SteveGreaseBoss

Check out greaseboss.com.au, its an RFID tracking technology for zerks in industrial operations. It tracks zerk by zerk how much grease, the timing and grease type.

Crushing rock is very energy intensive, transporting rock to farms is energy intensive. Placing rock in the soil is energy intensive. Its hard to see how this passes the B/S test.

hey lostgame, reach out. I'm mech eng, YC founder, and have experience in IoT.

Thanks for the kind words

The cofounders are spread across Gold Coast, Brisbane and Sunshine Coast in Queensland

I think this is a very good idea and point. I raised the idea of GreaseBoss on the reddit aviation forum a few weeks ago and got shot down by all the questions about regulartory issues and approvals.

The tag in cap idea is solid

Yeah we saw this after we had our prototype and customer orders. We have never seen any in the field.

we have LoRa network in Australia, we have not yet tested on it. We have the capability but it keeps getting pushed down the product roadmap

We are QLD based as well. Tim is Sunny Coast, Pete is Brisbane and I'm GC. DM us on linkedin.

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.

Australia has excellent prototyping and product development facilities, I would expect to see many more products in the future

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

great to hear from a tribologist. We have the military on our plan - we just don't have an entry point yet. Do any companies for a partnership come to mind? We want to make a camo head unit

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 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..

Thanks Ryan, I'll reach out, I had you on my radar for post-YC.

Our metric for our investor deck is NUM: Nipples under Management

Zerks are called Grease Nipples in Australia ;)