Who We Are

Lomenett is built by NuLenke, a two-person hardware company in Minnesota, and the company name is a shortened form of the phrase "new link."

Why "new link"

There used to be a simple arrangement between you and the technology you bought. You paid once, the product worked for you, and the company never asked you for anything again.

That arrangement is mostly gone, because products now report on you, bill you monthly, require accounts, and stop working when a server shuts down. When we picked a name, we picked the thing we wanted to build, which is a new link between people and their technology with the old arrangement back in place. You pay once, and after that the product simply works for you without the company staying involved.

We would have to build something we would buy

When we were kids, technology was moving fast and it was exciting. Now it can feel more like a burden than anything, since every product seems to come with another login to manage, another subscription to track, and another app demanding an update before it will do its job.

So we set one rule before building anything: if we were going to make tech products, we would have to make something we would buy with our own money.

The world does not need another tech product that spies on you, makes you subscribe, locks you into an ecosystem, or holds your data hostage. There are plenty of those already, made by companies much larger than two people. What is missing are products that simply belong to you. The longer version of that story, including why we never took investor money, is at Two People in Minnesota, and the promises we hold ourselves to are written down in The Nevers.

Six months, seven revisions

It took seven hardware revisions over the past six months to get Lomenett to its current design.

The early boards taught us the main lesson of the project: the largest friction of a device is using the device itself. When you need into an account, you are trying to log in, not operate a product. If the device adds work, you will eventually skip it and reuse a password instead.

So each revision removed friction instead of adding features. We ditched the touchscreen, added a battery so you can find the right login before you plug in, and added an accelerometer so the screen works in whatever orientation you hold it. The design that survived seven boards uses a scroll wheel, a single button, and a screen, and getting a password now takes about five seconds. The full walkthrough is on How It Works.

Our own bad passwords

The number of passwords Matt has had to reset over the course of building this product is crazy. Building a password device did not give us good password hygiene. We reuse passwords, and we land on sites we have not used in a year and click "forgot password" without attempting to remember.

Every time that reset email arrives, it makes us want to work harder to bring this product to life. It is validating, because it shows exactly who Lomenett is for: people who know how important strong passwords are and have bad password hygiene anyway, because the existing fixes ask too much of them. We are those people, and we built this for ourselves first.

One purchase, then it's yours

Lomenett is $90, once, and then it is yours forever. It is designed to be serviced, the firmware and schematics will be open sourced, and if NuLenke disappeared tomorrow your device would keep working. That promise is written out in full at Yours, Forever.

That is who we are. We are two people in Minnesota who named the company after the thing we are trying to build, which is a new link between you and the things you own. The device is at nulenke.com.