The One-Problem Ebook (Brian Moran's $1.2M playbook)

01The full story

Brian Moran is the founder of SamCart, which he describes on camera as a $300M software company with over 100,000 people who have made a sale on the platform. But the money that funded all of it started with an ebook. He says he has made $1.2M selling ebooks, and that for this video he spent 48 hours going through sales data from more than 20,000 ebook sellers on his own platform. The useful part of the story is the failure, not the success. His first ebook was in the baseball niche, sold from a site called trainbaseball.com, and it took almost 18 months to make its first dollar after nearly two years of work. He blamed the design, then the site, then traffic, then ads — he burned a couple hundred dollars on paid and made zero sales. None of those were the problem. The product was called The 10-Step Hitting System: a glossary, an encyclopedia, a book that promised to fix every hitting problem a player aged 4 to 18 might have. His retrospective diagnosis is the whole entry: he should have taken one chapter — hitting a curveball — and shipped it as its own book, aimed at one buyer. Our read: this is why the ebook category looks saturated and isn't. Most sellers ship the encyclopedia.