Kurt Avery Shares How This $20 Filter Has Saved More Lives Than Most Governments

Kurt Avery built Sawyer Products from a snakebite kit into the most trusted water filter on the planet. His tech is in 80 countries, used by the Red Cross, World Vision, and the U.S. military. He lost money for 23 of his first 25 years — and kept going anyway.

In this episode, he tells us everything.

What We Cover:

💧 How a 30-cent filter gives someone 10 years of clean water — and why villages that used to wait until age 3 to name their babies now name them at birth

🦟 The JAMA-published study proving Sawyer's fabric treatment cuts malaria in babies by 67%

💰 Bidding 69 cents when everyone else bid $5 — and landing a 6.2 million bottle military contract with only 24 products ever shipped

📉 Losing money for 23 straight years and funding the company through Gulf War contracts

🧠 The "Decision Matrix" — Kurt's framework for making better decisions by killing emotional bias

⚽ Why Kurt hires based on the sport position you played (and why he loves midfielders and point guards)

🏛️ Why Sawyer will never be sold — it transfers to the Sawyer Foundation so the mission lives forever

✝️ How faith drives every layer of the business — from naming the company to scaling globally

Quick Hits:

• Sawyer filters are used by 140+ charities in 80 countries
• 3–5 million people get clean water for the first time every year through Sawyer
• One filter serves 100 people for 10 years. It never wears out.
• Sawyer treated a third of Puerto Rico's water supply after back-to-back hurricanes
• Kurt went to Northwestern (Kellogg) for his MBA and played baseball at Hope College
• His book Sawyer Think has 25 business lessons and is being used in college entrepreneur courses

Connect: 

🌐 sawyer.com 

📖 Sawyer Think — available on Amazon (ebook ~$7) 

📧 customerservice@sawyer.com (reference the podcast)