Video Script

Hi I’m Uriel Eisen

And I’m Kyle Henson, and we’re Arda’s founding team.

The PROBLEM we’re solving

NO SYSTEM FOR INVENTORY

WASTE 20% OF A TEAM’S TIME

NOT VALUE ADD

I Experienced This When I Started A Mfg Business In 2021

We Tried To Scale Production

Didn’T Have Everything We Needed In Stock

Wasted Hours Running Around The Shop Checking On Supplies, Scrambling When We Missed Something

We Solved This Problem With Handwritten Kanban cards based on Toyota’s production system

This Solved Some Problems But Created New Ones

We Knew When We Were Low

Still Had The Onerous Task Of Creating And Updating Cards As Well As Placing Orders

That’s when I reached out to Kyle to see about getting some help.

Uriel and I worked together on a CMU startup called Rorus and have been close friends ever since. I spent the last 6 years working with private equity funds to help evaluate the go-to-market and product practices of their acquisition targets and develop post acquisition value-creation strategies, which gave me a probably unhealthy love for Excel and low-code/no-code business process automation. When Uriel told me about his issues implementing Kanban, I knew I could help him solve those problems and I created what became the first version of Arda for him to use in his shop. The product ultimately does 3 things:

Helps users easily print physical order cards to place in their inventory

Allows users to action orders within seconds by scanning a QR code, going back to their database, and pushing context-dependent buttons that trigger different actions based on the supply that was scanned. With the click of a button, users can:

Automatically generate purchase orders and email them to their suppliers

Go directly to the product page on a supplier’s website to place an order

Add the item to a cart to be aggregated with other items from the same vendor and combined into one order which can be sent on an automated schedule

Create shopping lists for in-person purchasing

Streamlines receiving to make sure that our clients get what they order and can restart the order card lifecycle by placing the card within their inventory as they replenish their supplies.

After working together to streamline the platform,

Arda ended up saving me 90%

After talking about it on Podcast.

So in January 2024 would people pay?

And they were! In our first week as a business, we had about 7 demos scheduled in a matter of days from a few Instagram posts and a mention on the podcast. So many businesses are experiencing so much pain related to their inventory and ordering that they were eager to pay us their hard-earned money to solve this problem for them. So we created Arda.

The past 8 weeks have been like drinking from a firehose. we’ve generated have 10 paying customers, $5k in revenue, nearly $20k in ARR, and we just finished our first onsite implementation which was a roaring success, saving the company at least $60k in wasted labor and freeing up nearly a quarter million dollars in inventory that they no longer needed to keep in surplus because they now have an automated way to make sure they never run out.

Between giving demos,

talking to potential customers,

dialing in product from feedback,

building the plane as we fly it,

it’s been pretty full-on.

We’ve been totally blown away by the response

more companies we talk to,

the more clear it becomes that inefficiencies

significant pain point, usually

felt most acutely by a business’s founders

highest-skilled employees

Arda is 10x faster and 10x cheaper

than what they’re doing now, making it a no-brainer for many SMBs

We’re each three-time founders who have worked on a CMU startup together before and have highly complimentary skills that make us the perfect duo to create and launch this product. Every time I add new features or make product adjustments, we test them out in Uriel’s shop and keep iterating until we’ve landed on something that makes the product both more powerful while ALSO making it easier to use.

The CMU entrepreneurship community has given us so much over the years; we both wouldn’t be where we are without your support and we’re very grateful to have the opportunity to continue working with you. Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions and hope to hear from you soon.

The billion dollar problem we’re solving is that most business don’t have a system for inventory and order management which can waste up to 20% of a team’s time and is not value-add activity for their customers.

I experienced this problem firsthand when I started a manufacturing business in 2021. When we tried to scale production we ran into issues keeping all the supplies we needed in stock. We’d waste hours running around the shop checking on key supplies, reordering those that were low, then scrambling when we inevitably missed something and ran out.

We solved this problem by implementing hand written Kanban or Order Cards inspired by Toyota. This solved a lot of our problems, but also created new problems. Now we knew when we were running low, but we were still faced with the onerous task of creating and updating hand written cards, as well as the laborious task of actually placing the orders.

That’s when I reached out to Kyle to see about getting some help.