Top iTunes Business Podcast

47+ Million Downloads

SPI 785: Small Tweaks for Big Sales with Brian Moran from SamCart

Tiny changes to improve your sales process add up to a lot more revenue. This is especially true for your checkout pages! If you want to build a frictionless customer experience and discover tools for next-level shopping carts that convert more, this episode’s for you.

Listen in on my chat with Brian Moran from SamCart, a platform for creating fully optimized checkout pages [affiliate link]. I’m an advisor for this company, so I’m very familiar with the work they do to help their users make more sales. Join us, because this is the kind of thing that can fundamentally change how you do business!

What’s working in today’s ecommerce landscape? How do the top people on SamCart use marketing and funnels to drive more sales? What can we do to increase conversions and eliminate the extra clicks where we lose buyers?

Brian and I cover this and more in today’s session. We also dive into some game-changing use cases I didn’t know were possible. You’ll hear my gears turning throughout the conversation — the opportunities here are incredible!

Don’t miss out on this one. Get the notepads ready, and enjoy!

Today’s Guest

Brian Moran

Brian Moran is the co-founder of SamCart, and an online entrepreneur since 2009. He is a father of three and was born and raised in Maryland.

You’ll Learn

Resources

SPI 785: Small Tweaks for Big Sales with Brian Moran from SamCart

Brian Moran:  For the solopreneur, you know, doing five, ten, fifty grand a month, just one or two of these things, let alone the six or seven different numbers that SamCart can make move in a positive direction, whether it’s your front end conversion rate, getting you more customers for the dollars or time that you’re currently putting in to get the customers, you’re getting, the amount that every customer is spending on day one on that initial order, and the amount that they buy later on down the road, if getting just one of those things to move 10-20%, that changes a business overnight.

Pat Flynn: Today we’re chatting with co founder of SamCart. SamCart is a tool that’s been around in the online marketing space for quite a while. And it’s kind of flown under the radar for a lot of people because for the longest time, they were just known as sort of a shopping cart optimization tool, but they’ve grown to become so much more than that.

And I know this because I’m an advisor to the company and I’ve been working closely with them for years. And I’m excited because we’re going to have Brian on to talk about how the landscape has changed in the world of internet commerce and not e commerce specifically and physical goods but digital goods and all the things SamCart is doing to help us in that regard and how actually they’re approaching it in a sort of anti-Shopify kind of way.

And we talk about what that means and what that looks like for us and how this works. We also talk about what is working today? How are the top people on SamCart using marketing and funnels to drive more sales? And how do we optimize for conversion rates today on a per order basis, right? Cause your best customer is your current customer and there’s a specific way to finesse an upsell or an order bump as they call it.

And we’re going to get into a lot of the specifics today. So today get those notepads ready. We’ve got a lot of stuff to talk about and again, appreciate Brian coming on and kind of spilling the beans on what’s working today in the world of online business. Here he is, Brian, from SamCart.

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he swears that if Back to the Future 4 would it be made into a movie he would riot. Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Brian, welcome to SPI. Thanks for being here, man.

Brian Moran: Thanks for having me.

Pat Flynn: So what is the Sam in SamCart mean? Because honestly, it’s typically the first question I get. Everybody’s like, who is Sam?

What is, what is Sam ?

Brian Moran: What’s funny, so we, we now have three Sams that work at SamCart and there’s always like a battle. We have our big like company retreat every year. Scott, my, for those of you that don’t know the older of two brothers and we worked together and Scott’s like the outgoing extrovert goofy one.

So he makes up these crazy company prizes and there’s like the ultimate Sam award because there is no Sam that we were named after. There’s no dog or child or anything like that. Here’s the backstory. The backstory is the, the previous business, we had a site called get 10000fans.com. The original one was trainbaseball.com. And get 10,000 fans was very hard to like, tell someone here’s what you type into the browser. It’s the number, not the letters. And so we wanted something short and sweet for this new software company that you could remember easy to spell. And we wanted the word cart in it back then it was a good idea.

Maybe not so much today because that word’s a little old, but back then shopping cart was really what we were in the term that we wanted to rank for. And as you can imagine, even in 2014, when we launched it, everything with cart in the name, all the domains are taken easy cart, click cart, whatever, anything you can imagine.

And a buddy of mine had just gotten back from some event. I think it was called Sam Con or something like that. And the Sam stood for sales and marketing. So I’m like, all right, that actually kind of works. Cause the original reason we built SamCart was kind of twofold. We were selling digital products, online courses, eBooks, trainings.

There wasn’t really a good e commerce platform for us, but we also were very kind of sophisticated when it came to sales and marketing. We ran a lot of split tests. We needed to maximize average order value because we were spending money on ads. So we thought, Oh, this kind of works. Is SamCart available?

Cause if it’s available, we’re buying it and not looking back and it was available. So we bought it, ran with it and didn’t really put a whole bunch of extra thought into it.

Pat Flynn: And that’s okay. Cause SamCart has grown to become something. Huge and we’ll get into that and kind of the fun things that have happened since then.

But in the beginning, I mean, I remember getting 10,000 fans or the first business that you had and like you and a few others were kind of the experts in the space with Facebook ads and conversions and funnels and all this kind of stuff. And it was just like on another level. So when you came out with SamCart initially, it was all about that final piece of the conversion puzzle, which was the, the cart. And, like you said, all these split tests were happening. It was so advanced, it was almost over my head a little bit. With how sophisticated you guys were all getting with Just the numbers related to selling and the funnels. And here comes SamCart with this beautiful solution for literally the last step in the process, which is often overlooked, which is the cart and how we can make those convert really well.

And that’s what SamCart had become known for was that that cart, but I know it’s known for so much more now. I mean, as an advisor, obviously I know, but if you were to answer the question, well, what is SamCart today? How would you answer that question?

Brian Moran: Yeah, I guess the, the short and sweet answer is it’s kind of the, the anti Shopify or the anti storefront.

And not that there’s anything wrong with those things. Some of our biggest sellers, in fact, our top two sellers, these are folks that do over a hundred million dollars a year, they have Shopify as well as SamCart. So there’s kind of a time and place for a storefront where someone might be looking at all your different products.

And there’s a time and place when you’re doing a promo or launch or an ad campaign. We’re building a funnel around one core flagship product. And those are very different worlds. And if you try to use the same tech or approach for one versus the other, your conversions will suffer. If you had a storefront and you can only buy one product at a time, that storefront isn’t going to work very well.

And imagine it’d be like going into a grocery store. You can only walk out with one thing, but on the flip side, if you launch a new product and you’re trying to get everyone to understand what it is and sell it, and you have all these other distractions, that product’s not going to do well, so SamCart in a nutshell, is this, it’s the ability to take an order.

It’s the ability to take a, an order form, a checkout page and deploy it as a widget or an embed or a standalone page anywhere throughout that buyer journey, whether it’s through an email, through an ad on a landing page in a member’s area, on a blog sidebar, wherever you want. And it’s just, it’s an extremely efficient, seamless, you know, every day we try to work towards how do we make the checkout process more seamless, easier, faster for the customer. Cause that’s what works today. I mean, we all use Uber eats and Amazon and the app store because you can buy things without typing in credit cards and they’re fast and I don’t know, can you buy one thing, you can add extra items into your cart. You can buy more than one thing, which as a business owner, I mean, that’s all of our businesses are math equations.

And if we can increase not only the average order value of every order, but, but drive up lifetime value of our customers by offering them everything else that we sell, your business is going to succeed. You’re going to be competitors. So that in a nutshell is, is what we are. We’ve kind of stayed focused on just the checkout and try to be the best in the market at that the highest converting.

There’s so many great other solutions. So, you know, we got, We can tell this story later of why we just focused on that, but there’s so many great options for building websites or landing pages or doing email. I think to, to be the best at something, you got to stay focused and that’s what we’ve tried to do.

Pat Flynn: Can you take me through an example of any products that you might have that, you know, SamCart is used for that really speaks to this idea of the honing in on just that product and optimizing that checkout process. Take me through like the user journey through that and kind of where SamCart inserts itself.

Brian Moran: Yeah. So some of our very large sellers are in the supplement space. So, you know, imagine any big supplement brand there, you’re going to go to their homepage and you’re going to find their Shopify stores, some sort of catalog of here’s everything that we have. But when those same brands run ads, it would be a very poor ad strategy to say, you know, you’re the picture in your ad is here’s all of our stuff.

Come to the site, kind of decide which one you want. The much smarter marketers or, or salespeople are going to run an ad around a brand new product that they’re launching or their flagship one that they know is kind of the best place for all their customers to start. When you click that ad or click that email or click that text, you’re going to land on a specific landing page about that product.

And you don’t want distractions all over the place. You might not even want top navigation bars that go out to everywhere else. You want them to stay focused on that product and buy it for your ad campaign or email campaign to work. So in that world, you don’t want this kind of add to cart multi step checkout process that most catalog stores force you into.

You want a super quick, seamless one click checkout process that also lets you show the other things that you have either during that initial sale or after the fact, so you still do your things like whether it’s order bumps, upsells, whatever, to drive up customer value, but you just need kind of a fundamentally different approach to closing that sale versus your kind of traditional organic visitor that might search for that brand and go find their store because they’re just browsing.

Yeah, that’s kind of how it’s used.

Pat Flynn: So instead of I click on an ad that I see that is about a company or a product, but then I just end up going to a single item on a much larger Shopify page that is pretty limited with what it might have on it. Okay. And you know distractions and then I go over here and it’s like asking me to add more things in my cart before I even go through the process versus just there’s this very streamlined, I click for this product because it solves this problem. Here’s the solution. Check out the little I mean you guys have some very sophisticated and I know very well tested conversions on the way the cart buttons show up and how they slide in or slide out and all that kind of stuff. What are the things that like, for example, if I were to just link to a Shopify item that I have, what would I be missing out on if I just drove ads to that versus like a SamCart experience?

Brian Moran: Yeah, I guess a couple things. One, when you’re, when you’re on something like Shopify, it’s tough to get full control over the entire process. So even simple things like if you’re selling a skateboard and someone’s going to check out, there might be a hey, you might also like these other products section, but many times you don’t have full control over that.

So you’re just trusting the software to make the right call. You might know as the business owner, most people that buy this, they’re going to be more likely to buy not these three random products, but these other two specific ones that I want to cherry pick and put in that environment. That’s number one.

Number two, the fundamental checkout process of add all these things to your cart, well, step one, view landing page, then add things to cart, then visit cart checkout page that summarizes everything and then place the order. That’s a very long process at its core. For us, the cart essentially lives on the page.

So you go click and say, yes, I want this skateboard. Maybe you click one or two other products to add them into that cart, but it’s all happening kind of in front of you as you look at it. And you can check out right then and there. There’s no kind of interstitial wasted page that we all know as marketers.

Every time you ask somebody to click every page that has to load, you lose sales every time. It’s just the way of the world. So we just try to limit that and make it as easy as possible for them to get to that point of giving you a credit card and placing a sale.

Pat Flynn: And for larger brands that are doing multi millions of dollars in sales a month or a year, I mean, those little incremental changes, I mean, that, that adds up to a lot, I would imagine.

Brian Moran: Yeah. I mean, we haven’t even touched on, it’s kind of the culmination of a lot of different things that every one of those little tweaks can add 5 percent here, 10 percent there. The other thing that I don’t want to say more experienced marketers, but, you aggressive. Marketers, you have the ability to do things like one click upsell.

It’s a perfect example where you make the sale, and then on the thank you page, you have the ability to offer other things, either at a discount or just offer them straight up at retail. And this works in the digital product space and the physical product space. There’s a lot of big sellers that, that need those things in order to make their numbers work, that they wouldn’t be able to run ads or run the big promos they do without those.

And on something like Shopify, that wasn’t really built from kind of the marketing and sales perspective of e commerce. We have those built in. You can, you can achieve some of those on Shopify through third party plugins that tend to make life a little bit more difficult. I don’t know from experience, I don’t sell on Shopify, but that’s what a lot of these big folks tell us on their way in.

It’s just kind of overcomplicates everything. On us it’s pretty unlimited. Like it, it’s almost like an open source e commerce platform where you can go take control of every little piece. You don’t have to use the out of the box e commerce experience. You can take it, remove certain steps, add certain steps embedded on certain landing pages.

There’s a bunch of extra control that you get, which those bigger brands definitely like. But even for the smaller folks, like when we launched both of our businesses, if we didn’t have the ability to do those things, and back then we didn’t have the same car, we just had to custom code them out. Those businesses wouldn’t have worked, like we wouldn’t have been able to run and pay for ads if we didn’t have the ability to do those things.

Pat Flynn: We’ve talked a little bit about physical products, supplements, things like that in this world with order bumps and whatnot, like that kind of stuff makes complete sense and it’s so obvious why SamCart is a great solution for that. It kind of lives on top of or can live with an existing cart platform, right?

It, like you said, it can, it can work with Shopify. I know it also integrates with a lot of tools that a lot of us use from Circle to Teachable, et cetera, like it can just help with that experience, but tell me the user journey for like an info marketer. I know that you are very familiar with the info marketing space and education and for, those of us in that kind of arena, what are some of the benefits of using a tool like SamCart for the checkout process, specifically for like an educational type product?

So is there anything special that SamCart does to help serve like the info community?

Brian Moran: Yeah. I mean, that’s where it’s kind of born and raised in that community. It’s why we built SamCart. We are running an info business. So, I mean, all the things that we talked about before helping info marketer the same way they help a physical product brand. And as info marketers. That’s kind of the way we all sell. A lot of us don’t even have an actual storefront of all of our courses for a number of reasons. Some of us do, but that’s, I’ve never met an info marketer that a large percentage of their sales come from a catalog landing page on their website.

Like that’s not how most of us sell those things. We’re using either sales pages or webinars or video sales letters or launches that open and close. So those things wouldn’t even show up in your catalog during certain times of the year. Like we are running specific campaigns around a specific product and you definitely don’t want a Shopify type setup with multi step add to cart in that world.

There’s just no need for it. You know, all the integrations that we built from the very beginning, we’re basically all for Info Marketers, any sale that you make on SamCart, we can automatically enroll people into Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific, Circle, you know, all the kind of membership course platforms. You can add any buyers to lists on tools like ConvertKit, MailChimp, and everybody else.

We just focus on the e commerce side and delivering that super seamless way for an info product buyer to come in, place that initial order, make that as quick as possible, either using stored credit cards, so it’s one click, or there’s a bunch of different ways that we, we make that kind of more seamless, allowing you as an info marketer to show the other products that you have, if you have them, so they can add more things to their cart, integrating with all the things that you use, you can automate course delivery.

Email confirmations, all of that stuff, the ability to split test every step in the journey, and then the backend analytics. I don’t know if anybody comes close to what we have now as an info marketer, especially because we’re running so many specific campaigns, you got to know how those things are doing.

You have to know which ads, which traffic sources, which affiliates are driving sales. There’s a built in affiliate platform in SamCarts, if you have partners that promote your stuff, I’d say one of the coolest things for info marketers specifically is our new, we call it checkout anywhere. It’s essentially for the first eight years of SamCart, you would log into SamCart and build checkout pages, very pretty design checkout pages instead of just your boring, like PayPal looking type page.

Now you can take that checkout form off of that page and embed it wherever you want. So if you’re big on webinars, you can now, if your webinar platform allows you to do it, and most do, you can embed that checkout into your actual webinar so that someone doesn’t have to leave your presentation or leave that video by clicking a button and going off to place an order.

They can place it right then and there inside the actual webinar. Or if you have a sales video like Marie Forleo just ran her Big launch of the year on us. Same thing, she’s got a couple pre launch videos and then a final kind of big reveal sales page. And now you can be watching that sales video and place the order on the page instead of clicking over off and reloading another checkout page, which again, every step, every click, every millisecond wasted is lost conversions.

Pat Flynn: Wait, so I could have a, a page set up, let’s say it’s a live webinar happening on that page and I can have a call to action live and say, Hey guys, click on the button right below here and they’re going to click that button. They’ll still be able to watch my video, but they’ll still be able to go through the checkout process sort of simultaneously while that’s happening.

Dude, that’s huge, because as soon as you tell a person to go, typically, to a sales page, they leave.

Brian Moran: Yeah, they disappear.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, they disappear, and maybe they convert. But if they don’t, good luck getting them back.

Brian Moran: They can’t get back in and ask questions. Yeah.

Pat Flynn: Versus like, oh man, this is huge. So imagine a webinar page and there’s like a number of people who are curious and they start, you know, going through the checkout process.

But while they’re doing that, that’s when I bring on a previous student to hear from their, their voice, almost like a live testimonial while that’s happening to reinforce The, the action of, you know, continuing through and then, oh, by the way, if you check out before the end of this webinar, as soon as you go through this process, some of you’ve already finished, some of you are going through it right now, we’ll send you this bonus thing and it’s just going to be dropped right in your email for you.

All while happening. They’re hearing that while they’re checking out. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of an experience like, like that.

Brian Moran: One of the reasons that we. Said, look, we, we got to give our users more control and allow them to take this checkout environment, put it wherever they want is, I think users like us users, like everybody watching are going to find new creative ways to use that you think about at its core. It’s just one line of code that you can paste anywhere that accepts code.

So we have landing pages now that live in notion because you can embed HTML in notion. So you can have free content that you give and at the bottom, there’s a checkout form waiting for you right there to, to buy whatever it is. Could be an upgrade or a bonus or a course or a physical product. You can now embed this checkout flow wherever you want on any page that essentially allows for HTML to go there.

Pat Flynn: So hold up. So I could offer free Notion templates. For example, and then at the bottom, say, Hey, if you want the pro version, or if you want to get this other thing or get into this product or whatever, it’s just in that free notion template. Yep. That’s pretty baller dude. That’s pretty sick. And this is where I feel like a lot of people are sleeping on the SamCart.

We for a while kind of just made it the shopping cart experience and we’re like, Oh, well, we kind of take care of that already with Teachable and Circle and such. And it’s obvious like what is being held back if you just stick with those native checkout processes, which work right? And it’s like, you know, on one hand, it’s like, Oh, well, I want everything to happen on Kajabi or on Circle or on Teachable.

How would you respond to, because I definitely want to get into the story of the raise that you’ve made and kind of where things are going in a second. But if somebody were like, why don’t another product to add on top of everything that I’m doing already, and it’s like, I’m trying to consolidate. Like, what do I need another thing for?

Is it worth it? How would you, I mean, how would you reply to that?

Brian Moran: Yeah. I mean, I guess, you know, you could have said that about a lot of things as I’m sure people said that about email marketing before AWeber MailChimp ConvertKit came along is, why do I need another tool? I’m, I’m getting, you know, my marketing’s working just fine, whether I’m running Google ads or doing whatever it is.

And then people realize the power of email marketing and it basically came down to, well, does your business like revenue or not? That’s the question is if SamCart does what we say it does, In what we see in the numbers all day, every day, and it’s why those bigger folks. I think that’s why we almost have a better, or we have an easier time convincing the Marie Forleo’s of the world or Tony Robbins of the world or Dollar Shave Clubs of the world, because there’s so much money on the line for them.

That 1 percent increase in conversion is such a big difference. The smaller folks, and again, they have If SamCart was complicated, which it’s not, I mean, anybody can use this thing. You don’t need a full time SamCart manager to run this software. It’s not like Salesforce, but even if it was those people have teams to manage this stuff. For the solopreneur, you know, doing five, ten fifty grand a month, I definitely get the objection of it’s another thing I got to keep an eye on. It’s another thing I have to pay for, but just one or two of these things, let alone the six or seven different numbers that SamCart can make move in a positive direction, whether it’s your front end conversion rate, getting you more customers for the dollars or time that you’re currently putting in to get the customers, you’re getting the amount that every customer is spending on day one on that initial order, and the amount that they buy later on down the road, if getting just one of those things to move 10, 20%, that changes a business overnight. Fundamentally changes it. You move all three of them in a positive direction, I mean, we just did a case study, which we did this for free because we wanted this case study.

This guy, Sean Fargo uses Thrivecart and Thrivecart’s very Similar to SamCart, it’s at its core and e commerce platform that focuses only on what we do, which is e commerce. We just happen to think we do it even better than someone who’s focusing it on at all time. Let alone the Kajabis of the world that can’t focus on it full time, cause they’re building entire platform. We said, look, he was kind of thinking about it. He’s got, I forget how much he does a year. It’s not a massive business. We said, let us, we’ll set it up for free. We’ll run the test. And if it doesn’t win, don’t use it, but you decide, let us show you the increase in conversion and sales.

And then you decide we put our embed on his page. He was running a promo for his, he has like a mindfulness course and added a little extra order bump to get customers to buy his other stuff, split tested one or two things, and he got 21 percent more customers and each customer was spending like 40. It was in the forties, 40 something percent more.

So again, in isolation, those sound like, look, that’s great. Maybe even those numbers aren’t enough to convince someone, but when you put them together and you understand, not only are you getting 20, 30 percent more customers, all of them, all customers are now spending 40 percent more. That’s an 82 percent lift on total sales.

That’s damn near doubling the revenue of a business by changing essentially one page on the site. Is that worth it to somebody to have another tool to potentially log into? Personally, SamCart and saw just the sheer Dashboard and analytics that you get to see in real time. I enjoy logging into my SamCart account because I get to see more than I would elsewhere.

Even if that didn’t exist, I would hope most entrepreneurs would say. Yeah, I think it’s worth having an extra tool that isn’t even that expensive, number one, but number two, for an 80 percent lift in sales I can’t imagine losing that argument many times.

Pat Flynn: If somebody were to want to learn how to get up and running on SamCart quickly, what’s the best way to do that?

Brian Moran: Yeah, we’re, I mean, right on SamCart. com. We have three different plans that are all self service. You can start a trial, test it out for yourself. We do have a full implementation team. That’s usually for bigger customers, but if someone wants to pay to have us set it up, we can set it up for you. We actually run the split test for you to beat whatever your control is.

We’ve yet to lose one of those. We’ve done them against Shopify, Thrivecart, Kajabi. So yeah, if you need even more handholding, but at its core, you know, again, I shouldn’t sell against myself and discourage anyone from hiring our team to build it for you, but it’s not that hard to set up and it’s very simple at its core, but you know, some of us want the easy button and we have it if you want it.

Pat Flynn: Nice, man. That’s exciting. I’ll drop our affiliate link at the episode for every, anybody who wants to go through. SamCart has grown quite fast and, and quite big as of late. I know. Can you give us any insight on the company and kind of where it started, but also some of the bigger milestones that have happened that, that signal kind of the future of the company and really how great things are going.

Brian Moran: I mean, we got started Scott and I back in 2014, I think we had a small crew of seven or eight people, a lot of entrepreneurial lessons that you’ve probably learned a lot of people listening and probably learn a bunch of the other folks are probably going to learn at some point of, we tried to build it on our own.

I learned through trial and error from 2014 to 2017, that I’m not a CEO. I’m not an operator. I’m a big idea marketing sales guy, you know, product visionary. This is usually not the people you want at the helm, making every little decision, managing teams. And luckily we found that guy. Justin’s now our CEO.

Luckily he was with us at the very beginning, so it wasn’t a big learning curve to get them up back on board, but we brought him into 2017. stayed bootstrapped, which basically means I funded the whole thing up until 2019. 2019, we probably had 15, 20 people were doing 5 or 6 million a year and really saw where this whole market’s going.

The infopreneur market, physical products is expanding. I mean, all of e commerce is just exploding. And I, I think we’re still just at the beginning. I’m very curious to see how many folks are working for themselves 10 years from now. I think that’s kind of, you know, where we’re going. And so we thought, look, Shopify is proving that this is a massive market, just e commerce in general.

And they’re just kind of in the physical product world. They don’t even touch the digital product world really. So we just saw this massive opportunity and said, look, if we stay focused and do what we know we can do, we think that there’s going to be, and there’s already a need for kind of. The same way there’s Pepsi and Coke and in most industries, there’s kind of two major big players.

And we saw the same thing that in the e commerce world that Shopify is probably not going to be able to, or not going to want to serve everyone. Businesses are just too different at their core. Not only is there this whole world of digital product sellers that. Shopify just wasn’t built for us. There’s folks that have a performance marketing conversion optimization background that Shopify wasn’t built for.

Sam car kind of was, there’s folks who sell without a big kind of catalog store. There’s all these different needs. And so we thought, look, if we move fast, we think we can, can be kind of the alternative to Shopify. Or the kind of the compliment to Shopify. Again, like I said before, there’s very rarely a case where we’re actually talking to a prospective customer and saying like, yeah, you actually don’t need your Shopify store.

It’s kind of like a blog, like everyone needs WordPress and lead pages or unbalanced or landing page tools. Like you need both. It’s not a either, or some businesses only have one and they make it work. Most businesses kind of have the need for both. So anyway, long story short, we saw this massive opportunity, but doing that as a bootstrap self funded business, you just, you’re restricted by how much cash you have to hire the best people in the world and build product and hire engineers and run ads, and so we, we decided to raise a small round of fundraising to move quick.

We found a great VC out of Atlanta to fund that first round. We saw firsthand what giving a business just a little bit of extra cash can do. And we were able to move at light speed compared to where we were. And we went on to raise two more extra rounds. We’ve raised a total of just shy of 100 million at this point.

And the business has taken off and we’re, we’re now just shy of a hundred people kind of scattered all over the place. We have two little hubs in DC Baltimore where I’m at and then down in Austin, Texas, where Scott, Justin, a bunch of the other folks are, but yeah, that’s the journey that we’re on is we think the world is going to the e commerce world, whether it’s infopreneurs, physical product sellers, we don’t really care what you sell.

We think that there’s a huge need for a non catalog store, kind of an alternative Shopify e commerce solution that is flexible, deployable wherever you want, you know, and extremely optimized. That’s the mission that we’re on.

Pat Flynn: Well, first of all, congratulations on all the success thus far. And I’m just really happy to be a part of a small part of the crew as an advisor and to be able to offer sort of like frontline kind of happenings from a, the solopreneur kind of perspective.

And I really feel like SamCart is, is right for a lot of us out there who are selling, like you said, not necessarily giant companies, but companies that know the value of an incremental and significant percentage increase in sales. And, you know, we’re seeing a lot of in e commerce now. I mean, Tik Tok shop is a big thing now, right?

Where you can on Tik Tok where you’re at, click a button and it’s just super smooth. Like you’re buying it right there. What you just mentioned earlier is, giving that power to all of us with just a simple line of code, the ability to check out fast. And we know today that people move from person to person, from product to product really fast.

So if there’s a little bit of friction in that purchasing process, it’s, it’s going to reduce your numbers by quite a bit. So It’s super clear, man. Thank you so much for your time today. Congrats to the company. Excited to be along with you for the ride here. And hope everybody checked out SamCart. It may be a perfect fit for the thing that you have going on to take what you’re doing and really make it work.

It’s almost like a nitro boost for, for your business, I’d say. So any, any final words of advice for the. Creator out there. I mean, you know, our audience best, it’s not necessarily the e commerce or the big Marie Forleo types, although there are a few of them in the audience, which are amazing, but for the entrepreneur who might be making two to 4, 000 a month, or maybe less who’s selling a product.

But they want to go bigger with it outside of obviously checking out SamCart from your perspective as a business owner, where should they focus in the next year?

Brian Moran: Yeah. I mean, we’ve all been in those shoes and those early days are, are tough and exciting. And you’re learning a thousand things at once. I think one of the smartest things I did, I know you did the same thing.

I, every, especially infopreneur that I know that’s kind of cracked six figures and then seven or maybe eight is we either got lucky enough or we just refuse to stop until we were able to either surround ourselves or learn from folks that are five, 10 steps ahead of us. And I think so many of, I know I did the same thing when, you know, the train baseball site that never broke five grand a month.

I think we did like two or three, maybe four here and there, and it wasn’t until I realized what is possible that like, I really was able to break through. I thought I was just kind of stuck there. It was kind of the normal, this was where it was going to be. And yeah, I mean, listening to podcasts like this, listening to folks, stories, going to events and meeting people and just trying to let your kind of mind open up to maybe there’s a whole nother world where all my limiting beliefs on this business are just BS. And it’s just a story in my head that it is, it is possible to get this thing to, to five or 10 or 15 grand a month and beyond. Yeah. So I think anybody listening to this right now, the advice would just be keep doing what you’re doing. I mean, you soak up everything you can get your mind on. It’s funny how those breakthroughs come about and you’re just hearing somebody average and all of a sudden you realize like, holy moly, they’re have a very similar business to me or they’re in my niche and they’re, they’re at a million a year or a hundred grand, like it just unleashes so much creativity.

Cause your brain realizes like, man, maybe I’ve been underselling myself and maybe there is an answer here. Whether it’s a different strategy or technique or different piece of software or whatever it is. Yeah, looking back, I think those were the times where I was fortunate enough to be accidentally stumble across a new friend or mentor or piece of content that just kind of built that belief in myself that, look, this, this can be a lot bigger than you’re giving yourself credit for.

And there’s an answer somewhere. You just got to go dig it up. Nobody’s going to do it for you.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, man. Huge. Brian, thank you so much for this. Appreciate you. And We’ll have to have your brother come on at some point in the future, and we can talk shop a little bit later with him as well. So, thank you and all the best to the team.

Brian Moran: Sounds good. Thanks for having me.

Pat Flynn: Alright, that is Brian from SamCart and I’m really excited to be able to start to experiment and implement a lot of the things that he’s spoken about here. And especially with where I know SamCart is going, I have a lot of Insider information of what’s going on in the company as an advisor.

And if you’ve been looking for an easy way to sell your one thing, but sell it really well, SamCart is definitely the way to go about doing that. So definitely check it out. SmartPassiveIncome.com/samcart is the affiliate link. If you have any questions, you can reach out to Brian or Scott over there.

They got a lot of great stuff happening and I’m just so grateful to be a part of their journey and they’ve just grown so big and are playing the big leagues now, which is incredible. So again, check them out. Brian, over at SamCart, SmartPassiveIncome.com/samcart. And if you want the show notes, head on over to SmartPassiveIncome.com/session785 again, SmartPassiveIncome.com/session785. Thanks again. You’re awesome.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media, and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!

Share this post


Smart Passive Income Podcast

with Pat Flynn

Weekly interviews, strategy, and advice for building your online business the smart way.

Get Unstuck in just 5 minutes, for free

Our weekly Unstuck newsletter helps online entrepreneurs break through mental blocks, blind spots, and skill gaps. It’s the best 5-minute read you’ll find in your inbox.

Free newsletter. Unsubscribe anytime.

Join 135k+

Subscribers