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Tilt<\/a> cofounder and CEO Abhi Thanendran<\/a> likes to point out that none of the 13 people who did $1 million in sales on his live commerce platform last year were influencers \u2014 and that is exactly the point. Thanendran created Tilt for people willing to start from nothing, learn the platform and turn a home or small shop into a seven-figure sales channel.\u00a0<\/p>\n Thanendran traces his ambition back to a childhood shaped by war and dislocation.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m a Sri Lankan Tamil refugee,\u201d he tells Entrepreneur<\/em> in a new interview. \u201cMy family moved and settled in Canada when I was about 8 years old.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n They landed in a low-income neighborhood in Toronto, where his parents pieced together odd jobs to make ends meet. Both of Thanendran\u2019s parents had been trained as teachers, and he says they gave him a solid educational foundation. That push carried him to the University of Waterloo, where he studied mathematics.\u00a0<\/p>\n After university, Thanendran\u2019s first stop was actuarial science, modeling when people would get sick or die. \u201cIt\u2019s a very morbid style of job, so I didn\u2019t really enjoy it, but the math was interesting,\u201d he recalls. He pivoted into hedge funds on Wall Street and Bay Street, using math to predict the market while funds traded on top of his models.<\/p>\n He then jumped into tech, joining $115 billion fintech Revolut<\/a> in London when the company had fewer than 30 people. \u201cI actually met Neil there, day zero on the job\u2026we still sit beside each other, but now in our own company,\u201d he says of his Tilt cofounder, Neil Shah.\u00a0<\/p>\n At Revolut, Thanendran rose to head of data and machine learning, building a large team and absorbing one lesson he\u2019d later import directly into Tilt: \u201cWe believe that anybody can almost do anything.\u201d<\/p>\n Thanendran started Tilt with the idea of bringing back the human connection in shopping \u2014 and putting it in the hands of people who didn\u2019t already have massive audiences.\u00a0<\/p>\n On Tilt, shoppers log into a stream of live auctions and flash sales hosted by sellers. The platform, which launched in 2023, is live in the U.S., UK, Italy and Spain.<\/p>\n The early product focused on independent brands doing live drops of new collections. It did not work. The breakthrough came when Tilt pivoted to live auctions and resale fashion. \u201cThe simple metric that showed us that it was working was just the conversion rate,\u201d Thanendran says. \u201cThe first stream in which we had live auctions, we saw way more sales in that stream for secondhand stuff than we ever saw for any brand that was doing a flash drop.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n It was \u201cnight and day compared to what the product was before,\u201d he adds. That shift unlocked a different user base: sellers trading in sneakers, watches, collectibles and eventually many more categories. Today, between 1,500 and 2,000 sellers make at least one sale on Tilt each month.\u00a0<\/p>\n The 13 people who now do more than $1 million in sales a year on Tilt share a common profile: They are young, ambitious and previously unknown. \u201cThey want to be their own boss,\u201d Thanendran says.\u00a0\u201cTilt wants to help people start from nothing and become superstars.\u201d<\/p>\n One seller, who sells under the name Yorkshire Trainers<\/a>, is 20 years old and does about $260,000 in monthly sales. Another top seller, Maddie, has fibromyalgia and is deaf. She sells from her room and has reached about $70,000 in sales per month, or $840,000 per year.<\/p>\n \u201cThey came to Tilt, they\u2019re homegrown, they\u2019re doing $100,000, north of $200,000 in sales per month,\u201d Thanendran says. What unites them is not audience size but attitude. \u201cThey all are very hard workers, and they have their own distinct personalities that their customer base likes,\u201d he adds. Live selling, he stresses, \u201cis not a passive business.\u201d<\/p>\n Thanendran is blunt about the work required to hit seven-figure sales. \u201cYou are an entrepreneur, so you need to learn how to source products, how to sell live, how to handle the logistics so you can consistently have good customer trust,\u201d he says. On top of that, sellers have to build a brand around their live persona and keep audiences engaged for hours at a time.<\/p>\n Many of Tilt\u2019s sellers go live daily, juggling commentary, inventory and fulfillment. \u201cIt\u2019s very hard,\u201d he says. \u201cTo do that every single day for several hours is tiring, and then on top of that, after your stream, you have to package your stuff, ship everything out, answer customer questions.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The platform\u2019s job, in Thanendran\u2019s view, is to make that grind sustainable for more people. One tool to help carry out that mission is AI. Tilt\u2019s flagship tool, Snap, automates the hardest parts of live selling.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhile you\u2019re live, you just hold up any product that you have lying around that you want to sell,\u201d he explains. \u201cYou can just hold it up and describe it, and our system will pick up all the details it needs, like brand, size and condition. It\u2019ll create the listing for you in real time, and it\u2019ll run that auction for you in real time.\u201d<\/p>\n The first versions of Snap almost \u201ccompletely failed\u201d because sellers hated the user experience, Thanendran discloses.\u00a0<\/p>\n But after a year of iteration, \u201cSnap is now the most widely adopted AI product on our platform,\u201d he says. The lesson matches his broader advice to founders: \u201cEvery single problem has a solution, and your job as a founder is to find what that solution is.\u201d<\/p>\n Investors inevitably ask how Tilt will compete with TikTok and other incumbents chasing live commerce. Thanendran\u2019s answer is to keep his eye on the user.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t really think about competition like that,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you want to build one of the world\u2019s leading consumer businesses, you need to just focus on what your customer needs.\u201d<\/p>\n For sellers, Tilt pitches near\u2011zero fees and tooling that lets them spend more time selling instead of typing.\u00a0<\/p>\n For buyers, Thanendran says, Tilt is unusual in that it doesn\u2019t follow the standard marketplace power law, where a tiny fraction of sellers capture most demand. Because Tilt leans into \u201chomegrown\u201d sellers, \u201cmany sellers have an opportunity to become big, and buyers are pushed into various different sellers to discover different people,\u201d he says. That broader distribution, he argues, makes the platform both more trustworthy and more fun to browse.<\/p>\n If there\u2019s one principle that Thanendran comes back to while building Tilt, it is persistence. \u201cThe absolute most important thing is to never give up,\u201d he says. \u201cMost businesses fail because the founders let their minds wander a little bit. If you have conviction, there\u2019s never a reason to give up.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Tilt<\/a> cofounder and CEO Abhi Thanendran<\/a> likes to point out that none of the 13 people who did $1 million in sales on his live commerce platform last year were influencers \u2014 and that is exactly the point. Thanendran created Tilt for people willing to start from nothing, learn the platform and turn a home or small shop into a seven-figure sales channel.\u00a0<\/p>\n Thanendran traces his ambition back to a childhood shaped by war and dislocation.<\/p>\nBuilding Tilt for non-influencers<\/h2>\n
How 13 people got to $1 million in sales on Tilt<\/h2>\n
Using AI to make live selling easier<\/h2>\n
Competing with giants and advice for founders<\/h2>\n
Key Takeaways<\/h2>\n
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