Brian Moran once kept a day job while an online business was already earning more than his salary. The explanation was wonderfully unromantic: he was building a house, and a mortgage lender wanted a longer record of self-employment. Freedom, it turned out, required paperwork.
In an early account of his working life, Moran described running a product launch from his desk in February 2011. By the time he went home, he said, the launch had brought in more than his annual pay. Yet he stayed employed. He had married the previous year. Guaranteed income still mattered. The young entrepreneur who wanted to work for himself was learning patience while waiting for permission from a bank.
That mixture of appetite and caution runs through his career. He would build SamCart with his brother Scott, raise venture capital and eventually give up the CEO job. Along the way, he kept returning to a deceptively small question: what happens in the final few seconds before somebody buys?
A center fielder finds another game
Before the checkout pages, there was center field. At Grove City College, Moran became the baseball program’s first All-American in 2008. He earned first-team recognition and a Rawlings Gold Glove. In the conference tournament championship game, he went four for five, homered and drove in six runs as Grove City beat Thiel 11-10. These were credentials a young hitting instructor could reasonably put on a website.
Grove City’s center fielder was already comfortable with a scorecard.
Professional baseball had been the ambition. His next chapter instead involved a government-related desk job in the Washington area. He had studied marketing, but the first thing he tried selling online was the subject he knew from practice: baseball. Train Baseball, which he started in 2009, offered instruction for players, parents and coaches.
The transition did not produce instant applause. Moran has described taking more than a year to make his first sale. Knowledge of hitting did not automatically confer knowledge of finding customers. A website could be open all night and still have nobody at the counter.
Mentor Paul Reddick, who worked in baseball instruction himself, became an important connection. When Moran began getting results promoting his material through Facebook, Reddick encouraged him to teach that process. The marketing was becoming a product of its own.
Ten thousand fans, and coffee with his wife
Get 10,000 Fans launched in November 2010. The idea was specific: help business owners use Facebook to attract people and generate sales. Moran said his own baseball page had added 10,284 fans in fewer than 60 days. That result gave him something concrete to explain.
By 2012, his description of a typical morning began with coffee with his wife. His former schedule had meant leaving before she woke up. He made a point of reclaiming that time. Lunch might be with her or with Scott, who had joined the business after college. For all the marketing vocabulary, the original prize was an ordinary day arranged to his liking.
He also had little patience for popularity without income. A large Facebook following, he argued, needed to help pay the bills. That concern would travel with him from social media training into software. Attention was useful when a customer could do something with it.
The brothers now had both paying customers and an audience that trusted them to explain online selling. Their next business would emerge from the machinery they used behind the scenes. An instructional business had quietly given them a place to observe a software problem.
The unglamorous last page
SamCart reached the public in 2014. Its founding problem was familiar to the brothers: they were selling courses, ebooks and other digital material with tools that did not suit the way they sold. A conventional storefront could display a catalog. Their campaigns often needed to explain one offer and let the buyer complete the purchase with little interruption.
Moran’s early software experiments had also introduced him to recurring revenue. He had sold access to a white-labeled Facebook page tool before SamCart. The appeal of software was becoming practical, rather than theoretical: build something people continued to use, and a customer relationship could last beyond a single training purchase.
For development, he turned to a college acquaintance, Justin Smith. Moran had known him as a political science major; discovering that he could code was a useful plot twist. Their shared history mattered, but so did evidence that Smith could make polished software. The first checkout product served the brothers’ own business before it was offered more widely.
A conceptual diagram of the buying journey, not a performance claim.
The details were hardly glamorous. Payment integrations. Page design. Testing what a buyer saw next. A good additional offer could increase the value of an order; a badly chosen one could simply be another interruption. Moran was interested in those decisions because he had been paying to bring customers to the page.
There is a pleasing modesty in the name. Sam was not a founder, a beloved pet or an especially persuasive relative. “Sales and marketing” supplied the initials, and the domain was available. By 2024, the company employed three people named Sam, giving the annual retreat an opportunity for an “ultimate Sam” award. The name had acquired its characters after the fact.
The founder changes position
A business that sells training and a business that develops software make different demands on the person in charge. Moran has been unusually direct about his fit. He describes himself as someone drawn to ideas, product, marketing and sales. Managing every decision and every team was another occupation.
He had funded SamCart himself before outside investment arrived in 2019. That year, the investor conversations included Brian, Scott and Justin. The operation was moving beyond a product the brothers could introduce to an existing audience. It needed an organization capable of serving a larger customer base.
In April 2022, SamCart announced an $82 million Series B led by Eldridge. The announcement reported more than 30,000 businesses on the platform and over $2.2 billion in sales processed. Those figures described the platform’s reach and its customers’ transactions. They were a long way from the mortgage application, though they did not eliminate the everyday work of running a company.
Later in 2022, Smith took over as CEO. Moran moved into the strategy role. Relinquishing the top title meant admitting that the business could benefit from a different person doing the job. His competitive instinct now required choosing where to play.
“Being the top person isn’t always the right fit.”
Brian Moran
In discussing the change, he described a better fit for both himself and Smith, and more room to be present as a father, husband and friend. His account makes the handover sound less like a retreat than a correction. He remained a founder with work to do. The company gained a CEO whose strengths better matched the assignment.
Making the thing that gets sold
SamCart acquired the design software then known as Dropdeck in spring 2023. Renamed Typeset, it could turn written material into presentations, documents and other visual content. For a company built around selling digital products, helping create those products was a logical move upstream.
It also brought a different question into Moran’s work. Reducing the trouble of taking payment was one part of the creator’s job. Producing something worth paying for came earlier. Design software could shorten the production process, although the judgment behind an offer still belonged to the seller.
The company’s sales education has attracted criticism, too. Some customers have publicly disputed whether they agreed to annual CreatorU subscription charges. Those complaints are customer accounts, rather than findings about every transaction. They do underline a responsibility that accompanies an efficient checkout: the buyer needs to understand the purchase, including what happens after the first payment.
That responsibility sits close to Moran’s original obsession. Every step of a transaction has consequences for the relationship. A completed order is a beginning as well as a result to count.
The next number, and the morning after
In 2026, Moran has been telling the story of building toward a billion-dollar exit in public. He has described SamCart as a business valued above $300 million. These are his stated valuation and ambition, with the larger number still a goal. His public channels now give the former marketing instructor another classroom.
The aspiration has grown considerably since Train Baseball. The question behind it remains recognizable. What can someone who knows a subject sell? How can they explain it? How can the tools get out of the way long enough for a customer to buy?
His own career offers a further question: once the business works, what kind of day does its founder get to have? Years before the funding rounds and acquisition, Moran had a precise answer. He wanted to sit down for coffee with his wife. It remains a rather useful measure of success, requiring neither a pitch deck nor a committee to calculate.
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