Co-Founder + Chief Brand Officer at Obvi | Forbes Featured

Ankit has for most of his career carried a renowned achievement to which his work continues to add to that achievement year after year. Ankit has gone on to craft the vision, brand elements and even build brand assets for nearly 20+ brands in his 7 year tenure as a designer, which has amassed to nearly 9-figures in sales for all the brands combined.

Ankit’s impact on the different brands he has creatively directed has been one that is everlasting, but his impact on the industry is what sets him apart to be a creative director with a lot of recognition behind his work. Ankit’s work with Obvi today brings him to an elevated role where he not only gets to drive the creative vision of the brand but also manage the voice and story of the brand. Ankit’s day to day may encompass creating the brand assets for Obvi, but his long term vision is to tell Obvi’s story to every potential consumer through his work.

Ankit Patel

I've spent years optimizing conversion rates. On March 24th, I'm optimizing my right hook.

I'm stepping into the ring at Shoptalk Las Vegas as part of Justin Silver's eCommerce Fight For Charity - and I couldn't be more terrified.

This event is bringing the eCommerce industry together to raise $1,000,000 for some incredible organizations:
🎗 American Cancer Society
💧 charity: water
🏥 Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières - USA

Tuesday night in Vegas: unlimited food, open bar, and eComm marketers punching each other in the face. If you're at Shoptalk, come watch me either land a clean jab or embarrass myself in front of everyone I respect professionally. Maybe both.

See you in the ring Nadeem Abboud 🥊

Dan Melnick

We partner with your brand and help you increase profit margins by 25% with personalized AI and Blockchain solutions.

I’ve been in the entrepreneurship world since 2011, first building my own businesses, then helping others grow theirs. In 2019, I expanded into software development, creating the tools and systems founders need to scale.

In 2022, I launched Zing with a simple vision: to help brands scale by providing the marketing and software development support they need. Flexible, results driven, and truly collaborative.

Since then, we’ve helped brands like:

Ferguson Farms, achieved 100 percent growth in just one year

Joeydolls, boosted ROAS by 500 percent in four months

Eight Hours, increased ROAS by 69 percent in four months

Worked alongside Noah Kagan at AppSumo

Our clients say it best:

“I was impressed. I almost never make these testimonials, but Dan and Zing are the team I will keep recommending.” – Noah Kagan, AppSumo

“It works really well to have an in-house team we can scale up and down with.” – Daniel Black, Glass Media

“With Zing, it’s good news all around and above all else we’ve got happy customers.” – Mike Ferguson, Ferguson Farms

We also host a podcast, Think Big with Dan and Qasim, where we share insights on business, growth, and building something bigger. Check it out on YouTube.

If you’re looking to scale your brand, I’d love to connect and explore how we can help you grow.

CEO & Co-Founder

I'm heading to Expo West in Anaheim next week.

If you're going to be there and want to connect, shoot me a DM. Always good to meet people building interesting things.

See you there!

CEO & Co-Founder @ Zing | 100+ Brands Scaled | Marketing + Dev That Unlocks Growth Systems

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Colonel Sanders was 62 years old when he started KFC.

62. Not 22. Not 32. Not some kid with a laptop and no mortgage.

He had already failed at dozens of businesses. He was living on Social Security checks and sleeping in his car while pitching his chicken recipe to restaurants. Door after door slammed in his face. Over 1,000 rejections before a single yes.

Experts told him he was too old. That the restaurant business was saturated. That his secret blend of 11 herbs and spices was not special enough.

He did not hear any of that.

He just kept driving. And pitching. And driving. And pitching.

By 73, he was a millionaire. By 80, he was a household name. He died at 90 with over 600 KFC locations bearing his face.

Your age is not your ceiling. Your calendar is not your constraint.

The only expiration date that matters is the one you print on your own ambition.

The best time to start was yesterday. The second best time? When you finally decide the voice in your head saying "too late" is just a liar you have outgrown.

What are you waiting for permission to begin?

I have already lost 12 pounds working with a coach who is helping me with my diet, workout plan, and step tracking.

Most people don't achieve their goals because they live in the land of "should" and "want."

I should work out today. I want to lose weight. I should eat better.

Tony Robbins talks about this simple principle that changed everything for me. Change the way you frame your mind. You WILL do that. Not should. Not want. Will.

That one word shift changes the entire game.

It is about having higher standards for yourself. Michael Jordan was the best not because he was obsessed with beating everyone else. He was obsessed with beating himself. Every practice, every game, every shot, he was competing against his own standard.

Most entrepreneurs understand this in business but forget it everywhere else. You hire the best developers, the best marketers, the best operators to keep your company standards high. But when it comes to your own health, energy, and performance, you try to wing it alone and wonder why you are stuck.

I hired a coach because I got tired of my own excuses. Someone who tracks my steps, checks my meals, and holds me to a standard I was not holding myself to.

12 pounds down. More energy. Clearer mind. Better decisions at work.

Where in your life are you accepting "should" and "want" when you need to upgrade to "will"?

"Work from home" is the biggest productivity scam in modern business.

I learned this the hard way.

Dated a woman who had it all figured out. Her WFH strategy was simple: leave the laptop running so her status stayed green. Then nap. Run errands. Binge shows. Occasionally type something if someone pinged her.

6 hours of "work" daily. Maybe 90 minutes of actual output.

She wasn't an outlier. She was the norm hiding in plain sight.

Here's what WFH advocates won't tell you:

1. Kids at home? You're not working. You're parenting with Slack open. Those two things are incompatible and pretending otherwise is delusion.

2. The "freedom" to do laundry between meetings isn't productivity. It's fragmentation. Your brain doesn't switch contexts that cleanly.

3. Accountability evaporates without eye contact. Not because people are lazy, but because humans are social animals who perform for audiences. Remove the audience, performance drops. This isn't controversial. It's psychology.

4. The best performers want to be around other driven people. Energy is contagious. So is mediocrity.

At Zing, our Pakistan dev team is in-office 5 days a week. Not because we love tradition. Because we've tested both models and the office wins on every metric that matters: speed, quality, collaboration, growth.

You want balance? Schedule it. Protect it. But don't confuse "being home" with "being productive."

Real work requires focus. And focus requires boundaries that most home environments simply don't have.

Twenty years ago, the White Sox won the World Series.

I was a kid in Chicago watching every pitch, convinced I'd be on that field someday. That was the dream. Play for them. Win for them. Be one of them.

I never made it to the diamond. Life had other plans. But that team never left my head.

Now my goal is different. I want to buy them.

People hear that and laugh. Sports franchise valuations are insane. The numbers don't work. The timing is wrong. I've heard every version of "that's cute, but no."

Here's what they miss.

I started my first business in 2011. Sold one company. Built Zing from scratch and scaled it exponentially. Every year we're adding zeros, adding talent, adding leverage. I'm not pretending I'm writing that check tomorrow. But I'm also done pretending the math stays impossible forever.

Jews make up 2% of the US population. We account for over 30% of MLB owners. That isn't luck. That's a pattern of people who were told "you can't" and built the leverage to say "watch me."

The same kid who thought he could play professional baseball grew up to build actual companies. The leap from "founder" to "owner" looks massive until you realize it's just the next inning of the same game.

You have to think big. Not for motivation posts. Because the alternative is shrinking your vision to match other people's comfort levels.

I don't know when. I don't know exactly how. But I know why.

That 2005 team taught me something about Chicago, about loyalty, about long shots paying off. Someone's going to own that franchise next. Someone's going to shape its future.

Why not me?

I interviewed Glass-Media’s CEO Daniel Black about why his team kept saying no to revenue.

"Let me get back to you." That phrase ended countless sales calls.

Not because clients needed time. Because Glass Media couldn't deliver what they were being asked for.

Daniel told me they were turning down software projects left and right. Middleware. Firmware. Complex integrations with retail sensors and legacy systems.

They had creative and hardware locked down. But technical execution? They had to find vendors, negotiate terms, and pray someone could deliver before they could promise anything.

Fortune 500 retail brands walked. Revenue that should have been theirs disappeared.

So we became their dev team.

Not multiple vendors to manage. One technical execution partner that scales with their pipeline.

Now their sales teams present timelines, costs, and comprehensive plans in the first meeting. No developers required. No "let me check with our dev team" delays.

Client communication streamlined across IT, visual merchandising, store design, and business intelligence. One partner, not fragmented chaos.

Daniel's update: "We don't say no anymore. We know exactly how long it takes to pull together a brief, timeline, and plan."

The software projects they used to decline? Now driving their fastest growth.

Sometimes your revenue ceiling isn't market demand.

It's your technical capacity to commit.

I run a dev shop. I probably shouldn't tell you this.

Last month, a founder friend fired his $130K/month agency after they took 7 weeks to build a checkout flow.

We rebuilt it in 4 days for $6K.

The difference? Claude Code and Cursor.

While legacy agencies bill hourly for "sprint ceremonies," AI-native teams ship entire features between breakfast and lunch.

Here's the 10-minute qualification system I wish more founders used on us:

The AI Stack Audit

"Do you use Claude Code or Cursor as your primary workflow?"
"How do you validate AI-generated code before production?"
Red flag: "We use Copilot sometimes" = they're billing 2019 rates for 2025 speed

The Velocity Test

Fixed-price pilot. 2 weeks. One feature.
No hourly billing. No scope creep.
Can't ship in 14 days? You just dodged a $100K bullet

The Ship-or-Nothing Scorecard

Daily 5-min async updates
Weekly demos with working code
No pay without shipped features
Most agencies fail at least one. That's the filter working.

The 5% that pass? They're the only ones worth your budget.

I built a 12-page guide with the exact scripts and red-flag checklist.

Comment "DEV" and I'll send it.

The tariff chaos is exhausting. One day it's 10%, the next it's 25%, then it's paused, then it's back on. The news cycle spins and founders freeze, waiting for clarity that isn't coming.

Here's the split I'm watching in real time.

Some founders refresh Politico at 2am, rewiring their supply chain every 48 hours, treating every headline like a personal attack on their margin. Others lock in domestic suppliers, renegotiate terms, and bake the uncertainty directly into their pricing.

Your customer doesn't care about your tariff problem. They care about your product. Price it like a business that plans to survive.

The founders who will win this year stopped waiting for policy clarity weeks ago. They make moves with 60% information. They build margin buffers instead of margin prayers.

What's the move you're making this week that you were waiting for "clarity" to justify?

Losing $30,000 was the best business lesson I ever bought.

The app failed. Not because of low effort but because nobody actually wanted it.

I hired too fast. Spent before validating. Built before proving demand.

That failure taught me how to hire properly, when to sunset, and why revenue matters from day one.

We have worked with dozens of 7 and 8 figure ecommerce brands across the globe. From DTC darlings to quiet giants nobody talks about on Twitter.

They all have one thing in common. Their tech stack is locked in tight.

Not bloated. Not fancy for the sake of it. Just ruthlessly effective.

I compiled the top 5 Shopify apps these brands actually pay for and rely on daily. The ones that moved the needle on revenue, retention, and operations.

Not the apps with the prettiest landing pages. The ones that show up in real P&L conversations.

A few patterns that kept showing up:

The best brands treat their stack like a product team, not a shopping spree. Every tool has a specific job. If it doesn't directly tie to a metric they track weekly, it is gone.

They pay for quality over quantity. One $500/month app that automates a $50K problem beats ten $29 plugins that create work.

Integration hygiene matters more than feature lists. The fastest growing brands we see audit their data flow quarterly. Bad connections between apps silently kill conversion and mess up attribution.

They test ruthlessly but commit fully. Six month trial periods, then decide. No "we will get to it eventually" tools sitting on the balance sheet.

The list includes apps for email, reviews, subscriptions, analytics, and one that handles a painful operational piece most founders ignore until it explodes.

I will gate this soon.

Comment "tech" below and I will send you the list.

Global e-commerce just crossed 20% of total retail sales for the first time in history.

Here is the part most founders miss: the US is still lagging at just 18-19%.

Compare that to the UK at 28-31%, China at 26-27%, or South Korea pushing 30%. These markets are not anomalies. They are previews.

Every time someone tells you e-commerce is saturated, show them that gap. The US is not ahead of the curve. We are still climbing it.

The UK and South Korea prove consumers will happily buy 30% of their purchases online. China shows us even higher penetration is possible. The US is barely past the halfway mark to those levels.

There is still massive runway for DTC brands, Shopify operators, and omnichannel plays. The pie is growing faster than most people realize.

We are not in a mature market. We are in an adolescent one.

When US e-commerce eventually crosses 50%, the brands that built the infrastructure, the trust, and the customer relationships today will own that market.

The question is not whether the opportunity exists. It is whether you are building for the market we have now, or the one that is coming.

What percentage of your total addressable market is still buying offline?

You can fake nice for a while.

But who you are when no one is watching always finds its way out.

I have been building businesses since 2011. Sold one. Co-founded Zing and grew it working with founders every day. Here is what I have learned about reputation:

It is not built in keynote speeches or networking events.

It is built in the Slack threads where you could have been sharp but chose to be kind. The vendor calls where you could have squeezed harder but paid fairly. The team moments where you could have taken credit but passed it down.

3 truths about character in business:

The small interactions compound
That junior person you treated well? They will be a VP someday.
That struggling vendor you paid on time? They will remember when you are in a crunch.

Entrepreneurship is a small world
The person you dismiss today could be your partner, investor, or competitor tomorrow.
Bridges burn fast. Building them takes longer, but they last.

Hard work without an audience is the only kind that matters
Anyone can hustle when the cameras are on.
The real operators grind at 11 PM when no one is posting about it.

You do not need to be perfect. You need to be consistent.

Be respectful when it costs you nothing. Work hard when no one is clapping. Treat people well when there is no upside.

That is the work that holds up when everything else shakes.

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The Battle

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Ankit Patel's LinkedIn Performance

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