Kevin Espiritu built the world's most-followed gardening brand — and a $100M+ business — starting with a single metal garden bed

waiting room. First, let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And we are joined by Kevin from Epic Gardening in the Reream waiting room. Let's bring in the TV show. Kevin, how are you doing?

What's going on?

What's up, brothers? How you doing?

Good to see you, brother.

Thanks so much for taking the time to join the show.

First up, we got to talk about that tank.

Yeah, what's in the tank?

What's in the tank? We've been talking about breeding rare Costa Rican tree frogs in this tank.

No way.

Yeah, they're endangered.

Okay. Oh, they're endangered. Okay. What else is What else is special about a rare?

And you're planning to release them in in all 50 states once you have enough?

This is the goal. This is the goal. We're always scaling over here. Yeah, of course.

I love it. I love it. Is it challenging? Like, how much of your time is devoted to that particular tank?

Almost none. Almost none. I just need to make sure that they're fed. Yeah,

that's cool. What do they eat? Yeah, they eat crickets, which I'm breeding in that little tank right over there. I can see that.

Yeah, we're breeding the different trophic levels over here for sure.

Okay. And then and then do these frogs have use in your garden? Is it purely just for fun?

No, I'm just branching out to to to Flora or to Fauna now, I guess.

Yeah.

Here at Epic, you know.

Okay. Well, uh, first time in the show, so I I want to kick off with your backstory. Uh I I want to know about the decision to start making content. I feel like that's always an interesting uh origin story. Like what when when did you think okay I need to make content?

Dude, I mean I I'm an internet OG so I was on Geoc Cities. I was on Angel Fire back in the day making

Angel Fire too. Yeah.

Anime tutorials, you know. So I don't know what it is. I think genetically I'm I'm designed to make content. But um for for Epic, it was really a calling card for remember when you used to design WordPress websites back in the day, like when people actually paid for that service.

I I used the blog as like a calling card or a digital business card for like designing websites for for local businesses and then just kind of kept

plugging along with it and adding different platforms and and here we are today.

Yeah. What what about the first YouTube video? Like what was the backstory behind choosing to go to YouTube, choosing to go to video? It's a big lift for people if they're on Substack or they're a writer and they don't know how they're going to do in front of camera.

First YouTube video was 2013, so it was a long time ago.

And ironically, back then, I mean, SEO and blogs were kind of the thing.

And so for me, the first YouTube video, maybe it's the second YouTube video, you can see me using a screen recording app, reading a blog article, just literally reading the article. and uh with the hopes that people would watch that video and click the blog link and I would make money off of the advertising on the blog. So it was a completely backwards logic to today of course you know

but then uh obviously discovered YouTube is is a far better platform especially these days.

So what was the what was the flow of traffic like over time? Were you able to reroute blog viewers to YouTube or did the algorithm eventually kick in because you're pre-algo feed right? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Right. I mean, I think it was back then if you subscribe to a channel on YouTube, that subscription would just show up. Yeah.

Which was a beautiful time. But no, uh I think every platform

as you expand to every platform, you think like, okay, well, I can get someone from this one to that one. It tends not to work. You tend to have to just play each platform for what it is.

And so, like YouTube became its own thing. Insta, all the other social media platforms have become their own thing now. Mhm. Uh how did you think about like uh serializing content, creating through lines like the initial formats like what was the actual development of the playbook that you ran on YouTube?

On YouTube I think in the early days cuz remember like I'm 13 years old as a YouTuber which is like two YouTuber lifespans. I think most YouTubers last about six years or so.

Um and so back in the early days it was just pure SEO especially for a gardening channel. It's like hey how do I how do I grow basil? How do I grow tomatoes? How do I prune tomatoes? These days, those videos have all been made either by me or someone else.

And so, we've had to come up with formats that that work repeatably over time. So, for us, it's great. I mean, it's a very seasonal business. So, in March, what to plant in March, in April, what to plant in April or um you know, in June, how to take care of your garden in June, that kind of thing. Uh, and then also coming up with like formats that are a little bit more high effort but tend to do better like garden makeovers or garden tours where you actually have to go somewhere but it's it's easy to kind of like bulk those into a week and produce them.

What uh what did the journey look like of transitioning from media into actually making products yourself because that is an idea that that is at least in the venture world people talk about. It's just a very obvious transition. you just go from content to commerce and yet there's actually so

like few creators who have like made that transition well actually created products that go on to have equity value I mean we we we've people bring up all the time oh you guys have this audience in in tech you should create you know software various products for for the audience and our answer has always been look if we do that we're competing comping against someone in our audience who is spending 100% of their time on that on that business and uh

be a sponsor.

Yeah. And they they could be a sponsor, but but more so like I don't want to compete with someone in our audience that is gets to spend 100% of their time on something when we can only spend like 10% of their time on it. Like they're going to smoke us. But I think in in what you're doing, like very very niched, very very niched down and maybe the companies that you're competing with are not like they can't go out and get a hundred million dollars of of funding necessarily right away, but talk about that transition and and how it's evolved.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think up until 2019, Epic was just media business and that's it. And it would be Google ads, it'd be YouTube ads, and maybe some brand stuff here and there. And I think in 2019 we did out of just that pool a quarter million in revenue. And then that was the year I decided to do product. And so the whole logic being I can't really control any of those three streams of income. Like traffic goes down for one reason or another. All of those go down commensurately.

And so I thought okay well what what can I sell? And the beauty of having content is that you kind of get like a prevalidation engine for for what you might want to put out there. And so there was this raised bed that I had. It's just like a gu a metal garden bed that had been sent to me and I was like this is the thing I get asked the most about so I'll figure out how to sell it. I didn't even know who gave it to me initially. So I tracked down the manufacturers Australian company and I just kept emailing them every quarter. I was like can I sell this? Can I sell this? They said no no no no. They eventually said yes. I think I had 70 grand in the business bank account. I spent 40 on a shipping container. I knew nothing about ecom. So, what I thought I would do is this is the most crazy stupid ecom logic of all time. But what I thought I would do is bring it into the port of San Diego, which does not take containers. So, that that was already a no-go. Um, it goes into the port of Long Beach. I thought I was going to go up and get it like me at the port drive driving the container down here. I'm just picking up.

Yeah. Just like hauling it down. And then I was looking into Costco self storage to like rent that, unload the container and like get like some sort of satellite internet to print the orders. And I talked to a couple friends and they were like, "Yeah, have you heard of a third party logistics company? Just ship it there." You know, just so stupid. But that's how little I knew at the time. And so what happened is made the order, got it on the water, made an Instagram story and said, "Hey, all these beds you guys keep asking about, they're here now. I have 550 of them. They sold out in 2 days. Use that cash to buy another container. No way.

Sold out that out in two days. So like by the end of the year,

I think we did quarter mil in just that.

So the business doubled. And then of course setting that up before the global pandemic was insane. So we went from 500 to like 2.8 million to 7.1 million the next year and then raised raised um a series A. But yeah, I mean immediately I was like, "Oh, this is obviously the actual revenue driver behind this business at least." Which I agree like a lot of media businesses don't have that easy plugin.

Yep. Totally.

Yeah. What was the team like before and after this transition? Did you have to hire business people? How did you like how do you feel your role was changing? I mean, we've had Doug Deir on the show a few times and he was like very happy to hire a CEO to sort of run Cars and Bids and go back into content mode, do podcast, which grew a ton. But every creator has sort of has a different journey as they as they evolve the business.

Yeah. It's so weird because I run into Doug all the time at the coffee shop down the street. So, and we share the same investors, but um yeah, so up until 2021 at tail end is when I raised a series A, it was me and four contractors. So, it was me, editor, a writer, and an assistant, and that was it. And we had did we did about 7.5 million that year, mostly product sales at that point. So, it was like way wait. So, so, so, so you have four contractors, but all those contractors are on the content side, but mostly it was

I was doing all the commerce stuff. So, so you have like

But you're single, you're single product at this point. You just made the bed. I'm just going to sell I made and you didn't have to develop the I'm sure you made changes to the product.

I didn't make the product. I mean, I think that's the biggest thing here is I did not make

the drop shipping dream. Like literally the thing that everybody gets sold and then it doesn't actually work.

It was crazy level drop shipping, I guess you could say. Except for I mean I I own the inventory. I brought it in. I had a 3PL. Like so it wasn't true drop shipping. It's just that I didn't invent the product. there was a distributor relationship. Eventually, of course, we've started inventing products and, you know, we scaled, I think, from

December 21 to December 22 from four people to about 90 cuz we use some of the funding to buy a seed seed company that had 60 people. So, yeah, that was a pretty crazy transition.

And talk about that the buy versus build decision on the on the seed side because I'm sure you had opportunities to do both,

right? So, so with seed, it's almost always going to be a buy because the infrastructure to actually like acquire seed. We we sell almost 800 varieties of seed, vegetables, flowers, herbs. It's it's nearly impossible to scale that really quickly. You have to have like buyers relationships. The buy orders are out a couple years. You need like pretty specific infrastructure to to actually like germinate and test those seeds to pack them appropriately. I think there's like three or four companies maybe that sell the packing machines and they're all in like Germany. So some German guy will fly over and like fix a machine for you. Um so yeah I mean and plus let alone like we bought the brand of the of seed that I actually started gardening with back in the day. So there's like a heritage sort of story angle there that worked out really well.

Yeah. Uh what about uh um the uh like your role shifting as you bring in those 60 new people? I imagine that they had a leadership team at a company of that scale. How are you interfacing with them? What what what does your role look like then?

Yeah, I mean the first the first year or two was like all out madness. It was like whatever I could do at any point in time. So like still be the face of the content and architect that but you know hiring scaling all sorts of ops types of decisions. Now we have a president similar to Doug setup

uh which is extremely extremely helpful. He's ex- chief growth officer at GameStop back in those crazy days. So he's got some pretty pretty wild stories.

Yeah. And um

uh with the seed brand, the founders wanted to leave and so we had like this little holdover position for them and she kind of coached our leader in

and they were just ready to go and we can always call on them if we need them but we don't we don't really anymore. Yeah,

that's great. Uh talk to me about seeds as a particularly good e-commerce business. I imagine like when I when I think about the worst e-commerce brand, it would be like I sell a gallon of water, you know, it costs $20 to ship it and people buy it for a dollar.

Low margin.

Low margin. Uh seeds, it feels like great e-commerce product that maybe people just needed to be educated about. But was that your experience? And what was it like actually scaling up uh the

Yeah, I mean I think like those original products, the raised beds, like I didn't have to invent them, right? Which is great. But every by every other metric, they're not a good ecom product. Totally. The the lightest one is 20 pounds, the heaviest one is 60 lb. And then you're also you're charged on dimensional weight of the shipping as well. And at the time, my my 3PL was out of like Thousand Oaks. So I'm shipping from SoCal to the whole country.

Um a 60 lb box, which is just terrible. The beauty of that time is that I was charging shipping, which is kind of unheard of these days, and I had no customer acquisition cost. My customer acquisition cost was actually negative because I was getting paid to make my YouTube videos. you know what I mean?

And that's what was selling it. Um, and so I remember back in those times, uh, pre preunding, let's say, kind of like laughing at all the DTOC ecom bros cuz I like you're running paid ads like cloud. And now I'm like, okay, I understand the the model a little better. But yeah, I mean, once we got the seed brand, that's a primarily wholesale business. And so when we looked at it, I would say about 15 20% of the revenue was direct to consumer. And they had not focused on it. And so we've tripled D TOC

just by saying we own the business basically. We haven't done like a crazy amount of improvements as far as like DTOC goes. We just we just actually paid attention to it and plugged it into content. But you're right. Yeah. The gross margin on seeds is is quite good relative to everything else in the gardening space.

Yeah. How do you think about the transition from I mean it sounds like you're actually doing the the backwards transition. Most of like the DTOC bros start online and then eventually they realize that okay well I found the efficient frontier of Cactile TV on Meta and Google now it's time to go into retail and then the whole company needs to pivot. They need to hire retail salespeople. Uh are you going are you going in one direction or both directions? Um I I've always wondered about the the retail side of the business.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the logic of buy the seed brand logic to me, I think there needs to be like a first order logic of buying something and that needs to be true and then the second orders can be like very beneficial and may or may not play out. For me, this the the logic was like what we just talked about. The seed margins are very good and it's it's actually the only uh item in gardening you literally need every year. Every other thing you technically could get away with not buying again, like a raised bed or something like that.

And so there's a repeatable addition to our business that we now have. But yeah, I mean the the sort of like second order thoughts of of buying the seed brand was can I introduce the raised beds, these seed trays that we developed to the wholesale network cuz that is very very hard to build out. We're in 75% of all independent nurseries in the country,

which it would be different if like we had Home Depot or Target or something and we could just say take this line.

Instead, we have reps that can go out to like 5,000 stores and say do you want this line? which if we can get penetration on like some of those harder goods, then that's a huge benefit that that that could play out for us.

I I have this thesis about uh creators that uh do that launch products is that they they typically underrate the number of B2B buyers in their audiences be and and you might not you might think, okay, I'm selling a protein shake uh I'll sell it to the consumer. You might have like a literally someone whose job is to buy the next protein shake who works at Target or Walmart and they might be familiar with you. Have you had any of those experiences? Has that been advantageous or you know is this a unique unique industry?

It's it's it's actually really weird because like the advantages you get, let's say, in like prevalidating a new product you might launch by teasing it in content and and sort of seeing early demand. You actually get that to some degree with the wholesale relationships. like we're in we're in about 1300 Petos now and I would say the sole reason is because the ma the major buyer at Petco's just been an epic fan for a long time so we were warmed up you know I don't have to go chase that down and prove it out um we're talking to Walmart for some stuff hopefully that comes to be but it's a similar sort of way that relationship started too so I think like the content angle if you can convert it you have some interesting doors like kind of automatically open

do you think you have the most AI proof business in the world because we talk uh like one you're obviously not like trying to sell like you know vertical software uh but but uh two even you know the the catrini piece pointed out that there's a lot of like AI proof businesses where if demand gets

destroyed because your buyer is no longer making 250k a year to do some email job

like your business might be fine but maybe maybe that there's less demand but I feel like even in even in these like AI doomsday scenario I was like, I probably, you know, if I, you know, lose my job, I still probably want some seeds and put them in the ground.

I saw that anthropic piece that came out saying like which which industries are the most vulnerable and I saw groundskeeping at a near zero.

Near zero,

which is, you know, gardening is just a, you know, a recreational version of groundskeeping. So, I think we're fine.

Yeah. Yeah.

How are you, how are you using AI? How are people using AI in gardens? is like I can imagine taking a picture of something happening in your garden and just being like how do I fix this? Like a lot of lot of ways that that it could be very useful. And

we have that. Yeah, we have that. So what we did is we launched this membership program

that com comes with commercial benefits. So you get like 10% off the store, free shipping, free returns, which is great if you want to buy like a couple seeds here and there. And then we paired that with an educational sort of side cuz we have more or less the biggest gardening audience on any of the platforms. So we trained a model just on our own internal content and then like licensed databases of let's say plant facts or weather or something like that.

And so if you ask it a question or send it a picture, it'll give you the answer that the closest answer you could get to what we would actually say, not just like what GPT or Claude might say.

Um, and then it'll kind of funnel you to live support if you want it. So you can get actual humans too. So it's kind of like a two-tier thing. And then we're just using it like along with anyone else that how how you'd use it inside of a company for operations and stuff like that.

What about on the content side? Uh are you finding it useful for scripting or thumbnail development or prototyping or sort of like layout? Anything there?

John, it's a game changer.

It's game changing.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's like the way we try to use it for content is like your your really good first draft that you would normally have to spend how however long to to script out.

The beauty of gardening, I think, is it's so bespoke to like a particular individual's approach or a particular geography that AI is not really crushing that right now, nor do I really want it to be, but it's really good for first drafting a lot of different things and content. Yeah.

Yeah.

Uh what how do you recommend I fall in love with gardening? I grew up, my parents uh basically forced me to do a lot of weeding, a lot of mowing, uh a lot of just random stuff around our yard. I had bad allergies at the time, so I would come out of that and be like destroyed. And so I I've not I've had zero desire to to get into gardening as an adult, but I feel like I just got to find the right wedge product. So, is it is it, you know, raspberries, tomatoes?

Look, I mean, if you pick you pick the crop that you are the most excited to eat and cook with and you grow that, you know. So, if it's tomatoes, I mean, I'll send the technology brothers a bed and some seeds. No problem. If if it gets you in the garden,

I love it. Yeah.

No, happy to support you. Just just tell us tell us what to get.

Yeah. uh how how are you thinking about the interaction between uh the creator economy, YouTube content and Hollywood? We've seen like you know Mr. Beast is all over Amazon Prime now. I could imagine you doing content with more legacy institutions. What's your philosophy around the those distribution channels? You know, so the two things we've done that are kind of tasting that world is we have a Samsung Fast channel now that we're we've licensed 200 hours hopefully hopefully more soon. And then we just launched last week a eight episode series on Home Depot's YouTube channel.

Cool.

So kind of like a co-produced series not not a show like not on streaming but um that's coming around too. I think I don't know. I mean I think that if you're Jimmy and you can get a massive check to do something on Prime like why would you not, right? Uh but a lot of us on the smaller scale or like maybe industrywide big but not like global big.

The f the fast channel deals are looking really good right now. The the sort of shows if you can brand a even if it's just a YouTube series as a show

versus just like a a video or a series of videos. It seems to be pretty palatable to advertisers these days.

Um which is kind of interesting cuz like fundamentally it's just a list of videos. There's nothing really different about it. But if you call it a show like Michelle Curry, Challenge Accepted. I don't know if you know her.

Oh yeah. Yeah, she's great.

That that that is very much like a show on YouTube and it plays really well for for those types of networks.

Yeah.

Yeah. And eventually you you have the seasonal element that you were saying like eventually you can be like here's a 100 hours of just April focused gardening content and that's like that's super powerful because the content is evergreen that the

plants and the earth and all these things aren't changing really

uh in any sort of meaningful way yearover year.

That's such a funny mind shift because I I don't know if you've had this experience but it feels like playlists on YouTube like never really got what they deserve. Did you feel that way too? Right. Like this.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean playlists like maybe back in the early days you would like crank through a let's play video game series or something like that and just let the playlist run. These days that I told the team actually I was like look at every playlist we have prune them down and then like bucket them into more conceptual shows rather than like this is my grow tomatoes playlist. It's more like

you know so so that's that's what we're trying to do right now.

Yeah. like with Doug you'll see like uh you know car reviews or like listicles and like it's more the structure but um yeah that like you could imagine there's also the question of like how set up is Hollywood to work with someone like you because if even if they're like yes like we want you to do a full season on HGTV uh but we're going to need to pull you away from everything else for and I think the corridor crew guys went through this a little bit where like the the numbers just never matched up like they would get bigger and then Hollywood would get more interested. But then the opportunity cost of taking six months off to do a real Hollywood movie.

This happened to me. This happened to me in the pandemic. So 2020, it was uh June 2020, I did a deal with Chip and Joanna Gains's then burgeoning network, Magnolia.

I think they were taking over DIY at the time

and it was supposed to be this transformation show. You go back, you have this beautiful sort of thing. And um obviously the pandemic kind of hampered that. I had just bought a house. So, I pitched this idea of I'll just build out this house and we'll show you and we'll go through the So, it was like 45 days straight of hardcore filming, like 10 10 plus hours a day trying to get this done cuz there's a skeleton crew. And 2020, of course, was the year, I think we started that year at 180K on YouTube. I ended that year at over a million plus another channel almost at 100K. And so if I take those 45 days and just calculate, let's say I was making, call it even just 15 more videos, it would have been not only more money straight up, but more sort of brand value to the business to just make the YouTube videos. And I think that's what all the creators are running into.

Yeah. Yeah.

Have you have you ever gotten tempted to do any of the like selling the actual end product? There's been a number of venture-backed companies that are like, you know, trying to make the perfect strawberry or or any of these kind of vertical farming things. I always wanted somebody to do one of those like one of those like um like uh butcher box style thing, but give me a live video feed from the ranch so you can actually you know if you have this like real time 24/7 idllic ranch and then and then you're you're able to like

No, I have a low TAM there. But

I mean look like it's hard enough shipping seeds around the world and shipping hard goods that don't expire. I can't imagine how hard it would be doing perishables. I don't I would I would never want to do it honestly.

Yeah.

Yeah. How are you thinking about product expansion? Uh you know, if you go to the nursery, there's so much there. There's certain things that you're equipped for, you're operationally set up for, and there's other stuff that's maybe better content, you know, could could uh you know, be marketed, but might be an operational challenge. How do you assess like new

Chrome Hart's epic gardening wheelbarrow?

I would do it. I would do it honestly.

Yeah, sure. Why not? You know, that'd be fun.

That's awesome. Um, I mean, look, like for us, there's a lot of room to run and seed. There's there's like tens of thousands of stores we're not in just on our botanical interest line. We launched an epic gardening line, which is like a guaranteed to work sort of beginners line. Maybe that goes through to big box because two-thirds of gardeners spend their first dollar at a big box. We're not in any of them. And the mission of company is to help people grow anywhere they are. So, if that's where they walk in, we want to be there in some way. So, I think you can you can run this business quite quite a bit further just on seed alone. Um, and then we're architecting the rest of the product strategy around that. So, our second bestselling line of products is seed starting trays and equipment and lighting. And then from there, it's raised beds. I think we probably do something in soil or fertilizers next. But again, like

do we own a fertilizer and soil mixing facility? No. And like do we just want to white label, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. on on fertilizer is the fertilizer broader global fertilizer crisis because of the straight is that going to trickle down to everyday gardeners or they're not it doesn't really matter for them if they're if the price even were to go 2x they still don't need enough product

it probably is fine for for us I don't know I mean I think it's way more of a problem for like industrial agriculture I think for us we're we're probably fine

that's Mhm.

Very cool. Well,

what about tools? Lennus TechTips has a screwdriver.

I know. Yeah. I was just hanging with um their CEO and I don't know, we you might even see an LTT epic collab at some point.

That'd be great. Yeah. Yeah. He's the king of clubs. Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

Great to finally meet you. Absolutely love.

Congrats on all the progress,

everything that you're doing. And uh

say hello to Doug

this year. I'll give I'll give gardening another shot.

Want to see it. We're we're at least getting now that we have team Kevin AI.

Yeah,

I'll hook you guys up. Don't worry about it. I got you.

Fantastic. You're the man. We'll talk to