When UX Meets LoRaWAN - Ofer Tenenbaum at Meter.me

Speaker: 00:00:08

Today's guest

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on MeteoScientific's

The Business of LoRaWAN is Ofer Tenenbaum,

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CEO of meter.me

a company focused on bringing visibility

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and automation

to rural water infrastructure.

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Ofer approaches LoRaWAN from a different

angle than most engineers.

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As a UX driven builder

whose mission is to friendlyfi complex

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technology so plumbers, pump installers

and ranch operators can deploy and use it

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without ever talking about sensor payloads

or gateways.

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In this conversation,

we discuss the scale of rural water loss

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and why silent leaks can multiply water

usage by hundreds of percent.

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How UX discipline can become

a competitive advantage in industrial IoT,

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and how meter meat uses AI,

including a monitoring agent

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nicknamed Maggie,

to detect anomalies and simplify system

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setup through natural language

instead of forms and thresholds.

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We also get into back end reliability.

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SCADA-evel responsibility

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and why you have to pay your dues

to the LoRa gods before declaring that

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it doesn't work.

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This episode is sponsored

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by the Helium Foundation and is dedicated

to spreading knowledge about LoRaWAN.

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If you'd like to try Helium’s

publicly available global LoRaWAN for free

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and support this show.

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Sign up at metsci.show/console.

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Now let's dig into the conversation

with Ofer Tenenbaum.

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Ofer,

thanks so much for coming on the show.

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I'm super excited to have you on.

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Thank you Nik.

I'm super excited to be here.

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So our mutual friend

Dana connected us and said that

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I must have you on,

and you graciously agreed to come on.

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Perhaps we start with,

what is it that you do for folks

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that may not have heard of you, or only

briefly seen your profile on LinkedIn?

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Sure.

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Meter Me is a company focused

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on rural water infrastructure.

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We're trying to bring visibility to our

stakeholders, our users, installers.

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You know, I've heard on your podcast

before, people talk about water loss.

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It's a significant, you know, portion.

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You know, I think the number

that one of your guests mentioned,

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40 to 50% of the water that comes out,

never reaches its destination.

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I think that's actually an underscore

of what happens in rural areas.

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Just as an example, 1 35

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gallon leak silently

leaking on a road in a rural area

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would lose one acre of water in one week.

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And I think the 40 to 50%

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they were talking about what

I always thought this is a funny

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term, non-technical losses,

which is what refers to stealing.

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But you're not talking about that at all.

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It's just like, hey,

this is out in the country. Things happen.

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You know, some pig will go rooting around

and break something

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and you don't know about it

unless you're monitoring it.

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Is that right?

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Or is there a lot of water thievery

in out in rural areas? No.

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Not so much.

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It's the cow stepping on the pipe.

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The earthquake breaking

or cracking a pipe underground.

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The rodents.

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And again, the amount of losses usually.

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I know it's the mathematical

here is weird, but it's hundreds

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of percentage of your normal use.

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So you might have a household

in rural area that should only use

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about 100,000 gallons a year,

but they will lose 500,000.

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Jeez.

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So so there's a lot

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of water loss that we're dealing with,

and that's what we're focused on.

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And you know, water

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water cost money to get get to your place

both in energy and the the water itself.

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So I can see that there's savings there.

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Now, you made it pretty clear to me

before we started.

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You're like, hey, I'm more focused on

making sure normal people

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can understand this

than I am in like deep engineering work.

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Am I getting that right that you're like,

you're more focused on like, hey, I want

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I want this to be understandable.

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Yeah, I'm a UX designer in my background.

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I've been doing UX design

for the better part of my life.

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And so for me to friendlyfi

something is kind of my life's mission.

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I look at technology and again,

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not like some of your podcast guests.

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I am the non geek guest

that you're bringing on.

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And even though like, you know,

my team would drag me into the geeky,

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especially like somebody like Dana.

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Oh yeah, I spend my entire effort

my entire day.

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How do we friendly find this?

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How do we don't talk about Laura?

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How do we don't talk about NTN or

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or 5G or sensors or, you know, payloads.

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Modbus I don't care.

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I just like, how do we don't talk

about any of those things.

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And we bring it

so that, you know, regular layman users

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could do is it the end user could use it?

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I really want a plumber, a person

that knows how to operate a wrench,

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maybe a voltmeter at the most

to be able to deploy Lora and IoT.

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That's the bar.

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Okay. I like it.

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I want the same thing.

It seems pretty difficult.

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What do you see?

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Or what do you think

you see as a UX focused builder?

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That maybe an engineer would be different

than what an engineer sees.

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Everything.

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That's okay.

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I still get it.

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Yeah. No, the list is long.

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Is like when you try to friendly

five things.

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There is a challenge

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that you get familiar

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with the product

and you get comfortable with it.

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Oh, what's the,

You know, we talk about signal, so,

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you know, you'll have a technician that,

you know, you've deployed your app to

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and you go like, oh,

we can't do this with this S and R.

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Like what?

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Like, you need to, like, wait, wait, wait,

what's snow?

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Because the next time

you meet the next plumber

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and you haven't educated them,

what's S and R?

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They have no idea what it is. Right.

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So you got a constantly

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have a virgin look at your own product.

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Okay.

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And you got to constantly hit

the reset button.

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I don't know anything about this.

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So when I'm like, you know, trying to

install a gateway is the word gateway.

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Okay.

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You know, I'm trying to install a moat.

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What's a moat?

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You know,

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it's really important to me to explain

people that it comes from the word remote.

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You know, so,

you know, you know, stuff like that

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sensor is okay, but payload is not.

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So you constantly

put these glasses on of an end user,

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and you try to

I don't want to say dumbed down.

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That's why we use the word friendly.

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You try to friendly by the entire process

so that the layman can use it.

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Or the professional trade could use it.

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And I would say there are some caveats.

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You know, there's things that,

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you know, your team will tell you,

we can finally find this right now.

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And there are some examples.

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You know, the NFC operation from a phone

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to a moat is very, very difficult.

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So if you can bridge that with a Bluetooth

because the manufacturer doesn't

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want to give you a boolean on the,

you know, on the device,

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then publish a video, you know,

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add a video to to the app and say,

you know,

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literally this is going to be difficult

to turn things on and off.

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Watch this video, fun video

that shows you how to do that.

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Got it.

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And are you using

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a little bit of an unusual question

but normal for today, I guess.

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Are you using AI to do any of that

where you like, hey, just generate

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like a cartoon video of how this works

or you guys aren't aren't doing that yet.

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You're just like, hey, here's my iPhone.

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Yeah, yeah,

we're using AI for much deeper things.

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One of the things with,

you know, IoT deployment

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that users complain about

is the overwhelming amount of data.

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Okay.

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And then you have plumbers

and pump companies and drill companies

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installing meter me at customers,

but they don't want to babysit it.

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Okay.

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So that's where actually AI comes for us.

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We bring in AI.

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We we we nicknamed our,

you know, our AI agent.

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We call her Maggie.

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She's our water magician.

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And she comes in in the role

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that cannot be fulfilled

by anyone in this ecosystem.

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You're not going to have an alarm

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24 seven system like for water systems.

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It's the the economics doesn't work right.

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But now you can.

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So we bring I actually to monitor

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for anomalies things that machine learning

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cannot find things that your threshold

definition couldn't find.

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And we also incorporate

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now in the new version that's coming in

May the actual set up.

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So instead of selecting

I want to fill the tank

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until it reaches, you know, then you have

like a form, you know, until this level

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and then the set the trigger at that level

and the safety,

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you're just going to free

talk to the meter me up and just say,

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I want to fill the upper tank with the,

ravine, you know, lower.

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Well, and then it's going to ask you,

okay, when do you want me to stop

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fueling the tank?

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Oh, when, I guess, I guess 90%. Okay.

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Do you want me to stop pumping from the

well when it's too low?

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Yeah, sure. Or whatever.

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Yeah. So.

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So you're going to have a free talk

with that?

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So that's where we're bringing in AI,

you know, both on the monitoring side

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and on the interaction side

with the installer.

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Oh, that's so awesome.

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I got a million questions.

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I'll start with how do you find customers

or the customers find you.

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Or are you guys putting up billboards

saying like,

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stop losing a billion gallons of water?

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Or like, how do people come and find

either metered meter, me or Lamar?

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Yeah, I don't want to.

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Sounds old fashioned and too naive,

but I've built several businesses

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and I can tell you that the only true

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way to find customers is by word of mouth.

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Everything else

is, you know, icing on the cake.

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The product has to be so good

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that people are just super

excited to talk about, you know?

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I mean, for me, Guy Kawasaki was,

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you know, my age

when he was an evangelist at Apple.

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But the product has to do the, the,

the walking, the product has to do.

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I mean, I need Sheryl Shapley to like,

sit in a table with like,

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you got to watch this meeting and be like,

I can do this and I can do that.

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And that's what sells.

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Everything else is icing on the cake.

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So you can find us on Instagram

and TikTok and,

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you know,

and I publish a few things on LinkedIn,

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and I'm having this podcast

with Nick and it's stuff like this.

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But none of that matters

if the product doesn't sales for itself.

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Is there a way or a method

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that you use

to figure out what a new person might see?

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That is really hard for you to see

because you've been in it so long?

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Yeah, we use SAS services that show you

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what and how people interact with the app.

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Right?

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So Microsoft has it, you know, smartly,

there's there's lots of,

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products out there that let you see.

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And then you actually pretty surprise,

like you're like, oh,

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we we think that our setting up

the alerts is super easy.

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And then you're like, you watch it

like, wait, why did they go back?

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No, they're going forward. You know.

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So as you know, UX designers, you have now

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eyes into

how users interact with your product.

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We're

also like to talk and visit and meet.

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So zoom is a great you know our product

managers get on zoom with people.

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I'm going to meet,

you know, one of our customers twice

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this week, you know, so I, you know,

boots on the ground and watch them.

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We tag along with installers.

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So our product managers will go

and we'll tag along.

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And you're like, oh,

I thought that was simple.

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And you see them

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like struggle with the simplest thing

that you thought that you solved

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and you did it.

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And so you just go back

to the drawing board

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and you just release a better version,

you know, next time.

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And is there a way you internalize

all that in the company that you have?

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I don't know, this.

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It sounds so lame.

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But like weekly stand ups, you're like,

hey, Bill went out and saw

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that this guy tried to put in a gateway

and you know, he's

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trying to plug in the Ethernet

to the wall or whatever it was.

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Have some other way of disseminating

that throughout the company.

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Oh, lots of ways, Nick. Lots of ways.

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So we've established like we

I call it doors.

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There's lots of doors for feedback.

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They all end up in the product

management channel.

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We have a troubleshooting channel where,

you know, people just do that.

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We have a discord channel where

we interact directly with the installers.

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We have shake bugs in the app.

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We have I don't want to say spying,

but like, you know, we have ways to look

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at how users interact with that.

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We have zoom sessions, we have product

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submissions, we've got prioritization,

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the friendly ification

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of what we do is our DNA.

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It's it's embedded

into pretty much the entire life

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cycle, the weekly life

cycle of the company that we have weekly

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meetings, acceleration meetings, friendly

friction meetings, unblocking meetings.

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This is all we do.

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It's all we do.

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Okay.

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Can you give me any by any dimension,

how big is the company?

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It sounds like this is more than just two

people hustling super hard.

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Oh, we're not big, but there are close

to two dozen people on the team.

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Yeah, okay.

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Yeah, and it also sounds unlike

any conversation I've had on the podcast

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where you guys sound

kind of awesomely insane about UX.

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I can't imagine that you're

not paying attention to engineering,

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because if things don't work,

it doesn't matter

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how good your UX is like,

it has to be usable, right?

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Right? Right. For sure.

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How much of a competitive advantage

does it give you to have this

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super focused intensity on UX?

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How much of a competitive advantage

did Apple have,

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you know, having focus on UX versus

Nokia or Nokia?

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I think it's one of those things

that pays the fruits over time.

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Yeah.

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So yes,

you could do a very fast, by the way.

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You know, to to answer your questions.

Have you seen our app.

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I haven't touched yet.

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No. Okay.

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Yeah I think that

when people see me for me

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there's Ha moments like, okay, well,

this isn't like nothing I've seen before.

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This is not just like a dashboard

with some graphs jumping up and down,

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like people have really thought

about intuitive design.

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And so I think it's something

that pays off.

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But to your point,

we're also paying a lot of attention

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to to the back end, the stability of

I mean, you got Dana.

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Yeah, we have Dana. Yeah.

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I mean, we paid our dues to the Laura

gods.

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And that's, you know, that's paying off

after 4 or 5 years into this,

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then you have to have redundancy

on your chirp stack and your app services

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and separate the development

and staging and production environments

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and QA and carry out a mission.

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In fact, I was in a meeting today.

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Nick and one of the engineers

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brought up a whole new backend

way to do our automation.

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Okay, because we do control automation,

we don't just do monitoring.

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And I reminded that engineer, I said, you

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know, despite us not wanting

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to acknowledge that we are

technically a scale, a company,

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and that means that

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everything

new that we deploy does not touch the old.

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We deploy something new.

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This new automation schema.

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That's great.

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It's going to be applied for new systems

that we're bringing on board.

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And an old system

will have to take their time to migrate.

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We're not in this kind of like,

oh, you know,

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just issue a whole new interface

and get users to use it like we are.

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We're mobilizing water.

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We are, giving water for cattle,

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for irrigation, for fire suppression.

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There's no toying with those things.

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So reliability on the back

end and friendly fire

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front end, our, you know, anchors blow it.

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So rad.

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I'm sure someone's going to listen to this

like I want to do that. Same thing.

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This sounds cool.

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Like, what advice would you give someone

who wants to friendly their Lora business?

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I think again

the reset button is really important.

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Like like pick glasses that that you

every time you put on these glasses,

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you look at

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: 00:16:03

things as if you were seeing it

for the first time.

326

: 00:16:06

And so it's like the The Virgin experience

kind of glasses that you're going

327

: 00:16:09

to put on and see that keep in touch

with your customers all the time.

328

: 00:16:14

They will teach you more than anything.

329

: 00:16:17

And our customers are installers, right.

330

: 00:16:19

And you do

I mean, as it as it pertains to Laura,

331

: 00:16:22

you do have to pay your dues to the

to the Laura Lourdes

332

: 00:16:26

because there's a lot to to shift

when you're shifting from broadband

333

: 00:16:30

connectivity and low latency

to this high latency thing.

334

: 00:16:34

You got to be patient.

335

: 00:16:35

You got to know how to architect the

the backend so that it works with the

336

: 00:16:40

with the advantages

and disadvantages of Laura.

337

: 00:16:43

Before you jump into conclusion

that I can't tell you how many calls

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: 00:16:47

I've been on, Nick and people say, oh,

we try this with Laura, but it

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: 00:16:51

just didn't work.

340

: 00:16:53

Yeah, it didn't work because you didn't

pay your dues.

341

: 00:16:55

Yeah, yeah.

342

: 00:16:56

It's easy when you know how it's done,

when you don't. Yeah.

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: 00:16:59

All right.

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: 00:17:00

Oh, for thanks so much for carving out

some time to talk to us.

345

: 00:17:02

I know you're super busy.

346

: 00:17:03

Sounds like you're running

this really badass company.

347

: 00:17:05

I'm excited to go

see if I can put meet me on my house,

348

: 00:17:07

which I'm assuming

I can't because we don't have a ranch.

349

: 00:17:09

But it does sound awesome.

350

: 00:17:11

Okay, come on, man, you're welcome.

351

: 00:17:12

Thank you so much.

352

: 00:17:15

That's it for this episode

of The Business of LoRaWAN.

353

: 00:17:18

If you want to go deeper

and actually deploy devices,

354

: 00:17:21

the Meteo Scientific Console

is the fastest way to do that.

355

: 00:17:24

And honestly, it's

also the best way to support the show.

356

: 00:17:28

When you use the console, you're not just

listening, you're participating

357

: 00:17:31

in the same real world LoRaWAN work

we talk about here every week.

358

: 00:17:35

You can get started with the free trial

at Medio Scientific, Aecom.

359

: 00:17:39

Huge thanks to the sponsor of the show,

the Helium Foundation,

360

: 00:17:42

for supporting open LoRaWAN

infrastructure worldwide.

361

: 00:17:46

Check them out at helium Dot Foundation

and hit the show has been useful.

362

: 00:17:50

A quick rating or review on Apple Podcasts

or wherever you listen.

363

: 00:17:53

This really helps

364

: 00:17:54

people find it and helps the show grow

so we can help more people.

365

: 00:17:57

I'm Nik Hawks with MeteoScientific.

366

: 00:17:59

I'll catch you on the next episode.