How ARTA CEO Adam Fields grew ARTA to $10.4M revenue and 10 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is adam fields he's the founder and ceo of arta arda the shopping cart for collectibles before joining the company he was vp at artspace.com where he where he became hyper aware of the difficulties and high friction nature of transactions for collectibles and unique objects today arda is used by market leaders in the collectible space across auctions merchants and marketplaces worldwide he holds a ba from the university of wisconsin-madison and though he grew up in downtown chicago he has called new york city home for the past 10 years adam you're ready to take it to the top let's do it all right so what is what does it mean to be a shopping cart for collectibles yeah so the whole idea here is that the the collectible ecosystem in our mind is really one of the last segments of retail to be transformed by the internet and one of the core reasons for that is because the high friction nature around the transactions so what we're really trying to do is provide marketplaces auctions and merchants in the collectible and high item value space so art furniture antiques julia jewelry baseball cards etc the ability to build their businesses on our digital infrastructure and what that really means is it allows these sellers to transact easier so that you can combine uh an item with the cost of shipping uh to have a more contained transaction it allows customer or sellers rather to sell and reach their customers globally by automating and scaling their fulfillment function and then what that does too is opens up post-purchase visibility and order tracking for all stakeholders would you call yourself a marketplace then or no we started as a marketplace and pivoted pretty hard away from a marketplace more towards an integrated option as we saw people needing an end-to-end solution um so we really have an integrated api that allows an online platform um to go from click to inquire uh to click to buy so who's paying you then the sellers of the art or the buyers of the art uh well it's it's much more than than art obviously um but it's really a b2b2c uh type transaction so we're integrating with a merchant directly an auction house directly uh or a marketplace directly um they then can surface shipping costs uh automate their entire checkout and fulfillment process and stay in touch with their customers once orders have shipped and have been on on their way so we're being paid for our software by the merchant or the seller and then on the transaction we're taking some um some margin um services uh whether that's uh shipping uh or insurance yeah and these i mean you have a big brand using folks like celebs for example use your tool to manage their their you know both sellers buyers transactions the whole the whole back-end api yeah exactly um you know so we're having some pretty large customers and enterprises building their digital businesses on our infrastructure so it's it's an exciting time interesting okay so tell me a little bit i mean how should we think about what these customers pay you on average per month to use the tool and what do you price against is it is it number of unique skus processed or something else yeah so we charge based on api calls we have a free model uh for non-integrated customers which is mostly for smaller teams or folks without technical capabilities for larger teams that are trying to really build a custom solution to automate their entire flow um we do charge based on usage and that usage is both on api calls and then seats as they start to scale up how many api calls can someone use this for like for free so what a thousand a month is free or something different so we don't offer any any api api calls um for free um the less the less integrated you are the less you pay you can ship a million items a month um if you're doing it on your own if you're really trying to to to get a little bit more uh automated with your workflows uh trying to optimize your team and overhead um we then try to transfer some of that value onto our technology whether that's automating pre-sell estimates um automating emails and post-sell communications um we charge against a variety of calls on pricing uh tracking visibility uh et cetera okay and i want to go back adam and get more of your back story here sort of how you got into this we sort of jumped right into current state of of things but you learned a lot early on you moved away from marketplaces but before we go there i mean so what's sort of the sweet spot right like what's the what's the average customer going to pay you per month to use the technology the api technology api technology if you're a pre-launch customer and you're trying to get to market faster and don't really want to have to build out all this infrastructure hire all the internal teams et cetera it'll start at a couple hundred dollars a month um if you're a a large team that might have 25 to 50 people and are really trying to change uh what your overhead and some costs are um that'll run higher um the more the more you ship the more you transact the more you'll pay but the less on a unit level um and and so we're quite well aligned uh and and we we want to do well when our customers do well adam i just have no context that i don't know the space at all what is a team of 50 people how many api calls might they be making per month it depends on how a customer would utilize a utilized api i mean we're really sitting in a pre-sale transaction and post sale um so sometimes an auction or a marketplace might want to show their customers what it would cost to ship and fulfill um before they buy something to try to build trust uh and create a more seamless transaction sometimes people might want to just fold it right into the transaction um themselves to make for a more seamless checkout so it really depends on how customers want to orient their businesses but we do see a pretty clear ratio between you know calls uh two transactions that we try to articulate to our customers as we go through the purchase and evaluation process interesting so so what is uh before we again we'll go to the box for here in a second but like i guess in november how many total api calls did you process are we talking like hundreds of millions or like a million or like ten thousand no no no we're talking more in the in in the ten thousand range we we launched our our new product um in q2 um and we launched with a pretty um you know focused set of customers you mentioned a few of them and are really starting to grow with them month over month we launched in in april uh and it pretty much doubled um you know a quarter of a quarter uh since then in terms of number of api calls in terms of overall revenue uh oh revenue rate yeah um that's great so so and just be i mean one of the things i like to do before going into causes just look at founders pricing pages and go do these guys have a shot just based off pricing alone the highest ndr companies today they like they almost always have this number of api calls right that's the utility based metric and the number of seats and if you can align value directly to your product value directly to like the subbies of the world i got to imagine your net dollar retention is just going to be through the freaking roof if you're doing a good job for your customers i think that's right and i think that's also i like to say the problem is the opportunity and the opportunity is the problem that this kind of collectibles market is so antiquated and really the struggle here is trying to find customers that have recognized they need to digitize their businesses um so trying to have people understand what an api is how they can integrate it um into their business and see the benefits not just for themselves but for their customers too is really kind of why the the the timing um is starting to align uh in the market interesting okay take me to the backstory here you mentioned you just launched this in april but when did you write the first line of code for the platform the back story here is that i previously as you mentioned was part of the founding team of a marketplace called artspace.com which was trying to make collectibles uh more accessible to a broader audience and really there saw how high prediction and difficult these transactions were but also how difficult it was to build these types of businesses online so we saw that there was a huge fragmentation across the vendor base that can allow sellers to connect with the vendor to ship these items again we're dealing with collectible and high value items this isn't just that i need a shipping label here you go this is more specialized packing insurance and services um uh to get from point a to point b um so there's not really a consolidated solution so what we really saw is that if you can build a consolidated solution to to to connect uh merchants uh or sellers with those um specialized service providers all of a sudden you're taking a ton of the legwork uh out of the entire process so as a marketplace we really were aligning towards that over time we kind of saw well people people want to connect with providers but they also want a full integrated automated and scalable end-to-end solution that can really open up these digital anytime so i'm just jumping timelines all right so you left art space back in 2014 right and jumped right into ardo so 2014 is sort of like first line of code i guess first experimentation started back then 20 mid 2015 was first line of code in the uh for the marketplace model um and then we transitioned right before kovid we said you know what this...