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Industry software is often outdated and clunky, disliked by shop floor workers who prefer tangible, hands-on tools. Our cards resonate because they offer practical, intuitive solutions that contrast with typical software experiences.Our commercial viability is highlighted by acquiring JE Dunn as a client after a fab shop worker, Kendall, saw an Instagram ad and recognized its potential, convincing her boss of its value.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:The free Kanban tool succeeds because it allows users without purchasing power to implement a simple, intuitive visual system without needing IT approval, effectively solving their problems.Our long-term strategy is a gamble based on identifying a market gap for user-friendly software that supports line-side delivery and addresses ERP shortcomings. This focus has been successful for us so far. Here’s an email from someone using the free tool
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.
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.
Hands with parts Cards in binsCool machineDeeply satisfying organization
Human faces Generic warehouses/pallet racksBuncha dudes in hard hats with iPads
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.
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.
Actually, just a couple of things about word choice and how we want to come off:
"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."
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.
“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.
“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?”
One thing that I take a lot of inspiration from is Vanta's ads that they just have billboards for. 
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.
Manufacturing execution software optimizes machine operations, while inventory software, like QuickBooks and Shopify, handles item tracking. Warehouse management software and clunky ERPs focus less on inventory in motion and often face criticism for inefficiencies.
Unlike other platforms focused on asset tracking, we ensure continuous supply and smooth material flow, emphasizing station availability over inventory counts.
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.
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.
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.
So anyways, that’s hopefully helpful. Content that, so far, it seems like people like:
And things people don’t seem to like:
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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