Kevin Espiritu, founder of Epic Gardening, walks through how he turned a hobby gardening blog making $300/month into a $45 million/year business. He breaks down the revenue year by year, explains the content-to-commerce pivot that unlocked product sales, and details three acquisitions — a seed tray inventor, a competitor’s blog, and the 30-year-old Botanical Interests seed company — that powered his growth. The episode ends with a wide-ranging conversation about plant breeding, farmers market fraud, and beekeeping as a business opportunity.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Kevin Espiritu (guest, founder of Epic Gardening)
Introduction and Who Kevin Is [00:00:00]
Sam: All right, what’s happening everyone. Today’s podcast is with Kevin Espiritu. Kevin has this company called Epic Gardening. Epic Gardening started as a blog where Kevin would just write about his hobby as a gardener — he started it in 2016. In this podcast, he’s going to tell us the revenue for every year that he’s been doing it, but this year they’re going to do something like $45 million in annual revenue.
Sam: Kevin walks through how they got traffic, how he built the company, how he bought other companies to make Epic Gardening a big business. It’s incredibly fascinating. He’s super transparent with all the numbers — he goes through deal by deal, all the companies they bought, how much they paid, how they found them, and why they passed on others. It’s a really fascinating story. This guy is really cool. I think in about five years he’s going to be a really big deal — he’s already a pretty big deal, but I think he’s going to be like Chip and Joanna. You guys have to listen to this. Let me know what you think. Check it out.
The 150-Million-View Kneeling Video [00:01:45]
Sam: Dude, it’s finally nice to talk to you. I didn’t know who you were, and then on the podcast Shaan told your story and I was like, oh, I recognize this guy from everywhere. I didn’t realize how big of a business you’d built. Congratulations — that’s insane.
Kevin: Yeah, it’s been a crazy ride.
Sam: I just watched one of your YouTube videos where one of them had 70 million views — it’s just you kneeling on this little kneeling device so you can garden on your knees more easily, and you were like, “I’ve been getting recognized in the streets because of this silly kneeling video.”
Kevin: That video might haunt me. I think it’s the most viral thing I’ve ever made. It’s a short-form video — I’d seen this little kneeling device on an Instagram reel from a German trade show. It’s made for bricklayers. I saw it and I was like, you know what, I kind of want to try it out. So I had my team grab one — there was one in San Diego where I live — and I made that piece of content in maybe ten minutes maximum, edited it up, tossed it out, put it on TikTok first, and it just started ripping.
Kevin: I was like, okay, this has some legs. So I threw it on Instagram and Facebook and YouTube. I think it’s at 150 million views across all platforms. The whole logic was: put this product in front of our gardening audience and see if they like it, so we can either hit up the manufacturer and carry it in our store or make some modifications to make it better suited for gardening. It was basically just market validation.
Kevin: By the time we went that viral, we hit up the manufacturer — a German company — and they said, “We would love to sell you some, but our entire stock in America is gone. Every distributor we have has sold out.” So they couldn’t get it to us.
Sam: How much missed revenue was that?
Kevin: I have no idea.
Sam: What’s your guess — over or under $10 million?
Kevin: I think it’s under. These things are like $50 maybe. I don’t know how many we would have sold, but I don’t think there was some crazy supply in the US. It was kind of a bummer. The only thing I’ve ever gotten out of it is being memed to death about it.
Kevin’s Origin: Online Poker, Web Design, and the Gardening Blog [00:05:30]
Sam: The reason you’re interesting to me — did you start with an internet marketing background? Because I know you were into search and SEO. Were you even into gardening and plants, or were you like, “I’m the plant daddy now because I’ve got this website?” Which came first?
Kevin: Designing websites came first. I came out of college with an accounting degree, but I played online poker to pay for school, and that kind of put me off the path of wanting to be an accountant right out of the gate.
Sam: You were making money?
Kevin: I made like $250,000 playing poker, so I used that to pay for school and had some money to sit on.
Sam: Was it all online?
Kevin: All online. I hated playing in person — it’s so slow. When you’re playing online you’re playing faster, but you’re also playing multiple tables.
Sam: What makes a good online poker player? I’ve only played maybe ten or twenty times. It seems like reading body language is part of the game, but what makes a good online player?
Kevin: Straight math. Understanding probability theory, understanding the types of hands someone could or couldn’t have in a given situation. But eventually when you play enough online poker, you know people’s screen names — you’ve played with them over days, weeks, months. You can even develop a sense where you’re like, in this particular position, this person waited three seconds longer than normal, and it’s this particular screen name — you’re nearly sure it’s a bluff and you call them.
Sam: And you made $250,000 over four years doing that?
Kevin: Yeah, something like that. I didn’t track it super well. That’s insane. It threw me off the path of wanting to be an accountant, for sure. When I got out of school I played poker for like six more months and then quit. I had nothing to do, started playing video games, and then started designing websites to pay some bills. Then I got into SEO because once you sell a website, it’s sold — you make your $1,500 or $2,000 or whatever, and that’s it. So I built the gardening blog at the same time because I was getting into gardening with my brother over a summer, but I needed a digital business card — a calling card to show website design clients what I could build.
Sam: What year was that?
Kevin: That would have been 2013.
Sam: I think in that same year I did the same thing. Were you reading Smart Passive Income?
Kevin: Yeah, yeah.
Sam: Okay. So Pat Flynn — for those younger listeners, Pat Flynn is still quite popular, he was one of the early bloggers on making money on the internet. He wrote an ebook on how to get a building LEED certified or something, he was making money doing it and displaying all his income online, which at the time was insane. Then he did a book on how to create a food truck and was blogging through the whole process. I read that and created a poison ivy “how to treat poison ivy” website at the same time, and it was making like $1,000 a day. I was copying everything he was doing. I have a feeling you were reading that same blog.
Kevin: I have an even more cringe story around that time. I was reading Pat like crazy.
Sam: You just called me cringe. I mean, that first site you make is always kind of weird.
Kevin: I have one worse than that. Pat was like a god to me back then — he’s a half-Filipino, half-white guy living in San Diego building businesses.
Sam: Are you half-Filipino?
Kevin: Half-Filipino, half-white. And we’ve become good friends now, which is awesome. When I read his stuff I was like, okay, I see the blueprint. My choice was to create a website called CocoaButterCream.org. So I go to CocoaButterCream.org and I start reviewing every cocoa butter cream on Amazon, using an alias. I was early 20s doing dumb stuff. I was “Susie Michaels, a mother of two” reviewing how all these different cocoa butters worked. I hooked into Amazon Affiliates. I remember it took me a month to make two bucks on that site, and I was like, oh my God, I made money in a way that’s not someone just paying me. It kind of blew my mind.
Sam: And then you got into internet marketing. Did you do a Kendrick Lamar website too?
Kevin: Yeah. That was probably a couple years later. My cousin — I was living with him at the time, he was a biomechanical engineer, and I’m over here building sites and he’s getting intrigued by it. A friend hits me up and says, “Hey, I have all these blogs I need to sell — I have Kendrick Lamar, Rita Ora, Schoolboy Q, all these up-and-coming artists. You want to buy one?” I said, “I’m kind of doing my own thing, but maybe my cousin will buy it and we’ll do it together.”
Kevin: My cousin Johnny put up the money — I had like 10% equity in this Kendrick Lamar website. We started scouring the internet and actually became the biggest source of Kendrick Lamar news before he dropped Good Kid, M.A.A.D City. No one really knew Kendrick at that point — only super fans. There was even a point where I think Kendrick’s manager called my cousin and was like, “We really appreciate what you’re doing for Kendrick, you’re putting his name out there.” The way we monetized was just selling print-on-demand shirts. I think we made like $30 or $40 grand doing that, and then after the album dropped and he blew up, he trademarked his name and we had to shut the site down.
Going Full-Time on Epic Gardening [00:16:20]
Sam: What was the main thing though — was it always the gardening website?
Kevin: The gardening thing didn’t really start for real until 2016, when I went full-time on it. It was just a hobby blog before that. A hobby I actually loved — I’ve done it every year of my life since 2013 — but I never thought it could be a huge company. I remember talking to friends who were doing the same thing and I was like, “Man, if this thing could just make $2,000 a month, that’d be amazing. Then I wouldn’t have to go get a job.” My mind just didn’t understand the scale any business could really become at that point.
Sam: And then you had this idea — it’s kind of a cliché in the media world now, but at the time it was pretty innovative — content and commerce. I’m going to build this huge blog and instead of just making money on advertising, I’m going to sell my own products. When you were getting going, I thought, “I can’t sell my own products, I’d rather just stick to content and ads.” You made the right decision — it’s a significantly better business.
Kevin: It’s a way better business. And there’s this blog post by my friend Nathan Barry called “Billion Dollar Blogs” — basically the story of a handful of people who started blogging and then built companies around the blogs. The most famous example is Glossier, the women’s makeup brand that started as Emily Weiss’s fashion blog. She realized selling stuff is way better than selling ads and it became a billion dollar company. Nathan has a few more examples like that. That’s when I first really understood the idea. But I still thought it was too intimidating, too challenging — and particularly for me, I ran a business website at the time. What was I possibly going to sell? It didn’t make sense. But you were living it and doing it, which is pretty cool.
Sam: Even still I thought it was too intimidating. But you made the right decision.
Kevin: Frankly it was quite intimidating to me, but I was either too dumb or too smart to realize that, so I just went ahead and did it. The brief story: in 2016 I went full-time on Epic Gardening. I’d been at Scribe Media — it was called Book in a Box before that — as like a second employee. So I quit, went full-time on Epic. It was just a blog and YouTube channel.
Sam: Did you have any revenue when you quit?
Kevin: I was making $450 a month. I actually have a spreadsheet of exactly what it was making. At that time, I thought I was going to farm — literally farm in people’s front yards, aggregate their square footage, and sell produce to restaurants.
Sam: That sounds really hard.
Kevin: It’s a really hard way to make a smallish amount of money. There are people that do it and I actually respect it a lot, but it’s not scalable. So I went, okay, how would I just make this blog make a couple grand a month, since it’s already making $450? If I could make $450, I could probably make $2,000. If I can make $2,000, I can make $5,000. That year the blog made $17,000 total — about six months of the year — and then the next year it was $72,000 revenue. The year after, $225,000. All media at that point, because I hadn’t done any product yet.
The Content-to-Commerce Pivot [00:21:00]
Kevin: Then 2019 is where I had that realization you mentioned. I was like, why am I just making money from ads and brand sponsorships? When brands do a deal with me, they want access to my audience. Well, I have complete access to my own audience. So why don’t I just be the brand selling to my own audience?
Kevin: Every piece of content I put out is basically a search for validating demand for whatever’s in that content. I was gardening in Hillcrest, San Diego — a small front yard in a pretty urban part of downtown — and I had these little raised beds made out of metal. Every time I took a photo, people were asking, “What are those? Where’d you get those?” And I was like, I actually don’t know — a brand just sent them to me.
Kevin: So I started emailing this company from Australia, maybe once or twice a quarter for a year, saying, “Can I somehow get these to America and sell them?” They kept saying, “No, we already have someone we’re working with.” Then the beginning of 2019, they emailed back: “Are you still interested? Our distributor isn’t working with us anymore.” I said, yeah, let’s do it.
Kevin: I think I had like $70–80 grand in the business bank account at that point. It’s media, so it’s mostly profit. Small business, nearly zero employees. I’m making like a mid-level doctor’s salary out of this business. I’m chilling, I’m gardening, I’m loving my life.
Kevin: So I hit these guys up and they’re like, here’s how it works. And I’m like, holy shit, I don’t know how buying product works, because I’m used to media. The way I tried to do it was noob-level. I bought a 20-foot container of these raised beds for I think $35,000 — about half the money I had. And then they tell me the container has to go somewhere, I have to unpack it, and then ship it. I’m like, okay, cool. Thanks for that information.
Kevin: So I tried to rent a storage facility — one of those Costco-type ones for when you’re moving — and I was trying to figure out how to get it from the port to the storage, and trying to look up how to get internet in the storage facility so I could print labels.
Sam: You were going to literally mail these things out yourself?
Kevin: Because I didn’t know anything about commerce. I didn’t know you could send it to a 3PL or a warehouse.
Sam: How many units did you have?
Kevin: I think it was 550 beds at that time.
Sam: That’s a ton. But I mean, I guess it’s kind of reasonable — just go to the post office four times a week.
Kevin: I thought it was reasonable. And the reason I was trying to do it like that is because when I ordered, I’d told my audience, “Hey, you guys asked where these things were from, I figured it out.” I put up a crappy Shopify store and said, “Here they are.” And then I sold them out in like four or five days.
Sam: Oh no — while they were still getting to America?
Kevin: While they were still on the way. So I knew it was working. I used that money to buy another container, that sold out too, and I was like, oh my God, there’s really something going on here. A friend of mine who was in commerce eventually told me what the hell I was doing: just get a 3PL, get a freight forwarder, send the container there, and hook your Shopify to it. They’ll ship it all out for you. And that was the genesis of selling products at Epic Gardening.
Sam: Didn’t you grow that to like $7 million in revenue with like four people?
Kevin: Yeah. 2020 was about $2.8 million — almost a 6x year-over-year. Then 2021 was $7.3 or $7.4 million, and most of it was product at that point. That was on a team of me, my garden assistant, my actual assistant, a video editor, and a writer. That’s it.
Sam: On $7.3 million, what was your profit?
Kevin: Probably like 50%.
Sam: So you’re rolling in it.
Kevin: Yeah, because if you run it like that, there’s zero paid spend. My acquisition cost is equal to my media, and my media is not a cost — it’s a profit driver. Negative CAC.
Raising $17 Million and Why [00:28:30]
Sam: Why raise money then? I know you raised $17 million. The cool thing about bootstrapping is you can do whatever you want. There’s freedom in that — that’s frankly my favorite part about business. You’re creating your own empire. If you want to grow it, you can. If you don’t, you don’t have to. You get all the money, you don’t have to answer to anyone. I assume at this point you owned 100% of the company. If I’m you, I’m not giving equity to my employees — I’ve been doing this by myself for a long time, I’d rather just pay you a high salary. Why even take $17 million?
Kevin: I wrestled with it for a long time. That deal took about six months to close. For the Chernin Group — the investor — it’s not some massive deal for them. It was a huge amount for me. The logic ended up being: do I know what I’m going to do in the next couple years? Do I understand the complexity of the business I’d built? Because it’s a really lean team for a $7.3 million commerce business shipping product. There are redundancy issues — anything north of $5 million, you’ve got something here that could potentially be huge, and you should actually shift to being a proper CEO.
Kevin: Being a proper CEO means hiring extra people even if at first it seems inefficient. At that point everyone was working 110%. You almost purposely become a slightly more inefficient operation — because 70% of effort from ten people is better than 110% from five, so there’s some redundancy when someone gets sick or quits. And on the operational side — hiring, inventory planning, sales tax nexus that you hit in all these different states — I was staring down the barrel of a lot of complexity I knew I didn’t know. I was at least smart enough to know I didn’t know what was coming.
Kevin: And frankly, 2021 was probably still the last best time to do any kind of raising. I was already ahead in my space — no creator in gardening was doing what I was doing. Why not stay ahead and partner with people who actually understand how these media-to-commerce businesses are built? That’s what ended up making me do the deal.
Sam: Were you able to take any money off the table, or did the $17 million go straight to the balance sheet?
Kevin: I was able to take some off, which was great.
Sam: That’s life-changing, right?
Kevin: It was life-changing. And then I had the warehouse too. I’d bought a warehouse to start fulfilling from — I was paying a 3PL like $30–40K a month in fulfillment fees and thought, why don’t I just start a separate company, buy a warehouse, and become my own tenant, building equity on the real estate side at the same time? When we raised, that warehouse didn’t go with it. So the way the personal financial math worked out, I was like, the way I live, I’m good now. I can just fully focus on trying to win this space. That was another part of it.
Sam: Do you have family?
Kevin: Yeah, I have a girlfriend. And a lot of my family lives in San Diego.
What Money Actually Does for You [00:33:00]
Sam: What’s it feel like to be a young guy and you’re like, “I’m good — potentially forever?”
Kevin: Kind of underwhelming, honestly. Was it like that for you?
Sam: For me I’d already made quite a bit of money running through 2021 solo, so it was a huge change, but it wasn’t like going from $1 million to $200 million. The way I live, I just don’t need it. All it did was eliminate worry — like, what if something medical goes wrong. I couldn’t even figure out if I wanted to buy anything to celebrate.
Kevin: Not having money was more stressful than having breathing room. I completely agree.
Sam: It mitigates all your downsides, but it doesn’t make you some massively happier person. You remember that study — $70,000 a year?
Kevin: That is absolutely bullshit.
Sam: That is absolutely bullshit. I agree. First of all, inflation-adjusted, isn’t it like $160K now?
Kevin: Even that number might be bullshit. $160K in one of the top five cities shockingly doesn’t go very far.
Sam: I think it’s bullshit because at like $200K a year you can have someone come clean the house, have meal support — things that help you free up time from stuff you genuinely don’t like to do. I obviously grow my own food, I cook meals, I bake my own bread — I don’t have to do that, but I want to. But I don’t clean my house anymore. Things like that give you — not positive joy exactly, just “I don’t have to do an annoying thing.”
Kevin: Yeah, it’s like the five love languages but for money. For you it’s not nice things, but for some people it’s cars. For me it’s the cleaner who comes often and I just genuinely feel happier not having to do my laundry.
Sam: I learned all that from Ramit. He has like a surgical team on every single part of his life that he hates doing. I was with Ramit on Saturday. He always asks these crazy questions where sometimes I just want to chill and have fun and he’s like, “Sam, what’s your rich life?” And I’m like, I don’t know man. He’s like, no no no, tell me your rich life. He goes, what would happen if you 10x’d your spending on services? He asked me how big my staff would be for the house if it could be as big as I wanted, and I was like, I think I have a cleaner and maybe a cook every so often. He gets into the details. He loves it. Those questions do make me think — am I thinking too small? If I love something, why don’t I get 10x more of it?
Epic Gardening Today: 90 People, $40–45M Revenue [00:37:30]
Sam: How big is the business now?
Kevin: About 90 people, and we’re hoping to hit somewhere around $40–45 million this year in revenue.
Sam: Did you ever think it would get there? And are you doing it profitably?
Kevin: Yeah, we’re profitable. The first year after raising I don’t think we were — we hired quite a bit ahead of growth because we were so under-hired with me and four contractors. But this year, yes.
Sam: How big do you think it gets in five years?
Kevin: I think it’s like a foregone conclusion to get above $100 million. We’ve made a couple of acquisitions — two small ones and one large one — and just growing those has a shot at getting us past $100 million. How much bigger than that, I don’t know.
Acquisition 1: The Seed Tray Inventor [00:39:00]
Sam: Why acquire something instead of building it?
Kevin: Speed — if you have the competency internally to do it. Did you know anything about acquiring companies?
Kevin: The big acquisition — the seed company — Chernin led a lot of the diligence on that because it’s way too complex a 30-year-old business. But the two small acquisitions I led those, and they just helped with the legalities.
Kevin: The very first one was a seed tray. When you’re gardening, you usually start seeds in a little tray, and most of those trays are made out of pretty flimsy plastic — throwaway things. A friend of mine from the media side of gardening was developing these trays and hit me up: “Hey, can I come down and show you this new tray I made to start seeds in?” Early 2021.
Kevin: He comes down, shows me this super sturdy, durable tray. I hold it — I’ve been gardening for eight years at this point — and I’m like, holy shit, this is the best seed-starting tray I’ve ever seen. He says, “You can stand on it if you want.” I’m about 220 pounds. I stand on it with one foot. Doesn’t budge. And I go, what do you want to do? I can put it on my Shopify store and see if the audience wants it. He says, yeah — we’ll split the profits 50/50, you have the audience, I have the product.
Kevin: I started teasing it in Instagram and YouTube videos. It’s injection-molded, so you can only make so many per day. We built up maybe a week or two of inventory, and then I put out an Instagram reel: “Hey, this is the coolest tray I’ve ever seen, link in bio.” We sold out weeks of inventory in like 25 seconds.
Sam: How much revenue was that?
Kevin: Like $25 or $30 grand.
Kevin: Over the next three or four weeks we just kept building inventory, dropping it, selling it out. Then I went to him and said, “Look, not only is this working way better than I thought, but there are more trays we could make — different form factors, little domes for humidity, whatever. But I can’t make them because that’s what you do, and I’m 95% of your sales. So what if you joined Epic? We raised some money. You could be our product lead. I can’t really buy the business based on revenue because that revenue is us. How do we structure a deal?”
Kevin: What we came up with: we paid him for all the assets — the molds, the R&D time, and a premium on that — gave him some equity, and hired him as our product lead. We’ve built that line out to like 12 or 15 SKUs going direct-to-consumer and wholesale. I think we’re up about 7x on the acquisition price in revenue. The acquisition was $500,000. To me that’s exactly why you would do it instead of building from scratch.
Sam: That’s a great deal for everyone involved.
Kevin: Total win-win.
Acquisition 2: The Competing Blog [00:46:30]
Sam: What are the other two?
Kevin: The second one was a media acquisition — a blog. A friend of mine from the old SEO days had built a gardening blog. We were hiring for a director of editorial — someone to run our blog, which was doing about 8–10 million sessions a year, mostly from search, monetizing on display ads, with some product sales on top.
Kevin: This guy emails me: “Hey, I saw that head of editorial position. I’m working in SEO right now but I’ve also been building a gardening blog on the side.” It was called AllAboutGardening.com — it now redirects to Epic Gardening. He says, “I’d like the job, but I kind of have a competing blog.” So I go, “You can’t work for us and run that blog. What if we bought your blog and hired you to run ours?” He said okay.
Kevin: We bought the blog and migrated his into ours — both around 10 million sessions a year. 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. 10 plus 10 equaled 25. And we were monetizing better off the display ads — our blog RPM doubled after the acquisition. Effectively the acquisition financed itself from the increased revenue in month one.
Sam: Can you say what it cost? More or less than $500K?
Kevin: In between $500K and a million. We paid some upfront and some over a period of time, plus equity. That was post-Chernin.
Kevin: How it’s worked out: we have an awesome leader running our blog at a higher level than before. Our traffic has more than doubled, and we’re monetizing at more than double the rate. We basically created cash flow that financed the thing that created the cash flow.
Sam: Did you read a book about this? How did you learn Acquisitions?
Kevin: I just thought about it. I was like, if I do that, I feel like all these things will happen — and then they did. You know how people say there needs to be one core reason to do something — an acquisition or a business move or whatever. I agree with that. But the way I mentally underwrote both of those things: the core reason is pretty obvious — I don’t have a product, now I do; I don’t have the traffic and a leader, now I do. But then I just go through how many other ways could this benefit us, and how many ways could it hurt us. If the ways that could benefit us outweigh the ways that could hurt us — I feel like it’ll just work. This probably holds true for acquisitions that are smaller, where it’s a less efficient market. I don’t know how it would work for some sort of giant deal.
Acquisition 3: Botanical Interests — The Seed Company [00:51:00]
Sam: What was the third one?
Kevin: The third one was almost a condition of the Chernin deal in the first place. They said, “We want to do some follow-on — we want to help you purchase a really awesome company in the space and power up Epic Gardening.” Kind of like what they did with MeatEater — they invest in the media company and immediately go acquire something to sell to the audience.
Kevin: We looked at a lot of companies. Maybe 150 to 160 different companies in the space.
Sam: Does that mean just putting ideas on paper, or actually contacting 150 people?
Kevin: Actually contacting more than 150 — talking with them, looking at a deck, inspecting them in some way. That’s why having an investor has been helpful. I’m out here running the business, I mention a company, they do the diligence — does this make sense or not? Then they’ll cold email or call them: “Hey, this is who we are. Would you ever entertain a conversation?” If yes, share some high-level numbers, and you go to the next step.
Kevin: We were even looking at the top 600 gardening apps at one point. The investment team came back with a sheet — “Here are the seven that make any sense whatsoever, here are the 593 that don’t.”
Kevin: Anyway, the seed company. This was a company called Botanical Interests, out of Colorado. What’s wild is that, without knowing it, it was the first pack of seeds I’d ever grown when I first started gardening. I went into some random nursery with my brother, just picked up a beautiful packet of cucumber seeds — and lo and behold, that turns out to be the seed company we end up buying.
Kevin: They’re really well known for having high germination rates — the seeds sprout really well when you buy them — but also the packet is just beautifully designed. It’s a husband and wife who’d been running it for about 28 years. They’d divorced a few years prior and were sort of ready to hand the business off to whoever wants to run it next. It’s like one of those “boring businesses” people talk about all the time. And the seed business is actually fairly complex — there’s a lot that goes into it that you have to understand. So we go out to Colorado.
Sam: What do they grow?
Kevin: About 650 varieties of vegetables, flowers, and herbs. Pretty much anything you’d reasonably want to grow, we stock it.
Kevin: We go out there, I meet the husband, and the second I meet him he says, “Hey, can I grab a selfie? I have a friend who’s a big fan of your YouTube — it’d be amazing if I could show her that we met.” And immediately I’m thinking, okay, maybe I’ve got a little edge in this process. It could go either way — it could mean I have an edge, or it could mean they know we have money behind us.
Sam: Could be that too.
Kevin: Could be that too. So we go through the whole thing — the diligence happens, we tour the place, we’re talking through pricing and all this sort of stuff. I told my investors: I’m just going to wear their hat in every piece of content I make until we either win or don’t win this deal, because I know the guy watches it. And I know probably his team watches it too. So for the next six months — this was maybe May, so we’re going May through summer and fall, prime content season for gardening — I’m cranking YouTube videos, cranking Instagram reels, short form, whatever. Hat on 24/7 every single piece of content.
Kevin: We go through the bidding process, we win the deal. We were not the highest bid — by quite a bit, a material amount that the sellers were not going to have in their pocket by going with us. We go out to celebrate and I said, “I really appreciate this — it’s truly an honor to carry on the legacy of this company. This is the first seed packet I ever grew.” And he goes, “You don’t know how much wearing that hat helped.” And I was like, I knew it.
Sam: Not in a malicious way — just using the angle you had.
Kevin: Everyone won. Everyone won.
Deal Analysis: Red Flags, Green Flags, and Multiples [00:57:00]
Sam: What were the red flags and green flags for that deal?
Kevin: The red flags: it basically is a seed company, and that’s just a hard business. Tons of SKUs. You have to do non-GMO certification, germination testing, pesticide and herbicide testing. You’re physically purchasing or contracting a grower to grow seeds that you then receive, test, repack. It’s not like you’re selling rugs — buy rugs from China, sell to America. It’s complex.
Kevin: The green flags: it’s far and away one of the best brands in the space. I’d loved it for ten years. And it was mostly a wholesale business — the online business they hadn’t done much with. I’m an online-first company, media and product. So we plugged those two together, and the first year after the deal, the online part of the seed company’s business is up 60 to 70% year-over-year without really doing much. All we did was move it to Shopify and tell people we own it now.
Sam: What multiple do businesses like this sell for?
Kevin: I don’t remember exactly, but I want to say probably 6 to 8x income.
Sam: And how long until you could pay back the acquisition?
Kevin: Hopefully like five years. But faster because of the audience we brought. We’re carried in about 4,500 stores around the country. And we’re making these trays and other new products now — we have a distribution network. Why not tell all those retailers, “Hey, we’re making better products your customers will want, just stock our stuff”? We’re still testing that, but it’s a big lever. Why wouldn’t we just offer a ton of our products to wholesale in a network we couldn’t have built on our own?
The Chip and Joanna Comparison [01:02:00]
Sam: Have you ever been to Chip and Joanna’s place? I filmed a show for Magnolia back in 2020. It’s basically like Disneyland for — how do I say this — four-year-old white women. You can buy anything in the world for your home or living room. I went once because my mother-in-law and her sisters wanted to go take pictures. They just wanted to see anything with Chip and Joanna’s name on it. And I was doing math: it’s like a campus, they’ve got food and many many different stores, and I was thinking, these guys are going to be billionaires. This is going to be the greatest thing ever.
Sam: And that’s going to happen to you, because you’ve got the same setup — you’re in a good niche, I imagine it’s mostly women, and they probably spend a lot on the hobby. But also you’ve got the charisma, you’ve got the look. It’s going to happen.
Kevin: Do you get crazy stalker messages or fans who are obsessed with you?
Sam: Definitely happened. People make fun of me on this podcast all the time — everyone thinks I’m gay because I comment on men all the time. But I’m not embarrassed to say you’re a charismatic, good-looking dude. I imagine you’ve got a lot of fans coming at you.
Kevin: Everyone thinks I’m gay too, actually. Just because I’m a younger guy in gardening, and gardening is seen as a more feminine hobby, people just assume I’m a gay guy. It’s an interesting phenomenon to experience on the internet all the time. It’s definitely happened. I’ve done the whole delete-all-your-info-from-the-internet process, but it’s kind of hard and it’s never good enough — especially when you film at your home. My set is my outdoors, so I can’t not show the street. There’s nothing I can really do about it.
Sam: I’ve had times where I took a picture of my house and didn’t think you could see anything, and then a couple days later I’ll get gifts sent to my home. People find it on Street View. And I’m not a famous person — I’m a mildly popular person in a small subset of the internet. So I can’t imagine if you’re actually real famous, or if you’re like you and your videos get millions and millions and millions of views.
Kevin: Look, it hasn’t been as bad as what I imagine for legitimate celebrity-type people. But I’ve definitely had experiences. Earlier this year — we film in the backyard most of the time, but there’s a garden in the front yard too. I have security cameras now that record locally to the house. This woman comes up the front door, knocks on it, says “Yoo-hoo,” looks in the house, then goes out to the front gate, opens it, kind of messes around with some plants, tries to walk around to the backyard. My assistant was out there and they kind of bumped into each other. My assistant freaked out. This woman saw nothing wrong with what she was doing — she said, “Oh yeah, I just wanted to see if you guys were filming, wanted to come say hi.” And there was nothing we could say to her that would make her understand her behavior was completely out of the norm. So every so often it’s like the law of large numbers — if you have an audience of many millions, you only need 0.001% and that’s still 14 people who’ll come mess with you.
Plant Breeding and Seed Licensing as a Business [01:07:30]
Sam: You were telling our producer before about something I’ve been crazy interested in — it’s a business I don’t really know much about other than listening to two or three podcasts and reading a couple articles. The licensing of fruits, vegetables, different types of seeds. I was reading about the history of the Honeycrisp apple — I believe it was started at the University of Minnesota. They took two plants and bred them, and it took many decades because getting a new plant takes forever. Then they come up with a really cute name like Honeycrisp or — I had one the other day called Cotton Candy apple. You brand it, license it out to farmers, and build this massive business with a moat that’ll take 30 years to disrupt. Do I have that right?
Kevin: That’s pretty much right. Let me go into garden nerd territory for a second to explain how it works.
Kevin: Making a new tree variety is really difficult. I met a guy at a farm once who’d been working on a potato for 20 years.
Sam: What was his goal outcome?
Kevin: Potatoes are grown from seed potatoes — you throw a potato in the ground. This guy was trying to make a potato you could grow from an actual potato seed. When a potato’s in the ground it throws leaves up and eventually makes a potato flower, which produces a potato berry that has seeds in it. If you plant those seeds, the problem is you don’t get the potato you planted — you get something different. So his goal was a more efficient process for farmers. It definitely was about taste too, but the core idea was instead of buying a ton of potatoes and planting them by hand, you could just plant a bunch of seeds.
Sam: Did he get his outcome?
Kevin: He got it. It took 20 years. It’s called the Clancy potato — we actually sell it on our store. Did he get wealthy from it? He did it under a seed company, so probably they got wealthy. I hope so.
Kevin: With fruit trees, same concept. You keep developing tons of trees, and then figure out — out of all the ones you grew out — this is my next Honeycrisp. What you do then is graft: you take a piece of that tree and put it on what’s called rootstock — the roots and below — because you can’t use the seed of the apple, it’ll be a different apple. You graft those little branches onto other apple rootstock, grow those out, and those are genetic clones of your new Honeycrisp. You do that again and again. That’s how varieties are propagated.
Sam: Each time, how long does it take?
Kevin: It depends on the fruit, but growing from graft is maybe 70–80% faster than growing from seed. And you have to do it that way — you won’t get the same genetic apple from seed.
Kevin: Guys like the Honeycrisp developer, or Floyd Zaiger — who’s sort of known as the Godfather of Stone Fruit, peaches, nectarines, all those types of trees — what they do is they have tens of thousands of trees that they’re cross-pollinating, growing out, grafting, and testing. When maybe 0.1% of those actually become a variety, they now have a patent on it because they developed that cultivar. And then they can license it out — they take a licensing fee on all those trees that go into production. You’re right: once they create the next Honeycrisp or the next killer peach, they can make cash flow off that thing for who knows how long, until the next one comes around.
Sam: I’m looking at Floyd Zaiger right now. 94 years old?
Kevin: I think he passed away a couple of years ago, but he was a total legend in the space. Up until he passed it looked like he was still involved.
Sam: Did he build a big company?
Kevin: His company was Zaiger Genetics. And then there’s Dave Wilson Nursery — I think they sell the most fruit trees in the US — they use a lot of Zaiger stuff. So they grow out a lot of Zaiger’s actual trees. It’s a crazy model because you’re right — good luck competing. You have to spend 20 years just to get started.
Sam: Is it a good business? Or does it look awesome but day-to-day it’s quite challenging?
Kevin: I don’t think it’s the easiest business — you have to know a lot about plant botany and genetics. But the people who like this type of stuff — there’s nothing you could pay them to make them stop doing it. So they might as well have a business based on it.
Sam’s Parents in Agriculture and the Produce Brokerage [01:16:00]
Sam: My parents are in the agriculture industry. My father’s first business was a fruit stand — he started as a stock boy in the produce section of a grocery store, then opened a fruit stand, then created a produce brokerage. Basically you have relationships with farmers in Idaho or Bakersfield, California. You buy, say, $500,000 worth of onions, then find a trucker to pick it up, and sell those $500,000 worth of onions to Walmart for $550,000. You make like $10 grand off organizing that deal. At this point he’s sold over $100 million of onions over the course of 20 years, but the margins are like 3%. He’ll be basically him by himself selling $20 million a year worth of produce and making maybe $300,000 a year. A good living, but you’ve got to sell a ton of product because the margins are so small. I’ve grown up talking to some of these farmers, and it’s more of a vocation than anything because it’s just what they know.
Kevin: That’s exactly what I’ve noticed in our space. A lot of smaller product companies, small seed companies — no one’s trying to get super rich doing it. Even me, back in the earlier days, I was very happy making that $250 gross revenue I was making and pulling out whatever I made. It just so happened that I also like business, and they combined really well. Can I ask a quick question about diet?
Local Food, Farmers Markets, and Farmers Market Fraud [01:19:00]
Sam: I recently moved to a new place — just mostly because it was across the street from a farmers market. I’ve been obsessed with the idea of buying produce and meat that only comes from within like 20 or 50 miles of where I am. Because even if you buy food at Whole Foods — Whole Foods was supposed to be the standard of healthy eating for a long time, but I still feel crappy after eating it. I don’t know what “organic” actually means, and I don’t actually buy into the hype necessarily that that’s the right way to do things. Are you eating all your own food, and do you think it makes you feel different than grocery store food?
Kevin: I think for sure it does. Because I don’t know that I believe in the Blue Zones book. I think it’s awesome, but I think a good part of it is bullshit.
Sam: You know why it’s bullshit? So I did a little research on it. It’s like — what they all have in common is that in some of these places, like Okinawa, Japan, there’s a shocking number of people born on January 1st. What’s going on? Turns out a lot of them lied about their age to get Social Security at a certain time. The commonality between the five Blue Zones is apparently a huge amount of age fraud. And it also maps to when we started accurately tracking birth certificates — a lot of these people are old enough that they’re from before we did that. So how can you really know how old they are?
Kevin: The thing that seems somewhat true: it just makes logical sense that the fresher the food you eat, the better off you’ll be. And it doesn’t get fresher than out of my own backyard. We just had an amazing carrot salad yesterday. I’ve even grown my own wheat to make my own sourdough bread — which is definitely extreme, not practical. But yeah, I think you do feel better.
Kevin: The next best thing to growing your own food is going to a farmers market, as long as you know the farmer is actually growing things the way they say they are. Because now there’s farmers market fraud — down here in San Diego, people will drive up from Mexico with monocropped food and just pretend it’s farmers market produce.
Sam: What questions do I have to ask them?
Kevin: Ask where their farm is. Ask if they spray pesticide, herbicide, fungicide — if so, which ones. You don’t even have to know what their answers mean, but if they can’t fire those answers off quickly, that’s your signal they don’t really know what they’re talking about.
Sam: What do you do for meat?
Kevin: I tend to just go to Whole Foods, or there’s a local fish market called Point Loma Seafoods down here in San Diego I’ll try to go to. And sometimes — I’m trying to get some friends to do that quarter-cow thing with me. So far no one’s down.
Sam: I’ve been trying to do that as well. You need a huge garage fridge — that’s how you know you made it, by having a garage fridge to store all that meat. But I’ve been doing it too.
The Smart Chicken Coop and Beekeeping [01:25:00]
Sam: Have you seen Coop? If you Google “smart farm chicken coop” — I had them on our podcast. AJ’s a good buddy of mine.
Kevin: AJ’s awesome.
Sam: What’s his URL? I want to give him a shout out.
Kevin: Coupe.farm. So Coupe is like — the tagline I saw was “the Tesla of chicken coops.” It looks pretty cool.
Sam: I might get one. I think it’d be awesome to have your own chickens — pretty low maintenance way to get into the hobby. The other thing I’ve done for years is beekeeping — I’ve raised my own bees to get honey. It’s an awesome hobby. Requires almost no maintenance. And from a business perspective — remember that Flow Hive that went viral on Kickstarter and raised like $20 million? I do think beekeeping supplies could be a legitimately good business. You could create a lifestyle brand around it because the content is inherently viral. I used to make these videos of me scraping honey off the comb — I don’t actually know anything about beekeeping even though I’ve had bees for years, that’s how little you need to know to successfully do it. I’d scrape the comb, make these awesome videos, give it to my friends, and they loved it.
Kevin: There’s a person I always look at — I think her name is like Texas Bee Works. She has this very soft, pleasing voice and she’ll be getting called out to take a hive out of a manhole or something. She has 1.6 million subs on YouTube.
Sam: I always look at people like that and think — don’t you realize you could have a thriving beekeeping goods company?
Kevin: The paradox of the creator world is most creators just don’t want to do that, and that’s why they don’t.
Sam: She was on Joe Rogan. I’m looking at it now — Erica Thompson. She goes, “I did my first podcast and it’s Joe Rogan.” She goes, “I did my first podcast. Link’s in the bio. Thank you so much, Joe Rogan and team.” That’s a flex.
Kevin: That’s a flex. Beekeeping is a great hobby — you should try it. It requires no work. And I’m pretty sure it makes your plants way better. Whenever I have bees I start seeing all different types of flowers in the backyard.
Sam: That’s the last thing I haven’t done. I’ve got the chickens, I’ve got the pond — I don’t have bees yet. I might have to get some.
Kevin: It costs like $200 to start. My hives are from Amazon for $200, and then you go on Craigslist and find a bee delivery person. The lady I used was this beautiful Eastern European woman. She shows up in her Lexus, pops out with a hive, no mask, fancy watch, beautiful blond hair, nice clothes. She just goes, “I’ve got your bees.” I was like, yes ma’am, please put them over here. $200 for the bees, $200 for the hive from Amazon. That’s all you need.
Sam: I had them up until recently. I had them in San Francisco and in Texas. In San Francisco I had them at my little house with a backyard, and also on the roof of my office in downtown San Francisco — about 10,000 bees. You could have your hive 30 feet away and not even know it’s there. Pretty self-contained.
Kevin: I’ve been stung twice total. People think it’s very intimidating and unapproachable, but I got into it because I made a list: I need a hobby that doesn’t require a ton of work, it can’t cost a ton of money, and — rule three — I can’t turn it into a business to make money. So I was like, what’s a good hobby? I saw a beekeeping documentary and was like, that’s it. AJ also got me into it.
Sam: I’m excited to see how that smart coop business does. Really cool design.
Closing: Where Kevin Is Headed [01:33:00]
Sam: Well thanks for doing this, dude. You’re the man. You’re going to be fun to watch over the next five years. This is going to be an exciting journey. We take pride in having people on before they’re really taking off — and even though you’re already incredibly successful, I have a feeling this is still early in your journey. We’re going to brag about having you on early.
Kevin: That’s awesome, dude. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Sam: All right, that’s the pod.