Great product. Great to see it’s manufactured in Australia . Huge global market and simple business model!!
Australia has excellent prototyping and product development facilities, I would expect to see many more products in the future
Launch HN: GreaseBoss (YC W21) – Real-time system to manage industrial greasing
121–130 of 152 posts
Re: Launch HN: GreaseBoss (YC W21) – Real-time system to manage industrial greasing
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I had a use case, I'd consider them just to be able to mention the "GreaseCloud" at serious meetings.
Our metric for our investor deck is NUM: Nipples under Management Zerks are called Grease Nipples in Australia ;)
GreaseBoss is an excellent name too, love the candidness of your startup.
Re: Launch HN: GreaseBoss (YC W21) – Real-time system to manage industrial greasing
#123Grease is such a weird word to me.
Re: Launch HN: GreaseBoss (YC W21) – Real-time system to manage industrial greasing
#124Grease is such a weird word to me.
It has been fun trying to build a brand around the word grease. We came up with GreaseBoss for hardware product and GreaseCloud for the software platform
Re: Launch HN: GreaseBoss (YC W21) – Real-time system to manage industrial greasing
#125As an Australian developer and entrepreneur, I cannot express how proud I am of you guys for launching what appears to be such a well-thought out and executed idea. Seriously, well done. I am curious as to what issues you've encountered in terms of getting people to sign up, is it the outlay required for these companies to switch over, is the migration process from traditional manual paperwork to your system a deterr…
thanks for the encouragement. Its good to find another aussie in these parts...
We have not had a problem getting customers to sign up, aside from the normal nobody wanting to be first customer - the outback handshake came in handy here.
The outlay required is the labour to fit the tags to each zerk - some plants have 1000's of them, so a fitter @$120/hr has to visit all of them pull the zerk off and fit the tag. When tey are fitted we need to record to ID and put it into the database, then the system is good to go.
After that, we can remotely program the intervals and grease volumes - using the know how of the people on site, or the OEM manuals. One customer did't have the data, he sent his fitter into the plant to complete a round with GreaseBoss and we used the recordings as the baseline data.
Re: Launch HN: GreaseBoss (YC W21) – Real-time system to manage industrial greasing
#126Applying the wrong grease is also a big problem. At one facility I worked at, we had about 15-20 difference greases for different equipment in our facility. We did a lot of training on the topic of grease selection and importance of not screwing this up... yet some techs still got it wrong from time to time. With some grease combos, you do not have long to catch the mistake before bearing damage, or even failure, occ…
Wow, TIL.
I'd never guessed that this would be something that requires a whole system or even a company to handle.
But after reading this it totally makes sense!
It's amazing the amount of stuff we (I) don't know about other industries and its complexities.
Cool stuff!
Re: Launch HN: GreaseBoss (YC W21) – Real-time system to manage industrial greasing
#127Congrats on the launch. Best case scenario that it is widely adopted: what's stopping others from releasing a similar product? Why haven't they already?
Others have tried, 20 years ago before the tech was mature, think windows 98, serial cables, beige industrial tech - we discovered them after we had started. There probably will be followers, especially now we are public. The number 1 risk is user adoption - ie the guys who have to do the greasing hate it. We have the opportunity to implement it and learn all of the lessons before the followers catch up
Thanks for the reply.
Yeah I just noticed, https://assalub.com/en/products/manual-lubrication/luberight... offer something similar but hopefully you can take it to the next level by reducing the friction and get passed the user adoption risk.
Best of luck!
Re: Launch HN: GreaseBoss (YC W21) – Real-time system to manage industrial greasing
#128Very cool! I work in industrial automation and deal with grease all the time. All my equipment is indoors; sometimes it feels like the cast iron foundries are some of the most hellish places on earth but I know your Outback mine sites will give them a run for that unenviable title! Most of the new equipment we build has automated grease dispensing systems, where my PLC dispenses a fixed amount of grease through hard-…
Great feedback, cast iron foundaries are terrible places. I used to work at a foundary, the sand and the dust was terrible. 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…
If they stop paying you, do they just lose the reporting, or can they no longer grease things? If they can still grease, I'd think that'd be easier to swallow. They can always stop paying if they're not seeing ongoing value.
Re: Launch HN: GreaseBoss (YC W21) – Real-time system to manage industrial greasing
#129So here's a question: if a company was suffering below average equipment downtime from lube problems, because they had somehow managed to have above average compliance to manufacturer's specs, would your sales pitch still work? Because as they said on Prairie Home Companion, "all our children are above average". No one thinks they have incompetent maintenance teams. There are industries where safety risks make lube h…
In my experience, management never thinks their maintenance team doesn't need improvement, because single failures cause so much financial pain.
It's true they don't want to spend more money on labor. And sometimes that means more downtime. But if they can spend some money on something that's not labor and improve uptime, they'll be all over it.
I would use this but we buy autolube systems everywhere we'd need it.
Industrial maintenance in general is a great market to be in - huge, huge spends.
Re: Launch HN: GreaseBoss (YC W21) – Real-time system to manage industrial greasing
#130This reads like a parody of the quintessential SV startup.