Slides That Follow Your Voice: US Midwest Accent Trade Show Pitch

Slide 1: The phone is my phone

0:17Come on in, there's coffee, it's bad, it's free. [laughs] I'm Dale, this is my daughter Jen, and that thing behind me that looks like a bundle of rope is the reason we drove six hours with a trailer.

0:30Here's the problem, and if you farm you already know it. You put forty thousand bushels of corn in a bin in October at sixteen percent moisture and you hope. You climb the bin in January because something smells wrong, and by then you've got a hot spot the size of a pickup in the middle of the pile and about three thousand bushels you're going to be selling to the uh, the ethanol plant at a discount, if they'll take it.

Slide 2: You put the corn in, and you hope

0:54We've been through that. Twice. The second time was twenty nineteen, and it cost us twelve, no, fourteen thousand dollars and most of a winter, and Jen, who was finishing her engineering degree at the time, said, Dad, this is a sensor problem, and I said, honey, I know, the sensors cost nine thousand dollars a bin.

Slide 3: So she built one that does not

1:15So she built one that doesn't. That's it, that's the whole company. Each cable has twelve sensors, one every three feet, reading temperature and moisture. You hang four cables in a forty-eight-foot bin. They talk to a box on the roof the size of a lunch pail, and the box talks to your phone.

1:32No subscription. No cell tower needed in the bin yard, because the box talks to your house Wi-Fi from up to half a mile with a little what do you call it, the, uh, antenna Jen is very proud of. [chuckles] She's proud of it because the first one was a coat hanger. I'm not kidding. Worked two weeks, then a crow took it. We've got a photo of the crow. The new one's crow-proof, which we had to test, and I'm not going to tell you how. Anyway.

Slide 4: The whole kit: $2,100

2:00The whole kit for a forty-eight-foot bin is twenty-one hundred dollars installed, and you install it yourself in an afternoon, with a cordless drill and somebody to hold the ladder.

2:11What it tells you. It tells you the temperature of the pile at forty-eight points, every hour. It tells you when a spot is warming faster than the rest, which is the first sign of a problem, about ten to fourteen days before you could smell it.

Slide 5: What it tells you

2:26It tells you when to run the fans and, more importantly, when to stop, because running fans on a humid day puts water back in, and we figure the average operator in this state spends about eleven hundred dollars a year on fan electricity they didn't need. And, the part the banker likes, it tells you what's actually in the bin, so when the elevator calls, you know what you can promise.

2:50Afternoon. You bet, grab a cup. Where was I. Numbers.

2:54We got, we've got... We've got two hundred and twelve of these in bins across four states this fall. Two hundred and fourteen as of Tuesday. Jen keeps the count. I round down. Our first customer, a fellow about forty miles from us, caught a hot spot in November in a sixty-foot bin at eleven days, pulled four hundred bushels out through the center, and sold the rest at full price in March.

Slide 6: This fall: 212 bins

3:19He called Jen to say thank you, and then he asked her if it could also tell him when his wife was coming home from town, and she said that would be a different product, would be a different product. No? That one usually gets a laugh. Okay.

3:34Here's what we don't do. We don't dry your grain. We don't promise you'll never lose a bushel, because grain is grain and bins are bins. [sighs]

Slide 7: What we don't do, and what we do

3:46We tell you what's happening in there, sooner, for the price of about a hundred bushels, and we answer the phone, and the phone is my phone, so, you know, be nice.

3:57Pricing sheet's on the table, the little bin is right here with a hot spot Jen put in it this morning with a heating pad, and if you want to see your phone light up, give her your number and she'll show you. I did warn you. Jen, show this gentleman the heating pad. The other one. Yeah.