Epic Gardening
Kevin Espiritu started the Epic Gardening blog in 2013 as a digital business card. He needed something to show website design clients. He didn’t think it could be a company. “If this thing could just make $2,000 a month, that’d be amazing. Then I wouldn’t have to go get a job.”
By 2024, Epic Gardening employed 90 people and was approaching $45 million in annual revenue. Sam Parr’s prediction: “In about five years he’s going to be a really big deal — like Chip and Joanna.”
The Revenue Staircase
The numbers tell the story more clearly than any description:
- 2016 (first year full-time): $17,000 total
- 2017: $72,000
- 2018: $225,000
- 2019: $2.8 million (the content-to-commerce pivot year)
- 2020: still product-dominant
- 2021: $7.3 million, on a team of five people, with roughly 50% margins
- Post-raise, 90 people: $40–45 million annual revenue, profitable
The jump from $225,000 to $2.8 million is the story. Everything before 2019 was a media business making money on display ads and brand sponsorships. Everything after was a product company using media as its customer acquisition engine.
The Pivot: Realizing He Was the Customer
The insight that changed everything came from a simple question. Every piece of content Kevin made was “basically a search for validating demand for whatever’s in that content.” He was gardening in a small front yard in Hillcrest, San Diego, using these metal raised beds that he’d received from a sponsor. Every time he posted a photo, people asked where he got them.
“I realized: when brands do a deal with me, they want access to my audience. Well, I have complete access to my own audience. Why don’t I just be the brand selling to my own audience?”
He emailed the Australian manufacturer of the beds repeatedly for about a year. They kept saying no, we have someone. Then in early 2019 they emailed back: the distributor relationship had fallen apart. Was he still interested?
He had $70-80K in the business bank account. He spent $35,000 — nearly half of it — on a 20-foot shipping container of metal raised beds. Then he tried to mail them himself from a rented storage unit. He didn’t know what a 3PL was.
He sold out 550 beds in four to five days while they were still on a ship crossing the Pacific. The next container sold out too. A friend explained what a freight forwarder was.
“That was the genesis of selling products at Epic Gardening.”
Three Acquisitions, Each Instructive
Acquisition 1: The Seed Tray Inventor ($500K)
A friend from the gardening media world had developed an injection-molded seed tray so durable you could stand on it. He showed Kevin. Kevin teased it to his audience. They sold weeks of inventory in 25 seconds.
The structure: Kevin paid for the molds and R&D time plus a premium, gave equity, hired the inventor as product lead. Result: 7x return on acquisition price in revenue across 12-15 SKUs. “To me that’s exactly why you would do it instead of building from scratch.”
Acquisition 2: The Competing Blog ($500K–$1M)
A job applicant for director of editorial disclosed he also ran a competing gardening blog. Kevin’s solution: “You can’t work for us and run that blog. What if we bought your blog and hired you to run ours?”
They migrated both blogs — each doing about 10 million sessions per year — into a single property. “You’d think 10 plus 10 is 20, but because our blog was so strong from an SEO perspective, we got maybe a 20-30% premium on traffic.” Display ad RPMs doubled. The acquisition financed itself from the increased revenue in month one.
Acquisition 3: Botanical Interests — The Seed Company
This was the big one. Botanical Interests was a 28-year-old seed company in Colorado — 650 varieties of vegetables, flowers, and herbs, known for high germination rates and beautifully designed packaging. A husband and wife who had since divorced, ready to hand it to whoever would run it well.
Kevin wasn’t the highest bidder — “by quite a bit, a material amount that the sellers were not going to have in their pocket by going with us.” But for the six months of the bidding process, he wore the Botanical Interests hat in every piece of content he made. Every YouTube video, every Instagram reel, every short-form clip. The hat was on.
At dinner celebrating the win, the husband told him: “You don’t know how much wearing that hat helped.”
The post-acquisition result: the online part of Botanical Interests’ business grew 60-70% year-over-year in the first year, primarily just from moving to Shopify and telling Epic’s audience they owned it.
The Content-Commerce Structural Advantage
The metric that explains Epic Gardening’s unit economics is negative customer acquisition cost.
“My acquisition cost is equal to my media, and my media is not a cost — it’s a profit driver. Negative CAC.”
When the business was doing $7.3 million in revenue with five people and 50% margins, it was spending nothing on paid acquisition. The content was doing all the work. Every YouTube video, every blog post, every Instagram reel was simultaneously a piece of content people watched for its own sake and a product showcase that converted viewers into buyers.
The media arm is the sales team. When Kevin raised $17 million from Chernin Group — the same firm that backed MeatEater and uses a similar media-to-commerce playbook — the deal logic was simple: an audience-first business that hadn’t yet scaled its commerce operation is a business with an unfair advantage waiting to be deployed.
Chernin’s model, as Kevin described it: “They invest in the media company and immediately go acquire something to sell to the audience.” Botanical Interests was that acquisition.
What Chip and Joanna Teach
Sam drew the comparison explicitly. Chip and Joanna Gaines built a campus in Waco — food, retail, multiple stores — that functions like a destination brand. People travel to buy things with their name on it. “And that’s going to happen to you, because you’ve got the same setup — you’re in a good niche, it’s mostly passionate hobbyists, and they probably spend a lot on the hobby.”
Kevin’s wholesale distribution through Botanical Interests gives him something Chip and Joanna had to build: 4,500 retail storefronts already carrying his products. The pipeline from content to consumer now runs through every nursery and garden center in America that stocks Botanical Interests seed packets.
See also: kevin-espiritu | content-to-commerce | epic-gardening | newsletter-business | sam-parr