How SAMA Labs Has Processed 9 Figures With SamCart’s Personalized Payment Processing

SAMA Labs built their brand building other brands.

Co-founders John Florey and Thomas Desernia have been best buds for years, founding their own roster of brands over the last decade, and they translated that experience into building Sama Labs and helping other brands build and scale with the help of their eCommerce and performance marketing teams.

We sat down with John to learn how they've helped over 250 brands scale $100M in revenue and the role SamCart has played in helping them achieve that since 2018.

“I looked a little bit deeper and realized the [SamCart] service, the features, and the platform provided what we really needed.”

Building SAMA Labs

“We're a 5-year old direct-to-consumer performance agency. We got our start essentially being brands ourselves,” John says. 

John didn’t always set out to be an entrepreneur. He went to school to be a pediatric psychologist and realized more school and more debt weren’t in the cards. That’s when he found eCommerce.

“Being a little bit of a techy, nerdy guy my whole life who was always playing video games, I really was drawn to it. It became a passion of mine. So I dove headfirst into that ecosystem, worked for a few entry-level SMB mid-market eComm brands and agencies before starting my own with SAMA Labs.”

This experience helped John gain perspective of what it's like to be on the service end and the operator’s end of running a performance agency. “It gives you a pretty holistic approach on what it's like to do this properly,” John says. “Same with my cofounder: He built his successful brand out of his bedroom and scaled it to 9 figures, did a partial exit with a private equity group. To have gone through from the bedroom to being institutionalized gives us a really powerful selling point when working with brands that need help.”

Today, SAMA Labs is a full service company based in South Florida with offices in Miami Beach and Boca Raton, where their production studio is for their content team. They focus on performance, retention, scaling and growth on the DTC side and they also have a content studio that allows them to work on a more local level, as well.

How SAMA Labs has scaled their own business by helping others

In just five years, the team at SAMA Labs has generated 9-figures in revenue, and they’ve used their own personal experiences building and selling brands as the blueprint for success.

“We now know what to do with other brands and how to navigate those different inflection points because it goes beyond just building Facebook and Google ads. A lot of operational and infrastructure changes that have to take place, and we’re fortunate enough to get to guide brands on how to make those good decisions to support a level of scale that rapidly,” John says. 

He continues: “We've also been fortunate to work with some really cool, high-performing brands over the years. But it comes down to not just strategy and not just our experience: We have a fantastic team that I give a lot of credit to. They grind to the bone for our clients; you know, it's a service business. We've always been very keen on giving a white-glove experience to any brand that works with us.”

With their own agency experience in their back pocket, John and the team at SAMA Labs are able to approach each client with an empathetic lens.

It’s that personal touch and SamCart’s profit-boosting features that have helped the agency achieve record success in just half a decade.

“I can sleep at night because I knew in the next thirty days, our clients would get automatically billed. I can’t tell you how many hours were saved for my partner and I once we got a better grip and control of our invoicing and receivables [with SamCart].”

SamCart solves SAMA Labs’ billing issues

Most of SAMA Labs’ services are retained on a month-to-month basis. Prior to SamCart, they would bill or invoice their clients by mail-in check.

“It was super archaic,” John says. “And then, one day, we said to ourselves ‘We're spending more time than we need chasing clients down to remind them to put a check in the mail or wire us.’ We had worked with another company prior to using SamCart, but we were curious about you guys. I looked a little bit deeper and realized the service, the features, and the platform provided what we really needed.”

One feature really changed it all for them: Recurring billing.

“I can create a hosted page where all of our services are listed. All our clients need to do is put in their contact information. I knew as soon as I saw that transaction come through, it would hit our Stripe account. I can sleep at night because I knew in the next thirty days, our clients would get automatically billed. I can’t tell you how many hours were saved for my partner and I once we got a better grip and control of our invoicing and receivables.”

How SamCart personalizes the SAMA Labs client experience

For SamCart and SAMA Labs, though, it’s not a one-size-fits-all model. 

“As it relates to SamCart, I create different pages for them that are a bit more branded. I can personalize it, too, as far as the title of the page and what's on there so it’s specific to each client,’ John says. 

Despite it being a more manual process, the cost-to-benefit ratio has always been clear for SamCart and SAMA Labs. “There hasn't been an instance where it's made our lives more difficult,” John says. “What it has is exactly what we need it for. We're a pretty simple business in nature, so we don't try to complicate things too much.”

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‍SamCart has processed $3.5 billion in sales, and businesses like SAMA Labs use our platform to power 7, 8, and even 9-figure engines. If you want to learn more about SamCart and the features you can leverage to scale your business, click here.