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Dan Melnick

@danpmelnick

3.5K
followers
3628
following
5x founder
Building @tryavyra
Co-founder @zingfuel
📍 NYC
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I wasn’t supposed to make it. But here’s what they don’t see. Every risk. Every doubt. Every quiet win. Still here. Still building. taken in Austin, Texas by @danpmelnick
26
a year ago
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A customer lands on your product page at 11 pm with three questions before they'll spend $400. For a complex product, that's normal. The questions stack up right before the buy. Someone has to answer them in that moment. Not in the morning. Staffing humans for every hour of the day is expensive. For a newer brand still finding its footing, that's runway better spent on ads and inventory. AI answers those questions for a fraction of the cost. It's always on, it gives the same answer at 2 pm and 2 am, and for a lot of brands it's more helpful than a rep stretched thin on the late shift. It's the cheapest leverage a newer brand has right now. by @danpmelnick
3
4 months ago
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Over 10 years ago, my friend and I beat Jalen Brunson in a pickup game. This weekend he won NBA Finals MVP. I won't be forgetting that one anytime soon. He won't either, I'm sure. But the pickup game is not the story I keep coming back to. The story is his dad, Rick. I used to watch him run Jalen through drills at that gym. For hours. Every single day. Walk off the court, come back, do it again. No crowd. No trophy. No cameras. Just reps. 32.6 points a game in the Finals. 45 in the closeout. The first Knicks title in 53 years. His coach said he was a top 3 player all season and nobody gave him the credit. All of it was paid for years ago, on an empty court, doing drills no one was watching. I think about that a lot as a founder. The version of you everyone sees winning is built in the hours nobody is around for. The unglamorous reps. The same drill, again, when it would be easier to stop. You don't get the Finals without the empty gym first. Congrats, Jalen. You earned every second of it. by @danpmelnick
1
4 months ago
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Thanks for 30K. I didn't set out to build an audience. I was building and sharing what I was learning along the way, and founders who were doing the same kept showing up. Every follower is someone who chose to stay in the room. That means more than the count. by @danpmelnick
2
4 months ago
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You can diagnose any agency relationship with one question. Who is chasing whom? Most founders know the bad version by heart. You ping Slack. You wait 3 days. You end up reminding the agency that the work they're paid for still exists. That dynamic is the actual product most shops sell. The output is incidental. Randy at Milky Tomato came to us braced for exactly that. He's smart, so he didn't sign a year on a team he'd never worked with. He gave us 3 months and the right to walk. His words, not mine: "Okay, 3 months. We do this. If we're not happy, we leave." I love that framing. It means we earn next month every month instead of hiding behind a signature. Here's the part worth the post. Somewhere in those 3 months the chasing flipped. He stopped following up on us. He started telling people he was the one struggling to keep up. We were the ones waiting on him. That's the whole job. The agency pulls the wagon. The founder is never the one dragging it forward. If your current team takes 3 days to answer a message, you already know which direction your wagon is moving. by @danpmelnick
0
4 months ago
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Saddened to hear about the passing of Stacey King over the weekend. As a Bulls fan, he was a legend. But beyond basketball, Stacey was genuinely one of the kindest and most approachable people I’ve ever met. I had the privilege of meeting him several times over the years, and every interaction left the same impression. The basketball world lost a great ambassador, and many of us lost someone we admired both on and off the court. Rest in peace, Stacey. Thank you for the memories. by @danpmelnick
0
4 months ago
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If you are doing a few million a year and you are in Lovable at midnight rebuilding a tool that already exists, close the laptop. I get why founders do it. AI made it feel free. Twenty bucks in credits and you can build your own stack, right? Partly true. The generation is good now. The part nobody tells you: the second you have to integrate data, connect APIs, and consolidate the apps you already run, you hit a wall. If you are not technical, you do not climb it. You sit there for a week. Meanwhile, here is what actually needs your attention: 1. Ads. The traffic. 2. Content. The conversion. 3. Offer and positioning. The thing better than any tool you could build. 4. Your customers. The reason any of this exists. None of those get easier because you spent 3 weeks half-building a worse Klaviyo. The best founders I work with do not confuse motion with progress. They know what to build, what to buy, and what to consolidate. Then they hand the technical piece to people who read API docs for a living. Your time is the one input you cannot get back. Spend it on the business, not rebuilding software the business already had. by @danpmelnick
0
4 months ago
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When Vicki came to us, she was nervous about spending more on ads. Her money, her brand, her risk. And she was doing the whole thing alone. Her words for what that felt like: "It is lonely. That is all I have ever wanted, someone on that journey with me." The challenge: - She did not fully trust paid ad spend yet - The metrics felt like a foreign language to her - Every decision sat on her shoulders, with no one to check it against What we actually did. Nothing flashy. 1. Regular updates. Not spamming her inbox, not asking for ten things at once. 2. Explained every metric in plain English until it clicked for her, instead of hiding behind a dashboard. 3. Tested more ad spend in a small, controlled way she could watch and measure herself. The result: sales climbed. And the moment she saw them climb, the whole thing made sense to her. Her words again: "The minute I saw the increase in sales from investing more in ads was a click for me. 100% I would always recommend it.” by @danpmelnick
1
4 months ago
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"Honestly the best experience I've had with a developer." That's what Andrew DiLullo from AdCrunch told us last week. Before he found Zing, he had already tried the full menu: - Cheap devs who couldn't actually execute - US teams that priced themselves out - Offshore shops that took weeks to ship a single page None of it worked. When I asked him what changed, he didn't say anything about our stack. He pointed at three things: 1. Speed. Landing pages in days, not weeks. 2. Clarity. He sends copy, we turn it into a real page. No 6 alignment calls. 3. Responsiveness. He messages the chat, somebody answers right away. His line on the last one stuck with me: "That's where agencies fall off. Just responding right away, making people feel heard." He's right, and most shops still don't get it. The technical bar in 2026 is lower than it's ever been. Claude can draft the feature in an hour. The differentiator is no longer who can code, it's who picks up. Old agency model: tickets, calls, revisions, retainers. New one: tell us what you want, we ship it this week. If your current dev partner takes 3 days to answer a Slack message, you already know what to do. DM me and I'll show you what the new model looks like. by @danpmelnick
1
5 months ago
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This week marks 5 years since I lost one of my best friends from childhood. His name was David Khalameyzer, David ben Lazar. He was 27 years old. No warning. No time to prepare. Just gone. He was one of the most incredible people I’ve ever known. Full of energy, full of life, and one of those rare people who made everyone around him feel like the most important person in the room. Every year on his yahrzeit, I sit with the same reminder: Life is short. Shorter than any of us think. Tomorrow is not guaranteed. The dream you keep putting off? Someone out there would give anything to still have the chance to chase it. So go. Build the thing. Start the company. Make the call. Tell the people you love that you love them. Don’t wait for the “right time.” This post is for him. And for anyone who needed this reminder today. May his memory be a blessing. 🕯️ taken in Austin, Texas by @danpmelnick
1
5 months ago
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Comment “BUILD” and I’ll send it right over taken in Austin, Texas by @danpmelnick
0
5 months ago
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Comment “SPIRIT” and I’ll send over the blueprint taken in Austin, Texas by @danpmelnick
4
5 months ago
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