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, so it was 2008 that we had three CERN scientists who moved back to Norway and created this company called Corentium. Their whole vision was to revolutionize. Sent out and you measure radon, you send it back into an institute and then you get a letter it tells you how much radon you have. So these guys figured out a way to create a small sensor that can do this in a digital manner, meaning that measures the radon and presents it on a screen. So that was the first product that came out, which which was the Corentium product. And then, after that huge success, there was also the whole rebranding and renaming, and that's where AirThings was born, and we also went into the indoor quality perspective, as well as creating sensors that could talk to the phone, again based on the technology I talked about earlier, and then moving and growing on that, and that's where we end up today. But the radon portion is the core. It is the DNA. It is the unique DNA and core for the company, for sure.

Simon: 1:27:24

And this is the thing that I'm trying to remind people of as much as possible and James McGrath from NUIG puts this really well is that radon should be an absolute slam dunk when it comes to air quality monitoring, because so much of what we monitor in the space is proxy stuff really. I mean even pm. It's not speciated pm. We've got no idea really what the pms are. We've got some idea, depending on the types of spaces, what the likely constituents of a pm is, but we don't know. We're not measuring it, we're just measuring how many of them and what size there are.

Simon: 1:28:02

Tvocs are a very broad spectrum of potential. Co2 is really just a measurement of ventilation performance, not polluting in its own right. Um, there's very few things that we can monitor on an ongoing basis that are a specific thing, a radon we know the source. It can only be one thing. We can measure it pretty precisely and we've got some pretty straight lines between the amount of it in a space and health outcomes, and we know the health outcomes are serious. So, from a from a things you can do in your built environment to protect your health, there isn't a bigger slam dunk really than measuring, flipping radon and doing something about it if it's high. Yet, as you said, strangely there's this weird psyche out there that people don't want to know. Um, you can't give a test away. You know, the studies have shown that repeatedly, that people are very reluctant to measure and we should be doing a lot more of it. You know, as a market potential thing it's enormous and some countries in the world, like Canada and Ireland, where I live, it's a big problem.

Joakim: 1:29:21

Radon yeah, absolutely, and I think you stole the whole pitch there. There's definitely, for sure, an interesting topic, because I still meet people from day to day that they don't really understand radon. They don't really understand how harmful it is, and for sure they never heard that radon is the primary cause of lung cancer amongst non-smokers. And still today. I read CNN. The other day there was this late CEO of YouTube, susan, who died from lung cancer, had a statement just before she died about the importance of research in lung cancer and so forth. And there was this doctor who had a statement in the CNN article that more or less downplayed radon by saying that there are some factors in the air, like asbestos radon, but that's probably just very rare and a minor reason for lung cancer. The more common one is mutation in the lungs. And then I was like what is going on here? What is she talking about? There's tons of studies showing that radon is the leading cause of lung cancer for non-smokers. And just the fact that she mentioned radon and then she mentioned mutation. Mutation is what happens in the lungs when you have these alpha particles exploding in your lungs because of inhaled radon. That's why the mutation is there in the first place.

Joakim: 1:30:59

So still today, you can read about things in media which is completely incorrect and it is a bit scary because there are so many deaths per year. I think in the US there were like 21,000 deaths in 2019 is one of these famous numbers. There were like 21,000 deaths in 2019 is one of these famous numbers, which is more than traffic-caused deaths in the US. And, as you said about, there's things like CO2, voc all these different things.

Joakim: 1:31:34

Even if you keep ventilation at a pace where these are at low levels considered all safe, you can still have high concentrations of radon because it's leaking into your building and it stays there and it accumulates up to large amounts and the long-term exposure is going to cause, or could cause, some serious issues, eventually leading to lung cancer. It's factual, so it's a bit concerning and probably you and me are a bit into the depth of it. But even if you Google it, it's not like there's tons of information about it. I'm even considering writing a book about radon, because there doesn't seem to be one that is of high enough standard, right? So we really need to step up the game when it comes to radon.

Simon: 1:32:29

Yeah, I did this video. I was trying to be a bit provocative there a few weeks back where I was saying that I'd come back from a conference and there was this new evidence that insulation we were putting into the buildings was causing everybody lung cancer. And the crazy thing is is that we could test it really easily and it was really easy to remediate. Yet nobody's talking about it and I kind of flipped that narrative to Radon at the end. But I was trying to make this point that there's not a lot of unknowns here and that's what's so unusual about radon compared to a lot of the other pollutants and illnesses that we get from it is that there are so many confounding factors to some of the other pollutants and whether or not they cause you harm. But radon's just such a slam dunk from that perspective you know it we're not confusing it with another pollutant that there's nothing else that does this. We can precisely measure it. You know there's a. It creates something that's definable.

Simon: 1:33:34

You know that that's measurable and it's really, and it's remediatable, and you know, that's the thing like we have mechanisms within our built environment that are very effective at reducing it. So just you know, I repeat myself, it's, it's just one of the slam dunks of the indoor air quality community yet and it's the sort of thing that we could have great success stories over.

Joakim: 1:33:58

Yeah, and even either and the worst of all is that people seem to think that there's no radon in commercial buildings. Yeah, that's, that's the worst part. Uh, we have. We had a, a client in in norway that installed, uh, our products in the entire building, uh, our space plus device. It measures co2 and radon and a bunch of other stuff, and the purpose was CO2 monitoring. But you install a product in every room and you can actually track and see the radon levels. You could track and see them going higher and higher towards a certain part in the building where he actually isolated a leakage. So you had this crack in the floor where radon was seeping into the building. And the whole building was run by a BMS system, but the air exchange wasn't enough, so the whole basement was just filled with hazardous level of radon.

Simon: 1:34:58

So it's not only residential, it is in commercial buildings as well, and a lot of these buildings I'd argue the educational sector as well, Joachim that we're not taking radon seriously enough in schools, Because schools are often ground floor buildings built before radon barriers were mandatory in most buildings.

Joakim: 1:35:18

Yeah, exactly, in Norway we have been successful.

Joakim: 1:35:22

We've deployed sensors with over 100 municipalities that also include the local schools and, as you say, there's been significantly high radon numbers.

Joakim: 1:35:34

The good thing is that they're identified and they're mitigated.

Joakim: 1:35:38

Fortunately, for most of these schools that has a BMS system, it is actually enough that during the school hours it is enough to drive out the radon.

Joakim: 1:35:47

But there's still, like, unique cases where, as an example, most schools have on the evenings they have these extra classes, or you have these group gatherings where people use the big halls for some sports or whatever, and in some of these cases the ventilation isn't actually turned on during the evenings and there is enough air in these big halls to sufficiently handle the sports during that small time window. But what they don't consider is that during this time radon is leaking in huge levels of radon. So you have these discrepancies when it comes to schools where, even though you have good, solid ventilation that mitigate the radon during use, you still have these off-hours kind of activities where the ventilation might be shut down. And this goes for all commercial buildings. Like, sometimes there are activities going on in buildings and the ventilation is reduced or shut down and they don't consider the fact that radon is then leaking into the building don't consider the fact that radon is then leaking into the building.

Simon: 1:37:05

Yeah, and and as a, as a provider of these radon sensors globally, are you starting to see a trend that these types of sensors are allowed as a way of measuring ventilation? Uh, sorry, radon officially in in, uh, as opposed to the hockey pucks that the, the, the passive samplers, because you know if the ever the evidence that I'm seeing is is that there's good equivalence. Like you're, the, particularly on the average counts over three months. Radar, electronic radon sensors of many different types are capable of providing, within a within of accuracy, the same level of accuracy as the passive samplers. Are you starting to see some countries or jurisdictions starting to accept that type of monitoring as a way of monitoring buildings?

Joakim: 1:37:52

So going back a bit first. So the reason why we do this is because radon is everywhere and always. Yes, it's. It's higher in the radon season typically, but that's not always the case. During winter periods we do have higher amounts of radon. That's also when these measurements are typically performed, but they're typically not performed in all spaces and you typically don't catch the real average values outside and inside of operating hours. You get fixed values right. So that's the purpose of having our products out there.

Joakim: 1:38:32

In Norway, we had to engage with each local municipality and specifically talked about the technology for them to officially approve it for the measurements and the mitigation purposes. But gladly. In Canada the past couple of weeks, after the survey that they had, they actually listed the AirThings devices and a couple of other devices as recommended devices, and that's actually digital radar monitors. So this is the first time in the history of the world that a government or a government organization officially approves a digital radar monitor, which is like a huge win.

Joakim: 1:39:14

I almost fell out of my stool at work when I read about it. This is like super good and it's kind of annoying that the rest is falling a bit behind. But this is common right when a new technology comes into the world, there is a bit of hesitance, even though there are proofs, even though there are lab measurements. There needs to be some time in field to prove that this is a viable technology for the masses to adopt it. So it's quite normal. But now begins the big work, right to try to replicate that effort into every other single country. Toyota approved.

Joakim: 1:39:55

As an example, we do have the professional radon equipment for the residential market, for the homeowner market in the US, which is our Corentium devices that has multiple radon sensors in them. Those are certified at a lab and are purchased under a calibration setup where you calibrate the sensors over again. It's using the same technology as our sensors.

Simon: 1:40:27

Is it Because there's a couple of technologies around? You've kind of got the ionizing chamber type technology, but you've also kind of got the, if I understand it correctly, the kind of needlepoint type technology. So I think you've got there's a couple of different levels even within air. Things isn't there in in how you actually measure radon um that's one is the passive diffusion chamber.

Joakim: 1:40:51

It's. It's the same for all of them. The only change is that, uh for uh, for our professional equipment we have more of them. Okay, so it just increases the accuracy, gotcha, that's the only difference. So we had actually cases where, you know, we had one municipality who wanted tested equipment and we said that, you know, the only way to test each individual device is to send them to Germany to have them tested.

Joakim: 1:41:21

As a radon test house in Germany that we have used and we could do this for you. It's going to prove that the radon is validated and accurate. Or you could trust us. It's a cost perspective, and in that case the municipality went for the trust perspective, because what most of these municipalities done in the start was to use our devices but also use these passive testers. And when they found out that you know, from an accuracy point of view, there's no need to have these uh passive trackers, um, then the word spreads and all of a sudden you have every single municipality in norway. Now we just have to make sure that the rest of the municipalities in the nordics, for starters, are fully aware of this, and then you know the rest of the world because I think it's super important. Radon is so underestimated.

Simon: 1:42:23

And often this stuff is about just creating workflows. If you don't have the confidence in the devices per se, that doesn't stop them being useful for creating the right workflows at the right point. So it may well be that you deploy electronic radon sensors across your municipality or across your building stock, or whatever it is that you deploy electronic radon sensors across your municipality or across your building stock, or whatever it is that you're managing, and some buildings will be fine, some buildings won't, some buildings will be the worst performing, and what that data can do is help you direct resources efficiently. So it may well be that that what they do is stimulate a radon professional to come in and do the survey and collect precise measurements, or whatever it is that you want to do. It's like a lot of this air quality monitoring stuff that the low-cost sensors aren't necessarily about the, the absolute values that they generate. It's about the information they provide for you to do the right thing by that building all the people in it and that.

Joakim: 1:43:22

Yeah, I think that's what that's also across the the all of the products from from my perspective. Yeah, it all breaks down to uh, what is? What is the level of accuracy? You need to take action, right? I mean we could. We could make super accurate, industrial, medical grade products that are super expensive. Nobody could afford them them, but they present 16 decimals. I mean it doesn't make any sense. So what we're struggling with, or not struggling with, but what we're challenged with, is how do you give enough accuracy to be able to take action without compromising on too high cost, because we want to keep the cost as low as possible so that we can sell as many real quality monitors as possible, because we want to be able to enable and empower as many people that we can.

Simon: 1:44:16

Yeah, no, absolutely, and I think that's kind of a great way to round the conversation off, really. Is that? You know? I think that the opportunity we have here with the global low cost, as we call it, environmental sensing technology, is creating awareness and narratives about air quality and building health, but providing people with the tools to do the right thing by those buildings and those people in those buildings.

Joakim: 1:44:49

Absolutely, and it all starts with monitoring right, you cannot stay to make any assumptions. You need to start monitoring.

Simon: 1:44:59

Yeah, no, absolutely. Joachim, thanks so much for spending your time with me today talking on the podcast. It's been absolutely fascinating and a brilliant insight into this space globally from one of the leaders in the field. So I thank you so much for being so generous with your time this morning.

Joakim: 1:45:21

thank you, I'm the one who should say thank you you're welcome.

Simon: 1:45:24

Thanks very much. Thanks for listening. Before you go, can I ask a favor? If you enjoyed this podcast and know someone else who might be interested, do spread the word and let's keep building this community. This podcast was brought to you in partnership with 21 Degrees, lindab, aeco, ultra Protect and Imbiote all great companies who share the vision of the podcast and aren't here by accident. Your support of them helps their support of this show. Do check them out in the links and at airqualitymattersnet. See you next week.