Insight
Espiritu: Media is only top-of-funnel; the real business is commerce
“What I've been building this whole time is the top of a business and not the bottom of it. Like, I thought media was the whole thing. I was like, oh, actually, media is right here, and it monetizes, but the bottom is actually where, where the business lies.”
Insight
Espiritu: Every piece of content validates demand for featured products
“Every piece of content I put out is basically a search for validating demand for whatever's in that content.”
Insight
Espiritu: Epic Gardening achieved negative CAC through profitable media channels
“Well, cause, cause the thing about it is you, if you run it like that, and it was with zero dollars of paid spend, right? And so I have no acquisition cost. My acquisition cost is equal to my media. Cause that's the only way I was getting the word out, but my …”
Prediction Open · timeframe May 2029
Espiritu: Epic Gardening surpassing $100M in revenue is a foregone conclusion
“I mean, I think it's like a foregone conclusion to get above a hundred million because we have, we've made a couple acquisitions. We made two small ones and one large one. And even just sort of growing those, I think has a shot at getting us past a hundred. I …”
Assertion Supported
Kevin Espiritu: San Diego farmers markets suffer from Mexican produce fraud
“Now there's, like, farmer's market fraud, because down here in San Diego, people will drive up from Mexico with, like, mono-cropped food and just pretend, like, it's a farmer's market.”
Disclosure
Espiritu Took Secondary and Kept Warehouse Real Estate in $17M Round
“I was able to take some off, which was great... I was like, you know what, I'm paying these guys, like, 30, 40 K a month in fulfillment fees. Why don't I just, like, start a separate company, buy a warehouse, and then become my own tenant, and, like, build equ…”
Insight
Espiritu: Spot farmers market fraud by asking for specific pesticide names
“You could ask, like, you know, do you spray pesticide, herbicide, fungicide? If so, like, which ones? You don't even have to know what their answers mean, but if they can't fire the answers off quickly, that's your signal that they kind of don't know what they…”
Assertion Supported
Espiritu: Epic Gardening reached $7.4M revenue in 2021 with five people
“I think 20, 20 would have been 2.8 in revenue. So almost a six xing year on year. And then 20, 21 was 7.4 or so. And most of it was product at that point in time, and that would have been on a team of me, my garden assistant, my actual assistant, a video edito…”
Disclosure
Espiritu: Epic Gardening employs about 90 people, targeting $40M–$45M revenue in 2024
“We're about ninety-ish people and we're hoping to hit somewhere around, like, 40, forty-five million this year in revenue.”
Disclosure
Espiritu: Epic Gardening Acquired AllAboutGardening.com for $500K–$1M
“It was, yeah, it was in between 500 and a million. And the way we structured that one is we paid some upfront and some over a period of time, job plus equity.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Espiritu: Epic Gardening Doubled Traffic and RPM Post-Acquisition
“Our traffic has over doubled and we're monetizing at over double the rate on the traffic. So, you know, like YouTube RPMs, right? It's the same with blogs. Like our blog RPM doubled after doing the acquisition.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Espiritu: Epic Gardening acquired Botanical Interests despite significantly lower bid
“We were not the highest bid by, like, quite a bit, I would say. A material amount for the sellers to, like, not have in their pocket if they went with us.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Espiritu: Botanical Interests online sales grew 60-70% post-acquisition
“And I think the first year after we did the deal, the online part of the business for the seed company was up like 70, 60 or 70% year over year without Really doing much.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Espiritu: Epic Gardening products are stocked in 4,500 US stores
“Cause we're carried in, I would say, 4500 stores around the country.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Espiritu: Kneeling device video hit ~150M cross-platform views
“I think it's at like a hundred fifty million views across the platform.”
