Building an Online Gardening Empire, Kevin Espiritu

Ish (00:00.909)
How's life?

Kevin Espiritu (00:02.924)
It's all right, man. What about you? Big change?

Ish (00:05.996)
Yeah, big change. mean, technically I'll be, yeah, I'll be not working full time by the time this releases. So that's exciting.

Kevin Espiritu (00:15.308)
Okay, nice. So you're still at A16Z for a bit. Nice.

Ish (00:18.37)
Yeah, and then I'll transition to like a consultant role, which is pretty cool. But be able to have like the full creative freedom to do the podcasts, do side projects and everything else. Yeah, I mean, I was actually kind of curious, have you ever had a like a full time job or you always just kind of did your own thing?

Kevin Espiritu (00:22.828)
Mm.

Kevin Espiritu (00:29.772)
It's a good setup then.

Kevin Espiritu (00:37.3)
I have, yeah. So I had one in 2015 to 2016. was working at, it's called Scribe Media now, but it was called Book in a Box back in the day. So I think that's really my only true full-time job, unless you want to count like an internship in college or, you know, working at like fast casual restaurant in college or high school.

Ish (01:01.144)
Yeah, so you haven't dealt with corporate bureaucracy in a really long time.

Kevin Espiritu (01:05.812)
Well, only now at my own company, you know, but, not, not in, not in the wild, I guess, but I don't, I can see why people don't like it. I'll say that much.

Ish (01:08.792)
Ha ha ha.

Ish (01:13.475)
So.

Ish (01:17.154)
Yeah, nobody likes being told what to do or how to spend your time outside of work.

Kevin Espiritu (01:21.48)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, totally. Totally.

Ish (01:23.854)
Damn dude, well thank you for making the time. I feel interesting talking to you because I feel like we have a parasocial relationship. I've watched a ton of your YouTube videos. We follow each other on socials. I see a lot of your updates. So it's almost like I know who you are and I know you, but I don't know you know you, if know what I mean.

Kevin Espiritu (01:30.22)
For sure.

Kevin Espiritu (01:38.508)
Yeah, it's funny how that works with all these, all of us creators, right? Like I'll meet people and we know we both know each other, but we've never met. And it's just a, it's a weird phenomenon that can only happen these days, I think.

Ish (01:46.495)
Yeah.

Ish (01:50.478)
Cause like you know so many random tidbits and like, know, insights about each other's lives or like what you do or like, you know, how you are and your personality, but you've never actually spoken face to face. But I think that's pretty cool. I think that's awesome. So the first question I just kind of want to start off with is like, how do you explain what you do? Like you meet somebody randomly off the street or you have like a cousin that you haven't spoken to in a really long time and they're like, yo, Kevin, like, like what the heck do you do, man? You know?

Kevin Espiritu (02:00.043)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Espiritu (02:14.732)
Yeah, I've, I've changed it over the years. Cause I think when you're like starting out and striving, you want to make yourself feel really good and important. So you say, Oh, you know, I'm building this company doing this and that. And you try to hype it up. And these days I just say, I teach people how to garden on the internet. Uh, it's the best, this is the quickest way I can say it. And then it,

If they, if they're curious, they'll ask more. If not, they don't. Or sometimes I'll just say I'm a gardener and leave it at that if I don't feel like talking about it. But yeah, I mean, the simplest way I can put it, or I run a gardening company these days is the way that I like to phrase it.

Ish (02:42.209)
Yeah.

Ish (02:50.508)
Yeah, isn't like the follow up question, especially from like family, like, okay, that's nice, but like, how the heck do you make money? how do you make money from gardening? They kind of get it. Yeah.

Kevin Espiritu (02:56.532)
Yeah, well, fam these days, like family gets it now. cause they all, you know, they all see me out there doing whatever I'm doing. So they get it. But I'd say for every kind of creator, it takes a while before they really get it. And they have to see some like kind of traditional external symbols before they're like, he's like actually legit, know? but yeah, they get it these days.

Ish (03:10.786)
Mm.

Ish (03:16.002)
Yeah.

Well, I feel like, I mean, you have a huge following and you're still, you know, like reaching a ton of people on a weekly basis. But like my mom watches your videos. I watch your videos. Like when I followed you for the very first time, I was like, this is interesting. Like I never seen somebody like on the younger side of the spectrum do gardening videos in like the YouTube-esque style. You know, like most of the videos that I had seen when I first started getting into like gardening were like older ladies, their backyard with like a really shitty iPhone or.

You know, like horrible audio quality. It's like an hour long video for just talking about like one small thing, whereas like yours are like optimized perfectly. And then you have like obviously the setup and everything, which makes it really cool.

Kevin Espiritu (04:00.82)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's how it started for me was trying to take some of that information and turn it into something a little bit more consumable. Cause I found those hard to watch and listen to. So, I kind of just made stuff. was like, well, I would watch this, guess. So, there you go. And it started out with a blog and then it went to YouTube, but same, same principle everywhere.

Ish (04:09.902)
Yeah.

Ish (04:23.126)
Yeah, and I know you've kind of shared your story in terms of like how you got to where you are today, but if we could just do like a quick overview of like, you know, you had these internships in college or whatever, your first job, and then how did you end up, you know, gardening and being like this kind of YouTube media star full time? I think it's pretty fascinating.

Kevin Espiritu (04:41.77)
Yeah. So yeah, yeah. I'll give like the quick kind of year by year. If that helps is I think I started Epic gardening in 2013. It was just a hobby blog and I had come out of college and I paid for my accounting degree with online poker. was playing online poker for a living. and

Ish (04:59.032)
Nice.

Kevin Espiritu (05:00.628)
I didn't want to do that forever. So I, I ended up quitting that and tried to figure out what to do. So I was building websites for, you know, local customers, local clients, local businesses. So I started the gardening blog cause I was doing that as a, as a hobby at the time, as a kind of like a digital calling card, like, look, I can build a website and this here's one that I have. And as I got into marketing and search traffic and all that kind of stuff, SEO, was using the gardening blog as proof. I could also do that. Like, Hey, look, my blog gets traffic. I could probably get you traffic at the same time. I started to get curious about, okay, well,

you can like blogs can earn money and they can you can put some ads on there and the bats can earn money and so I kind of

got enamored with that idea and explore that a little bit more. And that led me down the path of growing the blog, which then led me down the path of, well, you should have different media formats. So then I got on YouTube and then I started the podcast and all the different social channels. And then in 2019, after the, you know, I was making a pretty good living at that point, just off the media side of the content side, I started offering products to the audience because you know, brands will come to you with brand deals or whatever, and they'll say, Hey, we want you to promote this.

And eventually I was like, you know, I don't, I didn't do many of them in the first place. It like, you know, I don't get why I would give my audience to a brand if I can just be the brand. Um, so I started selling products to the audience in 2019, which went really well and was very fortuitous.

Ish (06:19.608)
What was like the first, like what was the physical product, right? So like, what was the product?

Kevin Espiritu (06:23.244)
Yeah. Physical, physical products. Yeah. So the first product, was a product I'd been sent as a sample. Um, and I just had it going in my garden. It was a raised bed, uh, which is just a way of planting, right? As kind of wavy corrugated metal raised bed. Uh, and so I kept emailing the company and said, Hey, can I sell these? Can I sell these? They finally said yes. Um, so 2019 took about half the money I had put it into a container of those beds, slapped the Shopify store up and off to the races. I knew they'd sell. didn't know they'd sell them like

pre-sale in like four or five days. And so I was kind of off to the races with that and getting into the world of EECOM, which I did not know anything about, like totally clueless, just running and gunning it. But then setting all that up before 2020 was very lucky, because obviously with the pandemic, all like home-based hobbies just took off like a rocket. And so that's kind of the shortest way I could summarize kind of what happened when Epic was growing.

Ish (07:18.094)
Interesting. And then I remember that time period quickly, because I think that's when I started getting to gardening like 2019, 2020. You already had your YouTube and everything by then.

Kevin Espiritu (07:24.267)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Espiritu (07:27.872)
Yeah, YouTube was probably at 180K in on March, early March, 2020 when the lockdown happened.

Ish (07:35.928)
Do you remember how much it grew over the span of two or three years or over COVID?

Kevin Espiritu (07:41.229)
Yeah. Well, yeah. So literally the day after the lockdown, um, I gained 15,000 subs. So over 10 % of the whole channel's growth in a day. Right. And so, uh, and that was happening across the blog, across all the social channels as well. And so I, I remember messaging my editor because up until 2019 I was doing YouTube, but I was kind of doing all the platforms and I wasn't hyper focused, you know, uh, all the platforms were earning some revenues. I was like, okay, you know, I'll be this multimedia.

thing and I messaged my editor. said, we're going to Monday, Wednesday, Fridays for the rest of the whole year, like without fail, 12 PM release, kind of like a, standard schedule. And that worked really well. So I think we hit a million on YouTube before the end of the year, or maybe just after the end of that, that one year, you know, and then all the other channels also grew. So it was, it was crazy. I remember saying to myself at the time, like, you better enjoy this while it lasts, cause this is going to be the fastest you'll ever, you know, that this is going to be the most sort of

promotion you're ever going to get and that that turns out to be like maybe true, maybe not, but it was, it was a fun time.

Ish (08:47.406)
Yeah, maybe true, maybe not because yeah, yes, everybody was at home bored and they're like looking for things to do. And so obviously you could do that time. But then after you reach a certain point, you know, it's like a network effect, right? Once you hit like 1 million, 2 million, 3 million, then YouTube is just recommending you attend to other people and you have, you know, an audience on other platforms like IG, Twitter, LinkedIn, et cetera. So you can kind of push people around to, to sub. so you said you kind of went all in on YouTube.

Were you like optimizing for YouTube and just cutting videos for shorts, TikTok, et cetera? Because I think you have a pretty big TikTok audience too, right?

Kevin Espiritu (09:22.868)
Yeah, TikTok's at three, 3.2 or 3.3 mil now. I think the days of being able to grow quick on TikTok obviously are not here anymore, but, so I don't think I could like replicate that today, but there's always like.

time and place, right? Like TikTok in 2019, 2020 was kind of like a magical place. And these days it's kind of TikTok shop and a bunch of random stuff. Still good, but not the same magic. No, so I wasn't cutting down from YouTube to short form. Cause I think what I discovered in 2019 when I got on TikTok is

TikTok was basically the stories concept on steroids, right? Like it was like Vine plus or stories plus, I guess the best way to put it. And so I was treating it initially as a story, a place to like throw IG stories or story-esque content and see what it did. And then I realized like, no, like the real players here are.

cutting that like it's a real video. You know, it's funny to say that now in 2019, obviously short form is such a science these days, science and an art. But back then I was making specific TikToks and kind of clipping them together with Premiere or whatever editing program I was using.

Then I took that and brought that over to the other platforms once they all copied TikTok. So going to Facebook reels, IG reels, and YouTube shorts, that all then blew up those channels. And I think it's an important thing when you're trying to build platforms is realizing that the platforms themselves have these incentives at heart. And so, you know, the second IG launches reels, you probably should just spam reels because they need it to work, right? Yeah. Same with YouTube and

Ish (10:52.59)
free distribution exactly.

Kevin Espiritu (10:57.032)
YouTube was interesting because it was not as quick of a ramp. It took like three months, I would say, for stuff that I was ripping from TikTok that I knew just factually did well on TikTok to hit on YouTube. took like three months. Like if you look at the graph, it'll be like a flat line and then a straight up. And I didn't get it. And I still don't really get it. But YouTube was just less of a responsive algorithm, at least back then. But yeah, I was doing custom content for shorts.

Ish (11:23.372)
Are you playing around with like LinkedIn video now?

Kevin Espiritu (11:27.21)
I haven't and I think it's a mistake. just haven't. Maybe, maybe I, you can give me some pointers because that plus gardening, I don't know that it makes sense, but I could just be wrong.

Ish (11:38.232)
think you can do like, probably not spam a ton of your IG reels or other stuff that you're putting up on YouTube, but maybe like some behind the scenes stuff that you've done. Cause then you do like a lot of like business content and like, here's my thoughts on personal branding and all that stuff, but you're so unique in the sense that not a lot of people are great at entrepreneurship, great at content and great at the very specific like hyper niche like gardening. And so being able to show like that third.

Kevin Espiritu (11:48.3)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Espiritu (12:03.884)
Hmm.

Ish (12:05.836)
bucket of your personality and what you do on a daily basis will make you like stand out a ton and then you supplement it with like all the other type of content that you're already doing. I think that'd be cool.

Kevin Espiritu (12:14.484)
Yeah, yeah, that could be interesting. Do a little like business ex-gardening back end.

Ish (12:18.636)
Or like there's that video that would hyper viral for you where it was like the knee thing where you like you like bend down with the knee like post that video and then in the copy you can do you know here's how we thought of it here's why we think it worked here are the results and then LinkedIn I think would love that.

Kevin Espiritu (12:30.898)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a good point. I'll give that a try in the next day or two.

Ish (12:36.462)
Nice. Okay, so we kind of covered how you got here. We didn't really talk about what like what products do you have today and how is the business structured.

Kevin Espiritu (12:46.636)
Yeah. Yeah. So a couple of years after I started selling products in 2021, the very tail end, I raised a series a, uh, which allowed us to have enough capital to make some acquisitions. So we acquired a couple of companies, bought a blog to boost our traffic. Um, we bought a small, uh, seed starting tray company. So when you start seeds, you usually put them in something and then you transplant from that thing to the garden. We bought that thing. Um, and

expanded that product line to about 15 different SKUs now. And then the big acquisition, which was the tail end of 2022 was a seed company. So we purchased a seed company based out of Denver called Botanical Interests. And that almost doubled the size of the company because it's seed and it's in wholesale and it's just a really established brand. so now

it's a, it's, it's sort of a brand under Epic, but we run it brand wise completely on its own because it's, it's a great brand. We don't want to disrupt the brand in any way. But yeah, now, now we've got quite a few different lines of products and we still have those raised beds as well.

Ish (13:53.358)
Yeah, why buy versus build from scratch? Is it just because seeds and all these physical products is kind of a headache to do? And guess building it from scratch, you kind of have to model everything out and figure out where you get your supplier from.

Kevin Espiritu (14:05.61)
Yeah, I mean, we are doing both. with take the seed trays, the seed trays was, it was just functionally the best seed tray that I'd ever seen. And so I was like, I'm not, it probably was, yeah.

Ish (14:16.166)
Are those the ones that you sent me? They're like, kind of like long ones, black, and they have a little bubble top, I guess. Yeah, nice. Yep, exactly, I just used them yesterday. Yeah, I like them.

Kevin Espiritu (14:22.348)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there's like holes in the bottom, right? Yeah, exactly. Nice. You liking them? Okay, cool. well, so yeah, I mean, when I saw that, the way that that worked at the start is a friend of mine invented them. And so he brought them down and I was like, man, these are the best trades I've ever seen. Like for sure. I just kind of knew it. And so I started to tease them in front of the audience, which is sort of free product validation, right? Especially when people are saying like, please send me the link so I can buy it. Then you really know you have something.

Ish (14:49.24)
Yeah.

Kevin Espiritu (14:50.796)
And so we started to sell them on the store with just like a profit split set up and they did really well. Like they sold out in 20, 30 seconds every time we had a batch of inventory. And so I was like, okay, cool. And so in that case, was like, why, why build it? He already has it. I just pitched him on, can I purchase the assets from you and hire you basically? And

His name is Diego. He's still, he still works with us and he's fantastic. So in some situations it's just illogical to, to build if, it's right in front of you. Then there are situations like the gardening industry is, is a very old industry. and there's a lot of physical stuff in this industry. Like the biggest categories in the industry are live plants, like fruit trees and vegetables and flowers, seeds and then, and then like soils and fertilizers, which are very bulky and heavy, right?

And to build any of those from scratch, you would need to start a nursery and grow it out. And you'd have to actually grow through many seasons to scale up production. you'd have to, to start a seed company with, with distribution, you'd have to probably spend three to five years building out like a distribution network, you know, plus there's a ton of regulation and seed. And so certain things like the entry cost is actually really high. And if you have the capital, would make more sense to just acquire a brand from founders who were ready to retire, which is what we did.

Ish (16:16.462)
This is the, I don't know how to kind of word the question, but again, you're kind of younger. When I think of gardening, I don't think of like a young dude, like selling seeds and all that. Do you ever get like shit from other people in the industry? Like this young dude coming in here trying, like even when you first started, that was like 10 years ago. Like you were probably in your early twenties then. Did you ever get shit from other, I don't know, people that were like leaders in the gardening space or anything like that?

Kevin Espiritu (16:33.76)
Yeah.

Kevin Espiritu (16:40.244)
You know, I'm sure, I'm sure it's happened. I think I've like heard little whiffs of it here and there. I try not to seek that stuff out, but I would say, you know, a lot of the folks that we work with are those people and I think they enjoy a different voice. I think gardener, like the thing about the gardening industry is so interesting is like by and large, everyone's pretty transparent and pretty, pretty friendly. I would say maybe the creator space is, is, is the example to the contrary of that.

Ish (16:46.702)
Yeah.

Ish (16:56.258)
It's cool.

Ish (17:08.014)
More toxic? Yeah.

Kevin Espiritu (17:10.25)
Yeah, like the gardening creator space is a little bit less so, but the actual gardening industry itself is pretty friendly. Like the seed industry, everyone kind of knows everyone's margins. Like it's, it's very transparent. and I think a lot of people, when you're in gardening, like you, you, you're not really sad that someone's bringing more people into the, into the passion. So you might not appreciate the approach, but you could at least can't deny the effectiveness, you know? So I don't think we get too much of it.

Ish (17:34.968)
Because at the end of day, you're growing the pie for everybody and you're making, like you said, you're getting more people into gardening, which is great for the entire space as a whole.

Kevin Espiritu (17:43.37)
Yeah, yeah. Which brings more people, let's say, into an independent nursery that maybe they don't like the way I'd make the videos. Not saying that's true, but let's just imagine still more people are probably coming into the nursery, right? So they're, still happy.

Ish (17:47.726)
Exactly.

Ish (17:54.156)
Yeah, that's true. Like how does the business run today? Like are you able to share any like numbers or like, you know, percentage wise how how everything is split in terms of everything they make?

Kevin Espiritu (18:04.812)
Yeah. I mean, these days I try not to share direct numbers just because there's, there's almost no benefit, but, you know, we're, we're a multi-aid figure business now. And we do, we're about 50, 50, 60 people plus, plus our warehouse staff. Yeah, it's a big team. You know, the seed company it's, it's, it's big. mean, we need everyone at the company and we take, we take raw seed and we bring it through an entire like testing germination process all the way through packaging and shipping. Right. So.

Ish (18:08.568)
Cool? Yeah.

Ish (18:19.053)
That's a big team.

Kevin Espiritu (18:32.8)
You need a lot of talented people to do that. And the machinery is very specific. So you need people who know the machines. so yeah. And, and, and then as far as like structure, eventually I did decide to hire a president, to help run day-to-day operations. Who's killer. cause it got to a point where I was like, I'm, I'm out of my depth as far as the operations, you know, when you're managing logistics of dozens of containers a year, like all that kind of stuff, it's just, it's, it was no longer what I was good at. And so, yeah, we, we've got a leadership team now.

Ish (19:00.654)
At what point did you feel like it got, was it like 30 people, a dozen people, or was it maybe a revenue number or product in terms of products? What point did you feel like kind of got out of your scope?

Kevin Espiritu (19:11.806)
Yeah, I I would say to be honest, like I've felt out of my scope most of the time. You know, like when we, when we raised the series, a, it was me and four contractors. It was a, my writer, my editor, my gardening assistant and my actual assistant. And it was just the four of us kind of running and gunning it. And even then I was overburdened by what was kind of coming down the pipe.

Ish (19:19.004)
Hahaha

Kevin Espiritu (19:40.567)
But then, yeah, well, after we raised, we went from, you know, an inside of a year, we went from that team to 80, maybe 90. And so my mind basically exploded. And so we were, and you know, I had a interim COO at the time who was helping with a lot of the scaling and acquisitions who was, who was awesome. But he was from the investor side. So it's not like he had a ton of operational experience either at the levels that we were at. And I didn't either, right?

Ish (19:46.67)
Wow.

Kevin Espiritu (20:07.508)
And so at that point it was like we were doing the best we could, kind of building the plane as it crashed or whatever that saying is. And at some point I was like, you know what, I finally kind of like mentally gave up and admitted and I was like, okay, we need to get people who know what they're doing here. And that was kind of the impetus for really building out the leadership team.

Ish (20:13.39)
Yeah. Has it crashed?

Ish (20:28.834)
Yeah, I mean, that's wild because even from a hiring perspective, I used to work on a recruiting team. So even hiring 50, 60 people is a headache on its own because you have to interview thousands of people or like screen thousands of people. So I can't even imagine doing all that. Plus running the company day to day, you know.

Kevin Espiritu (20:40.639)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's so crazy because when I look back at 2022, the year after the raise versus 2021, my day to day just dramatically shifted. You know, there's so many calls I had to be on and I kept feeling pulled away from kind of the essentials, even though, you know, if you're hiring, is, that is the essentials. Like new essentials came to be. And I was unfamiliar with like what those days were supposed to look like, you know.

Ish (21:06.168)
Yeah. Now that you have like an established business, established team, and you're somewhat like, you know, you're super tech savvy and all that. So I'm sure you understand like what's going on with AI. How do you see, and Caleb and I were kind of talking about this before the call, like what are businesses or just things that are like AI will likely not be able to solve entirely. And things with your, like with your hands or things that you build or things that you, that are in the real world are probably,

Kevin Espiritu (21:28.971)
Mm-hmm.

Ish (21:34.614)
Not like foolproof, more sound and secure than tech and software and all that. But how are you thinking about implementing AI into your business? Or are you even thinking about it?

Kevin Espiritu (21:47.819)
Yeah, I mean, honestly, we use it a good amount already. We don't use it in our written content counterintuitively. we, I have, know, the person that I, I hired when we, we actually purchased his blog, he runs all of our search now, our editorial content, and he's kept it completely AI free, which you would think would be the first thing to go because it's written, right? LLMs are really good at that, but no, we keep that pretty clean because,

Ish (21:54.776)
for soon.

Ish (22:14.712)
Cool.

Kevin Espiritu (22:15.786)
we feel that the gardening knowledge from actual human beings out in the real world is more important than what AI can generate there. But what I will say is like, I have a model trained on the way I write that we use to draft up like the skeleton of let's say an email copy or something like that. And then we'll go through it and redo it. So it's really just like a rough first draft we'll use it as. Yeah, it saves me a pass. And then I'll also use it as like,

Ish (22:37.134)
Saves you a pass.

Kevin Espiritu (22:41.964)
narrative structure skeletons for let's say a short form of script or something like that. Or I'll use it as, gut checks against like different ways of structuring content. So like, is there a different way I could structure? Is there a different title combination I could use? Or if I can't crack, let's say a YouTube title, I might say, you know, I'm having trouble with this title. It needs to be, and I'll give it the parameters like under 55 characters, one emoji, power word, whatever that might be.

And sometimes, not all the time, it'll crack it for me. I'm like, I can't believe I didn't think of that formulation of the title, you know? And then, how else are we using it? the big thing we're, well big thing we're working on is, think about what we've built, right? We have thousands of articles, videos, et cetera, and it's all done by real gardeners. And so what we're trying to do now is create basically like an epic.

Ish (23:19.854)
Is there any, go ahead.

Kevin Espiritu (23:36.001)
knowledge base that can be pulled from and queried against any like type of query someone might have. So if they're on our blog, they can just say like, can I actually grow this plant in zone nine B or something? And it'll tell them. Or if they're on the store, let's say they might say like, Hey, I have 10 square feet. What, what's the best product to buy? And then how do I, what do I plant in it? You know, we're trying to get to that level where you can answer all that with real information, not like hallucinated stuff.

Ish (23:46.616)
Mm-hmm. It's cool.

Ish (24:02.51)
Yeah, that's kind of what I was getting at is like, you can almost build like your own GPT wrapper on like highly trained on gardening and everything that you know, all your YouTube videos and everything. Because like even me, I have a tiny little garden in the backyard and like, I'm always like Googling like, all right, what the heck to garden in February or like, you know, this is the temperature that I have in the backyard. Like what can I garden in this specific space? I guess like 40 % sunlight. And I ended up spending like more time digging through, you know, Google and articles that.

Kevin Espiritu (24:11.283)
huh, yeah.

Ish (24:32.79)
end up trying to sell me something versus if I had just one tool that I could use and spat out an answer that was somewhat accurate and less biased.

Kevin Espiritu (24:34.796)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Espiritu (24:41.354)
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, that's, that's the idea. especially because gardening is such a weird, niche or category because there's so many permutations of how the answer could express for the same question. So like, can I grow tomatoes? Well, it's like, okay, where do you live? What time of year is it? What kind of space are you in? What do you like to eat? Like there's too many variables against that. And that's why I think people find it so confusing. It's not like, you know, what saw do I need to cut a two by four? You know, there, there is usually just an answer to that.

Ish (25:08.078)
Exactly.

Ish (25:11.914)
I mean, I guess you could pick up on your geolocation and the date and time and all that, which would help a lot, make it specific to the user. I should have asked this at beginning, but how did you even get into gardening? Did you like doing this as a kid, somebody in your family?

Kevin Espiritu (25:25.534)
No, I mean, I never, think my grandfather had like a small garden as a kid, but I never really connected to it. But I was very much into like nature and science as a kid. I was like collecting rocks and collecting bugs and coins and all that kind of stuff. But I got into it in my early twenties with my brother. had come out of college playing poker, like I was telling you. And when I quit, I started playing video games instead of poker because I didn't know what else to do. I, and I had some money and I was like, I'll just play some games and enjoy life or whatever.

Ish (25:30.478)
scared.

Ish (25:37.038)
Nice.

Kevin Espiritu (25:55.073)
But I started playing like way too much, just way too many video games, grinding. I was on, back then it would have been when Starcraft 2 came out. So I was on my Starcraft 2 grind. I was terrible at it. I didn't ever get that good. That was when Minecraft came out. So I'd play Minecraft with friends. And I think at some point, League of Legends dropped and I was on League of Legends for a while.

Ish (25:58.114)
Video clips. What games were you playing back then?

Ish (26:04.91)
my god, that was my jam. I love that game.

Ish (26:14.264)
Nice.

Kevin Espiritu (26:22.048)
But it was just too much. You know, I was like, I'm going nowhere doing this. I might as well have kept playing poker. was like a video game. I actually made money on this. I'm not even making money, right? so my brother came home from college. He's younger and we decided to garden that summer and I just got really hooked by it. I was growing cucumbers, hydroponically, the science of it combined with the nature of it. I just really got intrigued and somehow that coalesced with like making the websites at the same time. So I started the blog and it just,

Ish (26:29.518)
Exactly.

Ish (26:46.83)
Hmm.

Kevin Espiritu (26:49.462)
Thankfully it was a side project that I never kind of fully dropped until 2016 when I went full time on it. I'm happy I didn't like forget to register the domain or something, you know?

Ish (26:58.456)
Yeah, that's cool. And like today, can you walk me through like your process for, you know, end to end in terms of you think of a new product or a new seed or new whatever it is that you're going to sell. How do you go ahead and build the product? And then I'll also think about your distribution strategy. Like which one comes first? Do you think of like, okay, how am I going to market this or how am going to word it? How am going to position it compared to the different skews that we have?

Kevin Espiritu (27:24.576)
Yeah. So, okay. So take a, take like our new seed line that we just dropped, which would be the Epic gardening seed line, which is kind of counterintuitive cause we have a seed brand that has 750 varieties. So like, why do another in that case? It's because that brand and many seed brands with a lot of variety, it typically caters to a gardener who like knows what they're doing already.

Cause they know not only do they want to grow marigold, but they want to grow the French marigold, you know, and a beginner doesn't even know maybe even what a marigold is. And so what we decided is we need a slimmed down line with less choice. And we'd like to do it under the Epic brand because that might allow it to go to new channels that our existing seed brand can't go to. So let's say if we wanted to go to a big box store, which would allow for more access to our brand and maybe at a better price point.

we can't do it with our existing seed brand. so we decided to have a different brand name for that. And then, as far as like the positioning of the product itself, we're like, well, let's give less choice, but let's make those choices really, really good no matter what. So they can just pick it straight up off and they know what's going to work. So instead of giving, you know, 17, 20 different tomatoes, we gave three and instead of, you know, two different squat or like 20 different squash, we have one, right? This is the squash to grow.

Ish (28:39.096)
Yeah, it is pretty overwhelming when I go to like Home Depot and I want to buy like some seeds and there's like so many different tomatoes and me as like a novice I'm like, okay, just tell me what the best one is and that like is easiest to grow for me as a newbie, you

Kevin Espiritu (28:43.167)
Yeah.

Kevin Espiritu (28:49.974)
That's all I need. Yeah. Especially when you start like what I needed when I started was something like that. It was like, this is the cucumber to grow and this is the way to grow it. And then just like worry about getting into the details of it for three, four years from now when you're obsessed, you know? But at the start don't. So anyways, that was the genesis of the line. Then you go through, you know, the artwork, there's the packaging, like all that kind of stuff. And then as far as like launching it,

I'm, I'm usually a fan of, sort of like integrating it in a non flashy way, usually. So what I'll do is we'll start to throw it in little short form pieces and tease it. then eventually when there is a big launch day, we don't usually synchronize everything, but you know, email and SMS will drop. Maybe there's a couple emails. we'll throw it in all of our communities. And then in this case, I did, I did put out like a dedicated YouTube video about it saying like we just launched a new seed line.

And that was our way of kind of getting the word out. And then we see, it have legs or does it not have legs? And if it does, you work it into more things. If it doesn't, then you don't spam bad product on a customer or an audience, And that's the way, and then you have your standard acquisition channels like Paid and stuff, and you spin those up.

Ish (30:06.766)
Yeah, that's what I was gonna ask. what is your own distribution strategy look like? What's your total reach? Let's say for a really good product that you wanna push super hard, I don't even know how many followers you have across everything that you would push it. And then if it does well there, then what's your paid acquisition strategy? Do you go to IG, Facebook, et cetera? What's, yeah, I don't know.

Kevin Espiritu (30:21.163)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Espiritu (30:28.042)
Yeah, mean, we basically, they operate semi-independently. So, you know, our paid team will be cooking ideas and trying to make it work in paid regardless of what we do in organic. But if I, for some reason, have a piece on organic that does do well, we might rip it direct and try to run it as an ad, or we might just, you know, recut it or slice it in some way and try to run it as an ad. But we're trying to make...

the product line work on both channels out the gate. And primarily, like the organic channels is to let someone know it exists. It's not usually for a direct convert, because then you turn your organic into sales too often. And if you do it, yeah, it's just not as fun and enjoyable.

Ish (31:07.0)
Yeah, it's not as fun.

Kevin Espiritu (31:11.274)
The only caveats I guess I'll say to that is like, if you've given enough value, you can make a big ask every so often, especially if the audience already wants it. And then if you make that ask in a fun and entertaining way, then you have even more license to do it. So like when we did, yeah.

Ish (31:24.674)
Like that knee thing that you did, maybe you can explain that because people are probably like listening to this, like what the hell is he talking about?

Kevin Espiritu (31:30.826)
Yeah, well, yeah, that one was crazy. I got, I had seen this video, this viral video, but it's basically a tool for pavers, like people who lay bricks to kneel down easily. And it basically creates an angle, like a right angle or a triangle to not have you, your knee hit the ground. And so I bought the tool that day when I saw the video, I was like, I want to make a video about this regarding and see what people think about it. And my idea in my head was like, okay, number one,

It'll probably do well as a piece of content. think it's, fun and enjoyable for our audience. Number two, if it does that well, maybe we can talk to the manufacturer and get some, some custom ones made for, for the gardening market. Cause this was really a more of a construction tool. and so it was kind of like a hybrid approach. Like number one, it should do well and the audience should gain value just from the content itself. Secondary effect would be if it does well enough, I can potentially make, this into a product. It did so well though, as a piece of content that we sold out.

of like the country sold out of all of them. cause I think in like four or five days, the, that piece of content did like 150 million views, which is just crazy. Like it's just, it's stupid. Like I would, I would be, I was at a volleyball game that weekend, watch, just watching the game and the guy in front of me was watching that video. You know what I mean? It was just so weird. I've never had something go that viral. So I never had that experience before, but so that, that's sort of in a way that succeeded and failed cause we've never gotten to sell that product.

Ish (32:47.788)
Yeah.

Kevin Espiritu (32:59.336)
it's, you know, it just sold out and that was, that was the demand wave. And so, it didn't make sense to kind of chase that down. but it's an interesting example of, of how this content mixed with commercial stuff can work out.

Ish (33:14.306)
Yeah. I mean, there's that saying that a lot of people in the tech world say, it's like first time founders focus on product and second time founders focus on distribution. And you kind of figured it out beforehand. Like you built the distribution as you were kind of building the product, which I think is the smartest way to go, because then you have either a CAC of zero or a negative CAC or you have returning customers that you didn't even pay for, but they're coming back and like buying stuff every month.

Kevin Espiritu (33:26.858)
Yeah.

Kevin Espiritu (33:35.21)
Negative cack. Yeah.

Ish (33:41.718)
I mean, on that point, what does like retention look like for customers in the gardening space? Once you have them in your wheelhouse, do they just keep buying for life? And how loyal are they to seeds or like, know, specific brands?

Kevin Espiritu (33:50.592)
Well you-

Yeah. Yeah. So it's hard because if you think about it, like I was saying, what the biggest categories in the gardening market is live plants, soils, fertilizers, and, then maybe seeds and there's tools and stuff, but think about how many of those recur. The live plants recur soils and first to some degree do fertilizers, maybe more than soils. And then seeds definitely recur. and think about which one of those are easy to sell in direct to consumer channels. Literally only one, only seeds. the rest of them, you,

pretty much need a wholesale relationship to make work. And so there was only, there's really only one online recurring revenue category within the gardening market, which would be seeds. which is why, which is why we are in seeds. because it doesn't make a lot of sense to sell someone that say a raised bed and then like keep trying to sell them raised beds forever. Although people tend to taste.

taste their way into gardening. Like they'll buy one and they'll buy two, then they'll buy four. At some point your yard is full though, you know? And so we, I like seeds. First of all, it's literally the genesis of gardening. So it's very on mission. But number two, it's a lightweight, fantastic product to sell and people love to buy it. And they're also very brand loyal to your question. know, when you like a seed brand, you like a seed brand and you want to get their catalog and browse their catalog.

Ish (34:55.32)
Yeah, that's true.

Ish (35:07.597)
Easy to ship.

Kevin Espiritu (35:17.324)
So usually people have two to three seed brands that they really like and they stick with those most of the time.

Ish (35:22.958)
That's awesome. How do you spend an average day today? Is it mixed up with, and I know you have days probably where you do content, other days where you do business stuff, but it's like an average day, an average Tuesday. How would you spend it?

Kevin Espiritu (35:36.811)
An average Tuesday is a day like this then. So average Tuesday would be a mix of like pre-production, production on content and, and yeah, pre and pre-end production, not post-production. So most of the time on Tuesdays, I'd be filming in the afternoons and I'd be working on what I'm going to be filming in those, those mornings. so that's actually where I'm headed right after this is to the, a team meeting on production operations. And then we're going to go film later today.

Ish (35:55.278)
Yes.

Kevin Espiritu (36:02.144)
But each day is slightly different. Like Wednesday is mostly a calls and like administrative sort of one-to-one, know, team meetings, that kind of thing. Friday is a pure garden day or as pure a garden day as I can get, you know? And then Mondays is sort of like a ideation admin product day. each day kind of has a bit of a theme to it.

Ish (36:07.96)
operations.

Ish (36:24.782)
Do feel like that works out better than trying to carve out like three hours each day to different, you know, different buckets of work?

Kevin Espiritu (36:32.212)
I'm still like playing around with it, but it works better than whatever I was doing before, where I, was like, whatever, whatever was priority just happened at the quickest possible time. Cause the context switching was driving me crazy, you know, cause I'd have a day where I'd take a meeting with another company's founder or something like that to learn. And then like two, three hiring calls, a one-to-one and then film. And I'm like, this doesn't make my brains in like seven places today. You know, it just, just wasn't working that well.

Ish (36:39.416)
Whatever was the most important thing at the time.

Ish (37:02.306)
Yeah. Do you have, I mean, I'm assuming the answer is no, but do you have any interesting hobbies or obsessions that you do outside of gardening and work and running a company and managing a team and everything?

Kevin Espiritu (37:09.822)
Yeah, I'm trying to develop some. trying, I really am trying to develop some cause I don't think it's healthy to only be all in on, your, your thing, especially when like your hobby became the business. Right? So I'm trying to develop a, another hobby that, that isn't this. And I think as, as the business got crazier and grew and stuff, a lot of the hobbies dropped away. Like I used to rock climb all the time and I used to skateboard or I was doing CrossFit with friends back in the day.

And a lot of that stuff has unfortunately dropped away. So I'm trying to find something new.

Ish (37:42.35)
Yeah, interesting. Yeah, I think it's good to like fully separate work and play at least a few hours a week. think I personally find I get some of my best ideas during that time. If I'm either just like going on a hike with my dogs, I think of like really good content or, you know, just fun things to do versus if I'm always working, I'm kind of just like wearing my brain down. Another question that I had is like, do you ever deal with, I don't know, weirdos in person? I mean, you're such a public figure.

Kevin Espiritu (37:52.715)
Mm-hmm.

Ish (38:12.63)
you're, you're an interesting because your production and the space where you record happens to be your home. And so you're kind of public in that sense too. But do you deal with people like coming up to you you know, if you're out and about, at a restaurant or even at your house.

Kevin Espiritu (38:29.824)
The house stuff has calmed down. Thankfully it was crazier in the last couple of years. I had, I've had people like walk into the backyard, like walk into the garden, drive by in very weird ways and like clearly they're there for that reason, you know? Yeah. So I, I like scrubbed all that from the internet. So that's happening less, which is great.

Ish (38:32.152)
Good. Yeah.

Ish (38:43.202)
Take a picture or whatever.

Ish (38:48.718)
That's great.

Kevin Espiritu (38:50.408)
In public, people aren't really weird. They just say like, Hey, what's up? You know, thanks for the videos or whatever, which is cool. that's kind of like, I would, I like getting those types of public interactions versus like, if I was like a lifestyle creator, you know, and they just are obsessed with you as the person, I'd much, much rather someone be like thankful that I put out something valuable to them. but yeah, it's, it's kind of weird. Like once you get to a certain scale, it was just, it's very unrelatable to talk about cause very few people are at that scale. Right.

Ish (39:06.094)
Exactly.

Kevin Espiritu (39:20.476)
you start to develop like weird biases, I guess I would say is like, so like, here's one that's just kind of weird. Like if I'm walking around anywhere really, but mostly like in America for sure, and someone stares at me for like over two seconds, I'm mentally prepping for something to happen, which would never happen in the past, right? Like it's never some, something that would happen in the past, but I've developed like a sixth sense now of who's there's like,

Ish (39:40.578)
Like a conversation or like a...

Kevin Espiritu (39:49.421)
three categories, like just weird people that like to look at you. That's just normal. Then there's like the people who are too shy to say something, but you could tell by their demeanor that they know who you are. Right. And then the third one is someone who's eventually going to say something to you. And I thought about that. was like, it's kind of weird that I've developed that sort of sense, you know? And it feels, it almost feels like egotistical in a way, but it's also just a reaction to what happens to you in life, you know? But yeah, most of the time it's a, it's a friendly thing. So.

Ish (40:18.062)
What's your total audience size right now? Because at some point it's a law of large numbers. So, you know, if you see a hundred people, one of them is likely to see you like,

Kevin Espiritu (40:22.804)
Yeah, yeah.

It's like 13 something million, I think. And then it's hard because like audience size is no longer really the metric, right? As you know, like it's more like what's, yeah, what's your, what's your view share, your impression share even like if you've ever interacted with gardening in any way you have seen my face at this point, right? And so someone will say like,

Ish (40:28.686)
Yeah, it's pretty big.

Ish (40:35.054)
Let's reach views, engagement.

Kevin Espiritu (40:47.084)
Oh, you're that guy a lot or whatever, you know? Uh, so yeah, it's just, I remember Mr. B said something, he had a very linear scale for it. I don't know if you ever saw that clip, right? He's like at a million, this will happen at 5 million. This will happen at 10. This will happen at 50. This will happen. And it, and at his scale, he was like, at my scale, I have to leave every place within a few minutes. Otherwise the word gets out that I'm there and then people will drive to it. And I'm like, that sounds like a nightmare, know?

Ish (40:55.426)
I remember that too. Yep.

Ish (41:15.31)
Yeah, I mean, this is something that I think about a lot too, is somebody's like building quote unquote personal brand or just putting content online and putting my face out there. Like niche fame versus like for example, you said lifestyle fame, people who like, I guess the Tim Ferriss's of the world or even people who are not even business creators in general, and then people fall in love with the individual and then they get obsessive like celebrities, I guess. But yeah, like I guess how do you think about like the future of

Kevin Espiritu (41:33.345)
Mm-hmm.

Ish (41:45.08)
putting yourself out there online and do you kind of worry about like, okay, well, if this keeps taking off, which it looks like it is, and eventually you reach like max capacity of hundreds of millions of people following you or knowing who you are, then does that interfere with your personal life or relationships and all that?

Kevin Espiritu (42:03.05)
Yeah, I think it's probably there already. I don't know. I it is a very weird thing. And I think that anyone it's happened to understands how bizarre it can be and the effects it can have. It's hard to rewind the clock and remember what it was like before that at this point. I do try to like...

I don't think I like take it that seriously. Cause I remember like, okay, well, you know, I was just, I was at the YouTube creator summit last, last year, the end of last year with a bunch of other YouTubers, right? That, you know, big in finance or lifestyle or whatever.

Ish (42:39.628)
Cool.

Kevin Espiritu (42:45.982)
And I had the same reaction that people would probably have to seeing me if they're fans of my videos, right? I'd be like, there's Graham Stephan. there's who, you know? And I was like, yeah, okay, I'm on the other side. Like I was at Creighton Barrel a couple of weeks ago with my girlfriend and I saw a musician that I liked and I said, I was like, hey, are you, are you this? And he's like, yeah, I was like, man, I like your music. And I just walked away. Cause I was like, that's what I would want someone to do to me. But I was like,

Ish (43:07.928)
Yeah, cut it.

Kevin Espiritu (43:09.996)
And then on the way out of Great Barrel, someone stopped me, right? So was like very weird, weird reverse scenario. And I remember thinking like, I know they know me as little as I know that guy, right? His actual life. And so the way I've tried to internalize it these days is like, they don't know, no one like knows you in the way that.

Ish (43:24.814)
Yeah.

Kevin Espiritu (43:32.813)
you think they do or they think they do. They sort of know like a mirage or a presentation of who you are or what you're saying, right? And that's all it is. It's a 2D image projected through a million different screens in a certain way that people tend to seem to like, would, depending on what the thing is. And so I try to keep that in mind, I guess, to not go as crazy about, you know, thinking about all this stuff. Cause it is, I don't know, man, it's just a very weird, weird feeling sometimes.

Ish (43:38.018)
persona.

Ish (43:59.374)
Yeah, I mean, think you're getting a good generally good niche like gardening people are generally, you know, excited that you're helping them. It's friendly versus something else. As somebody I've been observing like the trend of like homesteading over the past couple of years and it's seen it like climbs steadily little by little and even like prepping like people like prepping for the end of the world or different situations. Do you have any general advice like going zero to one for growing a homestead and being like as self-sufficient as possible? Like where would you start? What would you build?

Kevin Espiritu (44:03.69)
Yeah, it's a friendly one. Yeah.

Kevin Espiritu (44:15.34)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Espiritu (44:27.243)
Hmm.

Ish (44:29.23)
You know, would you get chickens? Will you start off with vegetables? And assuming that they have like a small house, small, you know, not a huge yard or anything like that. Yeah, exactly.

Kevin Espiritu (44:33.608)
You could start.

Like a suburban yard. Yeah. Yeah. Suburban yard. mean, I would say it's hard to say like, start with chickens or don't, start with personally, I would start with fruit trees because number one, they take a while to actually get going. the sooner you get them going, the better. But number two, like once they are going, I have like 15 citrus, for example, and I can't, I can't eat all of that. Right. At this point, three, three, four years in, I can't, I can't eat all that citrus.

Ish (44:49.944)
Mm.

Kevin Espiritu (45:06.666)
And so I would start with fruit trees and then I would get into like whatever vegetables you enjoy eating the most. And that's the key. It's not like what's the easiest to grow. It's the, what are the ones you actually like to eat the most at, which for me, it would be like tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, like kind of the basics instead of getting into these esoteric things. and then go from there. And if you want us eventually get chickens, you can, especially now, like, I don't know if all these egg memes, you know, the chickens are looking pretty good right now.

Ish (45:32.11)
Dude, I went to Costco yesterday and there was a line of probably like 60, 70 people. Like it was halfway down Costco. And just for the X. And everybody in line was like, people in Spanish were saying like, I need to get a damn chicken. Like, this is crazy. And I just started laughing. And you have chickens, right?

Kevin Espiritu (45:39.594)
That's great just for the eggs. That's crazy.

Kevin Espiritu (45:49.553)
Yeah, dude. mean, I don't get, well, yeah, I have chickens and that's the thing is like, I've had chickens for so long now, I'm disconnected from the market dynamics of eggs. You know, like I don't relate to it now. And even though in winter we're not getting that many eggs from your chickens because they have a bit of a lull, but I'm getting like maybe four eggs a day now. That's fine. I don't need, I don't really need more. And then in summer I'll be getting, you know, probably seven to eight a day.

Ish (45:58.702)
buying eggs. Exactly.

Ish (46:11.022)
Oh, it's all you need. You're not going to eat more than that.

Kevin Espiritu (46:18.78)
then I'm good to go. And so, yeah, think chickens are very rewarding. Especially like their symbiosis with the garden is really nice too.

Ish (46:26.392)
Yeah. Anything else you'd build or you'd have?

Kevin Espiritu (46:30.7)
Um, I mean, I would, I really like like energy systems. So like I put 24 solar panels on the roof to help offset those costs. Um, I, I changed up some of my water, like I did rainwater capture, but all of these things in a suburban suburban environment or maybe a little bit more extreme, like you don't really need rainwater capture in a suburban environment. Um, the, the further out you get, then yeah, the more that would be important. I would say like you could get, you could go a long way towards

meaningfully reducing your grocery bill and then also like increasing the nutrition of what you're eating by just having like a nice vegetable garden and fruit trees. Yeah.

Ish (47:08.43)
Very cool, nice. I saw that you were experimenting with the second YouTube channel. I don't know if you're kind of public about this, but what's the thought there? you're already busy as hell as it is, so splitting time and energy and shifting between different, I think you're doing personal branding and just a bunch of different content themes over there. So how do you think about building that? Are you just experimenting just to see what happens?

Kevin Espiritu (47:20.757)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Espiritu (47:32.971)
It's just a place like if it's your, you're talking about my personal channel, it's just a place to put up stuff that I need to get out because I like to make content. You know what I mean? that's it. The, the, the, the Epic world has four channels.

Ish (47:37.486)
Yeah, I it's what it was.

Ish (47:42.252)
That's cool.

Kevin Espiritu (47:48.767)
And then this one, you know, this is just my place. I was like, you know, I need a place. I don't talk about gardening and I talk about whatever else I want. I don't publish to it too often. so it's a true like whenever type channel, which is very relieving feeling instead of having to be on a schedule for everything. So yeah, it's just kind of an outlet.

Ish (47:55.747)
Yeah.

Ish (48:06.254)
Yeah, I mean, there's a thesis that I've been kind of working on. It's one of the reasons why I'm, you know, quitting my job and going all in on content is basically building an online presence is one of the highest leverages of your time, especially as AI gets really good at like previously high skilled work. And I think you're one of the people who's like playing this in real life, you know, building an online presence, being really helpful online, not being negative and being

Kevin Espiritu (48:17.707)
Mm-hmm.

Ish (48:35.842)
very specific within a niche, but also showing your personality in a sense where you're not just talking monologue all the time. So I think it's pretty fascinating to see what you've built, how you run your operation, the business, and everything that you do, while also leveraging different social channels for different parts of your personality. Twitter's different from YouTube, and it's a little bit different from IG, and you won't catch the fun TikTok that you would find on LinkedIn.

Kevin Espiritu (48:43.134)
Right, right, yeah.

Kevin Espiritu (48:57.642)
Mm-hmm.

Ish (49:03.918)
So yeah, I guess, do you have any advice for early creators or people who have an inkling for business but they also want to start creating content and they understand that it's important?

Kevin Espiritu (49:14.688)
Yeah, I mean, I would say, man, it's hard because now I'm like old in this space. So a lot of my advice that worked for me just simply either doesn't exist or would not work anymore. But I guess if I was restarting, I would pick the platform I'm the most comfortable creating in or the media format, I guess I'm the most comfortable in. Is it audio, video or text?

Ish (49:24.739)
Yeah.

Kevin Espiritu (49:35.423)
and I would pick the dominant platform for whatever choice that was. And then I'd go all in on that for a while until I kind of like built my sea legs on how to make for that particular format. And then I would start to expand out from there and say like, okay, well, can I go to say I picked text, right? And I picked X. Okay, cool. I'm doing well on X. I, can I now translate that to LinkedIn? And it has to be a translation as you know, right? You can't just repost.

Because the audience profile is different even if it's similar people following you, even their psychographics, your mind's different on LinkedIn than it is on Twitter,

Ish (50:07.822)
Exactly. Like they're probably scrolling LinkedIn at work versus Twitter, they're on their phone, like, know, the mindset is different, like you said. Yeah.

Kevin Espiritu (50:13.484)
They want something a little different. And so I do that. And then, you know, if you had the ambition to go multimedia, then I would start translating that stuff into the different formats of media. So I might, I might do a little audio bites or I might do short form videos or this or that, but you don't really need to do all those to do, to do well. It depends on what your, business is right. Or what your goal is. Mine is, is we, our company mission is we exist to help you grow. So we have to be in every media format that

that a gardener would ostensibly want to consume on. Otherwise we're not fulfilling that. So that's why we're on everything. But a lot of businesses don't need that to survive and do well.

Ish (50:52.12)
Yeah, just a few more questions, I'll let you go. Are there any misconceptions about what you do? The one that comes to mind for me is like, this is freaking awesome. Like you get to garden for a living, but that's probably a misconception because there's a shit ton of work that goes into it because you have a business and your media empire as well. But any other misconceptions or even the one that I just said right now, that true?

Kevin Espiritu (51:16.34)
Yeah, I mean, man, misconceptions. think there's an interesting one. I'm curious if you agree is like, if you're a creator type, let's say you're in like a hobby category or even cooking or something like that. You actually have to be better at creating than you have to be at the hobby. You don't have to be that good at the hobby. you actually have to be world-class at the creating part of it, which

Ish (51:33.326)
Yeah.

Kevin Espiritu (51:39.505)
is counterintuitive. And that's, think where you were mentioning like, do people get angry or this or that? That's where you will tend to see people get frustrated with your content is when they think they should have it. they should be at that level cause they, they're like, maybe they're a better trained chef than some big YouTuber. And it's like, well, cool, but you're actually not better at the combination. and that's, and that's the important part.

Ish (51:47.694)
you

Kevin Espiritu (52:05.204)
And that's why like with our brand, at least I've told Jacques on my team, who's a creator of ours, as well as I tell myself, we never claim we're experts. We just sort of claim that we love to garden and we know a lot because this is all we do now, but we're not experts speaking to you from on high. We're just like fellow gardeners trying to learn and share what we've learned that's worked for us, which helps stave off kind of some of that behavior. But yeah, I don't know. It's an interesting one.

Ish (52:28.984)
Because otherwise you get a lot of haters in the comments saying like that's he did it wrong or he put the seat too low or like, know, that this is great.

Kevin Espiritu (52:34.366)
Not really, not that often. I'm pretty proud of like the way we put information out. Most we make mistakes here and there for sure, but like we're pretty good. and we'll hear that feedback from, from nursery trades people. like, yeah, we like your videos cause they're the most accurate or whatever, which is great to hear. but you will, you will see that sometimes, you know, I don't know. I just think it's a, it's a creator misconception in general. It's like, you actually have to be better at the art of creating than whatever you're creating about to be seen, you know?

Ish (52:42.574)
Awesome.

Ish (52:59.778)
I agree. Yeah. And on top of the creation aspect, you also kind of have to be a little bit of a growth hacker and understand how these platforms work. Like you said, how to optimize for each one and how to play the game, I guess, which is kind of annoying sometimes, but that's the way it is.

Kevin Espiritu (53:14.604)
Yeah. And that's where you see like creators get hard stuck at smaller account levels. And then they go into, into like cope mode where they're like, well, I'm not the type to want to do that to grow. And it's like, okay, well then you won't grow, but you also can't complain about not growing. So like you've made a moral choice, I guess, to not make short form video, let's say. I've seen this happen actually a couple of times, like in our space, like people be like, I'm not, I don't make those little stupid little videos that

Ish (53:37.315)
Yeah.

Kevin Espiritu (53:44.885)
are dancing and this and that. I'm like, well, first of all, you're bastardizing the format. There's a lot of ways you can make these videos. But second of all, you're just making a cope for why you don't, you're not growing and you're saying that's the only reason why. It's like, no, it's you're, you, maybe you're just not that good at it. And that's fine. Like maybe you're just not that good.

Ish (54:00.034)
Yeah, exactly. Or just hire somebody to do it for you. That's great at content. You do the, be the talent.

Kevin Espiritu (54:05.792)
Totally, totally. Yeah. So it's interesting to see creators kind of get, the second someone gets mad at the algo, you know they're kind of cooked is my opinion. That's when you know they're done. Yeah.

Ish (54:15.426)
Yeah, they're done. I agree. Okay, so the past 10 years you kind of built this gardening empire. What do the next five to 10 years look like for you? mean, 10 years is kind of far out, but the next couple of years, anything that you're kind of interested in working on or aspirations that you have?

Kevin Espiritu (54:28.48)
Yeah.

Kevin Espiritu (54:33.3)
Yeah. I mean, I'd like to get more space to grow. I'd love to physical, physical space. Yeah. Yeah. Cause there's so much that the story could continue in such a grander way if I could, have more space and a new story to tell. like the homestead I'm at now, it's pretty much built out. Like I'll always be able to, to improve it and refine it. But a lot of the big projects are done here and I'd love to, you know, own a nursery one day under the Epic name.

Ish (54:37.442)
or like physical, physical space, gland.

Ish (55:01.996)
get people like a sense like how is a quarter acre like half an acre like what are you okay not bad

Kevin Espiritu (55:04.832)
Yeah, it's a third of an acre. Yeah. Third. So it's not, it's not super big, but for SoCal, it's pretty big to have like a suburban lot that's 13,000 square feet. but yeah, it'd be nice to have a, a headquarters, right? Like an Epic headquarters, which is maybe a retail space and some experimental gardening space to be cool. Obviously more product development to be done and then building out the content network. so launching a few more podcasts and hopefully having some creators on the team that can.

Ish (55:13.848)
Yeah.

Kevin Espiritu (55:34.582)
carry channels on their own. So I'm not on them all the time. Would be nice, because eventually you have to think about that.

Ish (55:44.254)
Do you find that that gets exhausting? Because in a way you kind of are the bottleneck for a lot of the content, especially if it's video content. Do you feel like it?

Kevin Espiritu (55:51.927)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the hard part is you have to start swapping yourself out at different parts of the process. like obviously editing, don't do editing anymore. but like video ideation, thumbnails, titles, usually most of the structure of the videos, post-production notes, et cetera, I'm still pretty involved in. And so I'm trying to figure out ways to, to escape some of those without losing the results. Right. And that's, that's the, that's the hard part.

Ish (56:01.205)
Yeah.

Ish (56:17.806)
Yeah.

Kevin Espiritu (56:20.044)
I would accept like a slight loss, not like a total loss. So I'm trying to crack that.

Ish (56:27.438)
I mean, I know you've listened to some Mr. Beast videos, but he talks about having like a, I forgot what he calls it, but it's like a duplicator, like a mini me. Have somebody follow him all the way around, like always all the time so that they can kind of be in Jimmy's brain of like, what would Jimmy do? And then to the best of their ability, like they kind of execute. And so you could kind of do that, but again, it's kind of hard having somebody always watching what you do and picking up like the osmosis.

Kevin Espiritu (56:33.995)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Espiritu (56:41.609)
smart. Yeah.

Kevin Espiritu (56:50.922)
Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's hard. mean, our, my creator Jacques on our team, he's awesome. He quit a PhD in geology after being my gardening assistant for awhile. And now he's a creator. He's got like maybe he's close to a million combined across all of his platforms. And, yeah, I mean, he picked up all the content stuff, totally osmosis through just observing and doing and trying. And he runs his channel. Like he comes up with all everything on his own, shoots it and our team edits it and puts it up.

Ish (56:59.97)
Yeah.

Ish (57:05.848)
That's great.

Kevin Espiritu (57:20.244)
And so yeah, he's the closest, but you need, it's hard because like you, it's, it's almost a catch 22 in gardening. Like you need different geographies and different climates and different use cases. But the easiest way to teach is if someone's there next to you watching you make the content. Right. And so it's like, okay, well I need someone in New York, but I have to teach them from afar, you know? so it's a little bit of a challenge sometimes.

Ish (57:27.918)
Mm-hmm.

Ish (57:40.728)
Yeah, I know we're out of time, you just kind of made me think of another question. you have these creators that you're building out on your team. How does it work? Like, do you pay them to create content for the business, but then they also fully own their own audience and their own brand or? Yeah.

Kevin Espiritu (57:55.847)
it depends. So in the case of, of Jacques, we, I developed the channel. I sort of pitched, I was like, Hey, I would love to do a channel with you because you have a different approach, you know? and so Epic, we, own the YouTube channel. and Jacques on the team is Jacques actually is pretty core member of our team. Like he's, he's doing video stuff. He's doing content research, but he's also doing product design and testing stuff and product feedback, you know, seed selection ideas. So he's, he's very integrated part of the team.

Ish (58:25.667)
Great.

Kevin Espiritu (58:26.398)
Other folks that show up on video, we typically do like kind of like a talent host sort of model, but we've played around with a lot of different, a lot of different models. I've hired people like full time and then not owned any of the content that they produced and that didn't work very well. So yeah, I've tried so many different ways. Yeah. And it's hard, man. Cause like, yeah, like the creator.

Ish (58:33.39)
Yeah, that's good.

Ish (58:43.438)
I don't think that's smart. Well, especially if you think about like YouTube content, it's all, it's the gift that keeps on giving, you know, over time.

Kevin Espiritu (58:53.738)
the creator is good because they have that relationship with their audience and typically they're not super motivated by like some big contract or whatever. And so a lot of times, especially in gardening, it's like, it's hard to get someone to want to join because they're happy making videos in their backyard, making an extra 15 K a year plus whatever they do else, you know? So it's like, it's kind of hard to persuade them.

Ish (59:18.392)
Thanks man. Well, is there anything else we didn't cover that you would want to highlight before we drop?

Kevin Espiritu (59:23.336)
No, I think this is a good pod, Appreciate you having me on.

Ish (59:26.498)
Yeah, it's good finally like chatting with you face to face too. if you're ever up in, I guess I'll hit you up after. So if you want to come visit or if I'm ever in San Diego, I'll hit you up. Yeah. All right, dude. Thanks for the time. And then we're gonna.

Kevin Espiritu (59:35.394)
yeah. Yeah, that'd be great.

Thank you.