Influence Weekly
Join us as we dive deeper into the latest trends, insights, and stories from the world of influencer marketing and the creator economy. Our podcast brings you exclusive interviews with industry leaders, in-depth analysis of key topics, and a behind-the-scenes look at the stories that matter most to our community.
Influence Weekly
Special Episode: Building Creator Infrastructure with David Abbey of Endlss
In our third guest episode, host Ceci Carloni sits down with David Abbey, co-founder and CEO of Endlss, to explore what happens when you actually listen to what brands need—and rebuild your entire platform around those insights.
🔄 The Pivot That Changed Everything: David shares the story of building Trend, a social marketplace designed to solve multi-brand checkout friction, only to discover creators wouldn't adopt it. Instead of forcing the product, he spent years listening to hundreds of brands describe their real problems: gifting chaos, manual payments through PayPal spreadsheets, communication nightmares at scale. This led to rebuilding from scratch and launching Endlss—an all-in-one influencer and affiliate platform where the entire feature set is free, and brands only pay as they scale.
📈 Where Creator Programs Break: Drawing from migrating brands with 1,000+ creators from competitors, David pinpoints exactly when systems fail: it's not one thing, it's the compound effect. Manual gifting works with 10 creators but breaks at 100. Email communication is fine for 25 but becomes impossible at 500. The 90-10 rule applies—90% of your results come from 10% of creators, but you can't identify them without proper infrastructure. The brands crushing it? Three-year-old digital natives who grew up in this space versus legacy companies still figuring out change management.
🎯 The Alignment Problem: David argues the biggest miss in creator marketing isn't budget or tools—it's alignment. Brands think "we need influencers" instead of "we need influencers aligned with our brand values whose audiences will resonate." He contrasts spray-and-pray approaches (message 100 people, hope for results) with strategic selection (carefully choose 100, introduce yourself, build relationships). One partner agency increased client revenue 80% in a single month by focusing entirely on alignment over volume.
From the hard lessons of building the wrong product to identifying exactly where scale breaks to why AI should accelerate creativity but never replace content—this conversation captures the builder's perspective on what infrastructure the creator economy actually needs.
The Big Three by Influence Weekly: 3 Biggest Stories. 1 Essential Conversation.