A Look Inside Epic Gardening: Teaching the World How to Grow

Creator Kevin Espiritu started Epic Gardening in 2010 as a gardening blog. He has built it into a creator-led brand with 80+ team members and generates more than $50 million in annual revenue. How did Kevin do this? Being an effective world builder.

Happy Tuesday Friends,

Our last post focused on the concept of world building. To recap, world building is about creating a captivating world around your idea, product, or service. In a time where people have endless choice, being an effective world builder has become table stakes if you want to capture and keep peoples’ attention.

We have become a bit obsessed with this world building framework and plan to apply it to individual creators to showcase how they have successfully (or not successfully) built their worlds. Today’s newsletter is Part 1 of a two-part piece on Epic Gardening, the world’s most-followed gardening brand with ~9 million followers across social platforms. Part 1 is focused on the background and history of the channel. Part 2 will be focused on applying the world building framework.

Let’s get into it.

The Beginning of Epic Gardening 🧗 

Becoming a gardener was never Kevin Espiritu's plan. He was an accounting student at UC Santa Barbara and supported himself by playing online poker. When he graduated, he had no idea what he wanted to do and found himself in the basement looking at screens all day. This took a toll on his mental health and thanks to his brother, he started to garden in 2010 as a means to ‘reset’ himself.

Realizing the tremendous joy gardening brought him and knowing from experience that there wasn’t a lot of content on gardening, he began sharing his journey online in 2010 teaching others to grow.

Epic Gardening started as a blog in 2010 where Espiritu shared cultivation techniques, strategies, and reviews of tools he had used. Espiritu slowly expanded around 2013 creating content on platforms such as YouTube and Facebook.

Going Full-time 👊 

Epic Gardening’s audience grew slowly for the first few years. Once the channel did build enough of a following, Espiritu started to make money via display ads, affiliate sales, and brand deals. In 2016, he felt confident enough to quit his day job and pursue Epic Gardening full-time.

As traffic to Epic Gardening grew, his revenues did as well. See below a breakdown of reported revenues between 2016 and 2018.

Keving started to build a multi-faceted world around his growing audience who were clearly listening to his advice and sharing their own knowledge with one another to create an active, supportive community. As Espiritu had tested and promoted hundreds of gardening products over the past 8 years, he started thinking to himself: “Why would I promote a product and get 5% of the margins when I can make my own and keep 70-80% of the margins to continue building the Epic Gardening ecosystem?”

From Content-to-Commerce 💵 👨‍🌾 👩‍🌾 🧺 

Kevin launched an e-commerce store in 2019 focused on selling his own products. He rolled out different products from garden beds to seeds to soil care, and more. But, before Epic launched a product, there was detailed research and rigorous testing over multiple seasons in their own gardens. Kevin ensured any product with the Epic Gardening brand was designed as a tool that served a specific function was the best on the market.

This shift is called content-to-commerce. It basically means that you are using content to help drive e-commerce sales and conversions vs using paid advertisements. If done effectively, the cost to acquire a customer (referred to as customer acquisition costs or “CAC”) can be 0 for content creators. Whereas traditional gardening brands had to spend money on advertising to acquire customers, Espiritu used his content to promote his own line of products for free. In fact, Espiritu had a negative CAC, as he was getting paid to create content in the form of ad revenue.

This shift to commerce led to exponential revenue growth.

In 2019, Epic Gardening earned $500,000 in revenue. $250,000 came from the media business and $250,000 from selling products. So, within a year, he was making as much revenue with his product business as he did with the media business.

Then, a bit of luck kicked in with COVID-19 and lockdowns where the demand for Epic’s products exploded.

In 2020, Epic earned $2.8 million in revenue ($500,000 in media & $2.3 million in products)

In 2021, Epic earned $7.3 million in revenue with a team that consisted of Kevin and a team of 4 other contractors. Nothing more.

Until this point, Espiritu had spent ZERO on paid advertising. All the revenue came organically through his content strategy. The growth of Epic Gardening didn’t go unnoticed. Well-known venture firms started to reach out. But, there was one firm that stood out: The Chernin Group, a firm specializing in content to commerce businesses, who made a $17.5M investment into Epic Gardening to fuel their next phase of growth to build the Epic Gardening ecosystem.

Today, Epic Gardening reportedly makes around $4M in revenue per month. That’s almost $50M a year 🤑.

World Building with a Purpose 🌎️ 🤟 

We are going apply the world building framework in Part 2 next week, but let’s summarize what Epic is doing differently from many other well-known creators. Let’s start with: Why does Epic exist?

This is clear, easy to understand, and carries a sense of real purpose. It goes much deeper than pure entertainment or sharing one-dimensional how-to/instructional videos. Epic has built a world for us to step into that is focused on growing things with our hands at a time where our industrialized economy, city lives, and digital worlds have left us disconnected from nature. Let’s revisit the concept of world building again:

If you dig deeper into Epic’s social channels and website, a few things stand out that shows us it’s a great example of world building:

• A diverse library of content that includes strategies, instructional videos, tips and ticks, product reviews, product recommendation, and physical products to purchase. Each social platform has their own content formats to meet people where they are at. Anyone interested in gardening, from beginner to advanced, can enter Epic’s world and learn, engage, and purchase what is relevant for them on their own gardening journey.

• Access to a community that are actively sharing their own experiences, knowledge, and advice around gardening.

World Building vs Selling Things 🌎️ ❌ 👕 👟 

Epic Gardening’s move to e-commerce is a great example of a creator-led brand that most people will describe as similar to Mr. Beast’s Feastables, Emma Chamberlain’s Chamberlain Coffee, and Logan Paul’s Prime. However, there is a big difference. Kevin has created a whole world around gardening with a clear, deep purpose, to teach the world to grow. Mr. Beast or Emma Chamberlain have not created a world around chocolate or coffee. When I am watching a Mr.Beast challenge, I am not thinking about buying a chocolate bar. There is no connection. The above creators looked at their audiences, found commoditized products that may or may not care about, and leverage their media platforms to sell such products.

Epic Gardening goes much deeper - their products are tools designed to make it easier for people to get connected back to nature by teaching them how to grow. While Epic Gardening’s audience is much smaller than some of the other abovementioned brands, it’s a perfect example of what we call creator-product-market fit. This occurs when the brand fits with the personality, audience, and content of the creator. This synergy makes it authentic, natural, and it goes much deeper than selling more stuff. To be honest, we get much more excited about creators that are world builders as they are the ones that have the ability to move society forward in a much more compelling way.

What originally started as a hobby, Epic is now a multi-platform brand teaching the world how to grow. Epic has become a trusted resource for millions of enthusiasts and aspiring gardeners who want to grow their own food and learn creative gardening techniques. It has grown from a blog to an 80+ person company earning more than $50 in annual revenue across, retail, and e-commerce. How did this happen? A ton of hard work and being an effective world-builder.

Have good week and remember to Go Direct!

Jordan & Scott

P.S. If you want to read part 2 where we apply the world building framework in more detail to Epic Gardening make sure you hit the subscribe button below.