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Comment by jeffrallen | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.

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