Epic Gardening's COVID Surge
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A story about how Kevin Espiritu built Epic Gardening from a small blog to a $30M+ business.
"This guy Kevin Espiritu used to work at Scribe, the book-in-a-box company. To get away from his online gaming addiction, he and his brother decided to start gardening. They went to a plant nursery, bought some stuff, and started figuring it out. Along the way, he started blogging his journey.
While at Scribe, his blog started getting traffic because he was very relatable as a beginner. The blog was making about $16-17,000 a year when he decided to quit his job. He started with hydroponic gardening, created r/hydro on Reddit, but later rebranded to Epic Gardening when he realized hydroponics was too niche.
His growth was steady: First year $60K, second year $100K+, third year $250K, fourth year $7M, fifth year kept growing. Today the business does over $30M a year. The big inflection point was COVID - his channel started adding 15,000 subscribers a day because everyone wanted to get outside and garden.
Initially, all his money came from ads and affiliates, making less than $1M. Then he launched products, starting by importing from Australia. Now he's huge on social media with 2M on TikTok, 2M on YouTube, 1M elsewhere. He just raised money from Chernin, the same guys who backed Barstool and Eater, to keep scaling the business."
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.