Kevin Espiritu: Building a Business and 3.5+ Million Follower Audience in the Gardening Niche

Tim Stoddart : Hi everyone, welcome to the Copyblogger podcast. My name is Tim Stoddart. Thank you so much for joining me. This week, we have a very, very special guest, the plant daddy himself, Kevin Espiritu. What's up, man?
Kevin Espiritu: How's it going? What's going on, man? It's the first time I've been publicly referred to that way.

Tim Stoddart : I like it. As I've been telling my wife that you were coming on the show, that's what I keep saying. I'm like, yo, I got the plant daddy coming on. We've been laughing about it. Yeah.

Kevin Espiritu: Yeah. Well, hey, glad to be here, dude.

Tim Stoddart : Yeah, me too. I'm, uh, let me tell you why I'm so excited to have this conversation. I got to tee this up a little bit. So bear with me on my podcast. We like to talk about people that are building cool brands and online marketing and content and all of that stuff. But inevitably what happens is you meet people where the content itself is part of like a bigger message. And I always leave it open to talk about that message just as much as, you know, the online business and the creativity and all of that stuff. And your message in particular is something that is really, really important to me because I have always been really fascinated with bacteria specifically and bacteria in soil. And I don't think the regular person understands how screwed up our soil is right now and how much of a ridiculously huge problem it is. I mean, sometimes I'm sitting up at night, I'm like, do people not understand how food grows? And do people not understand what happens when you just pump phosphorus and potash into soil over and over and over again for decades and decades? And so anyway, I'm teeing this one up a little bit for you and we're going off the beaten path here right from the beginning. But man, I think what you are saying And the message that you're putting out there is so much more important than people realize. And I guess just like, thanks. It's important, man. Keep doing it.

Kevin Espiritu: Hey, dude, I appreciate that. I mean, I didn't really understand it myself. Even as Epic Gardening started, I was growing like in hydroponic systems and stuff. I had no conception of not only what the problem was, but I guess the severity of the problem, right? And when you break it down, I mean, I think the thing I love so much about gardening is it's really just a study of the natural world. Like you're running all these experiments, you're growing stuff, you're messing around, but eventually you start like connecting it to all the different things in the world, like all the different food, food system, water system, you know, how photosynthesis works. Like you can learn almost anything you want out of, out of a garden. And you're right, dude. Like you look and you go, not only do people not know how food grows, like if you ask a two to three to four or five year old to grow or sorry, draw like a carrot, like they might draw it on a tree. They just don't really know. Um, let alone like adults have no clue how plants actually grow at all. Thus they have no clue, like why it's bad that we're like commercially monocropping most of our crops and then driving them around the earth with, you know, fossil fuels. It's like there is a better way. Uh, there should be, or we're kind of screwed.

Tim Stoddart : It's a monocropping is interesting. Because in some regards, the efficiency that it generates makes it so that we can all live the lives that, that we're used to living. On the other side, I also, is another thing that I've just learned about and have been educated on where leaving things alone is pretty miraculous how systems work. And this is true with any system, but especially true with, with growth. And if you just think, let shit be, eventually the natural order of things comes around. And I mean, I remember reading this statistic that says, uh, like a handful of topsoil has something like 9 billion different species of bacteria in it. And when I hear that, it always makes me feel very, very like insignificant because we think that we're here. run in the world, right? But in reality, bacteria is running everything and we're just sort of along for the ride. And I have learned through gardening, I'm not as much a gardener as my wife is, but one of the things that I have learned from it, and I just would love your feedback on this, is the value of get out of the way. You actually don't have to do as much as you think you do. You just plant the seed and set the conditions and then The rest of it more or less takes care of itself.

Kevin Espiritu: And he was like, dude, the plants, you don't grow them, you don't grow a plant, you create an environment in which it grows itself, it's a living organism, it's going to do what it's going to do. And all you need to do as a gardener is just provide it what it needed. You know, when you when you grow a garden to like you take a pepper, tomato, bean, etc, like all these plants evolved endemically to like many different areas of the world, and you're asking them to grow in one place where you live. And so you have to go well shit, they might not actually want to grow here. So I have to plant this in this area of my garden because it gets a little less sun and that's what that plant wants. And so I think you're totally right. Like a plant will grow itself if given the right conditions. And then the larger point it seems like you were making, I would totally agree with would be if you do that enough, the complex systems start to act. When I first moved into my house, there was nothing. It was like wood chips, tons of earwigs, for example, because what are they? They're decomposers at the surface layer of the soil. There was nothing else for them to do but eat the chips and leaves because there was nothing else. Then I start manipulating the landscape. I plant things that birds like. Birds are here. They're on the ground. They eat a ton of the earwigs. The earwig population is cut by like 90% the next year. but then I've got a problem with roly polies, right? And then the next year. And so it, it all like balances back out as you rebuild sort of the, I guess like the first principles of how an ecosystem works. And you're doing that when you garden to some degree.

Tim Stoddart : Yeah. That's so cool. That's really amazing. I'm, I'm really happy for you. It appears as though you're very much enjoying the process, all of that with all of that. So now that we've got some of the science and and the philosophy out of the way, I want to dig in into your story a little bit. I mean, when I look at your brand and, and what you've created, the first thing that always comes to mind is like, did you have any idea that you were gonna be like a, a garden celebrity? Was that the plan? Or is that just sort of what happened? Cause it's, I think it's probably, and I'm speaking for you here, but I think it took off on you a little bit, right? I think it's like, it turned into something that you didn't necessarily expect.

Kevin Espiritu: Yeah, I mean. It's funny to talk to you because I mean, it's called Copyblogger, right? Like the whole thing started as a blog for me. And I remember reading Copyblogger like back in the day. And so I remember early, early on when I had the blog and a YouTube channel with like five or 10,000 subscribers, YouTube back then at least would give you a partner manager really early. Like they won't even do that for a hundred thousand subs these days. And this woman who I had, she's like, well, my goal is to help you grow. So why don't you like put your face on the camera? And I was like, why, like, what's the point of that? And she's like, well, you know, very basic things she's teaching, like, well, people connect to people, of course. So if you're a person, you should be on the camera. And I was like, Oh, that's silly, whatever. And as I started to do that, and kind of, I guess, become more comfortable with being on the screen, or maybe creating on social or even doing our own podcasts, five, six years ago, I knew it would be something at that point. But I didn't know, Well, I didn't know a pandemic would happen, but I also didn't know even if that didn't happen, we'd probably still be quite large. Just something about gardening that hit the earth over the last three or four years and when you're in a position that we were in, we were like, you know, 200,000 subscribers back before the pandemic. And then just you wake up and it's like plus 20k plus 20k plus 20k. Oh, good morning, America's calling. Oh, this is that, you know? So then you that's when you realize like, okay, okay, I could I couldn't really engineer that part of it. I could like growth hack and sort of create my way into a great sustainable business. But certain things when you break out, like I can't program that. Right. So I do feel very sort of lucky or along for a certain part of the ride if you want to put it that way.

Tim Stoddart : Yeah. It's interesting to hear you talk about the blog and about YouTube. Different people, depending on who you ask, will say different things. I'm still waiting for this AI apocalypse to take SEO out. Everyone keeps telling me it's going to die. And I'm still waiting for my traffic to go down because all I see is everything continuing to go up and up and up. So that's funny. But I do personally think that if there is a close second, it's probably YouTube right now. The, the power of YouTube in my view seems to be almost kind of like everything else combined. And, um, so I, I'm interested to hear about that, but, uh, Even before we get there, let me kind of double click on YouTube a little bit, because I'm really interested to hear that you didn't start by putting your face on the camera. Because one of the things that I think helps you is you're a real natural in front of the camera. And I'm saying that as a compliment, but I'm also curious about like, did that come naturally to you? Because it looks like it comes very naturally to you. Or did you have to practice that and really like get better at it?

Kevin Espiritu: You know, it's a good question when I look I actually just my team was trolling me a little bit and showing me like our earliest videos on YouTube, which is just the worst, you know, so painful obviously you cringe but even back then I would say I was okay, I wasn't like Atrocious and there was a lot of best practices. I wasn't doing for sure, but I wasn't like Terrible terrible like someone I might see today who might send me a sample. They want to do something with us I go Oh, like that's really you have a long way to go. It's all improvable. But I think the things that helped me really early is I just randomly after I graduated college was super bored. I was living with my cousin and he's like, let's go to a Toastmasters public speech club on a Tuesday night just because we have nothing else to do. And so we did that for like two or three years. And it was like this sort of weird nerd hobby that we both had that helped us speak a lot better. And then after that, I did like 18 months of improv comedy in like 2016, 2017, just like learning, you know, taking those classes, level 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And that I think really broke the wall because, dude, the stuff that people make you do in an improv scene, like to strangers on a stage, It's so stupid and like kind of cringe, especially if you're not funny in that moment, you're like in your head, that to then after that, go sit in your backyard and talk about tomatoes, which you actually know a lot about. It's really not a big deal at all. So I don't know. I don't know how much is natural, how much is not, but certainly something I did work on.

Tim Stoddart : Yeah. That's actually the reason why I do this podcast. I, uh, out of my tiny, when I was growing up, I had a speech impediment. I couldn't say ours. And I've had years and years and years of speech therapy. Um, it's like one of those things where you're, you were a kid then, and I'm 37 years old. I got family. Like, why do I still think about this when I go to sleep at night? But, but, uh, that was just like a very difficult process. And, um, and so doing the podcast has been my own little personal exercise of just forcing myself to. sort of be out there and have conversations with people. Cause I'm the guy that would, I'll just stand in the corner and I actually don't have a problem with that. Like I'm totally fine going to a party and just like standing in the corner the whole time. It doesn't bother me at all. Um, so. I don't know why I'm telling you that. I guess I'm just saying that it is something that at least in my experience, it's a practice, you know, like there is a way to be more charismatic, I suppose, to really listen when people are talking to me to really engage with your words and avoid the arms and the likes and the slip ups and all that. It's definitely a practice.

Kevin Espiritu: Oh, it is. It is, man. And then I think there's almost like a self growth piece to it, that it becomes easier as you just stop caring about shit that doesn't matter. But you have to realize that on your on your own path, I guess, like, for me, it was, I don't know, just trying to be more social, because I'm kind of the same as you, like, if you throw me at a party where I don't know anyone, I would be fine to just kind of chill, maybe leave early, whatever. I didn't want to be there in the first place type of thing. I could make that excuse. But if I get a little push and get into a good conversation, then it could be amazing. It could become the life of the party, whatever. It just kind of depends on the vibe. But it's like this path I could go either way. Um, and so I think part of it too, was just like pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and putting a video up and not caring what, like all your random high school friends that used to make fun of you for your big head would say when they see it, you know, which is something that I had, like, I could pronounce my R's, but my head wasn't is massive. And so, you know, it hits you sometimes.

Tim Stoddart : So we all got, uh, We all win some, we all lose some. Hey there, it's Tim, and I need to take a moment to tell you about this show's sponsor. It's a product called Hype Fury. When I was able to speak to Yannick, who is the CMO, one of the founding partners of Hype Fury, and he agreed to sponsor the show. I was so thrilled and the reason is because I have personally used Hype Fury for the last three years and it has allowed me to build my social media following and my personal brand to over 70,000 followers. I could not have done it without Hype Fury and I really, really mean that. I use this product every day and it's added so much to my business. and to my life. So hypefury is a social media scheduling tool. It has three main features that I think separates it from every other tool. One, it, it allows you to quickly create content and schedule them. So it's a very nuanced feature, but it's so helpful. Basically, I sit down at my desk in the morning, and I type out my tweet, I type out my LinkedIn post, and then all I do is I hit enter. And Hypefury schedules it at the opportune time on Twitter and on LinkedIn. I don't have to think about it any more than that. All I have to do is sit down and create my tweets, create my posts, hit enter, and Hypefury does all the work for me. Second, Hypefury makes it so that you can easily create threads. And threads have been the biggest value add for me in growing my following. So threads really helped me grow my following on Twitter and those threads format themselves into longer form LinkedIn posts on LinkedIn. It's actually kind of funny. I made a video about this not too long ago about how, yes, like you want to create threads on Twitter. You want to be a thread boy, because I'd say like 80% of my growth on both Twitter and LinkedIn have been from threads and long form posts. And I wouldn't have been able to format any of this. without using Hypefury. And then third, Hypefury is really good for keeping you inspired. So what it does is it, it shows you some of your most popular tweets and your most popular posts. And it basically gives you information. It gives you inspiration as to what your audience is looking for and what they most actively engage in. So you're never sitting at the computer thinking, oh man, like what am I going to say today? What, you know, what kind of content am I going to create today? It's constantly feeding you new ideas, new inspiration, and it allows you to quickly create this content so that you can continuously get yourself out there, continuously build your brand, and most importantly, turn that social media following into newsletter subscribers. So through Hype Fury, I've been able to grow my personal email list, timstodds.com, to over 30,000 followers. That's turned into a business within itself. It's really helped me grow the copy blogger newsletter. We're at 110,000 followers right now. A whole lot of that is also because of hype fury. So please, this is a product that I use every single day. I personally vouch for it. You can check it out at hypefury.com. H-Y-P-E-F-U-R-Y.com. If you have any problems with it, you can send me a DM on Twitter and I'm sure I can convince you as to why it will add value to your life. So hypefury.com. Thank you so much to Hype Fury for sponsoring the show and let's get back to the episode. I still want to come back to the YouTube, but I would be doing a disservice to not talk about your website because, uh, I. I find websites to be just really beautiful. It's been a fascination of mine for years. It's why I've done well in SEO, the structure of them, the process of organizing information in a way that people can find what they're looking for without really trying to find what they're looking for. It's just in front of them. It's like an art. I really, really just appreciate it. The epic gardening website is, it's like perfect. It's laid out, it's laid out perfectly. And so I guess just to almost tee that question up again, how did you learn how to do that, man? SEO is not a thing that comes naturally to people because it's not. The way Google prefers websites laid out isn't, you just wouldn't naturally know that you have to intentionally make it a certain way. How did you learn how to do it? It's so good.

Kevin Espiritu: That was like, well, I mean, these days, if you're looking at the website, I take zero credit because we have a amazing SEO. His name's Jason, who we actually acquired his blog. He had grown a blog to like 11 million uniques in a year. And I was like, oh shit, like let's talk, you know? And so we bought his blog and hired him as our lead and he redesigned it and he did a whole lot of stuff. So as it looks today, I would give all credit to him. Obviously I've 500 of those articles are ones that I wrote back in the day, but, I mean, dude, learning SEO was like beating my head against the wall because I just didn't know anything about that when I started. It probably would have been 2010 or 11 when I first started even hearing of the term. And then you hear, you know, there was like online forums, like Wicked Fire was a forum way back in the day. I don't know if you were on it or not, but like a lot of SEO knowledge was accumulated there and disseminated there. And then in the early days, it was just like trial and error, trying to build some links to the blog, trying to write well. But it's interesting, the structure, when you talk about the structure like you did, I actually think that helped me with the YouTube stuff as well. Because if it's a plant guide, like how to grow rosemary, and I've already laid out like overview, what it is, history, basic facts, light, sun, water, air, et cetera. Um, well then I just have to speak that on, on the video with some good, good footage. Um, obviously more complex than that, but yeah, I mean, it's just, it's just learning over time and, and practicing and changing and then tracking the results in the search engine and all that kind of stuff. I mean, I'm sure maybe similar to how you learned it, right?

Tim Stoddart : Oh yeah. I, I'm a, I'm totally a smash my head against the wall kind of learner. I make life probably more difficult for myself than I need to, but I just have no interest in the more traditional, like educational sense. I think I enjoy the process of like failing and figuring things out. The structure, it's cool to hear you say that because it's actually, I don't want to get too deep into this, but I, in sort of the same analogy we made with gardening, I've learned a lot of these. higher level life lessons through SEO and through the structure of websites. But when I say structure of websites, that pertains a little bit more to how Google wants to see the website. And there's like another side of it, which is more like the organization of information, which is how people naturally perceive the information. You kind of have to appeal to both of them to an extent, but as a writer and as a communicator, I don't think anything has taught me how to be an effective communicator. Like the process of having to say as much as possible in like as short amount of time as possible, as directly as possible. Um, while also making it like captivating and entertaining. Right. You guys succeeded that really well. And so as I was looking over your website, let me just pay you one more compliment. Like that's, that's sort of what I noticed. Like, damn, they really got it. They understand how to. say the shit that needs to be said without going on long meandering stories that nobody cares about. They just want the information. So you guys nailed it.

Kevin Espiritu: Hey, thanks, man. Yeah, I mean, it's funny you say it in that way. Because I think when I think about video, like if we want to toss on over to YouTube for a sec, like YouTube is the longest form content you typically create and it's in video, which is really the most content rich media format because you could, it's really, video is just still images played fast. So you have a ton of stills from that. Um, you also have the text from the transcription. You also just have the audio files. You have every type of media in, in video. And then you have the runtime length of the video per platform. So you have like youtube long form and then all the short form formats and even you think like 15 verse 30 verse 60 verse 3 minutes verse 10 minutes verse 30 verse an hour it's like those are maybe the break points um of basic sort of content lengths and you you I think the best creators or content makers are the ones who can say, well, I could talk about, let's say in my world, Rosemary for an hour, 33, 10, 90 seconds, 60, 15 and 30 seconds. What would I say in each of those? And what would be the most interesting way to communicate it? Um, that's, I think how you, you tend, tend to win and blogging seems to be like a great practice in that cause you have to synthesize all of it until what, like 700 words or so.

Tim Stoddart : What's the most, uh, I guess valuable is the word. Yeah, I'll say viable. What's the most valuable like asset that you have for the company? Is it the blog? Is it the YouTube?

Kevin Espiritu: Is it your Instagram? I mean, in the world, you're talking like in the world of content assets. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I would have to say it has to be YouTube. The blog is probably a second. And the reason I say it is because on a direct revenue basis, like direct ad rev, the blog actually crushes the YouTube channel. But on a secondary sale through to commerce, YouTube far and away destroys every other thing. And that's because you get the most affinity with someone that's creating if you're watching 20 minutes of them all the time, right? Versus reading the blog or watching a short form video on like social. So that's what I would say. What do you mean affinity? So like when you watch, do you have, do you have like a creator you really like on YouTube that you watch just for fun?

Tim Stoddart : There's a guy named Peter Zion. He's really into like, geopolitics and geography. He sends out a video every morning. I watch him probably more than anything. There's also a guy named Pig, but he's like a streamer. I'm a dork.

Kevin Espiritu: That's actually a really good example because personality-based streamers are the ones that their product is purely who they are. Whereas me or Jacques on our team, who's another creator that He has his own channel. You come to us maybe for us, but also you say, I want to know how to grow an eggplant and this dude knows how to grow one. So he could be rude or he could be nice. I prefer he'd be nice, but I don't really care. Whereas like a personality streamer, they're the product, like that's what they're selling is themselves. And so when I say affinity, I mean like the familiarity you build with a creator is best developed on YouTube. repeatedly because you have long exposure, right? Like longer pieces of content and more often that's where you see these like rabid fans be developed. Probably streaming is maybe even more so, but you don't get it as much, at least not in today's world on like a blog or on like short form video.

Tim Stoddart : Understood. And so you're, you're saying the affinity, the relationship you build with your audience sense through video, that relationship is like tighter. Yeah. that, that attention translates more into direct sales than your blog does?

Kevin Espiritu: Yeah. Right. I mean, right now the blog does quite good in sales. Um, but it's, it's easier to attribute that cause it's just, you can do it in Google analytics, right? And you're good on YouTube. It's you can do referral traffic and track sales on that via Shopify, of course. But then you have these weird buckets of like, untrackable traffic, weird word of mouth sales, direct traffic. And you're like, when you do a survey on those buckets, he's like, where did you hear from us? It's almost always YouTube, like 90% of the time. And so, but the path of that is the most random stuff you might ever hear. It'll be like, Oh, you know, I, I watched your stuff during the pandemic. Then I moved and then I actually got enough space. So then I remembered you. Then I went back and watched one video and a friend of mine told me, and then I bought, you know, And, and so it's, it's like this crazy chaos path of, of attribution, but it seems to be the most powerful one.

Tim Stoddart : Yeah. I'm surprised to hear you talk about ad revenue as like a legitimate part of your business. I guess when you have videos to get 10 million views, you can stack up some significant ad revenue. But I, I assumed and you know, bad news bears, I'm making a huge mistake there, but I assumed that like. You had a company that sold your own products. So if you're willing, I hope you are. Can you break that down a little bit? Like what's your ad revenue? Do you have products that you own? Do you have affiliate products that you dish out to, do you get paid to do like product reviews and stuff like that?

Kevin Espiritu: Yeah, I'll break, I'll break it down. So up until 2019, it was all ad brand affiliate type stuff, like more of a classic blog model. We had YouTube too, so you would get the YouTube ads and brand stuff. 2019, I offered a product to the audience. It was one I already had in the garden, distributed products. I didn't like invent it or anything. I brought it in from Australia. It's a metal raised bed, still one of our big sellers today. So that was the first taste of physical products. And in just that year, it became half our entire company's revenue. And so I was like, dude, I worked so hard on this blog, worked so hard on the YouTube videos. And in one year I bought five containers of raised beds and sold them and like doubled the revenue. I was like, okay, maybe the. business is actually different than what I thought. And then, you know, now we've raised money and we've always been profitable. We've raised money to grow faster and purchase some companies. So there's some products we do own, like we own this company, Botanical Interests, which sells seeds, which is an awesome, awesome brand. And then we've developed our own and invented our own products. And then there's things that we still sell via third parties because we don't want to compete or we think they have the best product. So we just sell that. And so to get to the ad rev first product sort of discussion. The product revenue is, is a dramatically large portion of our overall revenue. It's, it's almost all of it. That being said, the display ad and affiliate and brand and this and that it's still a seven figure line of business. And so the way I think about it today versus, you know, when I was starting is, well, now the content makes enough to pay for the entire team and resources to make the content and then some. So then I have a free sort of organic channel that is self-perpetuating that actually mostly drives business for the thing that is making most of the money. And so it's like, if you were a direct to consumer brand, like, I don't know, they like send you like a little toothbrush you can use and subscription pack. You don't have that. Like you have to spend 30% of your revenue on paid acquisition and you're like, okay, well our product also costs 35% of our revenue. So, and we have to pay our staff. So like, you know, so you have this free marketing function basically, which is, which is how the content tends to work for us. So that's why I think the ad rev is important is because it funds sort of itself.

Tim Stoddart : Okay. I'll, Love that. Do you not do any advertising at all?

Kevin Espiritu: Like as far as like brand deals or? Or just anything. You don't spend, you don't do any paid ads. We do spend. We just don't spend. I would say we, on average, compared to like a direct to consumer brand that might, you might know, like a Casper maybe, or something like that. We probably spend a fifth of our, as fifth, a fifth as much of their, our revenue as they do. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Stoddart : So talk about. content marketing, basically. And I love how you broke it down because I think of things very similarly where my funding mechanism, let's call it has always been my agencies. And there's some parts of me that thinks it's low leverage. It's stressful, right? Like you got to deal with bullshit, but that pool of money. is just cash. It's like the good thing about agencies is a very cash intensive, right? They cashflow very well. So there's pros and cons to everything, but one of the things I like about it. And so now I have options to reinvest into things, make acquisitions if I choose to do so. Maybe I just reinvest into the agency itself, which it sounds like you are. And so, yeah, you can look at it from the lens of, This is such a small part of it. Why am I bothering with, with this ad revenue? But in a way you could argue that it's kind of like the most important thing you have because it funds itself to grow. Like you're literally getting paid to grow yourself, which grows the actual business. When you put it that way, it's kind of like a. It's like this whirlpool, this cyclical, self-fulfilling prophecy of growth, which is just fucking badass.

Kevin Espiritu: Yeah, man, because think about if it was gone, what is Epic Gardening without it? We're just another company that sells gardening products. There's nothing special about us anymore, nothing cool, nothing fun, nothing that helps the consumer in a deeper way. I think for us, it's nice because we're in a field where gardening is feel-good. It helps people in five to seven different meaningful ways, mental, spiritual, physical, etc. So it's a, it's a great world to be in. Cause you're like, well, the worst thing that happens here, even if sales are down is I help a ton of people learn how to grow food. So, you know, oops, you know, so it's, it's not a big loss, I guess. And in investing in the content and it's not even a loss cause it's, it's profitable.

Tim Stoddart : Yeah. So then I think it's so cool that you're selling physical products. Have you ever thought about. doing non-physical products, just digital products and educational stuff, or are you going to stick to the actual meat and potatoes of gardening?

Kevin Espiritu: We probably will. We probably will next year. I was just chatting with someone. We might do a course, our first course in maybe spring of next year and just see what happens. It's interesting because I've put out many videos that if you follow it, you're going to have a successful plant like rosemary or microgreens or lettuce or whatever. And so I go, well, how do I make a course that's, you know, meaningfully more valuable? I think there's ways to do it. So I think, I think courses honestly for us could be a huge profitable, like high margin business that maybe buffers out the physical goods, which sometimes can not be so high margin and way more complicated, honestly. So yeah, we probably will at some point.

Tim Stoddart : Oh, way more complicated. You nailed it. I owned a t-shirt company once and I loved it. It was so much fun. Um, it's the first and only company I've ever actually sold. And so it just still has a real soft spot in my heart. Like I remember the first time I got recognized, I remember the first time I saw somebody like wearing my clothes. I was in Vegas of all places at a, at a pool party. Um, but man, inventory is different. Like it is. Very, very, very different.

Kevin Espiritu: Say that again? Because I've never messed around with something that with that many sizes and colors and options, like the variance you must've had on that business is crazy.

Tim Stoddart : It was, yeah, I totally underestimated it. Totally underestimated like, uh, just stupid stuff like returns and, you know, Oh, wow. I got the shirt. I love it so much, but it's just, I need one size bigger. I didn't realize that the sizes were. were as small as they were or whatever, like there's a million different things. And so I've developed a whole new appreciation for logistics and warehousing and storage and organization of all of that. So do you, one, do you house your own products? Do you warehouse them? And then two, if you do, like how do you ship such big inventory pieces like that? You must have like a whole department that manages nothing but your shipping.

Kevin Espiritu: Oh yeah, man. We have, especially as you brought botanical interests into the fold as one of our brands, a seed company. We have like a 35,000 square foot facility in Colorado that we not only do we ship.

Tim Stoddart : Oh, we're in Colorado. Oh, is that, I don't know if you remember, we talked on Twitter where we were going to get lunch or something like that. Is that what you were doing out here?

Kevin Espiritu: That's what I was doing. Yeah. So I, a lot of our team is, is, is in Colorado, just outside of Denver. And yeah, I mean, Long story short, in the early days of 2019, like I mentioned, it was just me. And so I was importing the raised beds to a third-party logistics company who would ship it out for me. Eventually, I was like, wow, that's expensive to do. And they're heavy. Maybe I'll just buy a warehouse and do it myself. So I bought a warehouse in San Diego and did it myself with a small team at the time. And I was like, okay, I'm saving some money. I think I can't really tell, but this is actually quite complicated. And if I'm good at anything, it's probably making content and making product, not like shipping the stuff. And so we raised some money, we staffed the team up, we closed the San Diego warehouse. I ended up selling it. And, um, Yeah, just we've routed mostly out of Colorado. We do have some 3PL partners that will ship or maybe if we have a third party company, like we really like a particular growing system that we don't make. We will sometimes bring it into the warehouse and ship it. Sometimes it's easier and more cost effective to have them ship it for us.

Tim Stoddart : You make this all seem very, not a big deal for you. Like. still look plenty healthy. You don't look like you're super stressed out to me even in this conversation.

Kevin Espiritu: I was big time really, man like I didn't so when we raised some money for the business, tail end of 2021, did not get a break after that. Like a bit's a big moment, right? Like you raise some money, you're able to like secure yourself a little bit. You'd maybe go on a vacation or something. No, we would go straight into building even harder. And so I think at the beginning of even this year, I think I weighed 259.8. I'm six foot four. So that's not like crazy, crazy, but it was too much. Um, And now I'm like 235, 234. So I've lost almost like 30 pounds. I was like having panic attacks and stuff. And it was just great. It was crazy, dude. But I didn't realize it until I stopped until I like tried to really push the limiter way too far. I was like, Oh, probably for the last three, four years, I've been running and gunning harder than I expected. I just didn't know. Cause I didn't know any different.

Tim Stoddart : You know, I was just having a conversation with a friend of mine who He's in his 40s. He's 46, I think. And it's the first time he's ever started a company. I've never had a job. And so I'm, this is all I know. And he talked about how he always thought he was like really made for this because he, he was an executive role. This is a CMO, basically like pretty, pretty powerful companies. And, uh, I was joking to him. He was just confiding in me a little bit. where people say like, oh yeah, it must be so nice to just make content and do whatever you want to do and travel whenever you want to. And in my head, when people say that to me, my first thought is like, yeah, it's really nice not being able to sleep because I can't shut my brain off, constantly paranoid about whatever huge problem is like simmering up that like I can't see. And there's just that slogan, only the paranoid survive. And for me, it's been Very, very, very true. And it's it's certainly I wouldn't give it up for anything. Don't get me wrong. I love what I do. I got the best job in the world. But man, it's not free. It's not a free pass by any means.

Kevin Espiritu: No, I mean, dude, it's it's actually way harder because the agency you need to have to live in that way is so high. I would say all things are trade-offs. Early on in my career, so to speak, I didn't really have one. I was just failing at stuff. But I would be like, God, it's so dumb to be an employee. You need to be your own boss. Meanwhile, me being my own boss was making two grand a month failing at building websites for people or something. It's like, cool, probably should have just gotten a job. But either way, it's like, you either trade off the risk for security and you could get laid off, for example. And then what do you do? Well, you didn't build a skill set that you could do something on your own. So you've got to go hunt another job. You should have beholden in that way. But for us, it's like, you know, my brother has a more traditional career. And when he leaves work, it's done. Like he doesn't think about it ever again. And on the weekend, he does not think about it at all, ever. Uh, and that's just how he prefers to live. And for me, I can't not think about it. Right. So it's, it's just a trade off.

Tim Stoddart : Yeah. I think you're doing a great job and I know you don't know you that well, but it's a lot to manage. And it seems like you have a defense mechanism that I have where you can like compartmentalize things. Like this is the shipping and the warehousing side of my brain. And this is like the content and the marketing side of my brain. And you can almost have like little neat and cozy drawers and cubbies where like you can keep all that information. So it doesn't spill over and, uh, and, and, and flood flood your mind. You know, I really meant it when I said it at the very beginning, um, my wife and I have plans to buy a farm. It's something I grew up in the city, you know? And so like this whole idea of food deserts and just malnutrition, it's something that is really, really. important to me and just life, right? And plants, like we, we can't live without them. And we don't know that we can't live without them because we're so used to just fucking buying Twinkies and stuff like that. So, uh, so it's, it's important work, man. Like, I think you're doing a great job.

Kevin Espiritu: Thank you. I really appreciate that. It means a lot to hear.

Tim Stoddart : Oh man. My pleasure. So, uh, semi-closing tradition when The end of the day comes and you have a little bit of time and a little bit of space in your head. What is it that you dream about when it comes to epic gardening? You strike me as a guy that you're going somewhere, you have plans for the future. What's like the dream that feels so big that you're not sure if it can come true or not?

Kevin Espiritu: So the crazy one that I have is you think about Maybe how like Starbucks was initially founded was this idea of like you have your work you have your home and you have Starbucks aka the third place right like the cultural third place where you go to chill. Obviously Starbucks kind of really isn't that anymore but what is? I can't really figure out one and I live in San Diego like I don't really know where that is but I know for me if you're a gardener you go to the nursery but the nurseries are like We service like 4,000 of them with our seed business and a lot of them are not doing that well. They're struggling. It's kind of like the whole thing with farmers. Farmers are aging out. A lot of nursery owners are aging out too. And I go, well, you have to go to them though. Because in Denver, it's completely different what you can grow than here, even maybe in Boulder versus Broomfield, right? Um, and so I go, well, they have to exist if gardening exists at all. And I think it will. So why wouldn't Epic be take a stab? Why wouldn't we try to like create the next generation nursery? Maybe not a ton of them. Maybe you just do like four or five, um, and make it like that third space once again. So not only do you go there to shop, but you go to like, learn, you take a class, you can have a coffee, you can have a drink, whatever it is. Um, and you kind of reinvent the nursery. Cause to me, that's cool as hell on its own. Then you turn the business brain on and you're like, well, it could also use, use it as a content studio. Well, it could also be a distribution center for the direct to consumer product. Like there's a million ways you could play it. Uh, but to me, that is the full expression, I guess, of, of what we could do.

Tim Stoddart : I think that's amazing. And I'll end on one quick story. I grew up in Philadelphia and, uh, my mom had a vegetable garden because we were trying our best to have healthy foods. And my mom used to go to the nursery every weekend. By the way, I don't know if you can hear the leaf blower outside. I'm sorry if it's loud. Okay, cool. And my mom used to go to the nursery every weekend until this day. Some of my best memories with my mom as a little kid was following her to the nursery and having her talk with like her plant friends that she made and just watching how like enthralled she was by it and watching how she would learn the names of plants. Man, like I can still smell the place. You know, you're talking about that. I can I can really still smell it. So I do. Although that's not what I thought you were going to say, the emotional attachment that people have to nurseries, I think is along the lines of that third space that you're talking about. So you can do it, man.

Kevin Espiritu: Go for it. Thanks, dude. Well, hey, appreciate you having me on, dude.

Tim Stoddart : Oh yeah, thank you so much. Really enjoyed it. Epicgardening.com, everything you need, the YouTube channel, the social media, you can find on epicgardening.com. Definitely signed up for the newsletter. Man, Kevin, thank you so much for your time. Congratulations. Good luck out and everything. And I can't wait to visit the nursery.

Kevin Espiritu: Oh yeah. Yeah. I'll hang out with you next time I'm out in Denver.

Tim Stoddart : Cool. Amazing.

Kevin Espiritu: All right, bro. Talk soon. Yep.

null: Peace.