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Arda - Strategic Plan

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Strengths - Continuous supply availability

Arda excels at ensuring what we’re calling “Continuous Supply Availability,” – making sure that our customers have everything they need at the point of use, all the time.

Whether your supplies are coming from an external supplier or an internal warehouse, ensuring Continuous Supply Availability is beneficial for businesses of all kinds, from van converters and tattoo shops, all the way through to large-scale manufacturers trying to optimize line-side delivery.

Arda has saved our customers up to 20% of their team’s time by enabling Continuous Supply Availability with minimal work. This happens in several key ways:

Knowing when you need to reorder saves employees time checking on supplies, asking other employees if things have been ordered, and checking whiteboards or Excel sheets for order statuses.

Placing orders with Arda is 10x faster than writing out emails, digging through inboxes for past POs, and trying to find links to specific product webpages.

When items arrive, quantities are designed to easily fit on shelves reducing overstocking and searching for supplies with inconsistent storage.

Reducing inventory frees up shelf space, allowing for more organized material storage, leading to efficient retrieval.

Eliminating fire drills and stockouts as well as the resulting impromptu trips to hardware stores or expedited shipping saves significant time and money.

Setting up to do a job only to discover not everything is in stock then having to tear down and setup a different job is eliminated.

Arda has also freed up significant working capital (up to $250,000) for many of our customers who, in the past, overstocked certain items to prevent stockouts. Because Continuous Supply Availability is systemized with Arda, inventory levels can be reduced and capital can be used on other initiatives.

Opportunities for Improvement

Setup can be a challenge and some customers stagnate with few items in the system. Once customers get items in Arda we see usage greatly increase to an often daily cadence.

Printing can be tricky. Getting the formatting just right for various printers and various sizes of paper can take some fiddling with.

Working with all of you, our customers, has given us some great insights for what sets Arda apart and some features we’re working on that we’re REALLY excited about. We go over them in the Roadmap below.

Vision & Roadmap

Vision

Our vision is to create easy-to-use, low-compliance, software that makes best-in-class, efficient business practices accessible to businesses of all kinds and delivers powerful insights and operational agility as a happy accident of enabling and productive workflows.

VRP – Improving Kanban

Overview

As many of you know, Arda began as a way to help Austere Manufacturing implement Toyota’s Kanban system. After months of refining the product for Austere, we started this business and began working with you, our customers. Since then we’ve integrated a lot of your feedback into the product, made significant improvements and adjustments, and met customers in sectors we didn’t realize would be interested in managing their inventory using the system that we’ve built.

Along the way, we came to realize that the product we’ve created is much bigger and more powerful than we realized and we had the opportunity to continue to make Kanban easy and accessible for businesses that weren’t able to use it before, while improving upon the system in new and innovative ways. What follows is a bit nerdy and in the weeds, so we don’t blame anyone for skimming, but we wanted to share more about the material flow theory that underpins Arda as well as our vision for what this product will become.

Push vs. Pull

Before getting into our vision for Arda, we wanted to share some quick background on the material flow theory that provides the foundation for our current product and future vision. There’s a lot of inventory management software out there, but none that works well for small businesses, which is why about 90% of businesses have no system for managing their inventory. The 10% of businesses that are using a system for inventory management are using what’s called Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. ERPs were fundamentally built to help businesses with accounting and have since expanded into inventory management. They are expensive to maintain, often requiring an in-house IT team, and even more expensive to set up. However, the biggest difference between what they do and what we do, is that they rely on a “Push” system, rather than a “Pull” system for deciding what to order and when.

A Push system relies on demand forecasts and triggers both production and ordering to meet projected demand. As a simple example, if a company thinks they’re going to sell 100 cars in October, they would order materials and schedule production over the summer so that they can produce enough cars to meet their forecast. The big problem here is that predicting the future is a dicey business and projections are often wrong.

Toyota solved this problem by creating Kanban, which is a “Pull” system – one which responds to demand and only triggers ordering and production when supplies are depleted by sales. Rather than ordering supplies and scheduling production based on a prediction, a business using a Pull system will set a minimum quantity for each supply and trigger production and ordering when that supply is organically depleted to the minimum. Using the car example, if I sell enough cars to hit my minimum, I’ll trigger the production of more cars, effectively “ordering” them from my car assembly department. When the assembly department hits their minimum number of doors, they’ll order more doors from their door assembly department. When the door department hits their minimum number of windows, hinges, handles, etc, they’ll order more from the window department, etc. which eventually just orders glass and other materials from external suppliers.

This is a best-in-class practice because it links production with actual demand rather than a forecast. Toyota uses this system to be more profitable than the three largest automakers combined, despite not being one of the three largest automakers. In the 2008 auto crisis, they remained profitable in large part because while other manufacturers produced cars to meet a forecast that didn’t account for a large financial crisis, Toyota didn’t produce cars that weren’t being sold.

One of the big issues with Kanban, or Pull systems at large, is that because they are agnostic to future predictions, they don’t account for growth. If your demand is increasing significantly, then your minimum quantities will constantly become obsolete. In a growing business, when you reach a minimum quantity and trigger a resupply, you’ll run out of that item because your minimum was designed for a lower rate of consumption and your resupply won’t arrive before you use the rest of your minimum quantity.

Toyota solves this problem with what’s called “Production Leveling.” This can include a variety of tactics, including curtailing marketing and reducing sales if they think they’re selling more cars than their system is designed to produce. ERPs solve this problem by creating forecasts for growth that can be more accurate at times about what the future holds than Kanban, which is at its core a mechanism for increasing the efficiency of the status quo. However, as mentioned above, predicting the future is often wrong, and ERPs incur tremendous setup and compliance costs.

We realized that with the data we’re already gathering when our customers scan their order cards, we can deliver a system that syncs production and ordering to actual demand while enabling our customers to account for growth without manipulating demand (because we’re not all Toyota) or incurring additional compliance costs.

Velocity-Based Resource Planning (VRP)

Every time an order is placed in Arda, we save a record of that order. Because we know the order quantity, minimum quantity, and the rate at which orders are being placed, those order records build a picture of our customers’ typical consumption of that supply. Using that information, we have the ability to unlock several powerful tools to manage production and ordering without requiring our customers to incur additional compliance costs or untether production and ordering from actual demand:

Using Machine Learning (ML), we can map our customers’ value chains by determining how changes in order velocity for one item affect the changes in order velocity of other items.

If order velocities increase or decrease, we can proactively suggest updates to order card parameters, like minimum quantities and order quantities. If changes are accepted, they can be pushed through the system such that when a card is scanned that no longer has the correct information on it, we can prompt the user to re-print the card with the correct parameters.

Finally, we can enable customers to conduct material flow sensitivity analysis across their operation to account for growth or other changes in demand, automatically adjusting all necessary order card parameters to account for desired or projected growth. Those updates can then be pushed across the system and all new order cards can be reprinted and replaced.

Until now, these strategies have been complex and required large teams to implement. As a result, they have only been accessible to big businesses, and we’re thrilled that we have the opportunity to bring these powerful tools to market in a simple and easy-to-use package that doesn’t add additional labor, compliance, or other costs to our customers’ operations.

Roadmap

Creating Our Own Software

We’re really excited about our vision for the future of Arda and the enhanced value that we can bring to companies that rely on physical goods to do their work. To make this vision a reality, we will need to create our own software product from the ground up and move away from using Coda as our product delivery platform.

We plan to recreate all of the features and functionality that you’ve come to rely on in Arda while adding significant improvements to the product’s usability and cohesiveness. We anticipate that this process will take up to six months, so no immediate changes are required, but ultimately, we’re very excited about the opportunity we have to deliver an enhanced user experience to our customers while also making the product more powerful.

It is our hope that you’ll join us on this journey and help us shape the platform into the best product it can be by joining our Customer Advisory Board, or even participating in our upcoming investment round. More details on both can be found below.

Hiring

To execute this plan, we plan to bring on several key team members over the next year. These include:

CTO/Product Development Lead

Customer Success Lead

Marketing Lead

We also plan to create an equity-compensated business advisory board comprised of professionals experience in our industry with a track record of success at established businesses. Roles we’re looking to fill right now include:

Technical Advisor

Marketing Advisor

Fundraising & Investment Strategy

With the development of our goals it has become clear that Arda will be best served by taking on some investment. We are currently raising $150K (please contact us if interested) to start laying the groundwork for building out custom software. We plan to apply to Y Combinator’s 2025 winter cohort, as they’ve

specifically called for⁠

companies making moves in this space (if you know someone at YC, we’d love a warm intro). They write a $500K check which would help grow the team and scale our go-to-market motion. After that, we plan to raise a $2M seed round to further refine the product and rapidly expand customer acquisition.

Intellectual Property Protection

Using a combination of QR-code powered order cards and ML-powered analysis of order velocity to create a flexible pull system for material flow management that can account for changing market and production conditions is an innovative idea that improves upon Kanban in ways that even Toyota seems not to have cracked yet, since they still rely on production leveling to manipulate demand to meet manufacturing constraints. As a result, we will be pursuing intellectual property protection and plan to apply for a patent by the end of this year.

New Customers, Pricing Tiers, and Features

Overview

We committed to being as customer-centric as possible when we started this business. We wanted to cultivate a personal relationship with each of our early customers, so we made a point to both jump on a product demo after you expressed interest, share our personal phone numbers, and even come onsite to install the product when it made sense. We have learned so much from our experiences working with each of you, and we want to continue offering you personalized, founder-led customer support. But we’re only two people, and there’s only so much time in the day. As a result, we’re making a few changes to our customer acquisition strategy, pricing tiers, and feature availability for future customers so that we don’t have to change the level of support we want to give to you, our early customers.

Until we develop custom software, we’re only taking on 15 new customers at the $250/month level

We want to continue offering personalized, founder-led customer service to each of our customers at this price level. In order to do this effectively, we need to limit the number of customers we take on until our software and team can handle more. We’d like these 15 customers to represent a variety of markets so we’ll be capping the seats in each market.

If you know a business that would be a good fit here, please make an intro. We’ll be giving you and them a free month of Arda for a signup.

We’re specifically interested in bringing on veterinarians, ambulatory medical practices, construction business, offices of highly skilled and compensated professionals, composite shops, custom jewelry stores, and cafes/restaurants.

We’re Looking to help two Arda Enterprise customers optimize line-side delivery

We’ve received some interest in Arda from large manufacturers who use SAP for their ERP but want to use Arda to manage line-side-delivery. Int these conversations, we’ve realized that this segment of enterprise production is under-served by software solutions at large, but especially lacks a powerful and easy-to-use tool for optimizing line-side delivery. We believe that this customer group will play an important role in creating and utilizing our VRP product as described above.

We made the $50/month tier easier to use by removing unnecessary functionality

We noticed that most of our $50/month customers were not using a large number of the features that we had built and included in the product, mostly at the request of our $250/month customers. In fact, we were frequently advising our $50/month customers not to use a lot of these features because they didn’t add value at their scale and created unnecessary work and confusion. Further, the inclusion of these features made the product take significantly more computing power and impacted performance. We’ve removed these features, which has made the product up to 3x faster. These features included:

The receiving workflow

Using order cards to trigger internal production rather than external orders

Tying inventory to specific projects and managing those projects using our Project Management tool

Using in-the-weeds production parameters to create Kanban Loops for one item and resupply process with multiple cards in each loop, each of which has its own unique QR code.

Timeline

Development of Custom Software

Pre-Seed Funding

Hiring CTO

Filling Out Initial Pool of $250/Month Customers

Simpler $50/Month Tier

Customer Advisory Board Created

Business Advisory Board Created

Patent Applied For

Acquiring Two Line-Side Delivery Customers

Y Combinator

Launch of Custom Software

Accepting All New Customers

Hiring Customer Success Lead

Hiring Marketing Lead

Series A Funding

2023

2024

2025

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

Development of Custom Software

Pre-Seed Funding

Hiring CTO

Filling Out Initial Pool of $250/Month Customers

Simpler $50/Month Tier

Customer Advisory Board Created

Business Advisory Board Created

Patent Applied For

Acquiring Two Line-Side Delivery Customers

Y Combinator

Launch of Custom Software

Accepting All New Customers

Hiring Customer Success Lead

Hiring Marketing Lead

Series A Funding

Quarter

TodayFit

⁠

Opportunities to Shape Arda’s Future

Investing In Arda

As mentioned above, we’re currently looking to raise $150,000 from a group of friends, family, angel investors, and most importantly, you, our customers. We have already secured $25,000 and have soft-circled another $50,000, so we’re looking for another $75,000 to complete our fundraising round. If you’re interested in learning more about this opportunity, please reach out to us. Having a group of our customers own a part of this business and advise us as we go along this journey is one of our top priorities for this fundraising effort, and getting on board before we take on institutional capital will be the best opportunity to invest in our business.

Join Our Customer Advisory Board

Keeping customer feedback front and center as we continue to grow Arda is our highest priority. In addition to bringing on a few customers as investors, we also want to deeply align our growth and strategy with our customers who don’t end up investing. Toward that end, we’re assembling a Customer Advisory Board which will be comprised of people with varying perspectives to help shape the future of Arda.

Members of the Advisory Board will help shape the business’s overall direction in addition to informing feature development in Arda. The Arda team gets access to your expertise and perspective as the customer, and you get the opportunity to shape our future, as well as early access to all new features and product changes.

Our Ideal Customer Advisory Board Member

Running a company that uses Arda for regular operations

Interested in the continued evolution of Arda’s feature set

Available for a quarterly meeting

Available for shorter, ad-hoc phone calls to discuss specific features

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