Founders
Two IT people, a lot of lawn care, and one problem that would not go away.
monitorMyLawn started in 2018, in the Midwest, between two people whose day jobs were in IT and whose working lives kept putting them around commercial lawn-care operations. We were not trying to start a hardware company. We were trying to answer one irritating question that nobody on either side of that fence could answer with evidence: does this grass actually need water right now?
Founder-runNo outside support tier Replies from the people who wrote the code
The premise
Two industries, the same blind spot.
From the IT side
Every other system we worked on had instrumentation. You did not guess whether a server was under load or a disk was filling up — you measured it, you alerted on it, and you could show someone the graph afterwards. Irrigation had none of that. It had a clock.
From the lawn-care side
Crews were making genuinely skilled decisions from a handful of soil to the touch and whatever the sky was doing. The good ones were often right. But nobody could prove it, nobody could hand the reasoning to the next person, and nobody could tell you what the root zone was doing four inches down.
The measurement was never the hard part. Turning it into a decision you could defend was.
The honest answer
So why has it taken until now?
Because a sensor that reports a number is a weekend project, and a system that tells you what to do about it is not. Reading soil moisture is straightforward. Deciding whether 22% means "water tonight" or "leave it alone" depends on your soil type, your grass, how much water the atmosphere pulled out of it today, what fell out of the sky in the last 24 hours, and where the probe is sitting relative to the roots. Get any of those wrong and you produce a confident recommendation that is simply incorrect.
A worked example of exactly that. Late in development our evapotranspiration figure was running at roughly two and a half times the physically plausible value, because a radiation constant was being used in the wrong unit. Every watering runtime the system produced was inflated. Nothing on the dashboard looked wrong — the number was plausible, the chart was pretty, the advice sounded sensible. It was caught by checking the maths against the published model rather than against whether the output felt about right. We would rather be late than ship that.
That is the whole reason the FAQ names the models, publishes the thresholds and states the limits, and the reason every tool on the tools page tells you where it falls down. It is not modesty. It is the only way an instrument earns any trust.
The two of us
Small on purpose.
There is no support tier and no offshore first line. When you write in, one of the two people who built the thing reads it. That does not scale forever — enjoy it while it does.
Founder one Name to confirm
Platform & data
Ingestion, the data layer and everything that has to keep working at three in the morning without anyone watching. Spent an IT career learning that the unglamorous parts — retries, retention, whether the number you are looking at is actually current — are the parts that decide whether a system is trusted.
Founder two Name to confirm
Agronomy & product
The models, the thresholds and the wording of every recommendation. Came at this from the operations side of commercial lawn care, where the cost of guessing is measured in water bills and dead turf rather than in dashboards.
No stock photography, and no headshots until there are real ones. A stranger's face from a photo library on a founders page is worse than an empty space.
What founder-run actually buys you
Four things a bigger company could not promise.
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One price, everything in it
No tier where the agronomy is held back. The tools are the product; charging extra for them would be charging extra for the point.
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Your data stays yours
We do not sell it, share it or aggregate it into something else we sell. Export every reading as CSV whenever you like, and delete the account for real if you want out.
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No hardware lock-in
Anything that speaks HTTPS, MQTT or LoRaWAN can report in. There is no proprietary hub, and there will not be — a hub is a way of making you buy a second thing.
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A person on the other end
Write to us and one of two people answers, usually the same day. No ticket carousel, no script.
Where we actually are today
The company is not new. The product is. We are launching it now, which means there is no install base to point at and no customer quotes to run past you — and we would rather say that than manufacture either. What we can offer instead is specificity: the models are named, the thresholds are published, the limits are written down, and every reading you generate leaves with you if you go.
More on the reasoning behind the product on the about page, and the full detail in 31 answers.