79. How to Make $7.3M/Year Blogging About Your Hobby

0:00$7.3 million a year. 300 % revenue growth year over year and more than 20 employees all from a single gardening blog. I just made 50 % of my whole revenue for the year in a month doing the products. If you can sell everything that you buy on pre-order, then you're cash rich before you deliver the product. I was at 183 ,000 subscribers, I think. And then I woke up the next day, plus 15K. Next day, plus 15K. Next day, plus 15K. And I'm like, oh my God, like what is going on? If you're the only person to have a video on the topic, it's still going to hit. You know, it's the whole logic of how we got on TikTok and that sort of blew up.

0:41I would say if I could do it based on some of the stories you heard and the clownish actions I've taken, certainly if you're listening, you can do the same thing. I'm your host, Alex Freeman, and I'm joined by Kevin Espiritu. Let us show you exactly how to turn a hobby into millions of dollars online. Kevin, thanks so much for joining us on the show. Hey, thanks for having me, Alex. I appreciate it. So I want to get started with the story, which I know goes back before Epic Gardening. So can you kind of talk us through your beginnings as an entrepreneur? Yeah. I mean, if you want to go all the way back, it's that classic story of like hustling in middle school, right?

1:19Selling, the lemonade stand. I think back in my particular day in sixth, seventh grade, it was Napster had just come out. And so I'd take customer requests and I would burn CDs, mixtapes, I guess, and sell them for like$10 or$12. That's where I sort of first realized, oh, you can make money on your own, right? Instead of someone having to give it to you. But really, I would say where it kind of developed was in college, playing online poker to basically pay for my four-year degree out of UCSB, University of California, Santa Barbara. And that really just taught me like, hey, there are other ways to generate income for oneself.

1:51Now, poker is sort of a high paying job. If you think about it, you got to play to actually earn. But during poker, I realized I could also invest in players or what's called stake other poker players. And that would generate an income while I wasn't playing. And sort of that was like a breakthrough moment for me of not necessarily passive income. I'm not a big believer in that philosophy, but a way to generate income that was decoupled from my time. There's definitely a couple of things that I want to dive into a little bit more, but I guess I want to start with something you just said, which is that you're not a big believer in the passive income philosophy.

2:22Can you unpack that a little bit for us? Yeah, sure. I mean, I think it sort of gets sold a lot online of, hey, you know, make passive income doing X, Y, or Z. The truth is sort of, it's never that way, right? I mean, work has to go in at some point to develop an income or to build a business. It just so happens that some models have that income streaming in when you're not physically working on the business. That's what I mean by that. It's just decoupled from direct time, but it's not really passive in a true sense. And then obviously, let's get into poker a little bit. I'm also a poker player, and I think that so many of the lessons in poker mirror such important business lessons that you can learn elsewhere and you probably learn in an MBA, but it's such a much more real and immediate example right in front of you all the time.

3:09What for you were some of like those big takeaways from poker that have helped you in your entrepreneurial journey? I would agree. I mean, I'd go more extreme and say you actually probably don't learn some of that in an NBA. Not that I've taken one. So kind of making that take up right there. But the thing about poker is it's a game of imperfect information, right? So you know the cards you have. If you're playing hold them, you know what's on the flop turn in the river. You know, to some degree, what people have done in the past. but you don't know what they're holding and you don't know exactly what they're going to do next.

3:39And so that's basically how the real world works. You know the information that sort of is circling around your own life and experience. You know the market maybe you're in if you're talking about a particular business, but you don't know a lot of other stuff and you just have to make informed decisions based on sort of probabilistic thinking and good strategy and tactics. So to me, I've always felt that poker was like a microcosm to train decision-making in the real world. And that's what it ended up being for me. I mean, there's obviously a lot more that you can go into with poker with bet sizing, bankroll management, those sort of things also apply to how you might allocate expenses in a business or investments in a business.

4:14So there's just so many ties that I don't even know that I fully explored every way that it relates, but it was certainly very formative for me in developing the way of thinking about business. You know, obviously you're accustomed to taking a risk as both an entrepreneur and as a poker player. How do you tolerate risk management and kind of stepping out on that ledge and taking a swing to further the poker analogy? Like how do you size your bets correctly? Yeah, to be honest, one of my weaknesses when I played poker was I could never really divorce the true monetary value from the game itself.

4:45What I mean by that is, you know, when I played a$200 buy-in, that was fine. I sort of was like, okay, that's actually not that much money to me. But when I was playing a$1 ,000,$5 ,000 buy-in, I would think that that was real money at the time. Obviously it was, but it's not helpful when you play poker to think that way. You should really just, the theory is more or less the exact same, regardless of the stakes you're playing at. That was always a weakness of mine. I could never really fully divorce it. And I think that just speaks to my general level of risk tolerance. I'm not one of those entrepreneurs that's like, you know, I quit everything.

5:16And with my last$100, I went into credit card debt and built this whole business. I've just never been that way. And so when I started Epic, it was really quite inexpensive. I mean, you register a domain, you start a blog, and really the only costs are your time. Now, obviously, as things have scaled up, we've made larger and larger investments and thus larger and larger sort of business mistakes and monetary losses. But I think what's been helpful for me in business is poker is so immediate, right? You know if you won or lost the hand, buy the end of the hand. In business, the results are a little more divorced for real time.

5:48And to me, that actually helps me, like say my emotional state of winning or losing in business. In poker, it was much more difficult. So that's a pretty distinct difference I would say I have. That's a really interesting perspective on that in terms of finding that right level of risk tolerance and the reward timeline for you. So talk us through your journey, I guess, after poker. Where do you go from there after you've kind of gone through school and start to dabble into other entrepreneurial ventures? Yeah, so I gave poker six months or so post-graduation to try and see if that was something I wanted to do for a longer period of time.

6:22And I think pretty quickly, I realized that I didn't want to for a couple of reasons. Number one, I was friends with a lot of really skilled players. I'm talking top 1 % or half a percent of the poker population on the internet. And I just was not at their level. And I did not think that I had the skill set to be at their level in any reasonable amount of time. So I knew it wasn't something I was going to be world class at. And then number two, when I looked at the people who were playing poker five, six years older than me, I was maybe 21. They were 26, seven. I just didn't want to live the way I saw them living, kind of like partying and then sitting behind a computer and then partying and sitting behind a computer.

6:59It's fine for some people. I just wasn't interested in it. And so I figured, you know, I need to figure out a way to make some income that number one does not require me to go get a job. More of that later, it probably would have been smarter if I just got a job. But number two wasn't poker. And so I started messing around with web design at the time and started building WordPress websites, did some local web design stuff for clients. And then again, realized, okay, well, once the client has been serviced. Once I gave them their website, I've got nothing else to sell them and I got to go find more clients.

7:26So just a service business model. And then that's what got me into learning SEO and sort of some of these online marketing principles. And so then I started selling that to the local businesses. Oh, hey, you know, we'll improve your local search results. And then of course you get a monthly contract in that situation. So I was basically like stumbling my way through the building blocks of trying to come up with business models that actually made sense. If you want to fast forward really quickly, and we can jump into any of these that you want, was doing that, tried to do a startup, was sort of like a machine learning relationship assistant in 2014, which was a bit early for that type of model.

8:00Yeah, that's kind of way ahead of the curve there. Yeah. Yeah, it was a little early. We were using machine learning to try to recommend if your partner, let's say, liked, I don't know, The Strokes, the band The Strokes, and her birthday was in August, it would know, hey, well, these seven bands are like The Strokes, or maybe the strokes are actually playing. And it's a week from her birthday at this venue, so maybe you should go get that ticket for her, that type of thing. Just didn't execute it super well, to be honest with you, mostly on me. My co-founder was doing a great job. So tried that, that failed.

8:30And then finally decided to humble myself and go work for someone, which I, in my early 20s, always thought I was like, oh, it's such a failure if you work for someone else. What a disgrace. It means you can't make it on your own. I was one of those, almost like the trope of the people that you see that's like, if you're not working for yourself, you're just a loser, like that kind of mentality, which is like such a terrible way to think. So I decided to work for a company because I was like, look, clearly I don't know how to get things past a certain level. So maybe I'll go work for somebody who actually knows and work for a company called, it's called Book in a Box at the time.

8:59It's now called Scribe Media. It's become one of the premier sort of hybrid traditional self-publishing companies out there. Done some books that have gone New York Times bestseller, et cetera. So I was a second employee there and learned a ton. I call it, I learned how to think about business. And then when I left there, went full-time on Epic. I think let's start with your time at Scribe Media. I do want to also kind of ask you some reflective questions about your failed business venture, but how did you go about learning a new way to think at Scribe Media? I don't know how to describe it in ways that I'm a pretty like pragmatic guy, right?

9:31I don't exactly know how to describe what happened there in a way that makes total sense to me, except for the fact that when I went in, I simply could not see very clearly about literally how the world worked, especially how the world of business worked. I just was sort of operating on a lot of other people's opinions, things I read in books, things I heard from some person on the internet or a friend, but I wasn't really filtering it through like a core logic of my own, right? My own sort of intuition and sensibility. By the time I left Scribe, I could do that. I sort of had the ability to think in first principles.

10:06And I don't know exactly what chain of events happened there that caused that to be the case, except for the fact that the founders were very much that type of person where they would say, look, let's break this all the way down to the bare bones logic of it and see if this makes sense. And this, when I say this, I mean, sort of like any business problem we might've been facing or any business sort of goal we might've had. And watching them do that in real time, I think made me understand, oh, you really need to come to the table of life with your own perspective that is sort of checked by the logic of others or the wisdom of others.

10:39But you really do need to trust your own ability to think and make decisions. And that's sort of how I came out of Scribe, sort of armed with that ability, I suppose, and allowed me to grow Epic, I think, much more quickly. So do you think that spending that time working for someone else in someone else's business is a step that more would-be entrepreneurs should take? Or are there other ways to kind of learn that lesson. I certainly think there's other ways to learn it. I mean, I brute forced a lot of those lessons, but I don't think it's smart necessarily to brute force if you don't have to, right?

11:09And so to me, working in person with people who were building a business at a level I had never gotten to before was think about your, like, how does information come into your brain? It's the senses, right? Like all of them, eyes, ears, sound, all of that stuff. So in person with skilled people who are doing and or have already done exactly what you want to do, the earlier you could do that in your life, I would imagine the better off you should be. And so if I was smarter, I would have found a scribe media like opportunity. The second I came out of college, the problem is I wasn't smarter than I thought I had things figured out.

11:43And that was a critical mistake that I made. I want to kind of look at the failed business venture. I believe great mate is what it was called. Is that correct? That's it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious with all of this experience post that and with such hindsight, where do you think things went wrong and what advice can you offer to an entrepreneur to maybe avoid that fate? Sure. So there's like a hundred things that went wrong there and you'd have to almost try to sequence them in order of their level of wrongness, I suppose. One would be you should ideally try to market validate the idea before you even raise any money for it.

12:17We raised some money for it from sort of like these rich guys that lived in like Newport Beach or something. They weren't even, quote unquote, real investors. I mean, they were businessmen, they were successful, and they were investing in sort of the real world, restaurants, car dealerships, that kind of thing. I think they just wanted a little taste of something in the tech world. And obviously, they don't have the deal flow to get those types of investments in the circles that they travel in. And so I think that was the arbitrage of how we were able to get some funding, is it seemed attractive to them.

12:45Not that we swindled them or anything like that, as we thought it was a good idea too. But we didn't really test if anyone actually cared about a relationship personal assistant app before we even set out to raise the money. That's classic like lean startup methodology. Just go validate the products. We didn't really do that. We built a desktop instead of mobile, which I think in 2014, there's an okay case to do that, but you still should have just gone mobile first. I was the non-technical co-founder. So what I should have been doing is running around literally outside talking to couples and seeing if this was an interesting thing.

13:16And if it was having them test the product over and over again and getting rapid iterative feedback and delivering that to my co-founder so that he could have improved the product further and further. I think we should have underwritten the actual business itself. Okay, in perfect success, how much money does this business actually generate? And the answer, I actually don't even know today, but it probably wasn't enough to be investable. It might've been a really cool sort of like affiliate traffic kind of app play, but maybe it wasn't investable. You know what I I mean, so there's like so many different problems.

13:47I could do a full postmortem. I probably should at some point just for my own benefit, but those are some of the bigger ones. Reminder for our listeners that you can find more advice on how to start and grow a business on the UpFlip website, which has proven blueprints to build a business from scratch. Just head over to upflip.com to check those out. Okay, so Kevin, now let's get to Epic Gardening. How did that idea come about? Where did it come from? And what was your process in getting that business started? Yeah. So that one, weirdly, in some of the stories that I've already shared, technically existed.

14:17So there was a blog at the time. I was using the gardening blog as sort of a calling card for my local web design business. I say, hey, look, here's a sample of a blog that I've built. So you can see, you know, this guy knows what he's doing. He can actually build a website. But I just enjoyed gardening at the time. And so I was using it as like a hobby blog and kind of practicing my writing skills, practicing my blogging skills, how to do SEO, how to build a link to a website, all that kind of like classic early days SEO stuff. And it just existed as a hobby blog for many, many years until 2016, when I eventually left Scribe Media to at least what I thought I was going to do is farm, actually literally farm people's front yards and like sell the produce to restaurants.

14:57But I said, you know what? I have this blog. It's making a couple hundred bucks a month. There's some traction there. Maybe I'll just get it to a stable point where it makes two or three grand a month so I can just pay my bills. I don't have to waste my money, draw my savings down. And so I kind of hit the computer and started blogging like crazy. And I got it there. I got it to about two or three K a month in a few months. And I was like, okay, that happened a little faster than I expected. I was excited because I was like, whoa, my skillset I learned in Scribe, aka how to think well about business, has now sort of been validated.

15:30I know I wouldn't have been able to do that if I hadn't worked to Scribe. So I was like sequencing, I was identifying the right problems, sequencing the right actions and building in the right way to deliver the result that I wanted. And so I said, you know what, let's see how this goes. I think I could grow this a little bit more. By December of that year, it was at five or six grand a month. And I said, number one, I actually really enjoy this. I love consuming information that's interesting to me and distilling it and then sort of repackaging it into content that I think more people could find palatable, aka taking like a university PDF on hydroponics and translating it into a great article and video.

16:05So to me, that was very valuable just for my own interest. And of course, you know, the market showed me that everyone else was interested in that as well. And so I said, you know what, I'll put the farming thing on hold and I'll just go full time on Epic. So that's really interesting. You didn't leave Epic necessarily. You left Epic with one idea and kind of landed in a slightly different place, only really thinking, and maybe this is just a misunderstanding on my part, but only really thinking like six-ish months ahead and not really being like, okay, here's the 10-year plan for Epic gardening.

16:33name. Is that an accurate kind of representation? I mean, I would say I didn't even think six months ahead, to be honest with you, dude. I was maybe at two or three months. I said, can I get this to stable income in two or three months? Yes. I didn't really have a care in the world after that because if you have something that's generating enough for you to live on, then my logic back then at least says, well, then you're done. You actually don't need anything else. In a way, that's true. Obviously, businesses decay and there's risks and maybe you want to spend a little bit more money until later on you go in life, you get married, these sorts of things.

17:04So obviously it was a bit naive, but it certainly helped me get to action, which is I think the most important part. Are you still setting business goals kind of in that way of like, okay, well, we've arrived at this spot. Where's the next thing? Like, how do you think about goal setting now versus then? Yeah, these days, definitely not. And we can get to the end state or the current state of Epic. But you know, these days Epic is a multiple tens of millions of dollars a year business in revenue. We're in wholesale, we're in retail, we have a content business that makes revenue as well. And so, you know, we're making our own physical products and then distributing them to our wholesale partners as well as retail.

17:38The timelines for businesses like that, it just stretches out quite a bit. I mean, you're talking about developing new product, physical product from scratch, you're looking at a year and a half minimum, if not a little bit longer. And so, yeah, unfortunately I can't just run and gun as much as I used to, but it's a different skill set. It's also fun to learn this level of operation. So yeah, walk us through that evolution from you running, gunning the blog to try and make a sustainable monthly income to where things are today. How did that evolution happen? Sure. So 2016 to 2019, call that the content scale up years.

18:12I try to kind of break this down into phases so people can understand how it happened and the logic of how each step went to the next step. So content scale up years is you You start out with a blog, you go, okay, well, the blog has strengths and the blog has weaknesses. There's no video, there's no audio. And these other platforms seem to be doing quite well, like YouTube or any sort of podcast. So I said, okay, well, let's get a YouTube channel going. I kicked that off by just making videos about my best blog posts. So sort of using one source of traffic to build the next platform, right? So YouTube starts getting off the ground.

18:442017, we start a daily podcast. The logic there was, well, if you're gardening, just by default, you're not watching something and you're not reading something, but you can listen to something. So I should be in my audience's ears delivering as much value to them as possible that way. So I did a daily show. The reason I did the daily show is because I looked at the landscape of podcasts, at least in my space, and I said, no, it's great to have a 45 minute guest interview. That's a classic format. We're literally doing it right now. However, if you're in the garden and you just want to know how to prune tomatoes, why don't I just give you a five minute little podcast on how to prune them and then just move on with your day?

19:17And so that was the logic on the podcast, which again, I launched by making a podcast episode about my top 50-ish videos or articles and then just linked the podcast there. So I sort of built the audience that way. And then of course, getting into some social media as well. So this was the evolution of like a guy who was traditionally considered like an SEO or a blogger, becoming a YouTuber, becoming a podcast or becoming sort of like multimedia creator. That's from 2016 to 2019. So I'll stop there if you have any questions, but otherwise we'll get into the next phase. I think that there's a lot of our listeners definitely that are interested in that progression.

19:51And I think that one of the things that I definitely want to pull out from what you said is the using one channel to drive traffic to another channel, and then obviously finding further audience at that new channel. So can you talk us through kind of your content creation process, even like going back to starting at the blog, you know, you have an SEO background, were you specifically creating SEO articles? Or was it articles that like you as a gardener knew that you were looking for and then going back during the SEO into it from there? How was that process? Because I came from building the websites for clients, as well as marketing their businesses locally and doing local SEO, I had an SEO brain is what I like to call it.

20:26And some people, they get their SEO brain, they never lose it. You see that where people are like, you know, they have these anonymous websites with some sort of pseudonym and they only blog. And it's the only thing they can ever think of. They could never imagine any other business model. And I was like that for a little bit. And then I realized, look, like, you got to get into these other forms of media. But as far as creating content for the blog itself, yeah, it was heavily SEO based because I wasn't really having a lot of success getting traffic in another way, like posting it on Reddit or a Facebook group or whatever.

20:55And to be honest, from an efficiencies perspective, if another website, aka Google, gives you people that keep typing in how to prune basil over and over and over again, you might as well write the article called How to Prune Basil, just let them come. And so that's how we did it. I mean, we just sort of came up with these templates. There'd be a plant guide, there'd be a pest guide, there'd be a listicle, these sorts of common content formats, use that logic of sort of systemizing the production, the content to get into the podcast and get into YouTube and all the other platforms. Now, utilizing your SEO brain for your expertise here, how does SEO differ from the world of blogs versus YouTube versus other social channels and other ways to get the content out, including podcasts?

21:35Are the SEO principles the same or do they differ somehow? Yeah, I would say, you know, on YouTube, obviously Google owns YouTube. And so there is a level of YouTube SEO. If you think about it that way, though, you probably will fail. So generally speaking, you could bucket YouTube content into search intent based. So something like how to prune basil and then suggested or algorithmic based, which would be something like we just did a video called he farms 35 hours a week on his one acre plot and makes 100K a year. Right. A story of my friend Andrew, who that's exactly what he does. No one's searching that, right?