Ronak Shah, Ankit Patel, and Ashvin Melwani on Nostalgia, Community Building, and Disrupting the Wellness Industry

As a part of my series called “Five Strategies I Used To Grow My Business To Reach Seven Figures In Revenue”, I had the pleasure of interviewing three business partners who founded Obvi in 2019 — CEO Ronak Shah, CBO Ankit Patel and CMO Ashvin Melwani. A trio focused on delivering wellness products that help you look and feel your best, without sacrificing taste and efficacy. Each Obvi product is developed with unique, first-to-market blends — flipping the script on traditionally tasteless collagen formulas with delicious internal boosters that offer amazing nostalgic flavor and incredible benefits for the whole body. In just two years, Obvi surpassed $10M in sales, amassed over 100K dedicated customers and created the world’s second largest collagen community with 36K active members on Facebook. Today, Obvi is poised to become a market leader in collagen, superfoods and women’s health products.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

Ronak: With passion for health and wellness almost all my life, supplementation has always intrigued me but also puzzled me why something so important was always created to look so boring and unexciting. My co-founders and I set out on a journey to build Obvi, a brand that normalizes collagen as part of our daily diets without sacrificing taste and convenience. Upon our launch on June 1, 2019, we told ourselves one thing, “no matter the growth or revenue, we want to educate first, empower second, and provide third.” Fast forward 24 months, Obvi has broken through the stigma in 150,000+ households and shattered 8 figures in sales across 75+ countries globally, with major distribution in countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Philippines and China. With over 10 million servings sold, we’ve been able to educate our customer base on why collagen is as important as any other protein source. With a growing community, ranking in the top 2 largest communities for collagen on Facebook, our Obvi Community has empowered 36,000+ customers and fans to converse in real time about their results with Obvi, both good and bad, making a true social impact.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began at your company?

Ronak: The most interesting story that happened to me since I started the company was when a friend of mine introduced me to his coworker and the coworker mentioned, “Wait, my wife drinks Obvi.” It was an amazing feeling to think that Obvi has the ability to touch hearts beyond your imagination but can still make the world feel so small. I find it so interesting when someone that I may know on a 2nd or 3rd connection level will have heard or known about Obvi prior to me even mentioning much more about it but the name. I think we live in an interesting time where the power of social media, advertising and organic reach is truly something we can’t even explain. I am glad Obvi is at the forefront of marketing so we can run into some of the most fantastic ways of our product getting distributed.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

Ronak: My dad has been a big help and inspiration along the way of creating Obvi. Anytime success would come around the corner, he would remind me to appreciate it, he would congratulate myself and the team but then he would harness me back into my seat because the ride isn’t over and let me know this is just a step along the way. When we hit milestones, may it be breaking 8 figures in revenue or breaking the 150,000 customer threshold, my dad would always be proud but also asked me what’s next, always indicating that there has to be more. I’m grateful to have a sense of over achievement embodied in me as I am constantly chasing it. Without the guidance, support and acknowledgement of where I am versus where I want to be, from my dad, it would be hard for me to lay the groundwork for what we need to focus on to get to the goal us founders have set. Each milestone is a piece to the puzzle and although Obvi is a jigsaw puzzle, we sure love to put together the pieces we have while constantly searching for the remaining parts.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Ronak: One of my favorite quotes from Soren Kierkegaard is “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” This is so powerful because it’s completely true for myself, and to much extent, my partners. We live life forward because we have to make decisions and take steps to find out what is to come next. However, along the way we will find out our decisions may not have been the best ones or the steps we took could’ve been in a different direction — but we will only understand that when we look back at life. When you come to understand that your past can help refine your decision making, you trust that you will get wiser through this experience. It is relevant in our life because everything we learned in the past and the mistakes we made in the past have taught us what to do and what not to do moving forward. However, the new decisions we make today may or may not be correct and as we progress through life, one day we’ll look back to today and apply what we understood and learned in the journey.

Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. We’d love to learn a bit about your company. What is the pain point that your company is helping to address?

Ronak: We started Obvi after asking ourselves, “Why do all the products that are supposed to help us look and feel youthful, feel so old, cold and clinical?” Come on, practical is great, but these dusty-looking things made getting better seem like some awful chore. No wonder it’s hard to get started. It’s no fun.

We even got tricked a little — we thought we were making super-high quality, crazy-researched products for younger people. Turned out, we were helping all kinds of people express a younger mindset. 200,000 people and counting — 36,000 of whom find massive support and encouragement in the Obvi Community on Facebook.

250,000,000 times in less than two years, people like you have used our products to feel something we all want…To feel youthful.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

Ankit: Our branding is very unique to the space. We knew we wanted to be very different from what was out there already in the collagen space, which was more or less a lot of boring, medicinal looking brands. To truly disrupt we went the complete opposite and decided to not only make the packaging fun and colorful but we also paired that with flavors that brought the consumer a sense of nostalgia.

When you first started the business, what drove you, what was your primary motivation?

Ankit: Initially the primary motivation was that the 3 of us wanted to do something of our own. I think we each had entrepreneurial mindsets and a common end goal of creating a brand that leaves a lasting impression.

What drives you now? Is it the same? Did it change? Can you explain what you mean?

Ankit: As we continue to grow the brand I think our motivation has shifted slightly to the end consumer. We want to help people and when we started seeing all of the amazing results and hearing all of the life changing feedback that many of our consumers have given us about the products we realized that’s the only motivation we need. We want to continue creating products that change people’s lives.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Ankit: We have some really innovative products coming out this year. Our collagen-infused meal replacement protein bars are definitely going to take the industry by storm. It took almost a year of R&D to get the flavors and formula just right but we believe the consumer will benefit greatly as this bar can replace any meal, leaving them feeling full and it’s great for anyone looking to satisfy their sweet tooth. Other than that, in true Obvi fashion, we have a bunch of new flavors of our Super Collagen on the way as well as some other surprises. Stay tuned!

The topic of this series is ‘Five Strategies I Used To Grow My Business To Reach Seven Figures In Revenue.’ Congratulations! Seven figures is really a huge milestone. In your experience what was the most difficult part of being able to hit your first million-dollars in sales revenue?

Ankit: Staying patient is always difficult. Rome wasn’t built in a day and overnight successes are hard to come by. The first year was a real struggle for us as it was literally just 3 of us trying to do everything. For many parts of the business we were learning as we went, and we ended up hitting our fair share of setbacks. It’s easy to get discouraged when situations get tough and your business isn’t thriving the way you had anticipated. We kept our heads up and stayed the course until eventually we started seeing the progress we were hoping for. Looking back at it now that initial climb to the first million ended up instilling so many valuable life lessons in each of us, I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.

Could you share the number one sales strategy that you found helpful to help you reach this milestone?

Ashvin: Hitting the 7 figure mark definitely requires a lot of patience and a lot of creativity. One thing that we have always prided ourselves on is our knowledge of the advertising space. This is where a lot of brands will simply outsource to marketing agencies. Many people are familiar with the concept of influencer marketing. Brands will send their product to popular influencers just to have them post on their Instagram stories in hopes that it will drive revenue. This strategy is outdated and often consumers are blinded by these posts now a days because it’s simply not genuine.

What we do differently is build a proper relationship with influencers who we feel fit our brand. We only work with influencers who love our product, not just a paycheck. We simply use influencers as a source of content creation and work out partnerships where we can whitelist their social pages to run advertisements from. This allows us to control where our money is being spent and relieves influencers from any heavy lifting whatsoever. This single strategy is what took us from a 6-figure brand to almost 8 figures this year alone.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you or your team made during a sales process? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Ashvin: Something that’s hilarious to think about now, but was definitely not funny at the time, was during the launch of our first ever Black Friday Sale where we were offering free gifts with purchase. About 2 hours into the sale, we realized customers were expressing a crazy amount of gratitude in our Facebook Community for giving free gifts with every purchase. We thought this was awesome and were excited that our customers were excited about the cool goodies they were going to receive. It wasn’t until someone posted a screenshot of their order details and we realized customers were able to add an infinite amount of free gifts to their orders due to some glitch! People were adding hundreds of free gifts to their orders, which obviously we could not honor as it was 1 free item per person. So imagine us at 2 in the morning scrambling to fix this glitch while our developers in the UK were sleeping, and our warehouse team was gearing up to start packing orders. It was a nightmare. Fortunately, we were able to fix the problem and communicate it to our customers who genuinely thought the glitch was hilarious and we were able to laugh it off after all was said and done. This definitely did teach us a valuable lesson on double checking everything on our website before launching our biggest sale of the year!

Does your company have a sales team? If yes, do you have any advice about how companies can create very high performing sales teams?

Ronak: Yes, our company has an extremely efficient and impactful sales team. My advice to anyone building out a sales team is to find a very strong leader in your VP or Director of Sales to lead this team. Empower him or her with driven members that have strong desires to succeed via highly incentivized sales agendas. What this creates is a dynamic of powerful leadership alongside strong performance through the team, which all in all, create a high morale and target-driven culture where every day, week and month everyone is chasing an aligned goal.

Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “Five Strategies I Used To Grow My Business To Reach Seven Figures In Revenue.” Please share a story or an example for each.

Ashvin:

1. Keep a constant eye on supply chain.

Your inventory levels are what can make or break you. Mainly because this ties back to customer experience. The worst thing you can possibly do is spend money on advertising to acquire new customers, only to find out you’ve run out of inventory and now have left the worst taste in a new customer’s mouth. By keeping a constant eye on your inventory levels and avoiding back orders and things of that nature, your customer will trust you even more. They trust that you’re not going to take their money and wait an extended period of time to receive their order. This overall just solidifies the relationship the brand has with its customers and in turn limits customer churn.

2. Never stop testing when it comes to online advertising.

Seriously, never stop testing. Don’t just go with ideas that you think will work, because 9 times out of 10, it’s the ideas that you would never have come up with that produce the greatest returns. This is where marketers have to get out of their comfort zone. You have a split second to capture someone’s attention while they’re scrolling endlessly on social media. It’s ok for your content to be outside of the box or unconventional. You just have to get people to engage with your ad. Never forget that every individual that is scrolling past your ad is completely different. They have different likes, wants, needs, etc. Create variation in your advertising. It’s the only possible way to resonate with as many people as possible to spread your message, and in turn see the greatest returns on your digital media spend.

3. Develop strong relationships with influencers who promote your brand.

Influencer marketing is very much alive if you know how to market correctly. Don’t treat influencers as a source of revenue, treat them as an extension of the brand. Treat them like you would your VIP customers. Keep them updated with upcoming products and launches. Let them be the first to try new products out. If they feel a part of the brand they’ll want to go above and beyond for you and in turn the content they produce for the brand comes across as more genuine to their following. This is where brands will see the greatest returns.

4. Never stop innovating.

To be the best, you quite literally have to beat the best. As a brand owner you should always ask yourself, why is someone going to buy my product over my competitors? Do we have better flavor profiles than them, do we have better ingredients, is our product more effective? Until you can confidently answer yes to those questions, you should never stop innovating or trying to make your product the best it can be. This also goes back to customer experience and limiting customer churn. They say it’s cheaper to keep an old customer than to acquire a new one. Make sure your customers are getting the best of the best. They trusted you with their hard-earned money because you promised them the world. Give them the world. It’s plain and simple. Brand loyalty is incredibly invaluable and can really push the needle when it comes to business growth potential.

5. Always listen to your customer base.

Your customer base chose your brand for a reason. Pay attention to their wants and needs and they will reward you for it. They hold the most valuable data that can make or break your brand. As a brand owner if you are ever stuck trying to make a decision in what direction your brand should go in, the answer will always lay with the consumer. Send out quarterly surveys, monitor and analyze the reviews they leave for your product, create a group where customers can openly talk about their experiences, basically anything that allows you to get direct feedback, because this feedback is what will help maintain a healthy and positive customer experience that brands work so tirelessly to create.

What would you advise to another business leader who initially went through years of successive growth, but has now reached a standstill. From your experience do you have any general advice about how to boost growth or sales and “restart their engines?”

Ashvin: One of the biggest things that we’ve accomplished is develop a very close knit relationship with our customer base through our Facebook Community with over 36K members (and growing). This allows us to keep our ear to the ground and find out what our customers want from the brand. This allows us to constantly develop our product roadmap and ensure our customer base is never bored or leaves us for a competitor. Our advice for any business leader is to do the exact same. Create and cultivate a community for your customers. They will feel a sense of belonging and further open up more about their experience with your brand. Once that sense of trust has been developed you can engage with them and learn more about their wants and needs which can be used as a source of inspiration to help “restart your engines.”

In your specific industry what methods have you found to be most effective in order to find and attract the right customers? Can you share any stories or examples?

Ashvin: Customers attract customers. Plain and simple. One of the biggest influencers that we use currently for our brand was originally a customer. They saw one of our ads on Facebook and purchased without us even knowing. Because they loved the product they shared it with their following. Lucky for us, this individual is so highly respected and trusted by her large following, it almost sold out our inventory. This is where we truly learned it’s all about authenticity rather than fancy marketing strategies. Since seeing this concept of authentic and raw reactions to our products attracted customers more effectively, we try and utilize customer generated content as much as we can. Whether that be video testimonials, images, reviews, anything, we can use this to our advantage to portray a more “real” side to our advertising and marketing which a lot of people tend to appreciate and resonate more with.

Based on your experience, can you share a few strategies to give your customers the best possible user experience and customer service?

Ronak: The most cliché concept we all hear is “treat your customer like they can never do anything wrong.” We use this mindset every day. If something is obvious, we take our time to explain it further. If our customers are unhappy with something, we take our time to make sure we give them as many remedies as possible until they are satisfied. If our customers have questions that have been answered a 101 times, we answer it a 102nd time. We over communicate everything from our refund policy, our benefits, who we are and why we’re here. We make the customer feel at home. The element to user experience that we feel has been a huge win for Obvi is our Obvi Community. We created this community that has now grown to 36,000 active members communicating with each other on a daily basis on how to make Obvi a part of their routine. Providing a platform like this to your customers gives them the experience to feel like they are heard and feel safe when committing to something that could change their life.

As you likely know, this HBR article demonstrates that studies have shown that retaining customers can be far more lucrative than finding new ones. Do you use any specific initiatives to limit customer attrition or customer churn? Can you share some of your advice from your experience about how to limit customer churn?

Ashvin: The best way to limit customer churn is to simply create the best experience for them. Their first time experience ordering needs to be as seamless as possible. The moment a first time customer encounters a bump in the road, the likeliness they’ll return starts to diminish. How can this process be as seamless as possible? The brand needs to be as transparent as possible. Whether that be prompt communication about their order details, to their shipping details, estimated delivery dates, etc. Not only does the experience need to be flawless but you need to incentivize your customer to return. We have built out a pretty simple but effective rewards program for our customers. Because we have a vast product line, we want to reward our customers handsomely for going all out and trying everything. It almost gamifies the entire process. Customers who build up their rewards points are always going to stick around to either earn as many points as possible or redeem them whenever they can. Another way we limit customer attrition is we never stop innovating. We are constantly thinking of new products to benefit our customers’ lives as well as variations to our current product lines so our customers are never bored with what they have. This allows us to release new products or new flavors as often as we do which allows us to keep the brand fresh in the customer’s eyes. We have already spent money to acquire these customers, we in turn need to listen to their needs and wants and come out with exactly what they are looking for. More recently, we noticed a lot of customers were asking for a coffee flavored Collagen Protein Powder. Because there’s so many flavors and variations to coffee out there, we actually came up with an event called Coffee Wars. This allowed for our community to essentially suggest and vote for their favorite flavors. With over 10,000 votes for so many different coffee flavors, we narrowed it down to just 4, which we then held a final vote. Customers tuned into a live event we hosted where they had to comment which flavor they wanted and at the end we tallied up the votes and declared an official winner. Hence the launch of our Limited Edition, Community-Nominated, Caramel Macchiato Super Collagen Protein. It’s experiences like this that we try to give our customers in the hopes they remain loyal to us and in turn lower customer churn drastically.

Here are the final “meaty” questions of our discussion. You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Ankit: I would ask my entire following to give a compliment to a random stranger. I truly believe people are products of their environment and by doing this we can create a positive and uplifting environment thus instilling positivity within individuals.

We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

Ronak: If I had the ability to have a private breakfast with anyone in the world, I would choose to have a private breakfast with the version of myself from 10 years ago. I want to tell this 10 year old younger me that everything you are going to go through will be worth it. Every battle, struggle and let down you face will come to fruition by creating a beautiful journey of self-discovery. I would want to tell the 20 year old me that the unknown journey you felt you were on back then is okay to be on so long as you never stray away from working hard at whatever it is that you are doing.

But if the qualification has to be a prominent leader, I would certainly choose Kurt Seidensticker, CEO of Vital Proteins. He truly paved the way for collagen and the ability to be formatted as not only a unicorn brand but also bring importance to the world of collagen over 10 years ago.

Thank you so much for this. This was very inspirational, and we wish you only continued success!