VentureBridge Application

Arda Pitch

Founder 1 Additional Information [If Applicable] (Include skills, experiences, why they are personally excited about building this startup and anything else you would like to include.)

After graduating from CMU, I founded a an Alphalap-backed music tech company called Nebulus and later joined AlphaLab Gear-backed Rorus as employee #1. Between then and now, I've spent the majority of my career doing consulting work for large and mid-cap private equity funds, either working with acquisition teams and acquisition targets’ C-Suite during exclusivity to evaluate the target's product and go-to-market practices, or working on executive-led deal origination and network expansion projects.

While I really loved learning about the world through the lens of 75+ software company acquisitions, I decided that career wasn't right for me and pivoted into software sales in healthcare. I was given a lot of responsibility and essentially no resources with the mandate to create $1.5m in new business in the northeast. From there, my love of business process automation truly flourished, and I used low-code/no-code platforms to develop a bespoke and deeply customized CRM that made me about 15-20x more productive and allowed me to land marquee clients like Mount Sinai and Cleveland Clinic. Uriel and I have remained close friends since Rorus, and after hearing some of the issues he was having while attempting to grow Austere Manufacturing, we created what became Arda merely as an attempt to help his shop become more efficient.

I’m personally amped about Arda because I’ve always wanted to start another business, but lacked conviction about an idea. Experiencing significant market pull, having most of the people we talk to immediately understand the problem and want to buy our solution, and getting a tremendous response from a few test-the-waters Instagram posts has given me the conviction I lacked. Three months ago, I didn’t think I’d be starting a business, and after wholeheartedly pursuing Arda for about six weeks, I never would’ve guessed that we’d have ~5k in revenue from 10+ customers and too much market interest to handle from a very minimal go-to-market effort. I’m thrilled to be working with Uriel again, and I’m continuously astounded by the degree to which Arda is the Goldilocks solution for so many businesses that have been struggling with this problem and desperately seeking an answer. I can’t wait to re-engage with the CMU community that has given me so much and I’m really thrilled about the possibility of working with Venturebridge to help Arda formalize from, “wow, I think we actually might have something here,” into the success story I know we can be.

I co-founded Rorus going into senior year at CMU which launched a career of founding and working with businesses of every scale to develop products and scale manufacturing. I’ve developed and prototyped autonomous helicopters, robotic boats, spacesuits for NASA, and many things in between. I attribute a lot of my success to my willingness to get my hands dirty. Where many only have a theoretical understanding of manufacturing and production methods, I have spent years sewing, welding, CNC machining, working with clay, glass, ceramic, casting, and even spent years working in production having machined and painted thousands of parts. My deep knowledge of manufacturing techniques coupled with my hands on approach to prototyping and manufacturing has allowed me to succeed in delivering practical and innovative products time and time again.

I led a team to design an open-source face-shield at the beginning of the Covid 19 pandemic to help alleviate PPE shortages. Our design was the #1 google result for open-source face-shields and was produced by over 60 groups around the world and protected millions of clinicians. The success of the design over other available designs was that it was efficiently manufacturable with a wide array of manufacturing techniques from laser cutting, to die cutting, to drag knife cutting while also exceeding protection standards for medical use.

Inspired by my work on spacesuits and my experience with high-volume manufacturing, I founded Austere Manufacturing. Austere mfg designs and manufactures award-winning, high-performance buckles for the outdoor industry.

During my time working on austere, I discovered lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System and have spent the past three years reading every textbook I can get my hands on. I’ve been implementing continuous improvement and lean manufacturing best practices at Austere Manufacturing resulting in a 600% increase in production which I discuss with my cohost on Incremental - the continuous improvement podcast.

When I was twelve I started telling people that “I am all about efficiency” and that passion has not let up. Co-founding Arda feels like the culmination of all my experiences. My deep passion for lean theory coupled with years of experience in manufacturing gave me the Insites to work with Kyle to build the ideal inventory system for SMBs. I have always been super excited about developing new systems to boost efficiency and Arda gives me the opportunity to work with many businesses to understand their business and deliver a solution that saves them many hours every week. This is my dream job and is a perfect fit for my passion and experience! There are SO many businesses out there that need a better solution to inventory and I’m so excited to help those teams reduce waste and become more efficient!

Working with VentureBridge would be a real full circle. CMU’s startup ecosystem launched my entrepreneurship journey and it would be so great to have the support to boost the growth of Arda.

Please provide a brief summary of your startup. *

Arda is an inventory and order management software platform that builds on Toyota’s world-leading card-based kanban system by adding an innovative and easy-to-use digital back-end that allows our customers to spend 80-90% less time managing their inventory and placing orders. At large, Arda enables users to accomplish 3 things:

we spent three years using traditional kanban and struggling with the

Arda makes it extremely easy to print color-coded, data-rich, QR-code-powered physical order cards. These cards are then placed within stacks of inventory such that as supplies are organically depleted, employees encounter the card before they deplete the supply past a minimum quantity (e.g. putting a card between the 20th and 21st in a stack of 100 paper plates). That card then triggers a reorder of the supply.

Print an order card and place it in your inventory between the 75th and 76th paper plate. Continue to use paper plates as you normally would (no need to scan each paper plate out as you go, like a typical ERP), but when you use the 76th paper plate and encounter the card in your stack, you know it’s time to reorder paper plates.

Completing the inventory loop, the third part of Arda is a receiving workflow that integrates with the FedEx, UPS, and USPS APIs to bring real-time shipping updates to our customers. This both ensures that our customers get what they ordered and also that they restock the item appropriately, replacing the card between the 75th and 76th paper plate in their replenished inventory so that the cycle repeats iteself.

Analytics-based automation - by creating enabling workflows (like placing and receiving orders) we’ve gathered significant data about our customers operations and can offer services above and beyond inventory and order management. Placing order and receiving orders through the system allows us to automatically calculate lead times for items. Generating packing lists for mid-prodution, third-party steps in the manufacturing process gave us the idea to add a “preceding item” category to each item so that manufacturers know what items went into the creation of their finished product. Because we now know the business’s value chain and lead times, we can accurately create business process maps that identify internal and external bottlenecks. All as a happy accident, second-nature steps our customers are taking to map their processes and gain efficiency become the engine that drives a sophisticated analytics machine.

How much funding have you raised and from whom?

We have grown completely organically on customer revenue.

How do you see your startup growing in the next 3,6,12,24 months

We've worked on Arda for about 3 months total and 6 weeks in earnest. A few Instagram posts later, we have a significant demand that has taken a lot of energy and been our overwhelming focus. We’re hoping that VentureBridge will help us sit down and gain much of this intentionality regarding the future of our business, but here’s a broad outline of what I see the next 3-24 months looking like for Arda.

Next 3 months: Formalizing and Stabilizing:

•Get help

•We could benefit significantly from regular mentorship and guidance, as many of our business practices are very immature since we’ve mostly been in reactionary mode.

•Create a scalable go-to-market practice and make our lowest price tier self-serve

•Right now, anyone can book a demo on our website and Uriel and I both spend an hour walking through the product with each prospect and ultimately setting them up with their own instance. This has been a fantastic way to get continuous exposure to our customers as we’ve been getting set up, and we believe that it’s still beneficial for us to continue selling in such a hands-on manner for the next several months, but as we grow, we need to focus our time elsewhere should make our $50/month tier totally self-serve .

•Create a customer onboarding workflow

•One of our learnings has been that getting started with our product requires a decent amount of work. Customers need to create their database of supplies, print cards and likely reorganize part of their inventory. Uriel and I have mostly been doing that work for customers, either by importing their data, going onsite and physically changing their inventory practices, or virtually walking our customers through how to organize certain areas, set up the system, and print cards. However, we need to figure out a scalable way to get customers up the implementation hill.

•Do at least one more onsite implementation

•Our onsite implementation at Rossmonster was a fantastic learning experience that resulted in tremendous improvements to the product and a deeply loyal customer. We are keen to do the next one, and need to find a few customers who are interested in having us come onsite to overhaul their inventory and order management.

Next 6 Months: Conquer a niche, Expand into Another Space, and Test our upper bounds.

Get help

We could benefit significantly from regular mentorship and guidance, as many of our business practices are very immature since we’ve mostly been in reactionary mode.

Create a scalable go-to-market practice and make our lowest price tier self-serve

Right now, anyone can book a demo on our website and Uriel and I both spend an hour walking through the product with each prospect and ultimately setting them up with their own instance. This has been a fantastic way to get continuous exposure to our customers as we’ve been getting set up, and we believe that it’s still beneficial for us to continue selling in such a hands-on manner for the next several months, but as we grow, we need to focus our time elsewhere should make our $50/month tier totally self-serve .

Create a customer onboarding workflow

One of our learnings has been that getting started with our product requires a decent amount of work. Customers need to create their database of supplies, print cards and likely reorganize part of their inventory. Uriel and I have mostly been doing that work for customers, either by importing their data, going onsite and physically changing their inventory practices, or virtually walking our customers through how to organize certain areas, set up the system, and print cards. However, we need to figure out a scalable way to get customers up the implementation hill.

Do at least one more onsite implementation

Our onsite implementation at Rossmonster was a fantastic learning experience that resulted in tremendous improvements to the product and a deeply loyal customer. We are keen to do the next one, and need to find a few customers who are interested in having us come onsite to overhaul their inventory and order management.

Additionally, we want to Test/Understand the scale at which businesses begin to look towards traditional ERP platforms like SAP/Oracle. We know that our sweet spot lies within smaller-cap businesses that those companies likely aren’t very interested in serving, bet we absolutely know that we we can change some customers significantly more money and further define our target customer in contrast to the groups who scale into cumbersome Oracle and SAP implementations, while developing a much more sophisticated go-to-market approach including the creation of a self-serve spin-up model with onboarding and training materials for at least our $50/month customers.

Next 12 Months: Fundraising, Proprietary Software, Expansion

Raise a seed round/series A

After having proven out a successful marketing and onboarding motion that acquires customers without founder intervention, we aim to seek funding in early 2025 to finance a larger marketing push, hire a customer success manager, marketing director, and likely hire key sales talent to expand within the “Enterprise” medium-sized manufacturing space depending on how our initial foray into that space is received, and develop proprietary software.

Build Proprietary Software

Kyle built the first version of Arda using a low-code/no-code platform called Coda. We are now on V5 of the product and it’s gotten both significantly simpler and extremely more powerful, incorporating a ton of feedback from our customers. When we spin up a new customer, we copy our demo environment, delete the example data, and share that document with the customer in a private folder, inviting them to the Arda workspace on Coda.

Coda is a fantastic platform and has a lot of advantages, but the two primary benefits to Arda are that its relational database structure allows us to iterate and build new features very, very quickly, and its pricing model allows us to onboard as many customers as we like while still only paying $35/month for Kyle’s one license (Coda charges per ”Doc Maker” and allows admins to invite an infinite number of “Editors” to their workspace. Editors can change values, add rows to tables, press buttons, and otherwise interact freely within the system, but cannot make overarching changes to its structure, like adding new tables or editing formulas). Unless something changes, we will likely be continuing to run this business on Coda through 2024.

However, our ultimate goal is to create our own software platform and expand beyond some of Coda’s limitations while mitigating the platform risk of being 100% reliant on a third-party platform for our product development. After proving out a self-serve, automated marketing motion and gaining enough customer traction to very confidently claim product-market fit, we will either hire a few developers or outsource product development to a third-party software shop.

Building our own platform will also allow us to create more sophisticated and advanced features to serve the needs of the “Enterprise” medium-sized manufacturing business that we’re working with the consulting group to explore. The huge advantage to this is that those customers are willing to pay between $1k and $4k per month for this product. Our goal would be to have a proprietary software platform developed and rolled out to all of our customers by the end of 2025.

Invest in the go-to-market motion that we proved out in 2024

A large portion of the capital that we’ve raised will be spent on customer acquisition. Our goal here is to expand aggressively into the niches that we explored in H2 2024, depending on the reception we get from those segments, and quickly gain market share with those targets while continuing to expand further within our bread-and-butter segments (van retrofitters and machine shops). This expansion should allow us to reach our goal of $500m ARR by the end of 2025.

Next 24 Months: Prove out our proprietary software and expand into higher-paying customers now that we will be able to develop the sophisticated features that they require

Potentially fundraise again, depending on our 2025 traction

Expand the team significantly so that we can support enterprise customers with account managers while also providing customer success resources to our lower-tier customers

Continue to refine and invest in our go-to-market motion to accelerate our growth

continue to push the upper bounds of what our solution can deliver with an eye towards being acquired by a legacy ERP platform to bring our SMB+ customer base under their wing with a modern and accessible product.

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