What to Expect When You're Connecting
What to Expect When You're Connecting includes interviews with a wide range of industry subject matter experts who share their journey, advice, and the mistakes they've made along the way in IoT. If you're adding connectivity to your products for the first time or seeking to optimize and scale your existing connectivity operations – welcome to the conversation.
What to Expect When You're Connecting
Approaching Agriculture Inventory Monitoring by Combining IoT and AI
In this episode of What To Expect When You're Connecting, host Ryan Carlson speaks with Nathan Hoel, Co-founder and CTO of BinSentry, a company in the smart agricultural technology market. They discuss the challenges of ensuring reliable connectivity for IoT devices in rural areas, the importance of customer-centric solutions, and the hurdles BinSentry faced with different IoT connectivity technologies. Key topics include BinSentry's use of time-of-flight sensors for accurate feed inventory in silos, dealing with microfretting in SIM cards, and the impact that a flexible and reliable IoT connectivity partner has on reliability, support, and the impact on cost savings. Nathan shares insights on maintaining focus as a start-up and the significant impact of precise billing models on their business operations.
00:00 Audio Podcast- Full Episode
00:33 Challenges in Animal Feed Management
01:02 BinSentry's Technological Solutions
03:00 Customer-Centric Approach
06:23 Processing the Data of Taking Measurements
09:42 AI and Image Processing
11:45 The AI Training Process
15:44 Inventory Management and Business Impact
18:48 Staying Focused on the Mission and Avoiding Scope Creep
19:55 How saying no is the key to maintaining focus and a winning market strategy
26:29 Digging into Technical Topics for Product Development
26:51 Connectivity and Radio Selection
32:10 Reliability Lessons Learned
32:43 The Vampire Issue: Solar Panel Problems
34:07 Importance of Carrier Relationships in Rural Areas
36:28 Soracom's Proactive Problem-Solving
40:18 Temperature Challenges and Industrial SIM Cards
46:56 Billing Model Innovations with Soracom
59:09 Final Thoughts and Reflections
01:00:08 What is Soracom to You?
Welcome to What To Expect When You're Connecting a podcast for IoT professionals, and the IoT Curious, who find themselves responsible for growing, executing, or educating others about the challenges with connecting products and services to the internet. You'll learn from industry experts who understand those challenges deeply and what they've done to overcome that. Now for your host, Ryan Carlson.
Ryan Carlson:Today on what to expect when you're connecting. We're here with a co-founder and CTO of a company called BinSentry. His name is Nathan Hoel and BinSentry is in the smart Ag tech market and as someone who has had family members who have cattle and pigs the last thing you want is to run out of feed over a long weekend or a holiday weekend. And that means workers get to climb up on these big tall ladders, open up a top, look down in and see if there's actually feed.'cause that's using the mark one eyeball to determine. Do I have feed or not? But in this particular case, technology specifically connectivity, is allowing a company called BinSentry to do something cool. So Nathan thinks for joining us and tell us who is it that you're serving and what is it you're doing that's so cool for people that are managing these bins of ingredients.
Nathan Hoel:Thanks, Ryan. Yeah, the people we serve are, it's across the board. Our business specifically targets mills, the ones that make the feed for animals, but we certainly are helping people that live on the farms and work on them as well. Like you had mentioned, I know a lot of people that have said, oh, I grew up on a farm and climbing the bin to see what was inside of it was my job as a kid that my dad made me do is always the job no one wanted to do. It was a chore that you had to go and climb and do every day. And so we're definitely helping those people out as well, but they aren't really our customer per se. Our customer is the mills because they have the greatest amount of overhead in delivering, feed to these farms. It's for efficiency reasons, either, whether it's trying to get the truck full, trying to drive less distance, for their entire fleet, getting things there and scheduling the mill on time. And we also sell to what is called vertical integrators. So the people who actually own the animals themselves and sell them and feeding the animals more consistently is actually a huge deal for their ROI, they want to make sure that, they grow as much as possible based on that amount of feed that they give them and it's great for the animal that the same thing that makes them more productive is also keeping them in, better environment as well not starving and running outta feed in these situations. But yeah, so the customer is the mill and we are also trying to help save people's lives from climbing up these bins as well. So it feels good to actually have a good cause and a good, thing that comes out of this as well.
Ryan Carlson:One of the things I thought was really cool is how customer centric of a company you guys are. Again, doing some of this research, I was able to find that, you're going around and holding forums with actual feed mill managers and people who are in the job putting'em up on stage and asking'em, what's hard about your job? I've even saw a number of. your customers who you got on camera at a conference and just said, Hey, what is it that we're doing for you? So it's really encouraging to see companies that are building these smart products to actually solve smart problems. And, to quote a couple of these feed mill operators, someone was saying. It's the accuracy of the data that's coming in and the time that's going to be saved by no longer sending people out twice a day to check the bins. That saves them time. And another individual said, they're most excited about the on demand inventory that they can trust to be accurate. And they could, and then they said, that could be the process of changing our mill moving forward is just knowing that real time data is available, so what is it that you are doing to the silos? One, like what kinds of sensors are you putting in? Are these like, I know that's really dusty in there, so you know, it's probably not lasers. Are you using ultrasonics? Is it radar, sonar, cameras? What are you doing to do this, to generate the sensing data?
Nathan Hoel:Yeah, we actually have two products and our first product is on feed bins and they're less dusty, less enclosed on at barns, at farms. If you're driving down the countryside, you'd often see a really long barn, and you'd see two of these, bins with a hopper at the bottom where there's like a funnel. And so a lot of our devices are on those out in the countryside. That's predominantly where most of our stuff is, but, the ones on silos. That you're talking about some of the feedback you saw from the conference that we were most recently hosting. Those ones are a new product that we recently came up with called Pros Sense HD. And in there it actually has to be explosion proof. It's called in an Explosive Dust environment. There's actually a class two, division one, rating and a bunch of other certifications we need to get on these devices and. Definitely safety is a major concern in there, and so we have had to make sure it could contain a spark if it were to create one at all. We are not using lasers specifically. It is something called time of flight technology. That's just a classification. You could actually have radio waves, you could use lights, you could use various different things. But we're using near infrared light essentially to, shoot out of the illuminators. It's just LEDs essentially that, sends out this NIR or near infrared light into the bin bounces off of things, and we indirectly measure how long that took for it to come back to us, and we get a 3D rendering of how much feed is inside of those bins, whether it's the feed bins on those customer barns, or whether it's silos at these sites. The difference between those products just being the safety concern at the silo, the mill, and the ability to see much further and much larger ones inside of silos.
Ryan Carlson:So you've got the time of flight technology for larger bins. And so this sensing equipment, this is a two part question. How much processing is done at the edge since, time of flight and all this stuff? And two, what does this communicate to centrally? What is it that goes out over secure cellular and transmits the data. What are these moving parts look like?
Nathan Hoel:That's a good question. We try to actually do as little processing as possible on the edge, and I know edge computing is quite popular and people try and do that quite a bit, but. For us, we are trying to send back as much raw data as we can because you can always make improvements to that if you have all of the original information. I think as a person who's in videography and photography and stuff, you always wanna take your images in raw because then you can make a lot of edits afterwards. So it's the same thing for us. We are applying, AI to the raw data that we get back from this time of flight sensor, depending on which one it is, we use time of flight in both. We have up to 76,000 points we're measuring inside of the silos and about 9,600 of them inside of the feed bins. The feed bin ones alone, we take 9,600 points of data and we measure to every single one of them, and we do that about 50 times in about five seconds. Then we stitch all of that together, as well as we can, and we send that back. We take about a half million total measurements when you add up everything just to get a single volume, inside of a bin. I calculated it one time, couple years ago when we had substantially less devices in the field, and I think we do something like. 15 trillion measurements or something like that every single year, at this rate. And yeah, and that relates to sending that amount of data back is actually quite relevant to our relationship with Soracom as well, because at first, we're sending back just a single reading. We used to just use lidar that sent back, it was 223 centimeters. And now we send back these images with both amplitude, and that's like a photo and then all of the distance data as well. So those two versions of the photograph, over as many photos as we can, back to us so that we can restitch this back together using AI and pick out all of the noise. Do as much post processing as we can there.
Ryan Carlson:Sounds a lot like the astrophotography work I do. Using some of the AI tools for image stacking, for Noise, and that's a piece of dust and that's not actually a star. It's your, it's interesting to see, I. so many different ways of pulling in information, whether it's light on a camera sensor, or taking this time of flight data that's telemetry of some kind, and then using AI to apply and look for the patterns. Pull out the noise, cut off the extremes, and give you. An answer, right? That, that would have previously required some really expensive hardware or a lot more sensing capabilities on premise, right?
Nathan Hoel:The AI we use. Is actually really, it's not even for the noise reduction and stuff like that. We actually tend to currently rely on pretty, classical methods of removing noise from our images. The AI we use actually does something that replaces what would be otherwise impossible for us to do, or we'd have to have a human look at every single image, which again, is pretty impossible for us to do at the quantities and scale that we're at. And that is to identify which parts of the image is actually the feed that we're trying to measure, and which parts are the bin. And this sounds really trivial, but it, in practice, it's actually ends up being quite difficult. In these environments where everything's dusty, everything's somewhat reflective. There could be feed dust on things. So the, it looks like feed, and we remove all of this, extraneous information from that end. Even now, I help train that AI and I think it's actually better than I am at actually removing the extraneous pieces of information that's, that are in those bins. I, I liken it to, ultrasound technicians. If you've had a child or ever seen the ultrasound images and they. Show you that photograph of the baby, and they're like, look here. It's a wonderful baby boy. And you're like, I'll take your word for it, because it just looks like an alien to me. And it, I'm gonna get in huge trouble for saying that my babies look like aliens. But, it. To me, as someone who looks at those images, I can look at them now and say, I know exactly what this piece is and stuff. It takes a lot of training and time to see that and being able to train an AI to go and do that for you has been incredibly useful. Again, our business relies on being able to have done this at this point.
Ryan Carlson:I know Mayo Clinic has for been on the forefront on a lot of radiology work as well. Looking at x-rays, looking at MRIs, and again, it's either a trained eye or Oh a trained ai, I did not mean to go down that route. I was actually gonna ask you about the training process. So how much of that training data or the algorithm is it that BinSentry has owned or created or did you use existing models that were already out there for looking at different types of materials?
Nathan Hoel:Pretty much everyone starts with an existing model. When they start into ai, they, you have to learn what ways to adapt the architecture that's best for you. Anyone who knows things about ai, do we want fully connected layers? Do we want to have. How many layers do we want to have in our model? Things like that. And so we started with one that was good at doing segmentation and image recognition and worked our way from there. We've learned a lot over the years and we're substantially better now than we were at the beginning. And we've done other AI projects now for the training. We definitely do all the training ourselves, the ground truthing, of the images. We are the only company in the world that has this many photos of the insides of bins to be able to actually achieve this technology right now, there's no one that has anywhere close to the scale of number of devices out there. It's really interesting. Although very niche to be able to say, I've seen the insides of over 40,000 different bins and images and looked at them with my own eyes. I don't know if anyone else in the world has ever done that. It's a weird accomplishment to have, but, we have that data and that was really necessary to be able to ground truth. These, we've done tens of thousands of training images of which. Even as the CTO, I've done a ton of them, in there, and I actually think it was incredibly useful to do. It's, painstaking and slow, but it gives you a lot of time to actually ponder and think about the problem and the ways to improve it if you, as you're looking at the data itself. But yeah, it's a lot of data pour through, but it's very good to.
Ryan Carlson:I think that's the interesting thing about your particular business though, is that given that you now have your own trained up model, you've got your own ai. Identification program, based off all this data, it creates a very unique competitive advantage that until someone else can scan 40,000 plus bins your training model, I. It's starting from square, you know, which is about as far as that basic model you can get that's gonna have soil, sand, grain, rock, it's gonna be trying to dial it in to get to the ingredients or the materials that are gonna be in the bins that you, you're particularly monitoring, I'd imagine. That much like the, the, companies that are building products on top of something like GPT, you, they're able to refine the, how the prompts and how the modeling is done. So if you've got a customer is at some point, are you asking them, is this flour, is it grain? Is it hops, is it like, then in the software say this is what they say the ingredient is, and then. The algorithm or the AI model is tighter or more specific.
Nathan Hoel:Yeah, we mostly use it for identifying which parts are, like I said. The feed or grain inside of it. In which parts? Our actual infrastructure, the body of the bin or the container that's in. We've thought about identifying material before. Most of, like I said, our original product is feed bins, and so these are called fleet feeds and usually, they've been milled, so they've mixed a whole bunch of stuff together, and it's a proprietary recipe that they have. And identifying the contents of it wouldn't even be possible for someone without, specific, really good instruments that can actually tell you what these individual grains and stuff like that all are in here and inside of the silos. They actually keep really good track of this themselves. The main problem that a lot of them deal with is understanding inventory and being able to track that, because if anyone's worked inside of a company before where you had inventory of any kind. It would be insanity to suggest to like an Amazon warehouse. Oh, you have, a$500 million worth of, equipment and goods and materials inside of this building. Don't worry, you don't need to count it. Just trust your records for perpetuity from here till whenever it's all gone. That's insane. No auditor would accept that. No business owner, no one running a business would ever run that way, but that's what a lot of these people felt like they had to do for their inventories that were offsite at all of these farms because they were remote, they relied on people that were at those sites just to tell them whether it was full or not, and give them a really rough estimate of how much inventory is there. And so that problem is substantially more important than a lot of the others. There's other problems in there for sure, but we. Definitely ask yourself the typical question. A business like an entrepreneur usually should ask themself, which is, who feels the biggest pain and what is it? And that's what we've targeted here is this particular thing. And just doing inventory alone has opened up so many doors. It's super interesting how many different facets of their business actually rely on that, whether it's the animal health and treatment. It's. Just stopping people from climbing ladders and keeping them safe, whether trucks went to the right location, sending trucks efficiently, sending trucks full, scheduling out the mill itself so they can mill, similar things that in an in, in a row so that they're much more efficient inside the mill. Just ordering ahead of time so that they don't have to be caught out with a material and have to pay excess charges for getting rushed deliveries of new materials. There's just so many different things that knowing the inventory alone will help them with, let alone all the financials and boring stuff that they have to do as well. That they legally are required to report on being accurate rather than just saying, I. I think we have a hundred million worth of, material inside of all these disparate bins. They can actually tell them what there is, so they're run, be able to run their business a lot better. And so knowing what's in those particular bins, that's something that they were actually very good at doing. So it's a long-winded answer to answer your question about that, but. Going off and talking about why they care about this one problem so much. And there's a lot of other questions people ask us. Do we check for grain spoilage? Do we check. For, temperature and humidity and a bunch of other things. And now that we're moving to silos, they care a little bit more about that. But within the feed bins, they actually cycle the feed so quickly that's not really a concern they wouldn't mind knowing. But the one, number one concern is accurately and in real time. How much do they have inside of those bins?
Ryan Carlson:So I'd like to point out to all of our friends out there that are building their own, like a new connected product or they're looking to take a product and make it connected. What you've described is not unique, it's just a different industry, but the, just picking one thing, inventory level. At any given time across, disparate containers, could apply to carwash, chemical and soaps. oil or propane or any number of other things. You can take a connected product and just solve one problem really well. That's all you need to do, right? It's, it'd be easy to delay going to market, say, we need to add temperature, we need to add humidity, we need to add all of these different. Sensing types. Before we get into the story of how you built this,'cause I'm very interested to hear about radio selection and any sort of challenges or engineering challenges you ran into in developing this product.'cause those are all fun stories for us and our listeners. I would like to just hear, you know, scope creep. What has it been like to. Saying no to good ideas, like how do you stay on mission with your product?
Nathan Hoel:That's a really key question for anyone who's starting a company. Anyone who's already running a company, actually, I would say there's always that temptation. Everyone is coming to you. Especially the better your ideas, the more other people are going to see. Oh, that makes a lot of sense. You should be able to do it in here and there these other places, even things that were really closely related for us, we work in agricultural scenarios, closely related to the mill, but we had someone who owned, different shipping ports come to us and say they use the same bulk containers to put plastic or other materials, and they want us to monitor that. They even dangled like a contract in front of us. And it is extremely difficult as a young startup to say no to those scenarios. But we realized the market opportunity in the one that we started with was large. And if we keep spreading ourself thin, we're gonna do all of them very poorly. And I think we realized how much extra effort it was to actually answer all of the problems for a customer in our particular area, in agriculture for the mills, it took us a lot of extra software and work to understand their problem and to actually make it solve those problems specifically. It's not just an off the shelf sensor that you put on these bins and then you give them a distance. There's a professor and he has a quote. People don't want a quarter inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole. And that is very true for our business. And I'd say that it's been true recursively over and over again because. It's not just a quarter inch hole that they want. What they really want is a shelf in their kitchen, and it's not really a shelf. What they want is a place to put their toaster, and we've gone all the way up this thing to the point where it's really what it is, that they're just hungry. Like they, they want some food and they need a place, they want some toast and they place to put their toaster and you're trying to sell them a drill. You're so far from their need and we've had to learn this whole process and. That's all on one narrow market, one narrow thing that we're trying to solve, and I think it's really naive and ignorant to suggest, oh, if I just went to another market, I would do substantially better. I think what you'll find is just the entire same set of rabbit holes, just a different set to go down and that it's also going to be hard over there. A lot of people have the same thing. They think If I can't sell in North America, maybe I can sell abroad and. The thing that would remind people of is, if you live in North America, this is your culture and your language, and if you can't sell here, why are you going to be able to sell in a culture you don't understand and a language you don't speak? And we constantly had people coming from outside of North America to us saying, oh, but we'll buy it now. We'll buy it now. And it might have been a small injection for our company at the time, but is a substantial distraction from the main target that we had. Now we are able, what we talk about internally is we've won the right to move into those other areas. You have to prove you can do that first market, that first use case, and then the ongoing thing that you have to ask yourself is what one other thing do you want to do? Because once you've won that right in, we've done really great North America in this one industry, we get to pick one more thing. Now we're still not big enough to tackle 10 different things in five different, countries and regions or continents. I still think that focus is incredibly important all the way along the way.
Ryan Carlson:It before you scale it, is, darn it, there's too many great products that, were tempted by that check. Oh, but if you could just add these three features for me, give you a contract. And I've been at companies where they took the money, they took the contract, and rather than honing that core experience, you've got 40 to 60% of engineering resources supporting one customer, and then 80% of support tickets are going to that side hustle. That was good money up front,
Nathan Hoel:Yep.
Ryan Carlson:Forced you into a position where you no longer had the focus really be successful and. Nail it, then scale it. And I hate bringing up this like trite little phrase, but Dang, it's just so true. So hats off to you and your entire team for really just staying focused on solving one problem well, and then earning the right find that next tertiary thing that you fix.
Nathan Hoel:And I appreciate the congratulations and the, the applause for that. But I should also mention, and I think this is important for everyone to understand, is we messed up actually along the way too. We just didn't languish in that for very long and we shut it down. We, there was a one point where we also started taking some of those and doing, we're like, we'll just do pilots in those countries. We'll try, the UK and Switzerland and Thailand and a couple of other places, like at one point and. We were, we justified to ourself, even with the focus mentality that we're just trying them, we're just scoping it out before we go. And then months later, when we are honest with ourselves, the amount of distraction it was giving us, we had to either forget about it, shut those things down, or. Focus on it. We couldn't leave it in the middle. It was just, I think it's just leaving a bad taste with people that we might be better future customers by just saying no now and moving on. So it's not even, it's okay if you don't do it perfectly. You just have to constantly be reevaluating though, if it truly is right. Go back and say, you know what? We are, we were wrong. It really wasn't time. This is us actually, taking our focus away. What from, what we should be doing.
Ryan Carlson:So that is an opinion that is informed, not because you're stubborn, but it's an opinion that's informed because you touched the stove and you realized it was warm enough where maybe we shouldn't go down that way. So I actually appreciate your worldview on bringing products to market even more, because it's backed by some experience. So let's talk about other experiences. I'd love to hear about your connectivity journey. So you got things figured out, or you're working on your blend of sensing. Yeah. as we all know, connected products, the best connected products that can't connect or can't stay connected fall flat on that end customer experience. So let's talk about, radio selection. This is something that a lot of our listeners talk about. It's which, what do I go with? There's so many different choices. I'd love to hear your journey with that and, pros and cons. What did you learn?
Nathan Hoel:There was quite a bit to learn in this area. I wish there hadn't been so much it. Brings me back to some of my oldest nightmares in this job that I've had so far. some of our employees will remember entire portions of their time here being just trying to solve something to do with connectivity, at different points. The radio selection was interesting. We didn't do it perfectly right off the bat, but we got fortunate in choosing the right radio pretty early on. It was interesting how this came about. Now that I think back to it, it's crazy to me that we actually did it this way, but we made a prototype that we tested with various interested customers. And we were using LoRaWAN at the time, which is a great radio and technology, but it really depends on scale and location. If, for instance, you were in Europe where lo Wan is, there's a little bit more, placement of that out there, or NB-IoT is far more common out there as well, then you need to know where you're going, and specifically what type of radio you're going to use. We founded the company at a time when a lot of these technologies were just starting to be deployed and turned on, Within two months of signing our very first contract, a large contract with our first customer, we became aware of something known as LTEM. So people are usually familiar with LTE. A lot of our phones use LTE 4G, 5G. And, LTM or LTE Cat M1, is a lower bandwidth, longer range version of LTE. But it, the thing about it is it works off of the same cell towers. That all of the cell, phones work off of. So the networks don't need to be deployed. They're already out there. And when we became aware of this, it wasn't even being advertised. We got introduced to someone at a carrier and they said, we're turning this on and we're not gonna even talk about it for the next two years. This was back in 2019, in Canada specifically. And so we made the decision at that time to have our contract electronics engineer, not even a full-time engineer. We're working out of a garage to, change our prototype at the last second, right as we were signing this massive deal with a customer that just said we were going to deploy a thousand devices of which. We have never done more than five at a time, for them. And we are changing the fundamental communication technology. one of the driving reasons for us is that in North America, lo Wan wasn't widely, deployed yet, and we were working with a partner that was going to deploy while we deployed in these different areas. something to understand about our company is that we actually do all the installation and service. We own the devices, and we give data as a service essentially. So it's not just ship it off to someone and they self-install and turn it on. We actually drive to every single one of these locations, do the installation. We monitor them and come back and service them. The logistics of where they go and when we can put them there, is actually very close to the way our company works. So we abandoned this idea of using LoRaWAN at the time went for this radio we had never tried before. And I can't say that we had no issues, but that's the first thing that I'll just mention is like choosing the radio was, I'd say we got a little bit lucky. Some things about startups is you have to be, I think arrogant, conceited, ignorant, and just think you can do things and that the problem is far smaller than it really is. Otherwise you would never try. And sometimes when I look back and if I was like, if I knew how hard parts of it was going to be beforehand, I might never have started. And so thank goodness I was, one of those things. I think ignorant maybe was the largest one, but also very. Tenacious and dedicated to solving the problem afterwards, being stubborn, I guess that we would make this possible and so that's why we ended up with LTE-M ones. And, they've actually, overall as a technology been very good for us in North America. It's not as widespread in South America and other countries necessarily, but it is getting, is becoming more popular in many different areas.
Ryan Carlson:It's pretty cool. It sounds a whole lot like, having kids starting a family startup, right?
Nathan Hoel:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson:if someone told me that it was gonna be the, like this, younger self might've questioned it, but, you do it because you have to. You're already committed. You're in that far, they're right there. And, so let's talk about, a previous conversation that we had in which you were talking about. Running into reliability issues. I think this is something that every single customer runs into, whether they have, they're not using something like LTE-M and they're reliant on proximity to towers or.
Nathan Hoel:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson:Sometimes it's just where your stuff is located, like the environment or how you're mounting the equipment So I'd love to hear about, share your story about the reliability lessons that you learned.
Nathan Hoel:Yeah, I have at least three, that I think are extremely pertinent. I'll try and keep them succinct here. One of the first ones. Was actually pretty interesting and you mentioned em, so it reminds me of that, and this is something that people would probably be interested out there that are trying to make these products, but, when someone checks your PCB design and suggests that you have more layers, because em might be a problem, you should listen to them. and when you're out in the wild, we were like, these things are in the middle of nowhere. Why would that be a problem? But our own device, it's. It has a solar panel on it and it charges, and the solar charging itself.
Ryan Carlson:Yep.
Nathan Hoel:causing issues on the board so that whenever we were charging the cellular connection would actually go away and we couldn't connect. And what this looked like to us was that it would go out during the day and come back during, the night. And so we coined it before we knew what it was. We coined it the vampire issue. So we just figured that, like vampires don't like the daylight and stuff. And so we named all of the issues that we had in, in our devices. And the vampire one was this issue where we, the solar panel ended up being the reason. And so when we were taking readings, we would just turn off the solar panel just for that short period of time and then turn it back on. We had to add a little, little miniature add-on to our devices to be able to do that. And we call that the garlic board, to get rid of the vampire issue. I'm not the one who did the naming. The one guy at our company was extremely good at naming things, so he named that. And we, it's so funny in our inventory log for ERP, like it just says you have 3000 garlic boards. And I'm just like, it's so funny. This is the actual name that we log this by, like internally, but so the, yeah, the, interference is definitely something. Another element is, and this gets closer to Soracom and how good MVNOs like Soracom can help. We've actually worked with probably more than a dozen, different MVNOs and directly with MNOs themselves and carriers. Tried many different sim cards and different relationships with these companies. And one of the issues that we came across, was that having access to as many different carriers in rural areas was extremely important, within a city, maybe a single carrier would work. I can't say because we don't work in inside of them. I just suspect, and it sounds, seems like you're suggesting it might not be, but what I do know for sure is in rural areas, you, no matter what they say, their coverage is. I think that we know better than the individual carrier does exactly where you're able to connect to in these farm areas than they do. They color a giant map and say, we have this area and we don't have this. And I think the way I interpret that is, there might be a slim chance that they have it in this area. And so you want as much overlap as possible. And why I'm saying Soracom helps with this is you need to have an MVNO who has good relationships and contracts and agreements with as many carriers as possible. And there's a lot of MVNOs who will talk about having those relationships and they'll advertise a ton of actual carriers. In fact, you'll find hundreds of carriers on a lot of the MVNOs. But my experience through. Losing a lot of money with the business has been that those agreements can be shaky and if you need connectivity to Verizon or you need connectivity to, bell in Canada, whatever it might be, and they lose one of those carriers without notice. We are in a really bad scenario at that point because we have devices all over the countryside and we don't know how many thousands of them are about to go out when that happens. And so we have to drive to every single one of these places and replace that with a different SIM card. And this process of going through this the hard way because it's really difficult to tell that this is going to happen ahead of time. Led us to Soracom and really the way I judge my relationships with MVNOs is how they deal with a problem when it comes up. Everyone's going to tell you everything's gonna be peachy, keen, and perfect when you first start talking to them. It's when you really run into, when the rubber meets the road, when you get down and you have to work on a problem and soracom isn't immune to, a carrier changing their mind on their agreements entirely. But some of the things that we've seen is that Soracom tells us far ahead of time, whereas others left it till three days before on us. And that's a true story, and that cost us a lot of money and being able to prepare for these things months in advance. And even then at the end of the day, a lot of those, agreements were fixed. And we continue to have those. And with the eSIM capability that, Soracom has, they're able to, move over to a different, sim card profile on, that device for us so that we can regain some carriers that might have come off of a different, profile or a different plan that we had. So there's a lot of flexibility there and having those carriers available, was something. We tried to solve with just different antennas, different location on the device, trying to boost the strength of the of the equipment, and sometimes you can't go far enough range. The cell towers, that you're connecting to are just too far away and you just need those other carriers. So that's my second story is, having those carriers and having an MVNO that has solid agreements and gives you a heads up when things are changing, it has been very important to us. And one of the things that, will make it really difficult for us to, change away from Soracom at any time in the future.
Ryan Carlson:I think What's interesting there too is that in my experience, the, the changing landscapes or the ability to add additional coverage, if you're selling into a new region, even if it's in country, sometimes there might be changes to new carriers, new agreements, but. There's so many different MVNOs, or even MNOs, but primarily MVNOs, where you've got that menu of carriers you can choose from, but it's still signing up for essentially just the reselling bandwidth on a relabeled sim or in some cases, you're having to, you have to be able to communicate to the sim to say, I need you to now go from AT&T, and now I want you to be able to connect to Verizon or T-Mobile. But what is it that you can't do? In the event of a carrier outage, switch to the other carrier because it can't connect. And that's the one thing I think that is, that attracted me before I even came to Soracom, was that idea of that multi profile SIM that at the same time has access to multiple carriers. So there's an outage, I don't even say if, because there's always an outage. Like up in Canada when Rogers had their big outage and a half ago, two years ago, it, none of our customers were really affected. It just, devices could transition. As long as there was that overlap that you're talking about, it would just pick up a signal. I. From the next best signal. And being able to have no fail situations in IOT has been so important and that's why with oil, gas, energy, safety, there's a lot of these different industries and ag is also one of those, when you're reliant on knowing. Inventory of something to make big decisions, or you have to send someone out to go look in a tank. So absolutely, I hear you there. So you've got the ability to switch carriers, the, having good agreements in place, radio coverage. else do you got? You said there was
Nathan Hoel:So the last, thing that I wish we had known before we started, was a physical issue that we had, and I. We discovered this before we with Soracom, but Soracom was actually a great help when we had switched to switched you guys, in maintaining this thing that we had learned. But just for the other companies out there that are looking at connectivity was, temperature changes, the environment that you're in. We are in a fairly wide ranging temperature, scenario. Where, we go through winters up in Northern Canada that could get below negative 30 Celsius. I'm not gonna attempt to translate that to Fahrenheit for the American
Ryan Carlson:negative 30.
Nathan Hoel:40. Actually negative 40 is exactly the same, but, so we get down to there too, but we don't operate around there. But we can be at negative 30 in an operational standpoint. Or even just during the summer where it gets cool at nighttime, it could go down to 10 degrees Celsius and it could get as warm as, 65, 75 degrees Celsius, which is extremely hot. It's like 140, Fahrenheit. I think I do know that one. And it's, and this is because it's sitting on top of a metal roof baking in the sun with a solar panel on it, and it just absorbs all that heat. This is besides the rain and the dust and all these other things that it has to deal with as well, and that temperature variation within 12 hours, you have a sim card. If you're using a physical sim card that has plastic and metal combined together, and so they expand and contract at different rates, and it causes them to flex and to bend. In this scenario, that wouldn't be so bad because the, the, sim card holder has little prongs that touch the sim card and push up into it, except that it's moving back and forth and flexing and causing those tiny little, connectors to scrape away the metal on the sim card, and it creates basically microscopic scratches. And little tiny microscopic filaments of metal are building up around that. And that will oxidize. And it's called micro fretting. It's a known phenomena, one that we didn't know about, but it, and that will oxidize and then basically create this barrier in which the connectivity does not work anymore to the SIM card. And so we'd have devices as they're growing and shrinking slowly turn off, go back on, turn off, back on, and then go away and never come back. And we started building up a large inventory of these devices back at the building. And I remember this distinctly because it was over the pandemic. I didn't have a lot of hardware engineers. I'm not a hardware engineer by trade, but, or by training, more on the software side. But I had learned a couple of things and I was going through diagnosing these as best as I could, and we could not. Peg what the problem was until, we wanted it to be a software issue, because it's a lot easier to solve. And we tried a number of different things and it just dawned on me at one point, I'm not sure why I thought about it, but we pushed down on the SIM card and it started working immediately in the test, situation. And I let go of the SIM card and it stopped working and I pushed down on the SIM card and it started working and I was like, no. No, it's physical and the reason I, as I was saying that we have our devices all over the countryside and this is a physical issue that we have to swap out these sim cards. Honestly, it was better to know at this point, and, we had a thou, a couple thousand devices at that point, which seemed so many to us, it took years to install them at the rate that we were going at that point. But it is still, I was like, one day this will be nothing. At least we know now what the issue is, but we still needed a way to, to get around that. And the way we did that was we needed to buy industrial SIM cards. And what that means is there has to be a certain thickness of gold plating on them. And when we had switched this, we'd found one that worked and we would switch to Soracom. You guys didn't have one available, but what I really appreciated was. You guys worked with us to find a sim card and we, you sent us many different samples that you guys could purchase from, and we sent them into the lab that did like an x-ray microscopic, image of these things to find out exactly how much gold plating is on them. And after, five, six different, vendors, we found one that had quite a bit. Of gold plating and it was much stronger and enabled to stand up to the durability test that we needed. And you guys made that available for us quite quickly and that was awesome that you guys worked with us to do that and basically bring forward a new product that you didn't have. And the other thing I would mention to anyone out there is you also have to put silicon gel on top of these sim cards as well. It thermally separates that as well from the environment. Up to something like 200 degrees Celsius. So those two things combined, we know that works in these environments and we haven't, done that again. And Soracom has a sim card that is in our mind, suitable for these, really terrible environments that we work in.
Ryan Carlson:I'll tell you what, that was the first time I'd ever heard the name bin sent was over the course, and even Jason has heard the name, was, we've got, three times a week like these all staff just quick sync meetings. It's just Hey, is there any blockers? Here's things going up. And BinSentry plus industrial sim card, like there was probably a dozen people around the globe that are, touch all different aspects of supply chain resourcing, sim stuff. It was awesome. Like they, shout out to Brian, one of our guys on our rep team who just led the charge and, found the problem. And what was really cool, we appreciated. Was getting that lab results at the end, like you guys did not just hold them up to a ruler or, run any tests. You, you legit had a whole third party group, do the whole shootout. And so it was really cool to see that, all of that hard work. We ended up with an industrial sim that far exceeds the thresholds of. So many other options on the market. And and between that and like understanding the need for thermal isolating gels and it allows our team to be able to re make recommendations of okay, let's hear more about the environment. You're gonna be deploying your device. We're more than just a cellular carrier, all our solutions architects just love walking journey with our customers. Just like BinSentry, we all get to learn and pass some of this information, pay it forward. so let's talk about the, something that we discussed a little bit earlier on, which was the billing model of IOT. I think everyone that is putting something out in the market, this is really, really important. Unless you are telling your customer, Hey, customer, you are in charge of picking your connectivity, which we already know. People don't wanna buy a drill, they want a hole. And in this particular case, they just want their thing to work. And
Nathan Hoel:Yes.
Ryan Carlson:You're bringing the connectivity, but how you pay for it and how you get charged are some of the things that everyone should be aware of. So what was the journey that, you guys have had over at Ben Sentry?
Nathan Hoel:Yeah. Coupled with this, this issue that we had talked about where, the MVNO we were working with lost agreements didn't give us very much time to think about it or react to it. There was another thing there that we were just ignoring for a long time. It wasn't at the forefront and, but it started becoming a bigger and bigger issue as we were scaling was that typically once you turned on a, a sim card, you could not turn it off again. They said this is normal in fact, when we found out about Soracom and the billing model that they offer, which I'll describe in a moment why it's so good, but when we described this to other MVNOs we were using at the time, they literally didn't believe us. They thought that it was so non-standard and I was fine with that response. I, I told'em about it and they didn't want to work to help us solve this problem in the way that you guys had. Especially in the industry we're in. We're in an industrial IOT device. Consumer grade IOT devices where again, if they're in charge of their own connectivity, or once you sell it to them, it's gonna turn on at that point, and then you're going to leave it on. It's a lot different if they're managing that. But for us, we're managing all these connections and we have an assembly line, and we do have to test all these devices on that assembly line, and then we package them back up. We put them in storage or we ship them off to an installer or a technician, field technician, and they could sit there for months. And we were just leaving all of those devices on and connected using no data. We weren't actually consuming any bandwidth or any of the service that we were paying for. And we thought that it was fair to request that we don't pay for that period of time, and we couldn't figure out a way to do that until someone and. It was more than one person actually, I had come across a Soracom sales rep at a pitch competition that we won one time, and I am ashamed to say that it was like two years before we went over to Soracom and I didn't listen to the pitch. I know it's really hard to get through to us sometimes. And, but finally, they planted that seed and someone else, another, another colleague at a different hardware company had mentioned, Hey, you should check out Soracom. They actually do their billing different, and go and talk to you guys and realized that not only can we turn off the sim cards when we're not using them, we also pay daily. For whichever days we're using. And within reason, we can't just turn'em on and off like a light switch every single day, but for us, it still matched the reality of what it's like to run an iot company where we build devices and turn them on for a day, and then we package'em up for a couple months and then we put them out in the field and they might run for five months. Five years. I'm not sure. It depends on, what crazy environmental conditions this device goes through, and for us as an iot company, we have to turn on these devices to test them on the assembly line. turn them off again while they're in stock and go to the technicians and then they'll be on for five months. Five years. I'm not sure how long it will be it depends on if we need to service that device. And then once we go service it, we want to turn it off again for a couple of months and then it goes through our refurbishing analysis crew. We turn it on for a week, and then at that point we may want to turn it off forever and we just put a new sim card in, because we can, it's a lot easier to do that, but there is a lot of periods of time in here. where we have a lot of devices that have SIM cards and aren't being used. We were actually reaching situations where we were almost paying double what we were actually using. And from a operational and margin standpoint, that was crazy. Especially'cause we weren't doing anything there. And when we went to Soracom, not only were they competitive on price, but we were able to turn off everything we weren't using and they had the systems. The actual automation inside their website for us to, do this without having to program it into our own system. It was surprising the contrast to us of a group who just doesn't seem to understand how IOT runs, even though they claim to be selling to IOT and Soracom, who seems to have built everything up from the ground to work for an IOT company. And it was just a night and day difference for us. The billing, the tools, everything that was there for us.
Ryan Carlson:So did just that change in how you are being billed was there any cost savings or did you recognize any Yes absolutely anything financially.
Nathan Hoel:The year that we switched to Soracom was one that we were really focusing on margin improvement as a hardware software company startup, your margins start up pretty terrible and we were in a segment where we were really trying to improve them, improve the reliability of our device. Improve the cost structure of all of our services that we pay for, and paying for things that we're not using was one of the first thing that things that had to go, and this was a substantial improvement to the margins for us and has helped us quite a bit.
Ryan Carlson:So at any given point, how much of your inventory would were you able to turn off and know you're not paying for at any given time?
Nathan Hoel:It was about half and you'd think that might be crazy. Because we don't have them on the shelf that long, except that we're growing so quickly that a large portion of our entire fleet, we increase the rate at which we're building things so often that a lot of our devices actually end up being in, in, stock or with installers because we're, like I said, like we're doubling or tripling the number of units we're installing almost every single month, from the previous month.
Ryan Carlson:That's wild. That is wild to think about paying for. Half of the devices that aren't being out there.
Nathan Hoel:Yeah, it just, it didn't
Ryan Carlson:it,
Nathan Hoel:and
Ryan Carlson:yeah.
Nathan Hoel:tried to give them an opportunity and just not set up. They're set up to handle more classical consumer scenarios where I. People have these things in their phones and they own like maybe a couple dozen or something like that. Not tens of thousands like we do, and we're trying to manage these things in an automated way, right?
Ryan Carlson:Take me back to the day when you first decided to evaluate Soracom and tell me what happened.
Nathan Hoel:It is difficult to remember everything about it. We've done so many, so a lot of them blur into one. Like I, I was being honest when I said a dozen, like it's more than a dozen. It was really easy to get over a dozen there, different MVNOs that we had tried, honestly, and I don't want to sound too bitter. It was just having one too many frustrating conversations with our other carrier. Where, especially when I told you that they didn't believe that this billing model existed, I didn't want to change our infrastructure. Like I didn't know who you guys were. It was always easier for me to stay with who we were working with. They had to give me a very good reason to leave, and it was just, I told them that this billing model existed and they thought I was bluffing, and I was like, I just want you guys to meet us where we need. To be met here. Like where it's fair. And they thought we were bluffing, to their own loss because I just was like, okay, that's fine. You don't have to believe us. We'll move. It's harder for us to do, but we're not going to pay double what we should be, forever going forward. And they were like, if we give you a discount off of this month's bill, they just thought we were angry and wanted something, but it was. was just really about the logistics, about how this worked. And so that conversation, I obviously had looked into, Soracom before then, and I was like, oh, this billing model makes a lot more sense. I wish others used this. But, and then when I really started looking at it, to be honest, I was happy we were forced in that situation because of, like I said, the tools that you guys have are substantially better. They're built for IOT companies. We are able to actually log in and monitor individual devices and how they're doing, whereas they would scarcely even tell us any information about the devices and the session connections and all these different things that are super important to us. And, all of that was built in. And there's so many things we haven't taken advantage yet, but we're excited about potentially doing in the future. In your toolbox on Soracom.
Ryan Carlson:Nathan, if people would like to learn more about BinSentry specifically in your product lines, where would you send them?
Nathan Hoel:We do have a direct sales team, but our marketing website, www.binsentry.com, is a good place to start. have a lot of videos for customers, but definitely reach out. But, send a message to us. Our market tends to be small in terms of the number of customers. Our customers are usually pretty big in the nature of they have a lot of assets to monitor. but that being said, what that means is we get to spend a lot more time with individual customers. So we, we actually have in like dedicated salespeople, dedicated service people that will be able to communicate with you, and we're really responsive because of that.
Ryan Carlson:So for a feed mill manager that's really protective of what's in their bins, BinSentry is exactly what they're gonna wanna, be looking at is, is to take that level of control and trust in the numbers that they have. I've seen too many, industrial settings where just human error alone. Causes so much shrink and loss, and it was numerical, then nothing was actually lost. It was just inflation and then actual recounts and audits, and then you end up just spending and wasting so many different people's time tracing or tracking down ghosts. And all this time, it turns out just having a, an appropriate and accurate monitoring solution that can provide near real time data is a great way to address a lot of those human error issues or manual corrective issues. that's really cool to hear. And that's not, that's on top of just keeping people off of really tall ladders and going in places that are harmful. I was a kid who had the little respirator mask on going to look inside of a bin. It's just. It's not nice work. It's dangerous.
Nathan Hoel:It's in the winter and stuff too sometimes for these people like Icy
Ryan Carlson:Yep.
Nathan Hoel:and we've had customers call and say, we're so thankful you kept my husband or my wife off of that bin this winter, they were in tears and it almost brings you to tears. Just hearing that it's, it's just a great purpose helping feed people, helping keep them safe removing trucks from the roads, so reducing greenhouse gas emissions. There's just so many good things that come about from doing things more efficiently.
Ryan Carlson:And all you're doing is solving one problem, not even having to worry about solving everyone's problems for a little extra money on the side. This is, this has been a great example of not only a company that is doing the right service, that is staying customer centric. I love that you put so much thought and effort into choosing the technologies that you do in order to create a holistic c onnected experience. And that's one of the things here on the podcast we just love to talk to, is people who are thoughtful about these decisions and decisions that are informed by getting a little too close to the stove and know, knowing, what to avoid. This has been really great conversation and I've been really enjoying learning about not only what you do, but the journey that you had on your way there from radio selection. I now know what micro fretting is, as a result of this conversation. And
Nathan Hoel:I didn't have to know what that was, but it's
Ryan Carlson:part of our history now and that's why you have to share it, right? Like you don't want the next person to have to learn about micro fretting because they were just trial and error pressing down on their SIM card and realizing it works.
Nathan Hoel:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson:So thank you so much for your time. This has been great.
Nathan Hoel:Thanks. I enjoyed the conversation, Ryan.
This has been another episode of What to Expect when You're Connecting. Until next time.
Ryan Carlson:Nathan, what is Soracom to you?
Nathan Hoel:That's a good question. I'm just, let me think about how to, I wanna phrase this. Okay. Soracom to me is a partner in my business. That's how I wanna work with our technology vendors. That's how we need to work. We're scaling at such a crazy rate that if the people we're working with aren't capable or willing to work with us in the same way that we work, going to have to leave them behind. And like I said, when things happen and we need to react, in the middle of the night, whenever it is, I call up the team and your team was there responding, phoning me back. And that along with my team, who I have on, a slack call, in my ear and that I have Soracom in the other ear, and that's so important that we're working together to solve those problems. And. To do those things and to develop the technology and to look into new regions that we're looking into, and that you're responsive. So in a way you're a partner, you're on the team. And that's the way I'd prefer it, rather than being at really far arms length and feel like we have, a really poor working relationship or something.
Ryan Carlson:I am glad we're all on the same team. This has been great. I am 100% honest when I say what we do is not exciting or cool. It's what people do with our connectivity services and platform services to actually solve real problems. It's so fun to be able to share your story.
Nathan Hoel:I would say that that what you guys do, there's a bunch of things that I've done where I've said the same thing, where I'm like, this shouldn't be interesting. It should be done in a standard way. But the thing that makes you guys so good, or anyone so good at these things is that I. No one does it in a great standard or regular approach. And so it's like, you shouldn't be the only one doing this this way, but you are, that I know of and so that makes it exciting to me.
Ryan Carlson:It is wild to think of like the 2,600 MVNOs that, we could go out and find. I know of three which includes Soracom that even has some of the same architecture to address problems in a unique way.
Nathan Hoel:Something I'd mention is that like it was so clear to us that these companies aren't used to doing things with IoT companies was because of the bill they sent us. It's just small things like that. It's because the bill I kid you not was 800 pages long. 800 pages and it took forever. Like it would crash our email clients sometimes and stuff like just to open, because they insisted on listing every single sim card that we had with them. And this was back when we were like less than 10,000 units. So it, I don't even know what it would look like now, and we joke about that, but we'd say, we'd actually refer to that all the time being like, clearly they don't have very many customers like us, or they would've fixed this by now. We couldn't even add up the stuff we'd always have, they'd have to send us a special customized bill after they sent us the automated one that told us what the totals were for different things because we couldn't open it most of the time. So it's just. I said, they said that they wanted to be with iot. There's some big companies too, area and they want, they want to work with iot. They even published us as oh, a Hallmark iot company we're working with and then they continued, like I said, to just say, we are liars when I said that we could this differently
Ryan Carlson:Yep. But this is all we do. It's all we do. And just like you do inventory
