How He Grew A $30M Gardening Blog From Scratch | Kevin Espiritu

0:29All right, Marketing School listeners. ado, enjoy the episode.

1:00helped you win that deal? I think it's because... Kevin, how we doing? We're doing well, man. Thanks for doing this. Everyone, this is Kevin Espiritu. So I met Kevin in person at an investors conference and he's got this amazing business called Epic Gardening, right? And he does a whole host of things. So this is going to be a wide-ranging conversation. But Kevin, what did I miss in that intro? Please add. That's pretty much it. I mean, I run a business called Epic Gardening, which I started, I think, technically in 2013. but full-time 2016. And it's been a crazy ride of being a blogger to being a YouTuber and then a podcaster, then an e-com.

1:37And then building a whole team around it and making acquisitions and all that. So that's it. What kind of numbers can you share around the business? You got the YouTube, all the things, whatever you're comfortable sharing. Sure, yeah. So on YouTube, we're somewhere around 2.8 million on our main channel. And then we have five total channels, three are over 100K. yeah one of them is like a creator that we've grown he was actually my initial garden assistant and we like built a whole little mini content universe for him one of them is my own story of my homestead so it's epic gardening and then i created a sub brand called epic homesteading because i wanted a place to kind of just like f around at my house and make whatever content i wanted and that started to do well and then i think on every platform besides facebook we are the biggest account that exclusively talks about gardening and then business wise i could share some revenue stuff.

2:27I raised some money for the business in 2021. So before that point, the trajectory of revenue was 2016, I did$18 ,000 total. When I quit my job to do this, it was like six months of the year, I did$18 ,000, which I was pretty stoked about at the time. 2016. Yep. And then 2017 was 72. 2018 was 220. 2019 was 550. 2020 was 2.8 and 2021 was 7.3 million. Got it. And then we raised some capital and now we've made some acquisitions. We do tens of millions a year. Got it. Okay. How much, I guess, why did you guys decide to raise? How much did you guys raise? We raised$17.5 million. And the reason why was because in this world of creator, operator, creator, entrepreneur, I had already figured out creating content and building an awesome audience of people who really cared about what we were doing and it was helping their life.

3:17And then I plugged in product, not really on accident, but without knowing how big of an opportunity it might become. And so I did that from 2019, 2020, 2021 through the pandemic. And by the time it got to 2021, I was on me and four contractors and we had done those numbers, which was like a woefully understaffed team. And I was beyond my level of operating knowledge. And so bringing on some partners helped a lot. Got it. So I'm imagining you're super profitable. Back then? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're not not profitable now, but back then it was almost cheat code because you're not paying for paid ads.

3:50We were charging for shipping at the time. We don't charge as much now. And so your margins were just insane back then. And the other thing too, I think people think raising money is bad. I don't think it's bad or good. It just is. Because I'm assuming you got to take some chips off the table too. Took some chips off the table, yeah, which is helpful just to allow you to focus instead of being constantly in a state of stress panic all the time as a founder. But yeah, I thought the same thing. I never thought I would raise any capital for the business because it felt like it was me. like your business is your child especially when you're a creator and you're the face of it too um but yeah in our space it just made sense to to partner up yep um okay so the botanical interests interests okay so let's talk about this deal yeah this one was crazy because the first seed pack i ever bought at a nursery like with my brother way back when i was starting to grow was one of their seed packs because it's this white packet with like hand-drawn illustrations and it just stands out compared to the rest of the ones on the shelf so i just picked it not knowing anything.

4:49And then lo and behold, like 12 years later, we now own botanical interests. It's just a crazy story. But we went out and met them. And the founder is a husband and wife founder. And the husband's like, oh, I know you. Let me grab a photo with you. I've got a couple friends who are fans of your stuff. And I was like, okay, I think we got a shot here. We might be able to get this. So he gave me the hat. The same hat you're wearing right now? I have like 17 of these hats now, but it might have been the same hat. But I remember thinking to myself, this is probably going to be a competitive process.

5:22I know there's like five to seven other people trying to purchase botanical interests. So I'll just wear the hat 24-7 in every piece of content that I make until this deal is either won or lost. And I did. You can look from all of 2022, I'm wearing the hat and everything. I kind of still do. and then we went through the whole bidding process for buying the company we were definitely not the highest bid verified fact by a significant amount a meaningful amount for the founders take home on the sale we were not the highest and they still went with us and so we go out to do the whole celebration closing party that sort of thing and Curtis who's one of the founders he's like you don't know how much wearing the hat made a difference and I was like I knew it I knew that would make the difference because I love the brand I was already a fan of the brand.

6:11So I was like, what's a small thing I can do to show that I'm different than the other buyers who, frankly, probably would have just gutted the entire team and done some roll-up type thing. And I was also not going to do that. So I think that helped. How wearing a hat won me the biggest deal of my life. Yeah. I texted my investors after. I was like, I want more equity back. Because we saved quite a bit of money compared to what I had to go up to. So what was the angle there? I mean, get them to integrate with you guys, like the seeds, like you guys weren't doing any seed. I don't know much about gardening, right?

6:42No, no. So the product lines we had at the time and we still have are, it was raised beds. So like something, a container to grow plants in. And then we had a seed starting trays. So trays to start the seeds that we weren't offering, right? And we were purchasing from a local vendor connection that I had, very small player. and we were like, well, we need to get into other categories and seed is a fantastic category to be in. It's one of the few things you actually do have to purchase every year as a gardener and not only do you have to, but you want to. These catalogs sit at your doorstep in the wintertime.

7:17You're thumbing through the catalogs. You're circling all the seeds you want. You're making lists. You're planting spreadsheets out and all this kind of stuff. It's the most fun activity for a gardener, but we just weren't offering the seeds and it's a very difficult business to build from scratch in any fast way at all. Because regulatory stuff, the different connections you might have to have. And so we're like, we think we should try to source a business like this. So that was the basic logic. Are you able to share what scale they were at? They were roughly at our scale. So we were somewhere in the mid-teens of tens of millions of revenue, and they were roughly in the same spot.

7:53Their team was larger because they were literally testing, sourcing, manufacturing, growing, and creating seed packets in this facility. But yeah, revenue-wise, we're roughly the same. So did you structure it? Did you roll an equity or was it up front and earn out? They were out. They were ready to go. Yeah, they were ready to retire. Oh, so it was up front? Yeah, yeah. They were ready. You always do some sort of hold back structure or something like that. But yeah, for the most part, they were just ready to be done. You still talk to them? Sometimes. Sometimes. Yeah, yeah. If I have a question, I remember asking him a couple weeks ago about some random password that I forgot, you know, but they're friendly still.

8:33Did he tell you like why the hat helped you win that deal? I think it's because look, like if you're a founder operator and they built that company over 28 years, you know, and so your legacy is being passed on and out of the people that were in the running to want to purchase it, obviously you have other equity, private equity companies and you have other seed companies who does another seed company need the staff? No. and if you're a founder and you want to take care of your team like you want to go to someone who is going to try to do right by the team yeah exactly and they're into it i would feel the same way like i was like what play would work on me because that's what would work on me you know yeah yeah that's poker play yeah yeah um so with private equity i mean um with tcg what is the expected outcome did they kind of outline to you hey like we're aiming for this like yeah i mean i I think nothing more than the standard return a private equity company might want, which is in the 2 to 3x range is what everyone underwrites, I think.

9:33Okay. And how did you get into gardening in the first place? Because you're 6 '2", right? 6 '3", 6 '4", something like that, yeah. I don't see many 6 '3", 6 '4", gardeners. How did you get into it? There's not a lot of young gardeners in general. Hopefully, there are more now. I got into it almost as like a desperation act to get off the computer. So I went to college. I went to University of California, Santa Barbara, got an accounting degree. I was playing online poker during that time. Because I'm of the age where Chris Moneymaker won the World Series in 2004. I was about 16, 17 when that happened.

10:07And that got all of us starting to play poker. And that's all we did in high school. That's all we did, right? Yeah, because we're about the same age, right? And so it's all we did. So the second I turned 18, I put$100 on, I think it was PokerRoom.net at the time. which is one of the OG sites. And I played limit poker, got decent at that. And then when no limit came out, I played full tables. Then I played six max. Then I played heads up. Then I was like VPNing into crazy sites to like play French people because they were worse, you know? And long story short, during college, I was doing well in poker, watching my friends sort of study for the accounting exams and just going, I'm making more than that now.

10:44And I never really craved to be an accountant. So after school, I played poker for a little bit, but I quit after about six months or so. There was just nothing there for me afterwards. I had no clue what to do next. So I did some small little business things, but I also started playing a ton of video games. Because if you play poker on the internet, it's very similar to video games. You just don't make money if you play video games. It's really good. So I got so obsessed with it that I was playing like eight to 10 hours a day. And so I started gardening with my brother one summer just to be out of the house, just to just have a hobby that existed outside.

11:15Because I imagine you're probably on tilt like all the time. Oh yeah, especially if you're playing poker. and you're winning, losing, and you can't have that emotional control. I broke a few. You can have winner's tilt too. Yeah, you can. You can just be on a total high. Okay, so you start gardening, and then how does it start to become a thing? So I started gardening, and at the time, the little fledgling business I had was designing and building WordPress websites for a local dentist, a local plumber, that kind of thing. And that was going okay. The first client I ever had, I think I charged$800 to do a site.

11:46I didn't take any money up front. It was a guy who made Letterman jackets in San Diego. And we got on the local news, we being my site. I had nothing to do with what I'm about to share. But he was just doing drugs and not delivering the Letterman jackets. And so my website gets on this news thing. And I'm like, dude, this was just a terrible experience. I got maybe$400 of the total$800. So I just wasn't doing that well. I wasn't figuring stuff out. and yeah, I mean, the blog was a way of, I built the blog as a way of showing that I could build a website, right? So I'd go to like a local client and be like, look, like here's my little gardening blog.

12:23It's doing well on Google. Like I know this skillset. So it's like a digital business card. Yep. And so what was the inflection point? When did this thing start to take off? It took a long time because from 2013, when I registered the domain to 2016, it was never the full-time thing. I was always doing other things. and when I came out of the only real job I had as an adult, which was at Scribe Media, I was the second employee there. I learned a ton and then I came back to Epic and 2016 was the first year I went full-time. So I think when I quit, I was probably making like 400 bucks a month on the blog and YouTube.

12:56I don't even think YouTube was making any money then. So how did you know to go all in on this$400 a month thing? Yeah, I don't think I knew or didn't know. I think I just was going to do it and was going to see if it could work because my logic was if I can get it to 400, I can probably get it to$2 ,000 or$3 ,000 and that's about as much as I spend. Theoretically, I could be that way forever and I'd be free. Plus, you had an SEO background too and now a writer background. Yeah, writing, SEO. I had the tools to build a website and market it and grow it and then I had the interest in gardening.

13:28Got it. One interesting, I think this kind of ties in with gardening too. We can take a little side quest here. Right now, you're carving wood, right? So how do you have to define all these new habits? I mean, I think that's like a, it's a strength and a weakness, right? Like all your great strengths become a weakness at some point. And so for me, like this insatiable curiosity about how all things work, I'll get into a little side hobby or a side quest. And then this whole carving wood thing came. One of the guys on my team, his name is Jacques. He's one of our creators. He got into it and he texted me and he was like, I just spent four hours carving wood.

14:05Like he made a spoon, you know? Yeah. And you can buy a spoon, but he made a spoon. And I'm like, okay, cool. Let me grab some of these carving knives and this wood. I sit down with him. I spent four hours making a spoon. Didn't look at my phone. I was just chatting. And then I left with the spoon, which was a terrible spoon. But I left and I was like, I feel so good right now. What's going on? And so to me, it's like a way to get away from the business a little bit and just have a thing that's pointless in a way. There's no point besides just doing it. It feels meditative. Yeah. Like this is like your version of like walking in the woods or just sitting there and doing nothing.

14:42You got to have something like that, right? Because I used to think like playing video games or like watching Netflix or like going out to eat or this or that was a way to de-stress. But it's really not. Like it's still stimulation for the brain. Like you have to have a present moment activity that like generally involves your body or hands or something with no outcome. Yeah. And plus, like I don't know if you're this way, maybe just like a mid-30s thing now. but I get a lot of anxiety just looking at my phone. And so if the first hour of my day is like, I have one hour of screen time, I already feel like a complete failure.

15:12And I just feel like my brain's scrambled. How are you with that? I'm okay at it. I think because of the nature of creating on the internet and being on YouTube, being on Instagram, being on TikTok, et cetera, part of how I built those platforms was just responding to every comment, no matter what. So up until like 2019, I think I responded to every comment on every platform. So I got really used to like multi-threading. And then when you played poker back in the day, like I don't know if you played online, but I would play 10, 12 tables at a time. And you're making like many decisions per minute on those tables.

15:43So my brain can handle it. But I think when you get to your mid thirties, just because you can't handle it doesn't mean you like should or want to. And so I kind of feel the same way these days. I wanted to take a second to talk about today's sponsor, Ahrefs. Ahrefs is my favorite SEO tool. In fact, we use it at my ad agency, single grain for internal uses and also for clients. And we've been using it for years and years. And the cool thing is they have a great academy that you can go to if you're looking to just learn SEO and they have a free offering. If you just search for hrs.com slash webmaster dash tools, my favorite feature with hrs, it's a sneaky feature here, but I'm just looking at zapier.com.

16:18And what I'm doing is I'm looking at, Oh, wow. They got 10 million visits in the last, I don't know, six months or so compared to the previous six months. Well, okay. How are they doing it? I can look at their site structure. So if I click on site structure, I can see that their blog has driven the vast majority of it. And it was a 5 million, a plus 5 million change, right? So basically what I can do is I can look at the pages that are driving that traffic. And now I have a sense for what they're doing in terms of strategy. So I can look at competitors. I can also look at our own stuff too, to figure out how we can optimize our own website.

16:47So you can just check out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. That's completely free. Or you can go to the Ahrefs Academy. That's also free as well to learn more. and that being said, back to the video. Six years of commenting. So I want to come over to YouTube because again, you have a 2.8 million sub channel, 350, 350. Yeah, and the other two are sub 10K. They're sort of starting out. And you just started a new channel and then boom, I see a couple hundred thousand views on one video. Oh, the personal channel. Yeah. So what's like your formula? Because now it's just a formula. It's not even a secret. What is it that works for you?

17:20I think it's channel dependent. So on the main channel, Epic Gardening, a lot of it is just educational how-to videos that play over many, many, many years. So like some of the early stuff still does really well. How to prune basil so it grows forever. Pruning tomatoes 101, everything you need to know, right? Like that's going to be searched for many, many years. And yeah, your ability to host, your ability to explain the information, that all helps a lot, but it's a search-based strategy, which is kind of like old-ish school YouTube. The new channels, Epic Homesteading specifically, it's more of like a for the fans type channel and it plays and recommends.

17:55I'm not titling something based on SEO. I'll title something like, I can't believe this happened. And then the thumb will have my chicken flying the coop or something like that. So it's interesting based on what channel it is. The strategy is different. I think it's also a combination, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it's one, you know the game of YouTube, but also there just isn't a lot of content being created around gardening, even today, right? Yeah, I would say there is, but it's just a smaller space than fitness or certainly food. I just came from this big food blog conference, and it's like 97 food bloggers and me, someone who does a Disney thing and somebody does a country thing.

18:33It's such a huge world. Gardening is not that big. And how does that YouTube engine help with your business? Do you have a sense for how much percent it drives? Yeah, so we try to crack this, because if you could fully crack attribution, you'd probably be like the richest person on the internet, right? But we know that direct attributed revenue from all the organic platforms that we have is somewhere in the 8 % to 10 % range. But that's like the lowest you could possibly track. It's like the one-day click, 24-hour window, like all that kind of stuff. So you've got to imagine if you've got direct traffic coming in from sources that are harder to track, like where else are they going to hear about us from?

19:12And we don't spend a ton of money on paid ads. So it's a good chunk. Got it. So what are the kind of distribution engines for you guys right now? YouTube, SEO? Yeah, so the blog is really how the whole thing started. The blog is a tank now because we've grown many, many times over the years. We also have made a couple blog acquisitions and folded them into our blog. And then YouTube, the short form platforms, which I would consider like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook to some degree, and even YouTube Shorts, we don't use that too much. Those to me all function as like top of funnel organic reach for more organic content.

19:45So I kind of want you to see that stuff, go like, oh, I might want to grow some herbs or something, and then go to YouTube. And then from there, you might go, I want to grow herbs with a system that we offer, and then you might go buy it. Got it. And so it seems like you use TikTok, Instagram Reels, but how come you don't touch YouTube Shorts? I do use it, but the way I use it right now, at least, is of the four Shorts platforms that exist, TikTok to me seems the most throwaway in the sense of its impact is not super strong. and so I'll test every piece of short form on TikTok. If it does well there, I'll escalate it to IG where we have a more dedicated and like long-term fan base and then I'll put it on Facebook.

20:25If those also do well, now I have three data points. This is what I call like a cross-platform banger. And if I have a cross-platform banger, it'll go to YouTube because YouTube is the most precious audience that I think we have. CPB, cross-platform banger. CPB strategy. Yeah, you heard it here first. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started.

20:58The best part about it, it has everything you could need. Say you're ready to launch your own design studio. Shopify has hundreds of templates to create a beautiful store that matches your brand style. Or if you need help with content creation, Shopify has got AI tools that write your product descriptions, craft page headlines, and even enhance your product photos. Shopify lets you easily create email and social media campaigns to reach customers wherever they are, whether they're scrolling or strolling. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side.

21:28Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school, Shopify.com slash marketing school. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where Framer comes in, and it totally changes the game. Framer is the design-first, no-code website builder that lets anyone ship a production-ready site in minutes. I recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours, animations, fast load times, responsive layouts, all without writing a single line of code.

22:04It was easy to use and the end result was polished enough to look like a developer spent days on it. One of my favorite things is that Framer's AI handles translations with a single click. So your site can be up and running in multiple languages almost instantly. And with real-time collaboration, your whole team can jump in and work together. No issues with versions or miscommunication. Whether you're starting from scratch or using one of their templates, Framer lets you focus on design while handling the technical side for you. Animations, responsive layouts, search optimization, and all the things that matter.

22:34Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at Framer.com and use code MS to get your first month of pro on the house. That's Framer.com, promo code MS. Framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. Yeah. So, okay, we can jump around here. But you just mentioned the phrase blog acquisition. So can you speak more to that? Because I think a lot of people would like to learn. Yeah. So the earliest one I did was 2017. I was writing almost exclusively about edible stuff. and hydroponics. So edible gardening, hydroponics. I wanted to get into some houseplant stuff because I was starting to grow houseplants a lot at that point in time.

23:11Like there was a big houseplant craze in the mid late 2010s. And so I found this website that I was using just to research potential articles to write. And then I was like, this is a pretty decent site, but it looked old, like it looked unmaintained. I'm talking like early 2000 style level design. So I did a who is search on it and I did a little SEO research. It was getting like 30, 35 ,000 hits a month. I do a who is search. It's some like Indian guy. And he was a VC in India. I find his Twitter and I go, hey, do you own this site? He's like, oh yeah, I actually forgot about that site. I'm like, would you ever want to sell it?

23:45And he's like, yeah, I'll sell it to you for$10 an article, which there was 90 articles, so$900. And I was doing the math. He's not the writer, right? It's just one of his sites. He may have been. I have no idea, honestly. A VC that just... Yeah, I mean, who knows what VC meant back then? I have no idea. But it was probably just some like AdSense project that he did back in the day, right? But anyway, so I bought it for$900. Just at$900 on the ad rev, you would earn just on display ads at a one-to-one, like assuming no traffic increase. I was like, this thing pays off in like four months. So it's just like an auto buy.

24:17So I bought it. I'd spent like a couple days transferring all the articles over, 301 redirecting them. I think just because my domain authority was higher, the rankings were better, right? And so then we - Oh, so you moved the articles over. I rewrote them from scratch and just redirected the URL to URL. And yeah, it contributed like 80 ,000, 90 ,000 hits a month to the blog at a higher RPM. And so it paid off in like two months. Yeah. You don't hear many people talking about, so you hear people buying blogs and they have the strong domain authority, they might have some articles, but buying the blog just for the content, not many people do that.