The Seeds of Success: Building a Multi-Million Dollar Gardening Website with Kevin Espiritu [Ep. 87]
How do you turn a humble content site into a multi-platform, globally recognized brand? For Kevin Espiritu, the answer lay in producing human-focused, genuinely useful content instead of churning out articles for profit. Kevin is the founder of Epic Gardening, a gardening brand with a relatively simple mission: to teach 10,000,000 people around the world how to grow plants and food. What started as just a website, is now a multi-faceted content and eCommerce brand with millions of followers on social media. In this episode, Kevin walks us through the things he wished he had known when he first started building his business, including outsourcing labor to free up valuable time. According to Kevin, “When it comes to growing your business, knowing where your time is most valuable as the founder is the most important thing. If you have the resources, what you should be doing is either automating, delegating, hiring, or deleting things that are not as valuable as your leveraged time.” We dive into the ins and outs of Kevin’s content creation strategy, discussing the techniques and approaches that helped him attract over 10 million readers to his website last year, and over 3 million followers on his various social media channels. Kevin also shares some insights into the future of Epic Gardening, including how he plans to use the $17.5 million in growth capital he recently raised. Kevin’s success story is a wonderful example of the merits of a human-focused, instead of profit-driven, business strategy. Listen in to learn how to grow your brand across multiple sales and social media platforms while maintaining a cohesive brand identity. Topics Discussed in This Episode: Kevin shares how his entrepreneurial journey started and where he is today (02:22) The origins and inspiration behind Epic Gardening (06:25) The secret sauce behind Epic Gardening’s enduring success (08:45) How Kevin approaches creating content across various channels and platforms (16:25) The biggest setbacks and challenges Kevin faced while building Epic Gardening (22:46) How Kevin identified the right time to expand into eCommerce (27:41) Why and how Kevin raised $17.5 million in growth capital (34:53) How Kevin plans to use this growth capital to scale Epic Gardening (38:07) Why websites make such a good investment vehicle (41:09) What Kevin would do differently if he had to start Epic Gardening all over again (43:06) Kevin’s dreams for the future of Epic Gardening (49:26) Mentions: Empire Flippers Podcast Empire Flippers Marketplace Epic Gardening Epic Homesteading Authority Hacker Backlinko Sit back, grab a coffee, and learn how to successfully scale your business while remaining true to your brand identity.