Insight
Espiritu: Cross-platform audience funneling usually fails
“As you expand every platform, you think like, okay, well I can get someone from this one to that one. It tends not to work. You tend to have to just play each platform for what it is.”
Insight
Espiritu: The average career lifespan for a YouTuber is six years
“I'm 13 years old as a YouTuber, which is like two YouTuber lifespans. I think it lasts about six years or so.”
Insight
Espiritu: Content acts as a pre-validation engine for launching products
“The beauty of having content is that you kind of get like a pre-validation engine for what you might want to put out there.”
Assertion Partly supported
Espiritu: Epic Gardening scaled revenue from $500k to $7.1M before Series A
“So we went from 500 to like 2.8 million to 7.1 million the next year and then raise, raise a series a,”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Espiritu: Epic Gardening generated $7.5M in 2021 with four people
“So up until 20, 21 at tail end is when I raised the series a, it was me or contractors. So it was me, editor, a writer and an assistant. And that was it. And we had, did, we did about 7.5 million that year, mostly product sales at that point.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Espiritu: Epic Gardening grew from 4 to 90 people after seed acquisition
“We scaled, I think from December, 21 to December, 22, from four people to about 90. Cause we use some of the funding to buy a seed seed company that had 60 people.”
Insight
Espiritu: Seed commerce is almost impossible to scale quickly without acquisition
“With seed, it's almost always going to be a buy because the infrastructure to actually like acquire seed, we have, we sell almost 800 varieties of seed, vegetables, flowers, herbs. It's nearly impossible to scale that really quickly. If they have like buyer's …”
Insight
Espiritu: Seeds Are the Only Gardening Product Requiring Annual Repurchases
“The seed margins are very good. And it's actually the only item in gardening you literally need every year. Every other thing you technically could get away with not buying again, like a raised bed or something like that.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Espiritu: Epic Gardening entered 1,300 Petco stores due to fan buyer
“Like we're in about 1300 pet codes now. And I would say the sole reason is because The major buyer at Petco has just been an epic fan for a long time.”
What-if
Espiritu: Making YouTube videos had higher ROI than filming Magnolia TV show
“If I take those 45 days and just calculate, let's say I was making call even just 15 more videos, it would have been not only more money straight up, but more sort of brand value to the business to just make the YouTube videos.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Espiritu: Epic Gardening Tripled Acquired Seed Brand's DTC Revenue Via Content
“And so we've tripled D to C just by saying we own the business. Basically we haven't done like a crazy amount of improvements. As far as like D to C goes, we just actually paid attention to it and plugged it into content.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Espiritu: Acquired seed brand is in 75% of US independent nurseries
“We're in 75% of all independent nurseries in the country, which it would be different if like we had home Depot or target or something, and we could just say, take this line.”
Disclosure
Espiritu: Epic Gardening trained custom AI on internal content and databases
“So we trained the model. Just on our own internal content and then like licensed databases of let's say plant facts or weather or something like that. And so if you ask it a question or send it a picture, it'll give you the answer that the closest answer you c…”
Disclosure
Espiritu: Epic Gardening licensed 200 hours to Samsung FAST channel
“We have a Samsung fast channel now that we're, we've licensed 200 hours, hopefully, hopefully more soon.”
Assertion Partly supported
Espiritu: Epic Gardening grew from 180k to over 1M YouTube subscribers in 2020
“2020 of course was the year. I think we started that year at a 180 K on YouTube. I ended that year at over a million plus another channel, almost at a hundred K.”
Assertion Supported
Espiritu: Two-thirds of gardeners start at big-box retail
“Two thirds of gardeners spend their first dollar at a big box. We're not in any of them.”
