Launch HN: GreaseBoss (YC W21) – Real-time system to manage industrial greasing

In industries relying on large machines, there's always companies promising their tools or their parts or their systems will increase profits and efficiency etc.

In many cases i've seen, the benefits end up being marginal, while complexity in the current systems are increased.

They end up bringing their own maintenance challenges and other unexpected challenges.

Availability of proprietary attachments and parts was always a big issue. We'd be at the whims of the sole provider as far as availability, pricing and delivery time went. This factors in to the amount of downtime when inevitable down time occurs.

There's a big difference between waiting a week for your fancy proprietary doodad to show up than sending someone to the hardware store.

Every external proprietary system you add to your current system is another layer of 'things' that comes with it's own problems eventually.

My questions aren't so much about how much money this will save from down times, but how much extra money will it cost when inevitable problems do occur with it.

Is it going to cost more in the long run than current human error does?

What i've noticed a lot of these systems actually do isn't reduce losses or increase profits, it just hides the losses further down the road.

From what I can tell, this system would be applied to hundreds of individual grease zerks across an entire industry, requiring likely at least a dozen or more of your proprietary ends.

Now, we're reliant not only on every one of those zerks functioning properly always, but we're limited in the amount of greasegun's we can actually deploy.

As the other commenter said, the greasegun attachments are expensive. They're going to be used a lot, everything that's used a lot wears down. Hell, normal greaseguns die pretty regularly.

This is now a new expensive part that the company will have to rely on to perform basic maintenance, which itself will need either maintainance or replacement at some point.

At which point, the company's waiting for their delivery instead of just going to buy a new greasegun.

On gun down means a loss of a person's worth of greasing until it's replaced. That's time and money lost there on top of the cost of replacement.

A zerk down means no data from that one until it's replaced meaning it's back to human error again.

I appreciate your zerks and attachments may be built ruggedly, but everything in a machine is prone to wear and breakage and eventually, they will bring maintenance issues.

What are the extra costs this will bring on top of initial and other ongoing service costs?

Are they low enough to actually save money in the long run?

5-10 years down the road?

These aren't tech startups with ephemeral existences, these machines will need to be relied on for years are you offering that kind of reliability?

A decade from now, will I still be able to buy your proprietary attachments and your zerks?

It would be great to speak to you further on this to get your thoughts on what implementation style would work best.

my email is tim@greaseboss.com.au if you're open for a chat

We get feedback from customers all the time that they use auto-greasers, or their new equipment comes with auto greaser fitted standard. One issue we see is when they blend the new equipment with old equipment, they inevitably have a bunch of manual grease nipples that don't get managed and are forgotton about. There is also a class of nipples that are uneconomic or physically unable to have auto lubers.

We are initially the neglected cohort of nipples as our target market, because they are the ones that fail the regularly. Our intention is to eventually get our system to cover integrate the Autolubers as well - we think it would be very valuable to have a single source of truth for greasing.

You are right in saying that our customers prefer to buy on capex, we are still figuring out ways to satisfy this. The problem of missed greasing occurs every day, so it should be paid for everyday, however our customers don't quite see it this way..