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Launch HN: GreaseBoss (YC W21) – Real-time system to manage industrial greasing
250 points by SteveGreaseBoss on Feb 23, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 146 comments
We are Steve, Tim and Pete, the cofounders of GreaseBoss (https://www.greaseboss.io). GreaseBoss is a hardware and software system that verifies that the greasing of industrial equipment is completed on time and according to specification.

Greasing, you say? Yup, you heard that right. Incorrect greasing is the number one cause for machinery failure on industrial sites. Industrial machinery failure costs the global economy $21B a year. Greasing is a big deal!

We know this is an unsexy part of the economy, so we won’t judge you if you have never heard of a zerk (grease point) before. Some of our favourite places you can find zerks include super yachts - 200 zerks, private planes - 80 zerks, breweries - 2000 zerks, theme parks - 1500 zerks. Other places with lots of zerks include factories, mines, utilities, farm equipment, trucks and military vehicles.

The idea for GreaseBoss came when Steve and Tim saw frequent machine breakdowns due to incorrect greasing while supporting mine sites in Outback Australia. This problem costs Australian mine sites hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity every year - disrupted production, spending on parts and labour for repairs. We built and tested our prototypes during the pandemic lockdowns on the back deck, over Zoom calls. We have now developed our MVP and have quit our jobs to chase GreaseBoss full time.

On the hardware side: we put RFID tags that fit like washers under each zerk. These are read by a head unit that is retrofittable to existing grease guns, which includes a custom RFID reader integrated into the nozzle. It also includes a flow meter and supporting electronics. Our device has 4G, Wifi and LoRa for comms, but also operates in an offline mode for customers in remote locations. Our hardware is rugged, dust proof, and water proof for some of the toughest operational environments (and operators..)

On the software side, we record each greasing in the cloud, right as the worker greases the zerk. Since most industry is still tracking this using paperwork, you can imagine how much more efficient this is. Our customers get back to production much faster.

We are building a HaaS (Hardware as a Service - is that a thing?) business model: we charge customers upfront for the hardware and then a software subscription fee. We are experimenting with per zerk, per machine and per site pricing. We haven’t found the sweet spot yet.

We have GreaseBoss installed at a large coal mine, a quarry and on excavators at the dump in Queensland, Australia. We also have a South African greasing contractor using our system.

We will be online for the rest of the day answering your questions (we are in AEST timezone). We are very excited to receive your ideas, experiences and feedback!




Applying 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, occurs.

This is a good idea. So your system verifies that the right grease gun, with correct grease, is used on the correct port?


Hi Cash, Yes, our system ensures that the correct grease is used and that the correct amount is applied at the right time.

I heard a story from a nearby power plant the other day of the incorrect grease being applied to a bearing. The two mismatched greases reacted poorly and turned to a wax inside the bearing. Needless to say, the bearing failed catastrophically very soon after. Our system not only tracks the grease type digitally, but we also have colour coding on our tags and head units to help humans easily match colours to ensure they have the right grease in the gun too.

Cheers


I have witnessed this first hand... it is not great when a component of one grease starts a polymerization reaction in another grease. In one case, the grease mixture basically became hard rubber.


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!


Oh definitely. “Kitting” (is this an industry term or just my firm?) in general is a surprisingly complex problem. It exists in the intersection of software, processes, people, and management.

That’s my take, at least.


Holy crap I love this. Great job, you guys!

A thought on pricing: per machine is probably the best. If you do per zerk, customers are going to try and do one zerk on the machine, and track it on a per machine basis, instead of per zerk (which is what you want).

The employees will then learn this, and grease that one spot. The customers won't see the value (since the data will be crappy), and might end up seeing it as a boondoggle instead of the valuable service that it obviously is.

Some other thoughts, and a reason to sell per-machine: early warning systems for parts that are about to fail. If a part is leaking grease, and using up more than it should, warn the customer about it. Could be a gasket going bad, but in any case probably needs maintenance attention.

Good luck!


I think you'll almost certainly want to have "Contact us" pricing. The cost of a zerk being poorly greased depends greatly on the value of that machine to the plant and the cost of that machine going down.


What kind of customer lock-in do you have? Is the API/data format open or closed? Can I easily export my data?

As a customer, I'd be concerned about longevity and data loss if/when you go away or pivot. Knowing that I could export my data, and re-implement my own backend using your open data standard if needed, would go a long way to easing my concerns.

Most customers won't go through the effort to build their own solution, and for those few that do you can easily out-perform with service, experience, and expertise.

You could even offer bespoke integration services...


Thanks for the feedback, I think you are raising a valid point

We have built the platform with APIs in anticipaction of integrations with SAP, Pronto, etc. We have also built in functionality to export data out to CSV files. Our market is a mix of big corporates who want the integration with SAP and never want to see out platform and small guys who run their maintenance from checklists and like the platform.

In regards to customer lock in, the system requires physical tags to be fitted to the zerks. Fitting the tags costs man-hours and they only work with our head unit. We think this protects us in the short term, longer term the capture, hosting and reporting on the data is our lock in.

Our customers are not the types to go out and build their own software - they may copy the head unit though..


Anything unique about the head unit you could patent?


We have patents on the head unit and the whole system


Tremendous. Best wishes and much success.


Have you been asked for on prem yet?


On this note, have you explored integrating your hardware/software into customer systems? I suppose customers may have existing logging applications they feed said paper forms into, and if you could feed that directly it would be useful.


The system has APIs, anticipating integration into maitenance platforms like SAP, Pronto etc. We haven't needed to do it yet, but our customers ask us every time.


Are you competing with equipment manufacturers at all? I worked with one big manufacturer briefly, and they were cramming telemetry and electronics into everything they could, so they could provide this kind of cloud-based preventative maintenance service (although i never heard anything specific about grease). Is there a chance you eventually won't be able to sell because machines already come with grease intelligence built in?


Yes, we are aware that big manufacturers are starting to roll out lots of telemetry into their equipment. i've only seen the greasing angle addressed by manufacturers on mobile equipment (bulldozers etc) The problem with these platforms is that they are designed to encourage lock in. Lets face it, most customers don't buy one type of equipment for their entire plant. With many different brand specific platforms, it may not be palatable for customers. Our strategy is to be light, retrofittable, simple and easily integrated into customer's larger management systems (like SAP)


The markets this company is targeting are many trillions of dollars. Zero sum thinking is a waste of time. Any slice of the pie is a huge business.


I’m not sure the wisdom of adding a washer under an NPT-threaded fitting at all, nor under a straight threaded fitting not originally specified to have a washer (especially in an aviation or other highly regulated application).

I wonder if you could get by in some of those applications by having the tag in a grease zerk cap instead (installed after and without disturbing the zerk torque/seal).

On my airplane, I rotate grease cap colors as a visual check that all fittings were serviced during the annual inspection. It’s a multi-day affair with more than one mechanic plus me plus interruptions, so it’s not difficult to miss some. But if the cap is blue and this year’s color is red, you find it at final walk-around.


For anybody who doesn't already know what NPT-threads are: it's a standard for tapered threads. You see it frequently on pipes, or anywhere you need the threads to seal up.

The point of it being tapered is that the fit between the male and female parts gets closer as you tighten the fitting. In domestic plumbing, you wrap the male threads with Teflon tape, and as you tighten, the tape gets squished into the very close fit and forms a seal.

The key point to understand before introducing a washer into the system is that there isn't a well-defined point where the system can be considered bottomed axially. It isn't like a nut and bolt where once the nut hits the bolt head, it isn't going any farther.

If you introduce a washer that doesn't allow the tapered thread to tighten to a sufficiently close fit, you've potentially lost your seal and might have a loose fitting. If your Zerk falls out, you risk loss of lube and/or contamination of the lube.

I'm sure they've given this some thought, but I would also be curious to hear how this works.


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


So 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 happen correctly. Are they still in your addressable market?

Good luck!


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.


great question and good logic.

Many sites are reducing headcount in maintenance due to high labour costs, greasing is one of those things that can be neglected. Our pitch is to do more maintenance with less head count, with GreaseBoss anyone can pick up the grease gun and be directed what to do, with no prior trianing.

Further down the track, we want GreaseBoss to power robotic greasing. But to get to this nirvana, you need to start with manual


I’m imagining the robotic arm picking up the grease and applying it to its hinges. What, that is exactly what you are planning to do, isn’t it? Will it replace its worn body parts too, before expiration? It is the obvious next step, isn’t it? You are right, this is a billion dollars market.


TBH, I recently finished the code for a product that did almost exactly what you are describing, but for a very specific domain and use case, so yeah, there's a market.


Hi Jeff, Also on your comment, what we've seen on a number of sites is that they do have a good maintenance team but sometimes jobs just get missed. If there is a series of equipment failures that draw the team's attention towards urgent repair work, of course the greasing is not going to get done. Those sites see the benefit of then having the system there to flag the greasing that was missed so that they can be completed once the urgent repairs have been completed - or at least ensure the critical equipment is greased.


I pursued something similar. The challenge you may face is that the act of regular inspections, maintaining the RFID tags, and paying for the service may cost more than doing a poor job of grease maintenance. The alternative is just simply doing regular rounds with a grease bucket.


Or running machines to destruction and taking the downtime costs (which the dysfunctional organisation has already built into their business model, since they cannot get their employees to grade then right).

I agree that there's a danger that this is easier to justify on Powerpoint than down in the dust and mud of real life industrial financials. (Pretty sure that gold mines do not stay open when the price of gold is too low to be able to pay for forgotten grease on conveyors.)

Source: countless posts on /r/skookum referring to idiot management that runs machines to destruction then drives maintenance teams to work overtime to stop the "unplanned" downtime.


I like your comment about this being easier to justify on a PPT than in the dirt - we are on the road every day experiencing this reality. We are making progress, customers are buying it for more than just the greasing - they have transient workforces who take care of the equipment differently and want consistantly . Some of them use greasing as an indicator "if they can't do the greasing, what else arn't they doing?" another guy got rid of 4 guys over 12 months for not completing the greasing, so he is saving on recruitment costs, there are many others..


Nice, never thought of using greasing as a proxy indicator!


How do you perform the initial rollout and configuration ? Does someone have to manually associate the RFID with the specific zerk and machine and set up a maintenance schedule? How do you handle machines where greasing is a function of hours of operation and not wall clock time ?


Great questions

For roll out, we try to upload the data into the GreaseCloud before going to site, then we have someone manually fit each tag to each zerk, they then use the head unit to read the code and map it into the GreaseCloud. Once it is in the grease cloud we can set the grease volume, grease interval, etc

For the timing, we have a function to set the operating timetable of each machine - most plants this is 24/7, however some are M-F 9-5. The intervals are calculated relative to the operating timetable of the machine. Machines can be "paused" if they are tagged out of production.


This whole thing is a brilliant idea. The Navy has a ton of people working on planned maintenance [1], and anything that could improve reliability is worth its weight in gold. I know you mentioned ships already for grease, but just thinking of how many things need maintenance and how nice it would be if you could have a system that ensured it was all done. Please attach RFID's to filters to ensure they get swapped out!

1. https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Home/Team-Ships/PEO-Ships/Suppor...


Awesome! HaaS is a thing. You just made it one.

Regarding the business model: You ever thought of a Franchise model? Perhaps train a few folks (perhaps folks who were incorrectly greasing before) who can then take contracts for the large job sites?

I have seen this practice with diamond coring machines of companies like Hilti in markets like Dubai (building contractors don't need the machine , they just need the holes they cut and they don't need it everyday) where folks but the coring machines and then charge per hole (per Zerk in your case) and Hilti provides training to them.

Regarding the segment: If incorrect greasing leads to machinery failure, then perhaps look at operations where machine failure can be mission critical. Sites like Baffin Island, where large contractors' maintenance plan is "buy 10 of each machine" If one breaks down, they just park it and put the next one into service. OR Offshore Platforms where downtime can mean several millions down the pipe. Example projects offshore in Guyana where replacements are not available onshore too.


Great feedback.

We are exploring the franchise model, one of our customers has a contract to manage the greasing for 18k zerks at a number of different sites. They want GreaseBoss to drive their manaul greasing business, they can reduce head count and reduce admin overhead.

I used to go to Papua New Guinean gold mines and the use case of not being able to get a spare part for months is very real. These are the early adoptor operations we are targeting


Modern day [public transport could use this in spaeds for morethan just greasing...

If you have maintenance RFIDs that alert to when action should be tacken BEFORE it has to be taken - you will instill confidence and reliabilaty into whatever system.

It would be wonderful if you open source access to your data regarding the frequency of maint to a vector of injuries/job loss/production downtime etc...

And provide the definitive source for how effective such a product is in whatever market.

The RFID gasket thingy you describe might well revolutionize the automotive market in general - but I would suggest focusing on getting those bitches into the giant CAT mining dumps post haste - heck, they spend $70,000 on a single tyre - so getting that readout on an engine might be bank.


Second that. HaaS is totally a thing in enterprise hardware, and I'd argue it's the one business model in hardware that sort of keeps everyone aligned!

For example, the recurring revenue gives the OEM incentives to continue supporting the platform. Meanwhile, the lower upfront cost for the hardware lowers switching cost for the customer in case there's a better solution out there.

OK, obviously there's a big gap between this theory and reality, but just thought that I'd point it out :)

Congrats on launching!


Very 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-plumbed tubing onto ball screw nuts, linear rail trucks, bushings, slides, or whatever else the machine requires. Those don't need GreaseBoss fittings, but perhaps chould be able to tie into your cloud if they've got some of your equipment and some of mine.

A lot of robotic equipment and repurposed older equipment, however, plus some new equipment with hard-to-plumb areas, has automatic greasing distance counters that pop up a warning/fault on the HMI that reads something to the effect of "Grease Warning: 20km travel on Z axis ballscrew, follow the greasing procedure and enter maintenance password to dismiss or OK to continue".

Those, I suppose, could benefit from GreaseBoss in three ways: First, you could guarantee that the procedure was actually followed (that both the easy-to-access top nut and the buried bottom nut were greased). Second, you skip the maintenance password step by detecting the grease being applied. Third, you could dismiss/reset the warning automatically if my PLC could query your API to determine when the zerks on my machine were last greased.

However, Haas is a machine builder, not a viable business model. A subscription to use the equipment is not going to fly with most of my customers. They're not stingy, CapEx is already huge and grease zerks are cheap compared to the engineering costs they're paying - you're putting in a $2.5M piece of equipment, they don't care if the optional RFID grease zerks are $0.25 or $2.50 or $250 - but OpEx and equipment lifetime are critical. The idea that their equipment stops working because someone in the front office didn't pay a third party is anathema to them. They'd rather spend $250 per zerk once than $2.50 for the tag plus a yearly fee of $5/zerk for the 10-year lifetime of the equipment.


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..


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.


Hi Leif, Haha i know what you mean in terms of the most hellish places on earth. Last month, we went 300m into an underground mine and that is not a place you want to be spending too much time.. haha

Very interesting use case and yes, the GreaseBoss system would be perfect to talk into your PLC through API's to verify that zerks had been greased.

Thanks also for the feedback on the business model (i like the comment "Haas is a machine builder, not a business model"). I agree that CAPEX expenditure for some companies is by far the easiest way to procure others are seeking OPEX as a way to manage cashflow. I think we need solid offerings for both models.

What is the name of your company? It would be great to chat further.


Very cool! I live in a mining town and the number one issue is just getting the mines to adopt new technologies. A lot of people very set in their ways. I've heard of million+ dollar projects just sitting unused because people weren't bothered to charge an iPad.

Do you manage the installs, maintenance, and training yourselves? Have you had any issues with people purchasing the system, but not using it?

I wish you the best of success! It's a very cool field to be in with so much potential.


Thanks Nathanael, Yes, tech adoption is a risk and something that we are trying very hard to address. Our strategy is to keep the tool & system as simple as possible. Our head unit has no buttons, only a screen and a charge port and is retrofitted onto existing grease guns. We want to allow operators to work as they normally would but to have the tool that augments them and makes their job easier. We know its not going to be an easy task, but simplicity in design is our strategy to overcome this.


Yes adoption risk is very real for us. We have encountered some operators who are as you describe but interestingly liked the idea for keeping other operators in check particularly in cases where there are teams of people doing the lubrication.


Never in my life did I think I would see the intersection of a zerk fitting and cloud computing.


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.


ha ha, we have had some interesting experiences explaining at pitch events and to investors.


This seems likely to have a good overlap with safety procedures. As such integration with the big bads in this space would be a nice box to tick - i think the term to google is EHSQ - the only one I know of is intelex. Might be worth looking at.

Overall, I love the rfid two-step idea - it's simple and brilliant. Good luck ! :-)


Thanks! Yes, i've been speaking to some guys in the oil and gas sector and one of them told me that greasing valves in that environment is a process safety concern as the grease assists the valve to seal and prevent gas leaks. We will definitely play the safety angle with these types of industries. Thanks for the feedback


Loved reading this! What part of your product has received the most traction/excitement from customers? The hardware or the software/reporting piece?


Our customers like the visibility the software brings to their operation. They keep inventing uses for the data we hadn't thought of - we had a customer who owns an intermittantly used shiploader request a report showing the last greasing of each zerk to be outputted 2 hours before the ship arrives in port, this is so they can prevent unforseen breakdowns while the shiploader is in operation and the costs are high

We still have a few iteration cycles on the hardware ahead of us - reducing size and weight and improving form factor.


Interesting insights, thanks for taking the time to reply! Always interested in this kind of stuff after working in the water resources field on the software side of things. We pull in data from telemetered data loggers (like Sutron - https://www.sutron.com/) and then create data driven maps and dashboards on top of it. Cool to see you guys operating both in the hardware and software space.


Thanks Tyler. Your line of work seems interesting. We are probably not there just yet but in 6 months or so, it would be interesting to see how we could extract more value out of the data we're receiving. What is the name of your company?


Used to work for LRE Water (https://lrewater.com/). Currently working for Stae (https://stae.co/) doing similar things but at a much larger scale. Freelance as well (https://www.lostcreekdesigns.co/).


Awesome Tyler! I'll keep note of your freelance page for reference later.

Cheers


Have you tried selling to the wood products manufacturing industry?

Not as much money involved but companies like Borgs have sites all over and hundreds of machines that need greasing.

Many of these machines have auto greasers, can you integrate with those to monitor if the grease is flowing?


I will check out Borgs, honestly they were not on my radar.

The autoluber question comes up all the time, initially we are targeting the zerks/grease nipples that are too low value or physically cannot be fitted with an autoluber. We are also targeting autoluber refills.

We have some specific autoluber products on our roadmap so we can have all greasing in our GreaseCloud


Interesting concept - I have heard of grease "dose" devices before, AvE on YouTube takes one apart in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydhndNX_8KI

It's effectively an unattended, disposable piston that uses an electronic timer to periodically generate gases to push the grease out. Everything is calibrated so that it dispenses approximately the right amount over the right time period. For machines that can use one of these, I wonder if there is room for integration with the GreaseBoss RFID tags and tracking system.


Yes, these auto lubricators are widespread and a competitor to our current product. That being said, these auto lubricator do have their downsides and our customers have been very open about these. One of our customers is using GreaseBoss to replace auto lubricators as it gives much better control over the greasing. Additionally, we do have a second product in development that works with auto lubricators to overcome some of the core issues that our customers are experiencing with them.


As 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 deterrent? I know the mining industry despite leaning heavily on automation in recent years still has that outback handshake mentality surrounding it.


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.


There are a few Aussies around here, but we definitely are not the majority, haha. The Aussie startup/tech space is quite tiny, especially in Queensland where I am from. One thing Australia is good at is quality over quantity. I see you guys being lumped into the same league of success as Atlassian, Envato, Canva and the handful of other startup successes.

Presumably, even though the labour for a fitter being $120/hr is quite high, the savings that companies will make in the long-run not having to repair broken machines that would have lasted a lot longer through regular greasing is the winning equation.

I'd love to connect and follow you guys on LinkedIn.


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


HaaS is definitely a thing. PMaaS, as well! (Preventative Maintenance)

I know a number of industrial robotics manufacturers have been pushing data-driven preventative maintenance initiatives. Ideally (for the manufacturer) this work is performed by the manufacturers techs during scheduled operator downtime, including the lubing of mechanical systems.

Have you all thought about presenting an alternative arrangement for the lubrication responsibilities of specialized systems, like industrial robotics, that might already have maintenance responsibilities (possibly contracts) in place?


Congrats on the launch looks like a solid and interesting product, Is there other hardware besides the head unit and RFID tags that I would need to make accommodations for? Most of the sites I visit barely have cellular reception.

Can the head unit be used without the RFID tags, for example in an environment where re-fitting a zerk can take place on the next maintenance window?


Thanks, at this stage we have no other hardware. We are piggy backing off plant wifi or 4G. We have explored getting our own network gateway so we can bypass corporate networks.

The system can work offline, record the data in the unit and then sync when it comes back into range. Our use case is working all day in the plant, then coming back to the workshop for charging and syncing data at night

The head unit records all greasing, even without a tag, but its up the user to log in and map them to the correct nipple


I love this. Good luck to the team. Unsexy opportunities are usually among the best ones to tackle.

Edit: do you know of a company called Entytle [0]? Might be an interesting partner for what you're trying to do. (I don't personally know them, and have no affiliation)

[0]: https://www.entytle.com/


Hi, we (pindora.fi) have been doing HaaS now for some months and in my short and narrow experience at least it is not easy to have hardware upfront cost and then software subscription fee for _something new_ people have net learned to pay yet.

What if you would try to have "setup fee" and then "subscription fee"? Could that work?

Same thing, named differently :-)


great idea, we are experiencing the same type of friction from our customers. We think we need to get it to something similar to cell phone contract from the 90's - $0 upfront, $X per month for 2 years


> We are building a HaaS (Hardware as a Service - is that a thing?) business model: we charge customers upfront for the hardware and then a software subscription fee.

Oh god. The rest sounds great, but this sounds like the worst of renting and owning combined.

How do your customers react to this model? Can the devices be used without the subscription?


I mean, they have to sell them the hardware. Then software needs to be run and continuously updated. I would probably prefer a subscription to a large up front charge for ongoing software maintenance, or having to gamble that a “free” cloud service stays online


Good point. I'd just worry about my device being bricked should they hypothetically go out of business (see other IoT stories). Great, I wouldn't be paying for the software updates anymore, but the device I own would be entirely useless. There's nothing wrong with offering a self-hosting version either, arguably it would be preferable.

I'm applying my personal values here, of course. In practice there will probably be contractual agreements to provide the service for some number of years.


We have a self hosted version of the system available, we have found that attitudes to data security and location are changing. Customers want to have it in house to the extent possible.


this is a good point, I mentioned that we are exploring the business model now.

One benefit of the current model is that we expect lots of improvements in the hardware over coming months. We are rolling these out to our early adopter customers as they become available at no cost.

There is room for more creativity when it comes to the model


This is the satellite TV business model or Starlink, or most LTE ISPs.


This may be due to my complete clueless-ness, but all these fittings look the same?

https://www.greaseboss.io/our-product

It looks like you're trying to list a variety of different fitting but copied the same image multiple times.


That's a simulated picture of the panel on the machine where all the grease lines come together for easy access.


Aha, thanks! Probably obvious to an actual tech :)


That's fascinating, my father works in Australian mine sites and I can't wait to tell him about this. He wouldn't be a potential customer, he'd just be fascinated as I am.

I love that this is borne of a real world need for an industry not initially related to software, identifying cross-industry problems is what a lot of founders have trouble doing because they don't have much exposure to other industries.

Applying software to other industries is what really gets me excited. Do you mind me asking what city you're currently operating from? Good work identifying the problem and building a solution, good luck and I wish you all the best.


Thanks for the kind words

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


I wonder if you put enough sensors on the gun head, if you could map roughly where each zerg was in 3D space.... so if there was a set start point, a grease run could be conducted... in case not all points needed greasing up at the same time.


Hi, awesome idea! Right now we’ve built in the ability for users to assign a preferred order to each zerk that is applied to the grease run. Obviously this isn’t practical for users with lots of zerks (some of our customers have 1000s of zerks!) but being able to automate the ordering process using sensors sounds like a good feature. I like to think of it as the google maps of grease runs. In terms of mapping zerks in 3D space- check out ‘digital twins’, this is something we are keen to explore down the track.


>On the hardware side: we put RFID tags that fit like washers under each zerk. These are read by a head unit that is retrofittable to existing grease guns, which includes a custom RFID reader integrated into the nozzle. It also includes a flow meter and supporting electronics. Our device has 4G, Wifi and LoRa for comms, but also operates in an offline mode for customers in remote locations. Our hardware is rugged, dust proof, and water proof for some of the toughest operational environments (and operators..)

Sounds expensive, grease zerk's are cheap, and easily replaceable, these sound expensive and likely just as prone to failure as a simple one.

>On the software side, we record each greasing in the cloud, right as the worker greases the zerk. Since most industry is still tracking this using paperwork, you can imagine how much more efficient this is. Our customers get back to production much faster.

This sounds like an over engineered, expensive version of a maintenance schedule. It's a management problem if they're not scheduling maintenance.

Workers are still stopping to grease machines, they're still using the same amount of grease, greasing the same spots at the same scheduled times. Tracking this by cloud adds nothing really from what I can tell.

This whole system would have driven me nuts when I was working machines doing biweekly greasing and maintenance.

It would have been just one more thing to worry about inside the machines and believe me, every little thing inside a machine that can go wrong, will go wrong at some point.

A couple of the machines had a few parts that were greased by a computer controlled auto greaser, it was always prone to trouble and needed to be adjusted frequently.

As you say yourself also, greasing maintenance is incredibly important to avoid downtime and machine damage, why should a company rely on your third party cloud for this?

What guarantee is there of its continued support and existence?

What happens if there's internet outages?

How does having a third party between me and the maintenance of my machines benefit me?


Thanks for taking to time to raise your concerns, these are all legitimate questions that have been raised by our customers during our sales process

Our your second point - the problem we are solving is human error and principal/agent problem, which can be addressed by management controls. We have seen the management controls fail when there varying skill and experience levels in the maitenance crew, when the operation has a transient workforce (say contractors at a harvest) or when the records are falsified. Falsification of records is principal agent - the person responsible for greasing doesn't wear the cost of downtime, labour and spares to fix it.

GreaseBoss can be used to eliminate all of these factors - customers who buy it may be a gold mine in PNG, or a potato farm in Victoria, a smelter in India. These types of operations have minmimal management controls compared to a modern developed world operation. As with everything, GreaseBoss has a sweet spot in the ecomony and it may not be where you have previously worked.

On your second point - we added a computer to a grease gun... that runs the risk of over complicating a simple tool, let alone an RFID on a zerk. We have worked really hard to make our system simple - we know our users are not going to tolerate a screen freeze, syncing errors etc - its not perfect now, but its on the trajectory. We have built our system with minmial impact to completing the current task, the only change is that you have to charge the unit at night. The only input interface is the RFID (no buttons) and the output on the screen. We want our users to pick it up and it just works.

With regards to the final comments, we have a version of the system that can be deployed locally - therefore no risk of losing data, bricking the device. The system works entirely offline, it only needs to sync once - provided the schedule never changes. And the third party can guide you around the plant, tell you how much grease and when its required, if you have a day off it can ensure the greasing is completed to the same standard as you would.

I hope this answwers your quesitons - thanks for making me work hard :)


Thanks for taking the time to answer, sorry for coming across bluntly, but it is a pretty big sell. I appreciate you taking the time to address those points and yours and the above commenter did clarify things.

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?


Thanks for the feedback. In answer to your comments: Each tag that is fit under the zerk is small and cheap, installed just like a washer. They cost about $2.50 USD and once fitted, should last a long time. The expensive equipment is located in the head unit, which attaches to a grease gun. So, most sites will only need a handful of these.

On the software side, the system uses the customer's existing maintenance schedule. The problem that it is solving there is that paper based work orders don't track tasks down to a per zerk basis. At a huge refinery we visited, the lube tech had one work order that they would do all week and close off on a Friday afternoon. There is no way that systems like these can verify that each machine has been correctly greased. In your situation, performing bi-weekly grease runs, the system would be setup to schedule all of your greasing on the nominated days of the grease run and would indicate the required grease volume for each zerk as you went through the rounds to make sure the correct volume is applied. If at the end of the day, you missed one zerk (lets face it, we are all humans here) the system would let you know that it was missed so you could ensure it gets greased.

We don't want to be a third party between a customer and their machines. simply a tool that supports the customer to verify that their machines are being correctly maintained.


> Workers are still stopping to grease machines, they're still using the same amount of grease, greasing the same spots at the same scheduled times. Tracking this by cloud adds nothing really from what I can tell.

Except apparently they aren't if the initial claim is to be believed (that $21B of industrial failure is caused by incorrect greasing). If you integrate tracking hardware on a per-zerk basis, you can easily tell if a worker missed a zerk, etc.


Well, for a fraction of the price, one could hire a person who's job it is solely to inspect and keep track of maintenance, it's pretty visually obvious when a zerk hasn't been recently greased.

Seems a lot cheaper than retrofitting my machines and greaseguns at my expense and paying for ongoing service for a company I have zero reason to trust will even exist in a year.


Our main compeittors are to do nothing and hire a specialist.

It turns out there is a whole dicipline of lubrication specialists called Tribologists - they have an association and chapters in many industrial cities.

Many operations have a target to reduce head count - aside from the salary cost, the logic is that people cannot get hurt if they are not on site. We have seen many cases hiring a specialist cannot be justified on both cost and safety.

As the maitenance workforce is reduced, the same level of performance is required. GreaseBoss is positioning so that anyone on site can pick up the tool, know what to do and then do the greasing. This way site can maintain the same maintenance performance, without increasing head count or putting additional people in the plant.


I understand your concerns. We are running trials with numerous companies (large and small) right now so that we can develop case studies to understand and communicate the ROI of the system.

The pricing of GreaseBoss is positioned to be less than the cost of having a full-time hire looking after the greasing alone (based on Western country pay scales).


Yes, precisely. In many industries, like mining, when a piece of equipment fails a root cause analysis is performed to identify the reason for failure. Incorrect greasing is a huge contributor to this. One of the world's largest bearing suppliers (SKF) note that over 36% of bearing failures is due to incorrect greasing "wrong lubricant, wrong quantity, wrong lubrication interval" (source link is below)

Tracking the completion of lubrication is the only way to verify that the equipment is actually being correctly maintained.

https://www.skf.com/binaries/pub12/Images/0901d1968064c148-B...


Congrats on the launch and excellent writeup, I learned something new today!


cheers, its one of those things that you would never imagine is still a problem


I'm currently trying to track down simple software to monitor our machine maintenance. Most of the products are either way to complex or far too much work to enter the data. So paper records become the best solution. Low cost, low complexity, and agile.

Your system looks amazing and solves the complexity and data entry problem. I wish it was just grease we need to track.


thanks.

We saw early on that if we were going to add a computer to grease gun, it had to be very simple and never crash or lose connection. Our operators have zero tolerance for complexity.

What are you trying to track?


We cut at a saw, then edge at an edge bander, after that we drill and mill on a CNC. The saw has blades that need changing. The edge bander has cleaning cycles that have to be run. The CNCs have drills to be changed, milling tools that need sharpening, vacuum pumps that need filters cleaned, and sacrificial beds need surfacing.

Those are all the regular tasks but each machine has maintenance tasks that each have different periods. Such as the vacuum pumps need veins changed every six months.

Oh, and general plant machinery like forklifts and vehicles all need regular servicing.

We want a system that throws up alerts when maintenance doesn't happen. So we are not replying on people to remember or check maintenance books. People leave and the organisation forgets all the irregular tasks they did.

The plant needs its own nervous system to tell us it's not well. Else we run until failure and have unexpected downtime.


That is so true about a plant needing its own nervous system.

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


Echoing the parent, your intro is very well written.

I'm surprised I read till the end, even though I had no clue about zerks, until I read your launch post.


I've used several battery powered grease guns. Some of them already have "measured output" modes. Have you looked into integration with those types of tools to automatically deliver the right amount to the serialized zerk?

Heavy industry is where things made of steel plate die hard deaths. How have you hardened your electronics? What's the price point owning the "system" when realized into a annual TCOO assuming a certain amount of tool breakage?


Hi Sean, Yes, we have a Milwaukee grease gun with the measured output. What our system has shown is that their "measurement" is not perfectly accurate all the time.

The biggest factor is the human performing the greasing remembering how much grease is required for each individual zerk and how often they require greasing. Reading the user manuals of some of this equipment shows that one machine might have 10 zerks that require 3 different volumes at 5 different greasing intervals. How can a maintenance operator be expected to remember all of that information for all equipment across the plant? Managing this data is the core value that GreaseBoss delivers to the maintenance operators.


I think we're agreeing :) I was getting at the fact that full integration would be cool because then you both wouldn't need to remember, or even pay attention to setting it.


Ah right.. I see your angle. Yes, it is something that we have looked into. This is our first product into the space and we anticipate many iterations and many more to come ;)


Stuff like this could have incredible value, but be aware that you are up against once of the most powerful forces in the universe: people that don't give a shit.

> The idea for GreaseBoss came when Steve and Tim saw frequent machine breakdowns

Were you doing the dirty work, or were you watching from the office? Those RFID washers look a whole lot different to the guy with the wrench than they do to the guy with the keyboard.


My comment sounds a little anti-blue collar, so I should clarify what I'm getting at. I grew up with roughnecks in and around oil fields. I'm looking at this through their eyes.

When they look at electronics, they see another thing about to break. These are guys that are used to dealing with industrial grade hydraulic systems and the like.

They also feel like they know what needs to be done to get the job done, and they are highly uninterested in introducing another way for the boss to more efficiently hassle them.

IMHO that means your biggest challenge is making fans out of the guys on the wrench through absolutely bulletproof reliability and convincing managers to not use it punitively.


Great comments - people that manage people that don't give a shit are our target market. But point taken.

I used to sell and commission equipment in the field, this meant visiting lots of sites and working in the service crews as a junior (getting tools, pumping grease, sweeping floors) to install and commission what was sold. I had a mix of field and office duties.

You are right in saying our RFID tags are not as rugged as they could be, we are currently making them by hand, while we wait for our injection moulding tooling to be delivered


Hi Alan, We've been working with people from both end of the spectrum (on the tools and in the office). I completely agree that the system may not have any appeal for the guys on the tools who don't give a shit. There are definitely plenty of them out there. What we have found that there are also plenty of guys on the tools that do care and do want to do a better job. They like the tool and want to do a better job.

PS> we are already working on the next iteration of the product tag to make them more hardcore.

Cheers


Brilliant concept and impressive execution. I saw you write in another comment thread "its one of those things that you would never imagine is still a problem."

This was precisely my reaction. And then on the flip side, when you see a deceptively simple solution like GreaseBoss, it seems so obvious in hindsight. Well done!

What's your tech stack? Are you looking to build out your software team?


Thanks. Yeah it can be a real eye opener when you step onto a large industrial site and once you get a look under the covers, see that the systems and processes around something so simple are in complete shambles. It appears that everyone is just too busy to take the time to fix them.. Our tech stack is being upgraded right as we speak.. The new system utilises micropython on the head units, AWS and Laravel. We currently have one great software developer (I'm sure he could answer your tech stack question a lot better haha) and yes, we are looking to build out our software team into the future.

Thanks for your support.


Very cool concept. I imagine there are countless similar avenues for automation of otherwise-paper-based maintenance management.


We should chat Steve!! Sounds like a lot of interesting potential and congrats on the launch!

- Ryan from UpKeep (www.onupkeep.com)


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


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


What a cool problem to work on - would have never have thought of it. What is the approx. hardware cost?


CUrrent state is $2500 - we have not started manufacturing on volume, we are currently hand assembled

We can get this much lower.


Very cool! I just passed this along to our preventative maintenance manager at our production facility.


Thanks Steve, We really appreciate your support


awesome thanks. we would love their feedback


This is fantastic and I'm one of those amateur "tribologists" you mention in one of your replies.

Have you looked into contracting with the US government, particularly the military? You might think of partnering with a company that's established in that space.


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


My email is in my profile if you want to discuss off HN.


yes, defense is definitely on our radar and we are looking for partners to assist us in getting into these places.


Government contracting is a whole separate animal, can discuss separately, my email is in my HN profile.


My neighbor has been working full time in a sawmill for 40 years as an oiler, as well as greasing bushing and bearings, part of his job is filling oil resivoirs. This may be another industry that could benifit from your tech offerings.


Absolutely. We've been throwing ideas around for OilBoss, AirBoss, FuelBoss and ExplosiveBoss. Obviously we're going to to focus on getting GreaseBoss right first but there are some other very exciting problems out there to solve!


Thanks Sigma, Yeah, this is not the first time that we've heard this.. Its another one thats on our product roadmap at the moment...


It's really interesting to see what IoT is becoming in reality versus the hype from 5 years go.

I guess the industrial cloud is actually a thing.

I'd love to see a teardown of one of your grease guns and how you keep the delicate components safe.


Haha yes, the industrial cloud is definitely a thing..

We faced challenges with getting such a system to be "industry ready" on the shoestring budget that we started with and hence our very first prototype that went into industry trials failed early. Our later version has taken on board all of the learnings from these first failures as well as a bit more budget. The system uses engineering plastics (like acetal and polycarbonate) as well as high quality, off the shelf industrial products. That being said we have another 2 or so product iterations planned to continue to ruggedise the system further. Our customers on these sites can be very rough on the tools.


BeltBuddy, GaugeMage, Filterly, etc etc. All sorts of growth potential lol


Congrats 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!


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


> Our device has 4G, Wifi and LoRa for comms...

How many of the sites are in range of a LoRa network?

I rarely hear of LoRa the US, although it seems like a great fit for many IoT use-cases.


nice thing about LoRa is that it's fairly easy to setup coverage for your own facilities if you need it, so existing network coverage is less important.


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


Why so mnay zerks in breweries, more than in superyachts?


pumps to flow god's nectar through the pipes.. also conveyors and screw pumps to carry raw ingredients (barley, hops etc) from storage locations into the vat.


Grease 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


This reads like a parody of the quintessential SV startup.


how? It's neither a "productivity tool for people building startups" nor a "sell customers subscriptions for stuff they don't need" nor a "Uber for toothbrushes", which I would see as the quintessential genres ;)


What are the odds something that needs greasing is called zerk and is only one hamming distance away from something else that also vastly benefits from greasing?




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