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Brand Voice Brief

Okay, when it comes to brand voice, I'm just dictating this by the way, so sorry if it's verbose. When it comes to brand voice, there are some things that, in my experience being new to this community and learning about it, manufacturers are sort of allergic to, and I'm going to do my best to describe it because I am not at all from a manufacturing background in any way, and so a lot of it I had to learn over the last year.

Basically, visually, here are some examples of our actual customers' actual shops.

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While there are pallet racks and warehouses involved in our customers' facilities, that imagery is a trite signifier of "I want to make this look like I'm in a manufacturing facility," and the vibe is kind of this software was made by people who don't understand manufacturing. The things that get our customers really excited from my experience are really geeky, nerdy things about cool machines that can do 6 or I think they're up to 7 axis operations or something. I'm probably not even saying that right because I don't really understand. But a bunch of dudes in a warehouse looking at pallet racks is not something that speaks to them and goes "this is for me"

This is probably our most “old school” customer. I think the business has been around for like 40 years, and I get the vibe that they show up to work in a shirt and tie even though they're running CNC machines on a production floor. Even so, they’re putting out videos with music over some random esoteric machine operations happening that are probably pretty cool if you understand them. Oh, I can do the rest of this on Loom.

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Actually, just a couple of things about word choice and how we want to come off:

Most of the software in this industry is old, antiquated, clunky, with bad UI. A lot of on-premise software still somehow exists, and using it is a very bad experience. People on the shop floor resent needing to use it. Frequently, it comes down from on high, and management doesn't actually know what being on the shop floor is like, and that's why they force the software on the shop floor. Shop people are people who really like the physical world, and like tactile things and working with their hands. Interacting with software does not feel second nature to them. There's something about the bins with parts that is speaking to people and making them go "Yep, I have that. I see that in my shop. I could do that." I think that's why the cards are very resonant with people because they think, "Oh my god, finally something we can actually do." Which really contrasts the vibe of most software out there.

And just to emphasize at least some of the commercial viability of this approach, the way we got JeDone, a 6B construction business, as a customer is because Kendall, a worker in their fab shop, saw an ad on Instagram (cards in bins) and thought, "Oh, I could do that." She had a demo with us, took it to her boss, and realized that she wasn't wasting her boss's time. They were like, "Yeah, this actually could work for us."

Also, the way we got into the other multibillion-dollar business we're doing a pilot at right now is because the guy followed Ariel on Instagram for years. Here’s what he said in a discussion last week:

"First of all, just the physical card integration, not including the software side, has already reduced us completely. We had not a single stock out during this month. Wow. So the technicians really took to it. Well, they thought that that was super easy. It also made my part easy when they came to me, I, you know, had a really clear path of this is what I need to do. And I know they have plenty of parts, so that was already a huge success. It made it all the way up to our director, who was giving a tour around to a bunch of VPS, and after that, came back to my desk, and he's like, What are all these cards that are in your area? I explained it to him, and he was like, that's super cool. Like, 100% keep at this."

The reason the free Kanban tool is doing well from all the folks we've spoken to is because someone without purchasing power probably needed a tool and was able to just do this and use these cards without requiring IT approval and all of these hurdles to be gone through. They were just able to create a simple, quick visual system that actually solved their problem and made intuitive sense.

Now, whether or not that leads to a commercially viable long-term strategy is definitely a bet that we're taking based on what we have experienced and observed about the gap in the market regarding software that is easy to use and enables line-side delivery and fills in the gaps where ERP's fail. But if we're trying to double down, that's where we've been successful so far. Here’s an email from someone using the free tool:

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And here’s a conversation with someone who was halfway through implementing Fishbowl and thought Oh man, this is horrifying. I need to get this off my shop floor. Found Arda, bought Arda, and removed Fishbowl.

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The place that I want us to be is very modern, with a deep understanding of what it's like to be on the shop floor and therefore super pragmatic, but also having expertise in best-in-class manufacturing theory. We are also taking a bit of a provocative stance? I guess? I mean, we're really just trying to stand out more than anything.

For instance, this is our output - our booth design for some of the conferences that are coming up in this document, and I also just wrote a bunch of emails as a follow-up lead nurture campaign for the free Kanban tool, with these subjects.

“Trying out Kanban?” “Re: Trying out Kanban?” “What got you thinking about Kanban?” “Re: What got you thinking about Kanban?” “Why do you hate Kanban?”

“You never forget your first kanban” “Two bins - one card - no waste” “Size Matters: How Toyota keeps one hour of inventory on the line” “Multi-Card Loops: When one card isn’t enough”

^I don’t know if this will see the light of day, but it’s not like Oracle is going to put out anything like this anytime soon.

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One thing that I take a lot of inspiration from is Vanta's ads that they just have billboards for.

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We actually went to a conference and our whole tagline was "inventory software that doesn't suck." We decided against that, kind of longer term. One because we don't want to be on the hook for using "suck" as a pejorative, even though we want to be provocative. I guess we don't want to be negative, and the other one is because inventory software is actually not a great term for us. When people think about inventory, they think about their finished goods sitting on a shelf waiting to be sold. They do not think about the precursor materials required to create those finished goods, and so there's this weird space in the market where what we actually do is called material flow. In later rounds with more money, I would really like to become the category defining business in material flow, but we don't have the cache or resources to do that yet.

Anyway, there's manufacturing execution software which helps your machines run and do the things you want them to do. There's inventory software which is sort of like people group it in with what a POS would provide (QuickBooks for instance and Shopify are two of the biggest providers of inventory software out there). Similarly there's warehouse management software which also is not associated with inventory in motion. And ERPs which are clunky dinosaurs that have a reputation for killing businesses and ending in litigation.

What all these other software platforms do a great job of is telling you, "Yup, that stuff is here on this shelf, there's a barcode, and if you go back there it'll be there." What we do is much less about telling you where this specific actual thing is and just more about saying, "Hey, this station will always have some of this thing," and so ensuring continuous supply availability and smooth material flow is much more what we do vs. asset tracking, warehouse management, or even really inventory (inventory is the closest bucket that we can come up with). Oh, some things we don't really want to say are: Keep track or keep count because we don't do that. You can't look anywhere in Arda to find how many of something you have.

Another brand idea that we've had that we really like is being the anti-ERP. Or running ads that say, "Never count your inventory again." Okay, I can do the rest of this on Loom.

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Oh, one other very weird thing that is like an impossible needle to thread is this kind of strange nuance between neat and organized worship (like everything has its place and is labeled) and a desire for authenticity and realness. So you'll see these lean shop tours where everything is shadow-boarded (has an outline of where it's supposed to go), everything is labeled, the bins are all color-coded, but there can still be stuff on the floor everywhere, it's not very clean, and parts of it can still be messy.

The weird reason for that is because all of the things they’ve spent time improving that sort of make it seem organized to me (that are kind of no different from the things that make it seem dirty in my eyes) are all in service to making it faster or easier to do your job. So like, color-coding - having a big wall of color-coded stuff makes it easier to find what you need, you need to spend less time standing there looking for the thing you want. Same with making shadow boarding everything - if everything if only one thing fits in a place, you will put it back in the place where it fits because it doesn't fit in other places, and so everyone will know to go look there and ambiguity is reduced. It's a lot of stuff like that where the neatness or systemization is all very pragmatic and it's almost celebrated to frown upon cleanliness or neatness as an end in themselves.

This is maybe a bad-ish example because this shop is so dialed that it is also super clean and organized. But the kind of 2-3 minutes in this video after the time that I linked it to are a really good explanation of the vibe of the lean manufacturing community. He says this at 3:45. Good ideas come from the people actually doing the work and kind of frowning upon this idea of management forcing things on people who are actually doing work or delivering value.

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And just an odd thing that I happened to notice while I was looking for this video was that of all the videos on this guy's channel (at least the 5 here), the one that's doing the best is the one with bins.

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So anyways, that’s hopefully helpful. Content that, so far, it seems like people like:

Hands with parts

Cards in bins

Cool machine

Deeply satisfying organization

And things people don’t seem to like:

Human faces

Generic warehouses/pallet racks

Buncha dudes in hard hats with iPads

Oh, just another data point that I thought of is that we were featured in this 3D printing shop tour thing. People scan the QR code on the Arda card in that video and request access to this guy's instance like weekly still probably I think that QR code is far and away our most scanned one and it's of him in a video. Which is insane.

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