The Synthesis of Media and Ecommerce with Kevin Espiritu of Epic Gardening
I’m happy to welcome an old friend who’s back for another episode. Recorded live from Capital Camp, we’ve got Kevin Espiritu, the founder of Epic Gardening.
In episode 16 of this podcast, Kevin shared how he bootstrapped and climbed the creator ladder from hobby blog to media empire.
In this episode, we talk about the synthesis of media and e-commerce, Kevin’s three recent acquisitions, and taking on outside capital.
Links to Platforms:
Here’s what I learned from the episode:
Kevin started a gardening blog in 2013/14 as a hobby, then made it profitable repeatable, and operationalized. Step by step, he did the same for YouTube and podcasts.
His business revenue grew from $500k in 2019 to $7.5 million by adding e-commerce and the pandemic tailwind.
The Chernin Group invested, the firm for content+commerce businesses.
With that investment and prestige, Epic Gardening could now hire incredible talent.
For creators, especially in niche markets, cultivating a strong following and attaching a higher-margin e-comm business to it can transform a simple media company into a powerful, flexible, durable business.
Keep the soul of your content while systematizing aspects of production. The audience can tell when the passion is lacking.
Creators teaming up and creating brands provide a huge potential for success. A great example would be Logan Paul, KSI, and Prime Hydration.
I greedily reference my post on “Creator Capitalists”, how content creators like Tim Ferriss and Jason Calacanis leverage their influence and audience for better access to investment opportunities.
Kevin tosses the idea of owning a couple of nurseries to use as distribution centers, content generation engines, and retail spaces.
Kevin’s biggest surprise in business: most of the things he tried worked!
The definition of success in coming years: reaching $100 million in annual revenue for the company and diversifying content creators across various gardening subcategories, reducing the risk tied to his own personal work.
This episode is sponsored by Scribe Media.
Scribe Media helps executives, entrepreneurs, and business leaders to write, edit, publish and market their books.
Scribe offers a middle path called "Professional Publishing" between self-publishing and traditional publishing. With Professional Publishing, the author owns all IP, so you can do anything with your book. You also keep 100% of their royalties.
You're getting the same level of professionalism as a traditional publisher—book design, interior design, and your own publishing imprint.
If you’re considering publishing a book, take 20 minutes to meet with someone from Scribe to learn more about the publishing landscape. To get in touch with Scribe, click here or email me and I’ll give you a warm introduction.
Learn more about Kevin Espiritu:
Additional episodes if you enjoyed:
Episode Transcript:
Eric Jorgenson: We're rolling on the first ever live studio audience version of Smart Friends. I’ve got my longtime friend Kevin Espiritu live from Capital Camp, very excited to be pioneering this. Our second session today. They've been keeping you incredibly busy. Because you’re a unique breed here, I think. You’re a creator, you’re a founder, you’re an incredible capital allocator. And I think kind of no matter where people are coming from, there's something interesting in your story for people to apply on their own. So I especially love stories with humble beginnings, and I know yours has one, from part time blogger to here we are. So, you started from the bottom. Let's go.
Kevin Espiritu: Let's go. Yeah, sure. I'll try to be as brief as possible in the run up, so to speak. But really, I came out of college with an accounting degree, didn't want to use it because I played online poker in college to pay for school. So, when you're doubling an accountant salary in college, you're not really wanting to sign up for the 80 hour weeks at Deloitte afterwards. The problem was I didn't know what else to do after that. And so, I played poker for a little bit after college. But once that fell away, the next closest analogue is video games, which any poker player, at least I can speak for myself, but many that I've met, hyper addictive personality, hyper fixating personality, and when that leaves, something must supplant it. For me, it was video games would have been great if it was like hedge fund trading or something, it just was not. And so, kind of fell into that in my early 20s. Not the best use of time and got into gardening as a way to kind of pattern break myself back into the real world a bit.
Eric Jorgenson: Was it an intentional move towards a positive sum game? Or was that not a model that went in?
Kevin Espiritu: I hadn't thought about it. No, I really hadn't thought about it. I just needed something that got me off the computer out into the real world. And so, with my brother, I gave him a bunch of options, like we surf, we can skate because we were Southern California kids, and he's like, what about gardening? Like why that? Out of all the cool options I gave you, you chose gardening. But anyways, we started growing, and then I just got absolutely entranced by it. Like the natural systems of the world just fascinate me. There are so many analogues to the business world I find. And so yeah, I started a blog back then. It was like maybe 2013 or ’14. And it was just a hobby blog, just nothing special. I was doing web design for local clients at the time. And it just kind of puttered along being a hobby. No master plan. I mean, I was like it'd be great if it had some income, sure, to subsidize the time that goes into it, whatever. But tried some startup stuff, raised a little bit of money to do this like relationship personal assistant app that was well before its time and also very poorly executed. So not a lot of wins on that particular one except for learnings. And then ended up kind of hanging my hat up and saying, maybe I should actually go work for someone, learn how to learn how companies work, learn how they run. So I was number two at a company called Scribe Media who did your book.
Eric Jorgenson: Scribe now sponsors this podcast. I just visited the office last month. I'm a huge fan of theirs.
Kevin Espiritu: Very, very interesting company and learned a lot there. So I was number two there, built out a lot of the early stuff, certainly take no credit for what's happened afterwards. And then when I left, I actually thought I was going to farm. I was going to sort of aggregate urban lots, farm them in this sort of decentralized way, and then sell that produce, high value crops to like local markets and farmers markets and stuff like that. But I had this blog. And I was like I would prefer to not draw my savings down to do that business, so I'll make this blog make some money first. So scaled the blog up a bit, got it to a self-sustaining level. I was like, actually, I really enjoy this. I enjoy consuming and disseminating information and sort of translating it into a way that makes sense for me and hopefully other people.
Eric Jorgenson: When you say self-sustaining, financially, or was the point of it that it was operationalized?
Kevin Espiritu: It was a bit of both. I wouldn't say was highly operationalized at that point in time, but it made enough money for me to not have to draw down my savings on anything else. Like I could live off of it, which is all most people want I think at the early stage of their career, especially when building something. That's the idea is like if I can just do what I'm doing and enjoy it, then I'm pretty happy. But what I started to do after that is I was like, look, I'm good at this, and I like it a lot. I like communicating. I like creating content. And so, I started expanding to platforms. So, then YouTube came, 2017, the podcast came. It was a daily show. And then 2017, 2019 or so was the content scale up. So, we hired a few folks, just like some contractors, a couple of contractors to help run that stuff. And then in 2019, plugged products into the business, which really exploded the business, especially in advance of COVID, which gardening and baking and carpentry, all these home-based hobbies really exploded. But fortunately, I had the infrastructure in place to actually service any comm business at that point in time. So, then we went from like 500k in revenue in 2019 to 2.8 million to then 7.5 million on the same team. And then we get to the point of last year, 2021, sorry, where we raised some capital.
Eric Jorgenson: And the majority of that growth came from, the revenue growth came from the products and the ecommerce side?
Kevin Espiritu: Absolutely. So like year one, it was half our revenue in year one, and then year two is 80, and then year three was like 92% or 93%. So I was like, okay, well, what I thought was a business wasn't the business. The business is actually servicing the customer with the product. The audience is now the customer, instead of making the audience the product, which is most content models, the audience is actually the product. So, it was a nice synergy.
Eric Jorgenson: It is better for the audience. They get a more authentic relationship with the products that they're buying. It's better for the product business because they're not paying someone else's audience and trying to gain trust. The synergies between these businesses is what fascinates me and what keeps bringing me back to it. And you came to it through this really organic path, which I think is so interesting. But once you see this pattern, I think it's hard to resist seeing those opportunities in so many other places, whether it's either already played out in some variation of your story or whether it's an opportunity that's available to brands, commerce businesses, or content businesses, no matter where you start, there's a move towards that kind of symbiosis.
Kevin Espiritu: I think so. I mean, I think what I found interesting during that time, because I was definitely running a bit of a different playbook than what was in vogue at the time, like scaling up DTC businesses by raising a ton of capital and LTV and CAC and all that sort of stuff. Whereas I had no CAC, my CAC was positive because it was the content. So, I was like confused at why they were doing it that way. But also, they were well at a scale that I could not reach on my own. But for a lifestyle business at the time, obviously, that was great. But yeah, I mean, you touched on something really interesting, where it's like the audience content fit as a substitute for product market fit, so if you get that part right, then just you don't need to be a genius to find PMF after that because they're going to find it for you because your audience likes you and trusts you. And so, they're going to give you feedback on products or services that you put in front of them. And you just go give them the one that they like the most.
Eric Jorgenson: The very practical example of that you gave, it's like every time I post a video with this product in it, I get comments asking where can I buy it.
Kevin Espiritu: It's not rocket- It’s not special sauce.
Eric Jorgenson: Hard to trick yourself when that's the case.
Kevin Espiritu: Yeah, exactly. And we've done that time and time again. I mean, the product that exploded us was a raised bed product out of Australia. It was the same thing, just over indexed in every piece of content. Where'd you get that? Where'd you get that? Where'd you get that? And I'm like, let me find out where I got it, and then let me do a deal with them, so I can give it to you. Same with some of the products we develop ourselves now. We acquired a seed tray company, and I hired the guy as our product lead because we were dropping as much as we could make in a week and it would sell out like 90 seconds or so. And so, obviously we ballooned to like almost all of this guy's revenue. So, I was like just join the team. It's going to be more fun over here anyways, we can make some amazing stuff. But again, that was something that I didn't need to create the product. I needed to find the guy who had the product and sell it into the audience. Now, of course, we're creating our own product from scratch now, so we're trying to go into product dev, but I didn't have to get started.
Eric Jorgenson: Does that seem riskier, the product dev approach? Or do you feel the same pull from the audience when you-?
Kevin Espiritu: Well, what's tough now is you can't float in front of the audience as quickly because now there's actually people watching us do that strategy and outcompeting us on execution perhaps sometimes. So, the copycats will start to come in if you start doing that too much. But we still have a competitive advantage on showcasing stuff to the audience that are- we have like a 2- 300-person ambassador list that we can send product to and get feedback on, all that kind of stuff. So, I think there's some advantage, but yeah, the risk is definitely higher now that we're developing product because we don't absolutely know what's going to work, we just are pretty sure it's going to work.
Eric Jorgenson: Something that is a small maybe meta aside, but something that I've always admired about your story, and I've watched you sort of grow over the years, I'm going to sneak as many gardening terms as I can-
Kevin Espiritu: There's so many ways to do it.
Eric Jorgenson: Organic growth. Yeah. You alluded to it, but in the zeitgeist of zigging, you were zagging. And I think that's just you are very- you're independent, first principles, sort of like I'm going to take the next step that makes sense to me. And it gets you to these really interesting places where the common knowledge is kind of like, oh, you got to have a 3x CAC to LTV. You got to have a growth agency. You got to have a competitive advantage. You got to have a customer oriented like product brand. You got to hire Red Antler to do your fucking brand for 3 thousand million dollars. And you just, I'm sure it maybe felt like plodding along at the time, but you were like here's the next obvious turn. Here's the next obvious turn. No large risks. No outside capital until you really had the high ground in that deal.
Kevin Espiritu: Right. Yeah, I didn't need that deal definitely and told them that a lot before we did the deal.
Eric Jorgenson: That’s a good strategy.
Kevin Espiritu: I was like come on. What am I going to do? Go home and make 8 million bucks? Like, oh, no, what a terrible life that is. So anyways, also, I don't know, luck is such a big part of all of the things that everyone does, like to be negotiating in the tail end of 2021 was pretty optimal. But yeah, I mean, I think I certainly wasn't zagging, like trying to zag and trying to be contrarian or anything like that. I just literally wasn't plugged into the common knowledge world. I was in my backyard growing vegetables and making videos about it and like selling product. And I live in San Diego. I don't live in SF or Austin or New York or any of the more common areas of like talent concentration. And so, I learned stuff on Twitter, I learned stuff on the internet, and just sort of plugged it into the business as it made sense. And yeah, really you are right, like not a lot of risk at any point in time. Very, very obvious high returning moves every time just sort of compounding.
Eric Jorgenson: So bootstrapped for seven years?
Kevin Espiritu: Yeah, 6, 7 years or so.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And then so let's talk about that sort of Rubicon of taking capital. You didn't have to. What did it enable you to do that you couldn't have done otherwise? Or why were you willing to take that?
Kevin Espiritu: Yeah. So like I said, I really wasn't at the start. I was saying in another talk earlier today, I was like, I don't know how investors know when a company somehow is investable. But all of a sudden, you reach a certain level of revenue or notoriety or something. And everyone just knows it. And your email inbox just somehow fills up. I don't know how you guys do that. But somehow that's possible. Anyways, so yeah, I got the call from the Chernin Group. And, obviously, with their portfolio like Barstool, MeatEater, Hodinkee, it's very, very much up their alley. They understand this business.
Eric Jorgenson: What's the playbook that they have for those that are unfamiliar?
Kevin Espiritu: They call it content to commerce. But basically, they're just saying, if your organic audience, I mean, in business speak, it is basically your organic audience just lowers your CAC. And the word of mouth and the affinity goes way up. And that's an extreme competitive advantage against like, I don't know, a Casper mattress or something like that, where they just have to buy every customer. And oftentimes, they're not first order profitable either. So, they're banking on some sort of back end monetization. And they're just like that doesn't make a lot of sense. Like, it's hard to make that business work. Unless, I guess, you continually raise and somehow exit out of one of those raise rounds or go public and liquidate and you won, but the company actually didn't win. So yeah, that's effectively their model. I mean, they come from media, Peter Chernin, CEO of Fox. So they come from media, and they understand that world really well. And then they figured out ways to plug commerce from the back end of it.
Eric Jorgenson: They invest in sometimes just media properties, sometimes media plus commerce with the intent of adding commerce.
Kevin Espiritu: I don't want to speak for them. But I think they prefer to invest in the media side if they can because that's, in their estimation, the harder one to get. It's the more talented thing to build than the product side, especially in the consumer space. So yeah, if they can, they would prefer to do that.
Eric Jorgenson: It doesn’t seem risky to add a higher margin product line to an existing media property.
Kevin Espiritu: Yeah, exactly.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. In your experience sort of working with them, how did they change the business? Was it sort of a capital only transaction? Did they bring some talent, or?
Kevin Espiritu: Well, I think the network was insane. Like the people that they know, especially in specifically things that would help me and my business is just I could have met them at some point after slogging through, networking or whatever. But the instant plugin to that network was extremely valuable. Certainly, we have a contact at Meta we can just talk to now, instead of me having to like email them a million times. So, some of that friction starts to go away, which is really nice. But yeah, obviously, the capital helped quite a bit. And the connections to getting talent, I wouldn't say they directly put talent, but yeah, the connections to getting talent was super, super helpful.
Eric Jorgenson: What did the capital unlock for you as an operator?
Kevin Espiritu: So we got to do some acquisitions that I- it's either like inventory or every other part of the business. And so, in this case, we did not have to make that choice. And so, we got to do the acquisition I talked to you about with the seed company, the seed trays, excuse me. We bought a blog. We recently bought a blog and folded the owner in as our director of search running our entire search strategy. So, I couldn't have done that without having to sacrifice on, what, inventory or whatever the case may be. And so, we got to scale slightly ahead. I think last year was the only year we ever lost a tiny amount of money. But also, we had like 800,000 or a million bucks in lawyers’ fees from three different transactions. So it's like, okay, well, the adjustment is actually not really- it's not a real true loss going forward. But yeah, I mean, I would say it allowed us to do a couple of different things that we wouldn't have been able to do to speed growth up a little bit.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. And are you able to attract different talent? Like, is there a perception of safety with that?
Kevin Espiritu: That’s the craziest part to me is the stamp. I mean, I'm sure you saw this when you wrote the Almanac of Naval, and I've done three books, but in gardening, so it's a bit of a different world, but either way, what happened-
Eric Jorgenson: Much prettier pictures in yours.
Kevin Espiritu: Yeah, beautiful. Full color, really nice shots. But what I noticed in book writing, we saw this as Scribe as well, is books have this weird like binary chasm that when you pass it, it's like, oh, he's an author. It's the same with this, like the investor stamp in this particular category opens up a lot of doors for getting talent. Like, oh, it's TCG company, whatever. Same as like, I don't know, if Sequoia or Andreessen invests in you, you get something that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise for simply the fact that they did it.
Eric Jorgenson: And Chernin Group has that sort of credibility in that world?
Kevin Espiritu: In that world, yeah.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. So, let's do a little generalization brainstorm because I think we're both broad business nerds here. And in seeing this pattern, applying it to other people, like from our first conversation and from when I saw sort of the emergent properties of what you were building, it totally changed how I thought about my business and how I prioritize. It gave me much more patience with like this podcast, much more patience to see the feedback loops between investing in a long term media growth. And I think, I mean, we're sitting here at Capital Camp in one of the babies of Brent and Patrick. And Patrick is maybe the best example of creating a media company that is the golden goose. And it just keeps producing these eggs. And he's sold the fund that he ran before, he's expanded the podcast horizontally, continues to invest in those, grow the network, and produce new businesses out of it, like the new venture capital fund. The feedback loop between all those is incredible.
Kevin Espiritu: Yeah, I mean, you have- I'll go back to myself, just because that's what I do is gardening, like you have the attention of some subset of some audience. Maybe it's the whole category if you're big enough. Maybe it's specifically b2b SaaS or something like that. If you have that, then the market is just giving you information 24/7 in a way that they're not giving it to everyone else. And so, if you can see that, then you can just apply that to like Patrick's a fantastic example over at the podcast. He has a media entity now. He has deal flow that he probably wouldn't have otherwise, like this camp exists, and we're probably all here because of some version of the content that he's created, and content compounds in such an insane and weird way. It's like very chaotic, the things that spit out of it, and that's what I think is so interesting about it.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, well, let’s dive deeper on the b2b side because I think this is creators, if you stop at the creator business model, it's not always a super compelling business. It is for the really high scale people, it can get really high margin, and you hear the crazy stories, but there's a power law there. If you can cultivate like a small niche, and if you can attach a high margin or even a higher dollar value business to it, creator businesses or interests or projects that don't necessarily seem interesting on their own are all of a sudden, not just self-sustaining, but fantastic businesses to own, fantastic investments.
Kevin Espiritu: I guess it depends on your- I'm certainly not an investor, only by way of like some of the stuff we've done within the company. But I guess it depends on what kind of returns you're trying to get or the 100xs, maybe there are very few 100xs or more in the creator space unless you're somehow early, Jimmy and MrBeast or something like that, which he would not let you do. Yeah, I don't know, b2b. And I just recently saw, there's the- are you familiar with Workweek? So, their sort of network of mostly Twitter plus newsletter type creators in business, like there's a franchise guy, there's like a healthcare guy, etc. I think I just saw them launch a franchise SaaS business underneath one of the guys. And it's the first time I've seen it at least. And I was like, yeah, I mean, that makes complete sense because he has a very, very captive audience of exactly the customer base who would buy that. So, at the very least in that business, I'm sure other acquisition channels need to activate for it, sure. But at the very least, he has a version of what I have or any of these other creators have, you have absurdly low acquisition costs, at least at the start.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And from a position of really high optionality. I wonder about the thought process that went into that particular, that decision to start that business with that model to that audience, and sort of what pieces came together to form it.
Kevin Espiritu: I wonder. I mean, I'm really not a b2b guy, so it's hard for me to postulate here, but I would imagine that when you're a creator in that space, typically written text platforms play a little bit better. So Twitter is where most of those folks are, and the YouTube audience is strong, but not in certainly the niche- you have to go a bit more broad on YouTube to make it work. And so, I think it's probably because the newsletter model does hit a natural cap in scale. And if you're trying to do something bigger, you simply have no other choice than to try to incubate some actual, excuse me, that's kind of rude, but some sort of more substantial business beneath it. You know what I mean?
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, you certainly hit maybe a ceiling unless you're Joe Rogan.
Kevin Espiritu: Take me for example, if I didn't put products in, I would say this year, the media side of the business probably makes like 2 million bucks or 2 and a half or 3 or something like that.
Eric Jorgenson: Like full focus and excellent execution.
Kevin Espiritu: I would say probably still. And that's like, in the gardening space, that's actually pretty good for the internet where we're at and the category we're in.
Eric Jorgenson: And that's a great business to own as a bootstrapped solo founder.
Kevin Espiritu: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you're absolutely retired for life based on how most people spend money if you invest that in any reasonable way. But if you decide to plug something in beneath it, then that's where you get into this whole game.
Eric Jorgenson: Would early Kevin, like with a blog, have taken seed capital?
Kevin Espiritu: No, because there's just no reason. It's just all-
Eric Jorgenson: There was no master plan, so that's kind of nonsensical.
Kevin Espiritu: I don't think anyone would. You really shouldn't, I would say, because you've taken it at the absolute earliest point and probably given up a decent chunk and just sort of like why because you don't really need capital to start a blog. But yeah, I don't think so. I don't think so. It's kind of interesting because if you find- like we've homegrown a creator. My initial garden assistant is now quite large on social and YouTube and stuff, and he has a great sort of subset of audience that doesn't overlap completely, it overlaps a decent amount which is its own problem. But we found him literally in the backyard gardening. He was a geology PhD, ended up leaving that to come work for us. And he has a great life and a great business. And certainly, he's making like triple to four times what he'd make as a PhD candidate or the life that he would live after that in geology. And so, you find that guy early and he loves his life. And so that's, I guess, some sort of analog of investing early into creators. Like you can discover them and cultivate them, or you can snipe like a star, and that obviously has its own advantages.
Eric Jorgenson: That's like you have that opportunity because you built the Golden Goose. Like, that's another-
Kevin Espiritu: All roads- I mean, it's like, if you take the classic Barstool model, if you go to Barstool, like Alex Cooper went to Barstool with the Call Her Daddy podcast, and they got her relatively early. Dave saw it early. It was blowing up. He did a deal with them. That deal quickly became, I really don't want to speak for them, but quickly probably became not the best deal because they got too big too fast. And so, they tried to renegotiate. And it turns out that one of the people just left, got kicked off the show because she just negotiated poorly and sort of treated that poorly. And then Alex Cooper sold it to Spotify for 50. And I actually asked some folks, I was like, was that a loss for Barstool? And they're like no, because every creator knows if you come there for that world, that's the on ramp to anything else you want to do in that world, whether it's with them or not with them. So, it's sort of like in the sports media world, at least for the internet, like all roads lead to Barstool to some degree. And if you go there, like you're going to accelerate your career dramatically. And a lot of these creators don't want to be business operators fundamentally.
Eric Jorgenson: It's a win-win for them, de-risks like that early chaotic meritocracy stage where you just got to battle through as a creator, often probably losing money or-
Kevin Espiritu: There’s a lot of stuff like you don't need to know how to edit at a high level audio, video or text, like thumbnails, we can help you with that, like all that kind of stuff, the operational side of the content.
Eric Jorgenson: That's another place to give credit where credit's due to you because you were the pioneer of each of these categories in your own business. Like you self-taught all the blogging, operationalized it, playbooked it, hired somebody to replace yourself, you dove into YouTube, learned how to edit, learned the thumbnails, learned what worked, operationalized it, brought somebody on, turned it over. Over and over again, you have sort of started from nothing, taught yourself everything that you need to know, taught somebody else everything that you learned, and then moved on over and over again for-
Kevin Espiritu: Yeah, I mean, you kind of have to because otherwise, you're just doing low leverage work eventually. Like the start of learning YouTube is super high leverage, and then eventually, it just decays to low. The tough part as a creator too, though, is like if you systemize everything, the soul leaves a little bit of the content, and it's immediately apparent. Like the audience knows it immediately. And then you know it when you publish it. And I've done it before. Like, yeah, I didn't put enough time on that or I didn't quality check the idea, we shouldn't have even made that particular video, like that kind of stuff. It does start to leave. So there's mistakes when you start to leave it behind, so to speak. But otherwise, what are you going to do? I mean, if I'm buying a seed company, that's probably what I should be spending my time on is closing that deal and not making the thumbnail for the video. You have to have help.
Eric Jorgenson: So where does that leave you today? What is the high leverage work and the low leverage work of your role as it exists now? I mean, this is a big company.
Kevin Espiritu: Yeah, it's decently sized. I guess what was shocking to me is like in the creator world, the numbers I was doing in the bootstrapped world, I was like I don't meet a lot of YouTubers or content creators doing more than that. And so, I thought I was like this baller. And it turns out when you get into a different world, you're just actually a tiny little fish. And people don't want to work for you because the opportunity is too small. And you're like what, like it seems pretty big to me. But obviously, you're the founder. You're super biased. But yeah, I mean, I think these days, what's interesting is literally, this week, we're working on an offer to a COO. So, someone who can help run a lot of the stuff that like I love, and I think it's interesting, but I just probably still shouldn't be doing it. And so, a lot of the like operations and logistics, the organizational structure, the management layers, like all that kind of stuff I think it's fascinating. I love learning about business and stuff that I don't know and can't really do quite at a high level yet. But at the same time, I need to be cultivating talent, I need to be finding these little deals, finding these creators, like bringing them into the ecosystem, developing the actual product. Because no one else can do that yet still at the company.
Eric Jorgenson: And so, as you look forward for Epic Gardening over the next, I don't know, five years, ten years, you believe you'll continue-? I mean, you've done three acquisitions. They've all been very successful from a returns perspective, successful from a cultural integration perspective. Do you think you'll keep marching on that path?
Kevin Espiritu: I think it really depends. I would prefer to not fire a bunch more huge bullets if I don't have to because then that just makes whatever eventual exit there is a little bit more difficult in my opinion, plus dilution, all that kind of stuff. But if I can make smart small, high returning acquisitions, why not? There might be some reason structurally like why we have to. Like the seed company is a great example. We were really distributor concentrated on a particular product line before the seed company. Once we bought the seed company, we diversified our channel revenue in half DTC and wholesale, as well as our category revenue in half seeds and hard goods. And seeds is recurring, which our other product line wasn't. So, I was like, okay, that deal makes sense to do and take some dilution, take some extra equity and do that. If it's not existential, I don't really think I would like to do that though. I'd rather just- we have the capabilities now to generate this in house. We can generate content in house. We can generate product in house now. We didn't before. Now we can. So ideally, you should just use that strength.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. And so, let's talk about places where, other places this playbook could work. And I can’t remember if this was a conversation or Twitter, a tweet that you had about like I think there are a number of categories, more than we expect, that are going to end up sort of accumulated under individual creators almost, as the audience, even though it's not always a great business or it has a ceiling on that business, it's the headwaters of success for a lot of other businesses in the category. And you've used that, you've leveraged that over and over again. I think there's a lot of categories that can end up bundled, and we'll see more and more creators that either team up in a space or-
Kevin Espiritu: Team up is a great- because you look at like Logan Paul and KSI. And whoever's making that drink, that Prime Hydration drink. It's a three headed beast right there. Without any of those three, it probably doesn't work that well.
Eric Jorgenson: And that's hard. Like I wouldn't choose that. I wouldn’t choose to compete with Coke and take on that kind of distribution problem and the kind of brand challenge.
Kevin Espiritu: The only reason they can do it is because their distribution is absolutely insane. And Beast is obviously another good example of Bestivals and Beast Burger and all that.
Eric Jorgenson: I actually prefer- the scales are very different. And they have such big audiences, they have to probably choose mass market things, but these are just small order value things. These are not recurring. They're not necessarily high margin. I think it is much more interesting, both from a brand perspective and probably a returns and just overall business quality perspective, to think about specific categories like gardening where there's much more alignment between the audience and the hobby. It's much more of an identity piece, than an energy drink.
Kevin Espiritu: Gardeners identify as gardeners like in their hearts, like similar with like a carpenter or a blacksmith or a baker is another good category, like Food 52 is a good example of a- a watch is actually a really good example with Hodinkee. Watches is like a fascinating category.
Eric Jorgenson: You went down the watch rabbit hole a little bit.
I think I got a little infected by the Hodinkee vibe.
Eric Jorgenson: Every time I open your Instagram, there's a new watch. Like this man is balling.
Kevin Espiritu: No, I'm not. They're like not that expensive. They are just like esoteric, weird watches.
Eric Jorgenson: You tricked me. Hodinkee is a much bigger business than I- I've heard whispers of it.
Kevin Espiritu: Well, they've got the pre-owned market that they service. They do collabs, which is really cool to be able to collab with these historic watch brands. And they have like an insurance arm as well to business. And so, they're adding a lot of different things to it.
Eric Jorgenson: Did that start with a blog too? Was that a content genesis?
Kevin Espiritu: I forgot how. Ben Clymer was the founder there. I forgot how he did it. I want to say probably it was a blog at his time of sort of coming up. But I don't remember.
Eric Jorgenson: So to expand the pattern, I think, actually, after we did the first podcast episode, I started applying this just as a mental model, sort of like testing it out more and more. And I ended up writing a post called Creator Capitalists that was looking at specifically financial business models because I think they are very prone to this, mostly because of the high level of trust that you need to create with someone if you're going to have a deep financial relationship with them, if you're going to give them access to your capital, if you're going to let them enter a long term tenure, illiquid relationship, and started tracking some of the careers of people. [inaudible 29:01] is an obvious one. You could put Tim Ferriss in this category. Like he was a blogger and author and made most of his money by getting angel access because of the influence of his audience and the talent that he had there. Jason Calacanis was maybe the OG here.
Kevin Espiritu: He's probably the best example I would say.
Eric Jorgenson: A shitload of podcasts that are successful and profitable. He's a billionaire. He's still reading podcast ads three times a week. It's unbelievable. I don't know if he's a billionaire; that was off the cuff for emphasis, but it's a big thing, started the syndicate, tons of access through that.
Kevin Espiritu: Yeah. What's interesting to me about the audience first model is like it really almost never ends up being the actual business. The business is the second or third order effect of that audience. I'm sure, I'm actually curious like with you, because I met you a long time ago on the internet, like with six or seven people writing about mental models, like I had a little blog and so did you, and you had Evergreen Library at the time. And then you were at Zaarly for a long time. And then you did the almanac. And how have you applied the content sort of first model to what you'd- obviously, a book is content.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, Evergreen was high reps and introduced me to a lot of incredible people just as a core of work of just kind of being like I'm capable of doing this. And it's attracting the kind of people that I want to work with and be friends with. The book I think is a much larger reach version of the same thing. It has never failed to attract the kind of people that I'm excited to have a conversation with, excited to work with. It is, I think, a portrayal of my values, even though it's not my words. It's just a curation.
Kevin Espiritu: I guess what I'm curious about, though, is like given that like for myself or some of these other creators, like the content ends up not being the main business. Do you think that the book, or books, because I know you have more coming out, will be the thing or will it open up access to the actual thing?
Eric Jorgenson: I don't know. It's a large portion today, honestly, because the podcast is new, and the fund is new, both newer than the books. So I kind of feel, I feel like I know, with high confidence, how to publish world class books. I feel like a blue belt of a podcaster, to be honest, and I feel like a yellow, green, whatever, I don't know, I shouldn't use the belt analogy. Something slightly lower than that in the fund just because it's, I have partners who are much more experienced than I am, but it’s a young fund, and in the fund world, 20 years is- you don't even exist until you're three years in in fund world.
Kevin Espiritu: But to me what's so interesting about what you did, though, is like you wrote the Almanac of Naval, and you have the other ones coming out. It's like that is the exact, the consumer of that product, many of them are the exact type of people that would accrue value to that fund.
Eric Jorgenson: On the founder side, on the LP side. And the podcast definitely attracts founders, attracts LPs, and benefits founders, like it's a huge boost to them. And often part of the pitch is like when you're ready, I'll put you in front of customers, early employees, team, press, that kind of stuff through this distribution.
Kevin Espiritu: That to me, because like I can often get- thankfully, I haven't done it today, but I can get really annoying about gardening metaphors. And so, to me, it's like what we build at Epic, for example, is effectively like a digital ecosystem. And so, you can think of the different platforms as different organs of the same sort of digital body, and they serve different functions. So TikTok, for example, it's not your conversion layer, that's more of your attention layer, so maybe it's your eyes, and then YouTube, it builds more affinity and then it builds more LTV and all that kind of stuff. But at the same time, the way they all interplay, they spit out unique results that you can't predict super well. The opportunities that that comes out of them is really sort of unique. It is kind of the same in gardens. Instead of growing- like you don't grow plants, you create environments in which plants grow themselves because you're not inside the plant growing it, it has its own genetic code, it is growing itself. And so, when you do that, and you combine different layers of an ecosystem, trees, shrubs, the life below the soil, the life above the soil, you could analogize that to the content ecosystem that you have created, for example, or me or a lot of these other people. And it is very emergent. It's like, oh, there's hummingbirds in the garden now because of these 13 things that happened that interplayed, and now that hummingbird finds that a suitable place to be. And if I wanted hummingbirds, then that's a great surprise for me and I really like that. And so, it's not a very methodical way of thinking, I suppose. It's very sort of open.
Eric Jorgenson: It's a very systems way of thinking. It yields a certain control over specificity of ins and outs.
Kevin Espiritu: It's like as long as the principles of what you're doing make fundamental sense, what emerges as a result should directionally be good. And you should just be happy about that, I guess, is sort of how I thought about it.
Eric Jorgenson: You mentioned sort of the diversity within the metaphor there. And I think something that you've done that I don't see commonly done is you're on all the platforms, which is not always good because you have to be good at all of them. You can't half ass any of them. But gardening is such a broad demographic. And you kind of have this really wide funnel. I know you have a very large Discord server, and you wouldn't think that's necessarily the gardening demographic, but you also have people who only pay attention on YouTube or podcasts or wherever. You were one of the early people who sort of convinced me of like there's people who love specific platforms, and they will attract themselves to whatever content intersects with their identity and their platform choice. And it's your job to serve them no matter where they are. And in your business, at the end of the day, they all buy seeds, or they all buy-
Kevin Espiritu: Well, I think, I mean, it's easy for me to say, I guess, because gardening is, it's really an analog, it's like highly inefficient farming. And we've been farming for thousands and thousands of years. So, it's quite ingrained in human history. Almost no one doesn't interact with it in some way or another. And so, I think that it's not b2b franchise software where maybe TikTok isn't that interesting actually, maybe there aren't 10,000 people who want a Discord server on that. But to some degree, I think it's true, you should be absolutely everywhere that your potential customers or audience are doing the best that you can for them because word of mouth is really the only compounding engine that that is free effectively if you do your job well and just be everywhere and give them as much value as possible.
Eric Jorgenson: I'm curious about your relationship with the word marketing.
Kevin Espiritu: I don't think about it, I guess. We have one person in our marketing department. And we have 10 in our content department. So yeah, I mean, that's not super fair. We do have an agency that we partner with who do paid ads now. So, I suppose they count. But yeah, I mean, I think the best marketing is done by the customer telling it to someone else as a result of connecting with what you do. The question is, to your point, how far does that actually scale? If we're going to turn on other channels, which is why paid ads exist now, which is why we bought a business that has 4500 stores worth of wholesale distribution. So, if we can do a better job at serving them when they walk in there, that's another version of experiencing content.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, impressions. I think the generalized sort of pithy takeaway that I had, again took this from our first conversation, the paradigm of marketing is that you expect to operate a marketing department at a loss to benefit the bottom line. And the paradigm of a media department is that you expect it to be standalone profitable on its own, and it has to live or die on the attention that it earns and the trust that it earns, which can only yield to the rest. But the best marketing department is actually media.
Kevin Espiritu: I think so. I mean, I think so. And I think that's just a choice, though, like you could run your media, your content empire at a loss to and say, well, it's because it's really effectively the marketing. But there's ways to monetize the content that don't destroy the ability of it to convert to the consumer on an actual sale, so to speak, and you're not just monetizing the eyeball or putting a brand in front of them. You can do it thoughtfully enough so that you can stack the models such that they're not like, whoa, this guy's really injecting on me all these different things. Sometimes it happens, but you can do it pretty well.
Eric Jorgenson: Do you think it's harder- Having come from- having built media first and attached commerce, do you think that is an easier path than starting with a product business and being like, oh, shit, I don't want a marketing department, I want a media department, I'm going to put the impetus on them, I'm going to generate a media business?
Kevin Espiritu: I think if you look at the evidence of the companies that are succeeding right now, at least in my small corner of the world, it certainly seems like the harder skill to build is the media chops, then like, especially in consumer, like especially if it's not consumer electronics or something a little bit more involved. It seems like that, there is a science on how you make product. It's pretty defined. There's a product development process, all that stuff. But coming up with a captive audience is the scarce resource. Like which one's more scarce? I feel like it's being able to generate audience.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, attention. I mean, it's almost a, if you apply this sort of AdWords, click bid model for attention, it's not that we're bidding for it anymore, it's that the highest quality content gets the attention. And the person with the greatest ability to monetize that attention or creates willingness to pay for it, is most willing to invest in that, will eventually either purchase that space or supplant them in gaining the attention.
Kevin Espiritu: Yeah, and it speaks to the- I'm sure you've seen this. I mean, that content compounds at such an absurd scale, that being early is so important. Like, for us, TikTok, has it driven a ton of business for us? Probably through direct traffic that we can't quite attribute perfectly even with some of the better models out there. But it's done incredible for us as far as like community building and weird versions of word of mouth. It's why we got media opportunities we wouldn't have gotten. Like we were on Good Morning America three times because specifically of TikTok. There are specific campaigns we've been able to do just because of that. And the only reason we're at the size we're at there is because I got on early enough such that there was a dearth of content in gardening among almost anything, everyone's just dancing at the time, almost in the music era. And so, it's like, okay, well, I could make the worst gardening content on TikTok. It's still the best because there's no one else here. And so, everything accrues to you the earlier you get on a platform. Like the early Twitter users, like they’re massive.
Eric Jorgenson: Do you try every new platform?
Kevin Espiritu: Yeah, you have to. I mean, I will say I give up on some sooner than others, like BeReal. I don't see how that one actually scales well for us or Clubhouse during the pandemic times. I was on it for like three or four weeks or so. And then I was like I actually don't understand how this works once we can leave our homes. So, I got off of it. But yeah, also that one, Clubhouse was tough because you have to be on it when you're using it. It doesn't persist.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, no longtail to it.
Kevin Espiritu: It's hard to sell.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I prefer Evergreen. I want every hour I spend to pay dividends for a very, very long time.
Kevin Espiritu: Yeah, dude. Oh, here's a story. Right when the pandemic locked us down, I made a video about how to grow ginger in a container. And it was a 30 minute, it was just like off the top- I was like what would be accessible for everyone who just got locked down, popular plant, easy method, whatever, sort of an easy formula. Made that video in 30, 35 minutes or so. I edited it up myself, didn't have an editor at the time. And I think it's accrued like $80,000, $90,000 just in YouTube ads, in ad rev. So it's like an $180,000 hour.
Eric Jorgenson: Not counting all of the intangible downstream of everybody else it brought into the ecosystem.
Kevin Espiritu: The table stakes is that it made the 180 in an hour. But I don't even care about that because the media business isn't the business. And so, that's sort of the weird twist of this whole world, I guess.
Eric Jorgenson: I think there's- all of your stories, not all, a lot of the patterns I keep hearing is like, well, we underwrote it to x. And that made sense all on its own. I know I can break even and I'm 98% confident or whatever the number is that it will break even. But I know that I have 20 other ways to win, that this is probably going to trigger one or five or ten of, even if I don't even know what it did.
Kevin Espiritu: I mean, just I don't know, it seems like a sensible way to approach bootstrapping is like if the first sort of reason to do something makes fundamental sense and isn't super risky, like let's say buying the blog, you pay X amount, it returns Y amount over z period or whatever. And you're like that's acceptable to me and the risks of doing it don't make me scared. Well, then, okay, that underwrites on its on its own. And like you said, I mean, what could come of that? Well, I could find a writer that's on the blog that happens to be a good video talent, which we already found. And she's being tested to become one of our creators. Or just like half every metric from DTC flow through from organic to the end checkout, just assume it's all cut in half because somehow the conversion funnel is like really poor. Cut it even in a fourth. We did that. And I was like this returns in a year just off of that metric. And so, I'm like, okay, there's like 14 ways it returns itself very quickly. So I guess I'll just do it. Thankfully, I can think that way, and I'm not a modeler. So, this is my way around having to model things. I just go if it works like 17 ways, I think I'll just go ahead and do it.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I mean, there's Charlie Munger quotes all over the place of like if it doesn't work out on a napkin, don't do it in a spreadsheet.
Kevin Espiritu: The spreadsheet brain I don't understand. I'll say that much. Everything can be modeled, like I don't think that's true. I just don't think you can model everything like that.
Eric Jorgenson: The other the other Munger quote that came to mind is like good businesses throw up easy decision after easy decision. Hard businesses, bad business throw up hard decision after hard decision. And I've heard a few times like every step felt obvious. That seemed like an easy decision. The napkin math worked. There's 14 ways to win.
Kevin Espiritu: I mean, I think there's like the counter to that, though, is like I could have grown a lot faster if I did any of the other classic playbooks, if I raised and tried to scale with paid and all these sorts of things, but my ambition was never to do that. I just wanted to do something I love to do and let it scale to the point that it naturally sort of was going to scale to. And then obviously, now, we're playing a little bit of a different game.
Eric Jorgenson: I think that authenticity matters a lot. I don't know. Do you feel you would have been successful if you had to do this in, I don't know, a category that you're not necessarily passionate about?
Kevin Espiritu: No, I mean, no, because that is the arb. Like the arb is that the people do it because they love it. And they do it right to you on video, text ,and audio. And you feel- I mean, the weird part about this is a lot of it is a parasocial relationship. Like, a lot of- I mean, you saw this earlier today.
Eric Jorgenson: Outside this theater, a lady ran out of this coffee shop, “Oh my god, you're the gardening YouTube guy. I've never seen anybody from YouTube in real life. I have to- Can we get a picture?”
Kevin Espiritu: First of all, that's really weird when it happens. Fortunately, I don't do something I think is like toxic to the world. So it's very flattering when someone comes up and says, like, oh, I learned how to grow this or-
Eric Jorgenson: You taught me how to grow tomatoes. The most wholesome thing in the world.
Kevin Espiritu: Very wholesome. At the same time, I've had many, many experiences which prove this out to me of how strong the parasocial relationship can be. Which is it weirdly is the arbitrage. It is why people buy from you. At the same time, it isn't real in a fundamental sense. Because someone will run up to me and be like, “Oh, how are the chickens doing? How's Gucci?” Gucci is one of my hens. She did pass away recently, unfortunately. But they would ask that. They’d say, “Oh, I saw Gucci died,” or whatever. And I'd be like, how do you know that? I have no fundamental idea who you actually are as a person. You've somehow consumed hours of my life, much like I've done to like people who are at this conference. Like, I've listened to a ton of your stuff, and this is the first time meeting in person, was this event.
Eric Jorgenson: A ten year internet bromance cultivated in this week. It was like the Notebook. We ran at each other in the rain.
Kevin Espiritu: We blew kisses and a hug.
Eric Jorgenson: We both yelled, “You’re bigger than I thought at the same time.
Kevin Espiritu: Exactly. Well, and also I thought I knew more than I actually did. Fortunately, I'm aware of the parasocial relationship. But that is the weird arbitrage of this whole creative world is you're building something that fundamentally both does and does not exist at the same time.
Eric Jorgenson: I think that's a huge responsibility, honestly. And I take it seriously, and I have a much smaller audience than you. I mean, I think there's a responsibility to do it well, and I see people abusing the neuro chemistry and some shitty stuff online.
Kevin Espiritu: Well, there's a lot you can- I mean, if you understand, like someone like MrBeast. He's so deep into the algorithm, he's so deep into human psychology effectively, he understands color theory on a deep level, like all of that stuff, he sort of just opts to not go to the dark side, at least too dark. And then there's obviously creators who do that. But it's kind of like how you got there is how you have to remain there in a way. For example, if you built an audience, let's say, as a super hot Instagram model, it's tough to build a million following there and then pivot to b2b SaaS. Like, it's just not going to work. Like the way you get there is the way you have to sort of remain. Your audience comes for a certain reason.
Eric Jorgenson: Which is back to the authenticity and picking something that you're very happy to do for the rest of your life, that you're deeply aligned with. I was trying to think about like can you imagine doing this in another category and like probably not.
Kevin Espiritu: I would say adjacent ones for sure. Like, I've done a lot of content in gardening at this point. I don't not like it anymore. I absolutely love it. But like keeping chickens or carpentry or baking; I love skills. And so, preserving and canning, like all that kind of stuff. Like I will find creators to do it but I will dabble. Let's say we launched like a woodworking channel or something like that, I will go kickstart the channel and I probably might get really into it, but they're going to have to pull me away from it to go to the main stuff. But yeah, if it was, I don't know, like pick a category I would be bored by, there's just no way. You just couldn't get-
Eric Jorgenson: Quilting. Which is like one thing my partner Al crushes at, and his mom loves it. And he ran the hell out of that business. And that's an incredible story that’s very similar.
Kevin Espiritu: It’s very similar. Yeah. Because she was early on YouTube doing that.
Eric Jorgenson: She was very early on YouTube. Yeah, it is a family story and they ended up growing up to buy a town. Dude, I’ve got to get Al- I want you and Al to have a conversation where Al convinces you to buy a town because that's what he did. He's bought two towns now. You can create the Garden City USA and like it's a Disneyland for gardeners and bring them in. It's an incredible model. Come visit Quilt Town in Hamilton, Missouri.
Kevin Espiritu: Is it named that?
Eric Jorgenson: Quilt USA is the unofficial thing, but it is the real name is Hamilton, Missouri. It is an hour outside Kansas City. 12 quilt stores. There's like buses of 60 year old ladies that come in and they do like slumber party all night quilting things. They’re setting up a boutique hotel. He's got killer Airbnbs. They're moving restaurants in. The whole main street is like-
Kevin Espiritu: It's a genius idea. I mean, the way I thought of tiptoeing into that is in that we sell in wholesale, hopefully, we'll be able to sell more SKUs into wholesale. Eventually, it'd be nice to own a couple nurseries. Because you have this triple threat of you can run them as a back-end distribution center, you can run them as a content generation engine, and you can also, of course, just run them as what they are, which is a retail space.
Eric Jorgenson: That's what Al says. He's like, 90% of our business is online, but 90% of the marketing for the online business is the fact that we own a town.
Kevin Espiritu: Exactly. I mean, my analog to that right now is my backyard. My backyard has like a coop, a pond, a greenhouse, all this sort of stuff.
Eric Jorgenson: It's so cool. I was going to say like speaking to authenticity, like this is your life.
Kevin Espiritu: Yeah, because that's how I- I love the fact that I can just go get eggs and eat them every day from my hens.
Eric Jorgenson: You'll post a picture of your dinner, like this plate is 110% from my backyard.
Kevin Espiritu: To the point where we had a dinner where we did home grown wheat into focaccia and roasted potatoes and eggs or something like that. It was like fully home grown out of a suburban backyard. Very impractical, if you think about opportunity cost of time. If I was doing any other business, that would be a bad use of time.
Eric Jorgenson: I baked one loaf of sourdough during the pandemic. I was like that is a $10,000 loaf of sourdough. Fuck this.
Kevin Espiritu: Yeah, exactly. If you're making sourdough, you should probably be writing Balaji’s book.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I should have been working that whole time.
Kevin Espiritu: Exactly. I don't know. I think that to me is a harmful way to think though. To me, if I'm not working, there is no hourly cost to my time anymore. I just delete the model out of my head.
Eric Jorgenson: The only place that it's useful is in buying back leisure time for yourself. Like it's really tough to measure, to measure it at the right times and value at the right times, but not think about the fact that like, yeah, cook dinner for your family.
Kevin Espiritu: I found it harmful to think that way when I was playing poker because when you're playing poker, you have a very quantifiable hourly rate. And let's say you get into a good game. Like I used to VPN into these French websites, the French, at a certain point in time, were just worse. Like they just were worse than Americans at poker. It wasn't as sophisticated over there. And so you VPN into these French sites and play heads up no limit against someone. And you're like this guy is as bad as someone who's playing 10 stakes levels lower. And so, you sit there and you're like, okay, my expected hourly here is probably like a couple grand. And then your friends are texting you, like come out, there's a big party down the street, and you're like, is it a $3,000 party? I don't think so. So I can't go. And then I missed out on a lot of college experiences by making that trade off. And then I go, why did I do that? Should I have done it? It's tough.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. We're coming up on a hard stop eventually here, but we’ve got a live audience and I know we have the technical capability to take some questions here. This is an experimental podcast first, but we'll see how it translates. If there's anything you guys want Kevin to dive deeper into or stories you want him to tell or brainstorms you want to kick off. If anybody's got one. Leo, thank you for making us not have to edit out an enormous silence later.
Question: You mentioned that sometimes you partner with products, sometimes you make your own. I’m just curious how you think about when you partner with someone, when you build something, what’s the decision?
Kevin Espiritu: Yeah, so I mean, early on, the decision was that I just don't know how to make products. So, partnering was the only option. I think now we bias 100% towards owned and operated, if we can do it. If the capital outlay isn't too insane and the product development sort of timeline isn't absurd, we'll do it. So, there's sort of three pipelines we will run now. One will be can we just develop a product in house and do it at a reasonable cost and speed. That's preferred because then you can control everything. And with the business that we have in the wholesale side, obviously, the more you can control on that, the better margin you can give your wholesaler, and then that business actually works. So that's the preferred model. If we can't, for example, there's like a vertical planter that is really, really performing. It just like works really well. And so, we're like we can't make a better one of those. We don't see a way to improve that. We'll do a custom color with them. And we'll just let first party fulfill that and there you go, that's about as good as we can do for that. Maybe we will develop a different type of vertical planter that does not directly compete. And then after that, the third sort of pipeline, which I would say is like maybe 5 to 10% of our products and maybe it trends to zero, is we'll just drop ship an existing product, no customization whatsoever, because that's obviously the least defensible.
Question: I'm really curious about the CEO creative strategies [inaudible 52:08].
Kevin Espiritu: Yeah, I wish I had sophisticated thoughts there. It's been actually quite mentally challenging for me to go from December ’21 was like me and four contractors, and then to scale up and have not only any layer of organization to the company, but multiple layers. And then, especially when we got the seed company came relatively quickly. It was like 10 months afterwards. The team size and the revenue size of the company just immediately doubled. And so, I've not run any company bigger than this one. And so, I don't know what I don't know as far as like what are things that CEOs should and should not generally do. And so, feedback will come through the grapevine of like, hey, you don't need to be in Slack like getting to this tiny little detail about this LP landing page or whatever. And I'm like, okay, cool, I'll hear that. So yeah, I mean, I'm taking a lot of notes from people that are smarter than me about that right now. Because it's difficult. It's like one day I'm doing meetings and trying to acquire something or having a hiring call or whatever. And then either the same day or later that week, I'm in the backyard talking about onions to a bunch of people. And so, the context shifting is like very difficult sometimes to handle.
Question: Following on to the last question, you’ve really taken this journey through various stages [inaudible 53:45]?
Kevin Espiritu: That's interesting. I never have thought what the biggest surprise would be. I would say that, generally speaking, most things worked that I tried. Most things worked. I mean, I think there's some weird missteps I've had. Like I tried the whole eBook route and these sorts of like, I don't know, a little bit lower level marketing-y type things but quickly sort of got out of those. I think the biggest surprise is when I first jumped into product when I bought the 20 foot container from Australia. It was like 35 grand or something like that. And I think the business had like maybe 100 grand of capital in it. And I was like, okay, well, that's 35% of everything I have in this business. So, if this doesn't work, it's not going to be ideal. And then I sold that out a week after I put the Shopify store up before it got to America, and then used that money to buy two more and then sold that out before it got there. And I was like, okay, well, not only did it work, but it really worked. So that was pretty surprising.
Question: What does success look like to you in three years?
Kevin Espiritu: Personally or for the company? The company? Yeah, I mean, I think there's the obvious financial metrics of we're trying to build a company that's doing 100 million a year or more, honestly, probably could be significantly more I think if the play that we think makes sense actually plans out, which is this wholesale like product development angle. So that would be ideal, financially speaking. I think from like a content perspective, having a very diverse and broad set of really highly performant and beloved content creators across like a variety of categories and subcategories in gardening or adjacent, that would be ideal because that means the fundamental risk to the business is now dilute, which is me basically dying or not wanting to do this, which kind of speaks to the- someone had chatted about TCGs decision to even invest or anyone's decision to invest in a creator led company, it's like that is the biggest risk that you- I don't know how they're supposed to underwrite that effectively.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think it’s funny, he’s here for diligence. He doesn't give a shit about your success personally in three years. You alluded to it, but it's worth stating very specifically, I think in this business, it's interesting because you've got excellent opportunities to grow both horizontally and vertically. Like, there's a lot of high dimension space for this business to grow. And since it's coming from an authentic high energy place where you already have the audience, there's a lot of value to be added in every direction.
Kevin Espiritu: Think about this, like we've never created any course whatsoever. I mean, we could create- I mean, I know for a fact that I can make the best course on how to garden, absolutely, let alone- and sell it the most. Let alone, I can get the guy who I know who grows- he's grown 4500 varieties of tomatoes over his like 70 year lifespan and be like, “Hey, you want to make a tomato course with me? And this will be the best tomato course.” Like we could spin up a seven figure, multi seven figure courses business at an extremely high margin too. We're just not because the product stuff is a little bit more effective.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, you can add a lot of products. And I think, I mean, you mentioned earlier like we can do canning, we can do bonsai. There is so much adjacent stuff.
Kevin Espiritu: The fundamentals of it, it's not gardening specific. I mean, if you really- like one broad way to think about this is you could just have a holding company of which Epic is one thing and you apply it to gardening, baking, fishing, etc., etc., down the line.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, Al is doing the same thing, started with quilting. It's crafting.com. And like horizontally expand through crafting.
Kevin Espiritu: It makes total sense.
Question: [inaudible 57:15]
Kevin Espiritu: I didn't. I don't know. I mean, they- I think that market was somewhat frothy. I don't know. I don't really know the investing side. But certainly 2021 seemed a bit wild. So, I think they were excited to do a deal in a space that seemed untapped. And no one, frankly, like no one else in the space creator wise had developed, demonstrated commerce competency. And so, I think they were like let's go. And I didn't seem crazy to them, I suppose.
Eric Jorgenson: You were the biggest creator in this space at the time?
Kevin Espiritu: At that time, I was not the biggest on every platform. And now, I'm the biggest, we're the biggest on every but one. I think Facebook we're not. But yeah, the aggregate was dramatically the biggest.
Question: [inaudible 58:16]
Kevin Espiritu: I don't really know. I mean, it depends on how many emails I deleted, I guess. I don't really know. I just never advanced the conversation with anyone else.
Eric Jorgenson: Their reputation is that strong?
Kevin Espiritu: Yeah.
Eric Jorgenson: Or was it the approach? Did you have a pre- were you already aware of them?
Kevin Espiritu: I didn't know them, but I knew the companies they invested in and I liked almost all of them. I mean, I'm not a big Barstool fan, but what they did business wise is interesting.
Eric Jorgenson: Are you aware, speaking of other people, of the other Kevin's in other spaces?
Kevin Espiritu: Yeah, I have like a list of people that I'd be like, if I wasn't doing this, I might help them do this. Like there's this woman, Aquarium Info on YouTube. She has like 3 million subscribers, absolute content master woman, like it's quite pattern hacky a bit. Like she does do some of that sort of attention arbitrage stuff, where she's like hooking you psychologically. But it's-
Eric Jorgenson: You don't even try, you just- You just pun constantly.
Kevin Espiritu: You could spin up a- and she has, I think she's just doing like a dropship collab type thing. And I'm like you don't realize what you're leaving on the table. But also with these creators, they don't quite honestly give a fuck sometimes. They just don't care. Their life is pretty good.
Eric Jorgenson: That's another thing that's unique about you is the business mind and the creator mind in one. And that's- I'm working on the Elon book right now, which is not a thing that I'm talking about much.
Kevin Espiritu: Just do improv comedy. That's what you have to do. If you're a very structured thinker, just do improv comedy, you'll be fine. It will break you of that to some degree. I mean, I think that's one of the biggest things I did for like- I did like 18 months of improv.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. I think there's underrated returns in being like an excellent multidisciplinary thinker. I think part of what makes Elon magic is having all the engineering information and all the financial information in his head at the same time. It's a sole decision maker, and it is different than a creator who's like, you know what you're talking about with her, she's an excellent content creator, even if she had an operator, those two different brains need to agree on every individual decision, and you've been able to navigate entirely. I think part of your success is having both of those in one and constantly making trade offs between the two, like to your question, what's hard about it is the context switching maybe. But there's also some speed and some singular vision that comes with that.
Kevin Espiritu: I switched my entire schedule around to fix it. Because I would have days where I’d do like meeting, meeting, meeting, hiring, and then film. And I'm like this doesn't work that well. I'm not super excited to go film. And so, on shoot days, I do not do any operational stuff at all. I just like mess around in the garden, which helps a lot. So just one way to-
Eric Jorgenson: That's good. I hear that a lot too, the compartmentalization of duties, separate companies, separate mindsets. Something, I mean, my driving motivation in everything that I do is like this incredible utopian future, which to me, solar punk is like the best visual depiction of. And something that we talked about before was like these distributed gardening things. And I think like just, we as humans have this like natural response to interacting with biological things. Like when you stick your hands in the dirt, it does something to you neurochemically that puts you at ease. It relaxes you. It's healthy for you. People talk about grounding. I think gardening can play an enormous role in a like high functioning where we well understand ourselves future and a lot more people can grow and be surrounded by green all the time, hopefully more and more.
Kevin Espiritu: I don't know. I kind of have like a semi contrarian view to what the future looks like, I suppose, where I think the best tech sort of falls away into the background of life and allows you to live as the biological entity you actually are, until like a singularity happens and we're not that anymore, or you’re Brian Johnson and your hyper biological optimizer or something like that. Like, for the most part, what makes us happy has been known for thousands of years. Tech just should enable that. It shouldn't hinder that.
Eric Jorgenson: Laying on the beach, swimming in the water, eating some fresh, delicious food that’s nutritious. I don't know how inspired by that future vision your day-to-day work is, I know you just love gardening, but I see this fitting into an incredible version of the future. And every time I walk by a lawn, which is a lot, I'm like that’s a fucking dumb thing to do with a patch of dirt in front of your house.
Kevin Espiritu: I do think we'll look at lawns as sort of an atrocity, especially in Southern California lawns like really should be effectively outlawed in my opinion. I wouldn't go that extreme on most things, but it's such an incredible waste of resources, freshwater. It's wild. But we'll see how it goes.
Eric Jorgenson: I like a future that is- where Epic Gardening has taken over the world, a lot of people growing their own veggies or even the community piece that we talked about before. I think we talked- I'm glad you didn't go down this road because it might have been an L, but tokenizing community gardens and sharing responsibility. Some people could donate land and some people can pull produce out.
Kevin Espiritu: I’m very glad I did not do that. That would have been stupid.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think this is an incredible- I think there is a long run for Epic Gardening ahead. I think it's an incredible- It's an incredible business, obviously, just from like a nerd capitalist business guy point of view. But I think it does incredible good for the world and all the people and all the fans that you serve. I think there's a lot to learn from almost any business about what you've done and how you've done it. I’m a huge fan of yours and the work that you do, and I hope more people pick up a piece of that and carry it with them.
Kevin Espiritu: Thanks, man. Likewise. I appreciate it.
Eric Jorgenson: Thank you for doing this. And thank you all for coming to listen. I appreciate you.