During the pandemic-fueled e-commerce boom of 2020-2022, David Abbey and his team had built the social commerce platform TRND with a vision of giving influencers ownership of the shopping experience directly in their feed. 

“We saw TRND as a way to build a storefront for the influencers that allowed them to own the experience and the transaction, as well as for them to create a destination for their audience, like a little micro marketplace for social media,” David explains.

The concept enabled creators to curate products from multiple brands in one unified storefront, customers could purchase items from different brands in a single transaction, and the platform would handle complex data sharing and fulfillment behind the scenes. But market feedback quickly revealed a disconnect.

“The hardest truth is that the storefront in itself will not solve the problem. We obviously thought it would be the silver bullet,” David admits. This persistent feedback forced him to confront a crucial question: Who was their true core customer? While TRND was built for creators, the market was clearly indicating that brands—particularly smaller, growing brands—were desperately seeking better tools for influencer marketing.

This insight led to the January 2025 launch of Endlss, an influencer marketing platform built specifically for growing DTC brands with limited resources. “We built Endlss from the ground up specifically for the small or growing brand,” says David. “That gives them exactly what they need without feature bloat and without cost.”

Rebuilding from the Ground Up

The transformation from TRND to Endlss wasn’t merely cosmetic. “We changed almost everything,” David explains.

The Endlss team handled the rebuild by examining the daily workflow of marketing professionals: “We took a look at the job of the influencer marketer, the marketing manager, the marketing director. And we try to distill it down to when they come into work Monday to Friday, what do they do?”

Their analysis revealed four core activities that became the foundation of Endlss’s value proposition: “They’ve got to discover creators, communicate and activate them, amplify their content, analyze the performance, and repeat.”

This workflow-centered approach addressed key pain points David had identified through countless conversations with brands. “Without a robust feature set, many brands are combining multiple solutions. Many brands are working with impersonal, templated emails that don’t get a great response. Many brands are manually searching on Instagram, talking on WhatsApp, and getting lost in email, creating a disconnected process,” David notes.

For discovery, Endlss built a database of 250 million creators with sophisticated filtering capabilities. “When you get to the smaller brands, they’re all looking for more niche and smaller creators,” David explains. “They can get the right keywords, the right demographics, looking at the right audience information, looking at the right content.”

Their Chrome extension has proven particularly valuable for brands conducting targeted searches. “We find a lot of the brand marketers are actually going down the rabbit holes of Instagram and digging through the hashtags and finding someone clicking on them,” David says. “Our extension injects directly into Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok, and they can get all those performance metrics right away and make that judgment call.”

How Endlss Works

Endlss operates through three integrated components designed to streamline the entire influencer marketing process.

The brand portal serves as the command center for marketing teams. “That is where the marketing team has everything they need,” David explains. “Intelligently built, they’re spending less time managing and doing administrative tasks.”

The influencer app creates a frictionless experience for creators. “The Influencer app is a beautiful, purpose-built application for the influencer,” David says. “It’s where they get paid and have full transparency on their commissions and payments, which are paid automatically weekly. It has a full built-in chat with the brand, so communication becomes very streamlined.”

While TRND’s social storefront concept has been temporarily shelved, Endlss has introduced “smart links” to solve critical attribution challenges. “A smart link effectively is a link for an influencer, but every time it’s clicked, it produces a one-time unique code,” David explains. This addresses two major brand issues: “Attribution and code leakage. Your attribution is 100% guaranteed and can’t be picked up and scraped by a third-party coupon site.”

For growing brands, Endlss focuses on metrics that directly impact the bottom line. “The two big things the small brand looks for are cost of acquisition and ROI on your gifting,” David emphasizes. “Because many smaller brands don’t have big budgets, they can’t pay $5,000 for the content. But they do run large-scale gifting campaigns. So the cost or the ROI on that gift is critically important.”

This focus on practical ROI differentiates Endlss from platforms that emphasize vanity metrics. “While gifting campaigns are common, there’s still a hard cost associated with them. Brands want to know if the ROI is 4x or negative, and like any marketing spend, once you know what works, you can confidently double down on it,” David explains. “Understanding the metrics that actually move the needle for the small brand is about finding the right people who align with the brand.”

Endlss Co-Pilot: AI That Enhances Rather Than Replaces

Endlss recently launched Co-Pilot, an AI assistant representing both a technological innovation and a philosophical statement about AI’s role in business.

“The inspiration comes back to my belief of what AI is meant to do,” David says. “I don’t believe that it’s supposed to replace jobs. When used correctly, it’s supposed to elevate staff to be far more effective and give time for more strategy and creativity.”

Co-pilot begins by learning a brand’s communication style. “The moment you set up, you enter your information, add your logo, and enter your website, the AI will then learn how you talk. And every message from that moment on is right in your brand’s tone of voice,” David explains.

The system then creates personalized outreach for each creator. “It also captures their content, performance information, and audience. And it tailors each message uniquely to that creator,” David says.

Rather than operating autonomously, Co-pilot serves as an intelligent assistant. “We are not going to build it where it is a full autopilot,” David emphasizes. “It’s just prepping everything for you. So when you come in, it’s doing the manual work for you each day. You can get through it faster.”

This initial release is the first of three planned updates. “By the end of the summer, the goal with the co-pilot is that it will run end-to-end campaigns almost entirely for you,” David reveals.

Real-World Impact

Several growing brands are already seeing results with Endlss. Paleovalley, a brand in the natural foods space, uses the platform’s discovery capabilities to find perfectly aligned creators. “They go down to the nth degree to find the perfect person,” David notes.

No Rivals, a startup in the collegiate headwear space, leverages Endlss to manage its overwhelming volume of inbound influencer interest. “The ability for them to use our application form to bring people in, hit them with a beautifully crafted message that kicks off the automated gifting flow is key for them because they’re a super small team,” David explains.

A third company in the home decor space is using the platform to build “a monster network of home designers, architects, and even design store owners to fully capitalize on social commerce.”

From Influence to Commerce

As Endlss looks to the future, David remains focused on its core mission, enabling brands to  “Transform influence to commerce.”

“That’s what we’re trying to do. That’s what our customers want to do,” David explains. “They’re using this channel because influencers have such an authentic reach. But impressions and likes are only valuable  if they don’t convert to real growth dollars.”

The roadmap includes several innovations designed to further streamline workflow for growth-stage brands. A primary focus is simplifying the management of paid campaign agreements.

Advanced AI features will help brands identify high-performing content based on engagement, sentiment, and conversion potential, enabling them to make smarter decisions about which content to amplify with ad spending.

For David, success will ultimately be measured by a single metric: the ROI Endlss delivers to brands.

“I love creating incredible pieces of software that solve real problems, but the ROI is the single most important thing for our customers,” David says. “If they’re paying us $700 bucks a month, and they’re generating $21,000 a month, that’s the metric that will be most important to me because right there I know that our platform and what we provide has immense value to that brand.”

As he reflects on the pivotal decision to transform his business, “Every founder really needs to listen to what the market is telling you and asking for.”