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 🥊

eCommerce enthusiast | ex-Bigblue | 👇 Follow for daily tips: your brand from 1 to 10M€ in revenue (Detective Box, ROWSE...)

Back in 2022 I was media buying for ecommerce brands.

This where I discovered the industry's hidden growth barrier.

It wasn't poor targeting or insufficient budgets holding brands back. It was the relentless demand for fresh creative assets that no freelancer or in-house team could satisfy.

I watched promising campaigns crash after initial success because creative production couldn't keep pace with testing needs. Designers got overwhelmed. Performance suffered. Growth stalled.

This frustration led me to create Statiq - a design subscription service built specifically for high-growth ecommerce brands.

Our approach is refreshingly simple:
- 100+ designs monthly
- 72-hour turnarounds
- Performance-focused creatives

We've delivered over 20,000 designs for brands spending $100K+/month on ads, helping them match their creative output requirement without expanding their internal teams.

On LinkedIn, I share my journey scaling Statiq and the insights gained from working with the fastest-growing ecommerce brands in the industry like AG1, Jones Road Beauty and HexClad.

Follow me.

Simon Robert

For two years, I couldn't get a weekend off without feeling like I was losing.

Every hour I wasn't working felt like debt. I founded Statiq at 25, a performance design agency that produces 9,000+ ads a month for DTC brands, and somewhere in building it, I stopped being able to separate the two.

A bad month meant I was failing as a person, and a good month meant I was allowed to relax.

Compared to my friends, I'm professionally ahead. Personally, I'm not so sure. That's not a humble brag, it's what happens when you spend two years unable to be fully present anywhere that isn't your company.

What I've learned the past few months is that when your identity lives inside your company, you fill every gap with noise: music, podcasts, grabbing the phone the second there's a moment of stillness. Not exactly because you're busy, but because silence is where you'd have to figure out who you are outside of it.

The work lately has been letting that silence back in: no phone before 11:00am, walking without AirPods, sitting through a movie without checking my phone.
Statiq having a bad month still hits me harder than anyone else on the team. It probably always will, but it doesn't have to be the only thing that defines me.

That's the difference.

CEO @Statiq | Performance design agency | Clients include AG1, HexClad, Jones Road Beauty & 100+ more

I'm on a plane to Argentina right now. First time I've ever booked a flight with no meeting on the other end.

Last year I had an intercontinental flight every single month. A conference I couldn't miss, a prospect worth flying for, a team issue I told myself needed me there in person. 

By the end of 2025 I'd been exhausted for six months and genuinely hadn't noticed.

This year I spent an entire month without boarding a plane. Not even for a weekend. I stayed in Mexico City with the people I actually wanted to see. That month did more for my clarity than any trip I took last year.

That difference took me longer to notice than it should have.

This flight is different. Jules, my co-founder and best friend since we were five, is sitting next to me. We built Statiq together: a performance design agency that produces 9,000+ ads a month for DTC brands. 

We're flying to Buenos Aires to meet our Argentina team for the first time. Not because the calendar required it. Because they've carried us through end of year campaigns, holiday rushes and Valentine's Day. Showing up is the only thing that covers that.

​​We're staying 15 days because anything less isn't worth it. Jet lag takes two or three days to settle on arrival, and the return costs the same. Less than that and you're spending most of the trip in recovery, not actually present.

But there are people in Mexico City I won't see for fifteen days. A year ago I wouldn't have registered that as a cost, I was too busy calculating what I was gaining from every trip to notice what I was leaving behind.

I'm learning to notice what I'm trading.

No alternative text description for this image

I made a decision this year that's costing us clients every month. I'm not reversing it.

At Statiq we produce 9,000+ ads a month for DTC brands, and for a long time the model was simple: the concept comes from the client, we execute it. Clean, fast, high approval rate.

Six months ago I discovered that was also the fastest way to become obsolete.

The only thing standing between us and being replaced was a designer. The moment someone decides to hire one in-house, we're out. So we made a call that made some clients uncomfortable: Statiq doesn't wait for your brief anymore.

What that means in practice: we come to you with the idea already formed. Not a cleaner version of what's running. A concept that didn't exist before we built it, sourced from patterns we see across hundreds of DTC brands and what's winning on Meta right now. The client doesn't need to show up with the idea anymore. We do.

Some clients wanted execution, so they moved on. For the ones staying, there's real friction: our concepts don't always match what they were expecting, there's a back-and-forth we're still figuring out, and we're oscillating between the old process and the new one. That's uncomfortable on both sides.

I used to play basketball. A free throw shooter hitting 8 out of 10 who wants to reach 9 has to rebuild their entire process from scratch. While rebuilding, they drop to 6. That's not failure, that's the price of the move.

We're at 6 right now, rebuilding the process that gets the right idea in front of the right brand before anything goes to production. I'm not rushing out of it.

The agencies waiting for briefs will keep getting them, until AI does it cheaper. The only thing that's actually hard to replace is the idea that didn't exist before we had it.

That's the only version of Statiq worth building.

For two years, anger was my competitive advantage.

I grew up wanting out. Out of my situation, out of where I came from. Some things in my childhood made me a rebel: someone who needed to break things to feel like he was going somewhere. 

That translated into 120-hour weeks, a 7 figure company built from scratch at 25, projects moving because I refused to slow down.

I didn't realize I was also becoming someone I didn't want to be.

Jules is our CRO & Co-founder at Statiq, and my best friend since we're five. 

Last year he pulled me aside and told me I was upset all the time and it wasn't sustainable. He didn't say it to hurt me. He said it because nobody else would.

He was right.

So I started paying attention to the inputs. Sleep, movement, when I pick up my phone, what I put in my body. What you put in is what you get out. Recently, I lost a week of sleep and the temper came back immediately. I reacted when I shouldn't have and hurt people. But I caught it faster than I ever would have a year ago.

The anger got me here. I'm genuinely not sure I could have built what I have without it.

But at some point the question changes. It stops being how do I win and starts being who do I want to be?

I'm still figuring out how to build from something cleaner. I don't have the answer yet. I just know that's the work now.

Most agency owners blame the client. I was raised not to.

My parents spent their careers in hospitality. The standard was simple: the client gives you their trust and their money. You don't get to resent them for having opinions about how you spend it.

So when I became a founder, I carried that with me.

Statiq is a creative agency that produces 9,000+ ads every month for DTC brands. We work hard on the ideas behind every single one. Sometimes clients push back on concepts before we've even applied their brand to them, or before the designer has done their job.

And the instinct, especially for creative people, is to think: they just don't get it.

I refuse to think that way.

If a client isn't betting on our ideas, and we know those ideas are good, it means we didn't follow up, didn't get on a call, didn't show up enough to make them believe it.

That's not the client's fault. That's ours.

We're marketers. If we can't sell our own ideas to the people paying for them, we don't get to blame the buyer.

That belief got uncomfortable enough that I made a product decision because of it.

We're rebuilding our platform to include clients directly in the ideation process: real feedback and conversations before anything goes to production.

Not because clients are always right, but because if they're not trusting us, we haven't earned it yet.

One of the best ads we shipped this month used AI. It won because the idea didn't exist before we had it.

At Statiq we produce 9,000+ ads a month for DTC brands. Lately we've had clients on both ends of the spectrum: some requesting "AI ads" as if that were a format, others refusing to let us use it at all. 

Both are missing the point entirely. The question was never AI or no AI. It's whether the idea was worth making.

Ad accounts fail because the ideas are poor: wrong angle, wrong emotional register, wrong moment for the audience, and AI doesn't fix that. If you didn't have genuine creative thinking before it, you now have more of the same mediocre work, rendered in higher resolution.

Wuffes, one of our clients, said it this week: "You guys are killing it. The AI stuff is seriously good." What they were responding to wasn't the tool. It was an angle nobody in their category had tried yet.

That's the only thing that actually wins on Meta: the idea that didn't exist before someone built it.

The only thing AI can't replace is an idea nobody's had yet. 

At Statiq we produce 9,000+ ads a month. And there's one thing I won't budge on: we don't do basic ad templates because they're a dead end.

That ad already exists somewhere else. AI will reproduce it, and when it does, there's no reason to hire us.

2026 is almost 3 months in and we've already changed our entire workflow three times. The market shifted fast: clients don't come to us to execute on their ideas anymore, they can do that themselves.

What they can't do is come up with the idea nobody's tried yet. That's the only thing that makes us impossible to replace.

So I started enforcing it. Pushed my team toward bets that made some clients uncomfortable. We lost some of them.

ALOHA, one of our clients, sent us this: "Really enjoying Statiq. Your recommended creatives found us quite a few winners with angles we would've never thought to try."

That's the whole bet, right there.

The clients who trust it are now spending multiple six figures a month on our work. The ones who wanted safe moved on.

I'll take that trade.

Most agencies would've killed this headline before it reached the client. We made it the centerpiece of the campaign. $10K+ in spend later, it became one of Snoozy's strongest performers.

At Statiq, we produce 9,000+ ads a month for DTC brands. Last year, Snoozy, a wellness gummy brand, came to us with a problem: their creatives weren't consistent enough to scale, testing was slow, and both things were capping their growth.

Joe Powell, their Creative Director, sent us a brief and we took it further than it asked for.

"I've been able to submit some briefs with basically just spilling my mind onto the sheet, the creative asset, and they've really been able to take that and run with it in ways I didn't expect."

Every competitor in wellness does some version of clean photography, calming colors, clinical copy. We made "FOR THE H*GH AND HORNY" and put it in front of their audience.

Multiple tens of thousands of dollars in ad spend. CPA dropping as they scaled. At least one or two winners in every campaign since.

The clients who brief us aren't just buying execution. 
They're betting on a perspective they don't have yet.

We spend multiple five figures a month on Meta for our own ads.

And we still got our strategy wrong.

Here's the three-layer framework we built from it, and the layer most brands never reach.

Layer 1: Where Meta is allocating spend.

Upload five ads in an ad set. If Meta pushes 60% of budget to one ad, that's your first signal before you look at a single result. 
Meta is running a real-time auction: it's telling you which ad has the highest probability of working. 

Layer 2: CPL or CPA against your target.

Our CPL target at Statiq is $450. If the top-spending ad is above that, we don't kill it, we iterate. Meta already decided it wants to spend there. 

→ For video: the hook is usually the problem, people are leaving before the key moment.

→ For static: it's the headline or the visual isn't delivering the message. 

One fix and the same ad that Meta already wants to spend on starts converting.

At Statiq we aim for 15% of ads produced hitting target. Your number will vary based on your spend level and category, but you need one. If it drops while production stays flat, quality is slipping weeks before CPA tells you.

Layer 3: Is the cohort right?

This is the layer most brands skip.

We scaled an ad with on-target CPL and Meta kept pushing spend to it. One quarter later, we evaluated the clients it brought in: high churn, wrong ICP entirely.

In-platform: green. 
Business: bleeding.

How to check: ask your customer service team what they think of the clients that came in last quarter. Are they staying? Are they the right ICP?

By the time cohort quality shows up in your revenue numbers, you're already three months behind.

Layer 1 tells you what Meta thinks. 
Layer 2 tells you if it's profitable. 
Layer 3 tells you if it's sustainable.

Most brands stop at two.

taplio

The Battle

Ankit Patel

Simon Robert

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreAnkit Patel's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreSimon Robert's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Ankit Patel

Simon Robert

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

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

Performance ScoreSimon Robert's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreAnkit Patel's LinkedIn Performance