AFFILIATE MARKETING

How Kevin Espiritu Grew His Niche Site Earning $400/Month Into an 8-Figure Per Year Brand

Published

2 years ago

March 2, 2023

Max

Would you like some killer tips on how to turn a niche site into a prominent brand capable of withstanding Google updates and an AI apocalypse?

Today’s guest on the Niche Pursuits podcast is the perfect mentor.

Kevin started a gardening niche site following The Authority Site System (TASS) course.

In 2016, he went from $400 to $4-5k a month from ads and affiliate earnings on his blog.

He decided to repurpose some of his best content onto YouTube and social channels to diversify his traffic sources.

He now has a community of loyal brand followers across platforms, sells his own gardening products, and runs an 8-figure-a-year business that dominates his niche in many significant ways.

Today he shares exactly what he did to get here – highlighting the power of thinking big and how to make it work.

Hope you enjoy!

Topics Kevin Espiritu Covers

How he went full-time with Epic Gardening
What he did to quickly multiply his affiliate earnings
Dominating the gardening niche on social channels
Repurposing content for different channels
Building out a process
Writing a book
Buying a site and redirecting it
How he started selling products
What he learned from selling products
Scaling his team
Brand building tips for site owners
Plans for the future
Thoughts on digital products
Thinking big
And a whole lot more…

Links & Resources

This Episode is Sponsored by Search Intelligence & Nichesites.com

Watch The Interview

Read The Transcription

Jared: Are you ready to jumpstart your next big idea? Then? Welcome to the Niche Pursuits Podcast. It’s all about helping you find your niche, getting the motivation and strategies you need, and growing your ideas into something real.

Welcome to the Niche Pursuits podcast. Today we’re joined by Kevin Espiritu from epic gardening.com. Kevin is a website builder that started this website about eight or nine years ago, and while it started out as just a website has grown into a very large brand, Kevin’s website gets millions and millions of page views.

But he’s expand. Into a variety of social media channels, including, uh, YouTube, TikTok, uh, Instagram. He’s the most popular gardener on all of those channels. That’s not where he stopped. He continued and expanded into developing his own products, of which now that makes up over 90% of his revenue. So he’s grown much more than a website.

He’s built an entire brand in the gardening space, and we get to deep dive the entire process with him, and it’s such a cool journey. Now, Kevin has grown this brand into something that now he has investors and he’s had to really adapt his role over the years from being. Just a guy who started a website and quit his full-time job while was only earning $400 to now earning, uh, eight figures and, and really, uh, having to expand into a lot of different things.

Now there’s something really here for everyone though. There’s a ton of inspiration you can gather from the different decisions that Kevin made along the way. And there’s a lot to learn about how Kevin pivoted at different points. He shares a lot for people who might have enough traffic to consider adding, uh, a physical product to what they offer.

But there’s also something here for you if you maybe are just on the website, but are ignoring other social media channels. Kevin was able at different points to do all of these things. And so I think it’s really interesting and I learned a ton from interviewing Kevin at how he slowly and methodically made decisions to scale this website up.

It’s doing really great now, I, I personally love following Kevin’s gardening advice. He produces great content and it’s so fun to hear how he’s done that along the way. Enjoy. Introducing niche sites.com. Are you looking to scale your niche site portfolio or build your first website? Look no further than niche sites.com.

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Again, it’s niche sites, plural Niche sites.com/trial. Go claim your free content today. Before we jump into the podcast, I wanted to let you know that today’s episode is sponsored by Search Intelligence. Here’s a short clip of Ferry from Search Intelligence showing you how their agency built digital PR links to a client’s website.

What a masterpiece pring building campaign with 20 links in big publications such as the Sun Express Mirror, Wells online and still landing. I would say this campaign is a massive success. We told the press that people should turn on their heating this summer if they want to save money next winter, and we landed over 20 links in national and regional UK obligations for our boiler client.

That’s crazy. The campaign hook was pretty clever. It is a known fact, at least in the boiler trade, that if you keep your boiler off for many months, it might rust and it might get you into trouble if you keep it turned off from spring to next winter. We therefore advise the press with an expert commentary piece on behalf of our boiler client that people should turn on their boiler this summer just when the heat wave is in full swing.

This way they can avoid. A boiler failure next winter and save money. Massive publications picked up our story, including the Sun Express Mirror, Wells online, and a few more dozen publications giving our client links, lots of links and lots of happiness hormones. No wonder that so many journalists covered our story at this headline is a massive link magnet to their audience.

This case study highlights the fact that a clever hook can be applied to any insight or story to make a campaign more successful and more compelling to journalists. Can you imagine when people see this headline in the news, you should turn on your boiler this summer? There’s no way they will not click on it.

I will click on it. So this was the hook, and this is why this campaign was so successful. I hope this video inspires and shows you what’s possible with a clever hook. If you want similar link building PR campaigns for your website, head to search dash intelligence. Dot co.uk and get in touch with them now.

Welcome back to the Niche Pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Baum and the Today we are joined by Kevin Aspi, too. Hey Kevin, welcome on board.

Jared: How’s it going? So good to have you. I love your background. That neon light is abs. I mean, I know people who are listening can’t see it, but if you’re watching a YouTube channel Oh yeah.

I, I just recently updated my background, so I feel pretty cool. But you, you have definitely upped the game a lot. .

Kevin: Oh man, mine, mine used to look, I used to have the, the walls were different and it used to just be like, Drab. And so I decided to go like gamer tech dude, you know, and have the RGB stuff going on.

So yeah, spices it up a little bit.

Jared: It’s great. It’s great. I love it. It changes colors and everything. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, so this is gonna be a fun interview. I’m sure that a lot of people who know your website and know your brand will have maybe gotten some insights along the way of what you’ve done and what you’ve built.

You’re with epic gardening.com and that entire brand and presence. And, uh, I can’t wait to dive into the details. Maybe at the, at the risk of, um, of, of delaying all the details. Tell us a little bit about yourself and maybe, maybe your story up until the point where you started

Kevin: this, uh, this brand. Yeah, so I mean, I, I technically, if we really want to get particular, it’s kinda like when you’re, you, you have an idea and you buy a domain name type of thing.

I bought the domain back in 2013 and threw up like a very simple WordPress blog. So I guess you could, you could call that the founding. Day. Um, but really, I, I kinda went full-time on Epic gardening in 2016. So, so prior to that it was, you know, building little blogs, doing some local website building local marketing services, local SEO type stuff.

Um, raised some money for a, what I thought was a genius idea at the time, which was a personal relationship, uh, app to like, help you have a better relationship. Never had been in one myself at the time. Didn’t dunno why I didn’t see that as a problem. , uh, then joined a, a publishing startup at a company called, it was called Book in a Box at the time.

It’s now called Scribe Media. Mm-hmm. . So I was the second employee there, um, doing a lot of the marketing and book launch stuff. And since I’ve left, I’ve left about. Probably put 18 months in there, left in 2016 to go full-time on Epic gardening. Uh, and then since then, scribe’s gone on to do all of David Goggin’s books.

Uh, some really sort of big heavy hitting books, which really cool model. But yeah, I mean, to sum it up kind of a smattering of different ideas, only one of them being like a full-time job. Uh, before going full-time on, on Epic gardening. What was

the,

Jared: the pivotal reason or, or, or, you know, inflection point for you to go full-time on Epic gardening?

It sounds like you had a cool thing going with, uh, scribe or what, you know, what they were called for time. Yeah. And

Kevin: what caused you to move over? So basically from my early twenties, like 18 on, actually, I, I had been relatively self-sufficient. Like I went to college at uc, Santa Barbara, but I was playing online poker to pay for school.

Um, and so sort of was on this econ accounting track and realized, well, the poker thing. You control your own desk anymore, you make more than an accountant. You don’t work 80 hours a week and sleep under your desk. So it kind of seems like a great, great way to go relative to accounting at least. And so, you know, it kind of put me on this track of I don’t want a traditional job and I like sort of scorn traditional jobs in my early twenties, which sure, great lesson.

I suppose, especially looking backwards, but, but also kind of put me on this like, Sort of hamster wheel of trying to figure stuff out on my own and, and kind of beating my head against the wall, like building websites for people. Oh, I can only earn this much money, barely enough to pay the bills. You know?

Uh, and so eventually I, I sort of hung my hat up, especially after the startup thing that I had tried with my co co-founder kind of tanked the relationship app thing. Mm-hmm. . Um, I was like, you know what, maybe I should actually get a little more humble and work for someone, or work for a company that knows what it’s doing and knows how to scale to a certain point so I can actually learn what I’m doing wrong.

Um, so that’s what I did. I, I worked at Scribe for about 18 months. We, we went from like 200,000 in revenue to like 2 million or two and a half million or something like that. Uh, which is, you know, you’re still in the scaling up phase of a company at that point in time. But still, it was further than I’d ever gotten.

And the writing was sort of on the wall as far as, um, my time there where it was like my role was getting split into like three different roles. I didn’t want to do one of those three roles. So I was like, you know what? I think I’ve learned enough. Maybe it’s time to, to go do my own thing. And that, that’s, that was really the impetus.

What

Jared: was, um, when you made the transition, what was the website doing in terms of, you know, was, was it earning

Kevin: revenue? Was it, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it’s interesting cuz like I, I had, I went full-time on a site that technically existed for a few years but had just languished, right? Mm-hmm. . And so I think at the time Epic actually have a chart.

I should have pulled it up, but Epic probably was making like three to $400 a month in a combination of like, affiliate earnings and, and ad sense. And it was ad sensee, I believe, still at that time. Um, so yeah, I, I was like, okay, let me see if I can scale this up to where it pays the bills so I’m not drawing my savings down.

Mm-hmm. , and actually I thought I was gonna be a farmer. I thought I was going to, to farm in people’s front yards, aggregate that land, and then sell the produce to like a local market or a restaurant or something. Um, so I thought I had this sort of clever model there, and then I put that on pause to scale the, the, the, the blog up to a point where it actually paid for my.

Life. Uh, and then that sort of worked. So in two, three months I was at two, three grand a month. Um, and so I was like, oh, okay, like maybe I’m better at this than I thought. Um, I like the teaching aspect of it. I like synthesizing information and kind of like translating it into different formats. So like, you know what, maybe I’ll, maybe I’ll just keep going.

And then by the end of that year, so about six months in end of 2016, I was hitting four 5K a month in, in revenue. And there you go. I mean, that’s, to me, that’s enough to, to live on as far as my own personal goals at the time. So I was like, okay, I’m gonna make a run at this thing. .

Jared: I think even looking back into 20 16, 20 17, those time periods, like that’s a probably everyone would consider a pretty fast rise to growth, right?

Yeah. Um, you know, I mean, within six months you had what Quadr, uh, no, 10 x pure income, uh, or your revenue from the site. Um, you know, tactics have changed a lot, but at the same time, I’ve, I always find a lot of the basic store remain the same. Mm-hmm. , what, what did you do to get the site going? What were some of the key things that made your site

Kevin: grow like that?

Well, I had, so to be clear, I, I had some advantage over like a builder who would’ve started the site in 2016. So I had some demand authority, right. Like I said, the site was sort of sitting around for a long time, so it’s almost like I bought my own age domain for myself and like restarted the site type of

Jared: approach and knew that it didn’t have anything wrong with it from the past or anything.

Kevin: right? Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, there was some, there was some links and, and this and that, and I had created a subreddit. Um, initially the Epic gardening was actually called Exonics. It was only about hydroponic gardening. Oh. And so I, I had created a subreddit, um, about hydroponic gardening and kind of built a community there, which, which helped like throw traffic and links sort of organically to the site.

Um, but really, I think back then, really not that many people were just trying to build a site in the space the way that I was trying to build it. Right. So I was sort of sniper shotting all these keywords and just making really obvious bets on, okay, this keyword, this difficulty level, this, you know, this amount of traffic, just write the best article on it.

And you have a relatively aged domain. It just seemed to work as far as the earnings piece. That piece. I think I, I did get a little bit more tactical about where now it’s, it’s, it’s the power law with a lot of this stuff in, in our space where it’s like, okay, you know, let’s say you’re making $2,000 a month on, on Amazon, or let’s just go back and say, you’re making the 400 that I, I was making, it’s pretty easy for me to export the, the Amazon sales for the month, right?

Or for the prior year. And so I go, okay, the, you know, x percent, like these, these 17 products are, are making up 80% of my revenue. So what are the pages that are driving that revenue? Can I write more articles around that as a sort of cluster? And so that’s what I did. I wrote like three to four more articles about a particular, you know, higher priced item and voila, those ranked like very quickly cuz there’s, it’s e even more niche than the original.

Um, and, and there you go. I mean, you, you don’t need that much more in traffic to, to triple, quadruple the income if, if it’s a big ticket thing. So I was going for like really obvious. , almost like slap your face, obvious type of wins back then. Topical authority

Jared: before it was, uh, in vogue to talk about .

Kevin: I guess so.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. .

Jared: Um, maybe for, uh, everyone listening, I, I, I oftentimes will ask this at the outset or in the beginning part of it, like, catch us up to where Epic gardening is today. Maybe, um, from a, a website and social media standpoint, maybe, whether it’s

Kevin: traffic or

Jared: Yeah, yeah. Or whatever, like, because it, it’s big and, uh, yeah.

I think it’s super cool. I was kind of going through your YouTube channel this morning preparing for this and was like, oh my gosh, I cannot believe he’s had so many lifetime views on this account and stuff, so, oh,

Kevin: yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, these days, I think with the exception of Facebook, epic Gardening’s account is the largest on every platform that only talks about gardening.

There are some bigger ones that, that mix different categories, but we’re the largest on TikTok. Um, YouTube. Not Facebook. We’re the largest gardening only account on Instagram. Um, so yeah, we’re, we’re pretty big on social. The blog, it does pretty well. I think probably around 10 million uniques a year.

We’re, we’re tracking towards somewhere around 15 to 20 this year. I, I hope, uh, with some interesting plays that we’ll be making. And, yeah, I mean, as far as like revenue’s perspective, we sell mostly products these days, which I’m sure we’ll get into. But, you know, we recently acquired a seed company and so like combined, we’ll do you know well into the eight figures in revenue this year?

Congratulations, . Thanks. Yeah, it’s pretty interesting. Ride from the, uh, the basement of my old condo, , $400 a month, hydroponics, you know,

Jared: $400 a month to eight figures. Yeah. A year. That’s, uh, well, congratulations. That’s amazing. Thank you. Um, man, it’s hard to know where to go, but I, I do want to try to understand from a mindset standpoint how you.

Took a website that was earning, we’ll, we’ll go back to where you were at the end of, I think 2016 in my notes here. Four $5,000. Yeah. Yeah. 5K a month. And I mean, obviously the big question is how you got into a brand this size, but what are some of the keys that took it from what is a very respectable income, right?

Mm-hmm. , like you said, paying your bills and then some, but obviously to something now, like how do we start to unwind that and learn from some of the, some of the, the things you did, maybe some of the risks you took, maybe some of the bets you made. Yeah. Some of the things you really dove into to to, to

Kevin: grow this.

Yeah. So, you know, what happened in 2016 is I just sort of slaved away writing, right? I, I didn’t have enough articles. The growth lever for the business was simply more content, more traffic, which drives the levers of affiliate income and ad revenue, right? So I believe in 2017, I think at that time I switched to Zoic from Aen.

So you got, uh, almost like a two x RP M bump. Um, and then I think pretty shortly thereafter I went to Adri, I wanna say. Uh, and then again another two x. And so same traffic, quadrupled rpm, pretty easy way to grow your revenue, right? Right. So there, there’s a lever to look at. It’s like, am I maxing my current input?

So if my current input’s a hundred k, you know, hits a month, am I actually maxing the income from that? And there might be some really easy ways to change that. For me, it was pretty obvious, like switching networks. Um, so that would be one way. And then there’s like the linear growth of I just need more traffic to monetize more on the current channels that I have.

And then what I, what I find or found at least is that stops working past a certain point. Um, for most niche site builders, what it seems like is that point never comes because they’re pretty content. The 5, 10, 15 in revenue, which certainly there’s nothing wrong with that at all. Like you, no one has to keep going down the path.

You, you certainly don’t have to, like, life’s pretty good at that point. What I sort of found at that point is I was like, it’s sort of just a job that I can do from my house at that level. You know, at 5K you’re looking at 60 k in revenue. That’s really not that good. Like most people would rather just work a pretty easy remote job at that point in time.

Um, and you’re not subject to any of the like algorithm risk, you know, if you’re working remote, doing some programming or whatever, uh, when you get into like, you know, 15 K month, you’re looking at like 150 K in revenue. You start looking at your net income on that and your take home and you’re like, still, it’s not, there’s still a lot of jobs that comp to that pretty even evenly and actually offer you benefits in retirement and stuff.

So I was starting to. I, this really needs to win a lot more than I thought it did to be comping out better than if I had just been that accountant right Now. Maybe that’s an extreme version cuz I, I would pay anything to not be an accountant personally, but there’s certainly jobs that are like kind of fun at the, you know, 90 to $150,000 range that you could do that don’t subject you to as much risk.

And so I was like, okay, well I need to expand and solidify the strength of the business. I can’t just ride or die on, on if I drop rankings. Right? Um, and so I expanded into YouTube at that point in time. I believe also a podcast at that point in time. Um, so the podcast now, I think we’re almost at 20 million downloads lifetime.

Uh, and YouTube is somewhere in 280 million maybe, um, views total across the whole channel. I, I forgot, but YouTube shorts has kind of messed us up a little bit. But, um, yeah, so, so basically what I started to do is build the base. That’s more resilient, right? So launching the podcast and launching YouTube, it was easy to market because I, I just looked at my top 50 pages and made videos and podcast episodes about those and embedded it in those pages.

So, voila, you don’t actually need to rely on a non-existent algorithm for, for podcast discovery, there’s, there isn’t one. Uh, it’s really just word of mouth. So my word of mouth was the landing page. Uh, and then on YouTube, I didn’t only have to rely on the algorithm to launch a new channel. Uh, I had some referral traffic coming in.

And so it was sort of a hack. It’s like, to me, the, the niche site or the blog is a way to launch every other media in a sustainable way. I mean, if, let’s say, you know, in my world you’ve got how to grow basil, right? If I’m ranking number one for how to grow basil, and then I put a YouTube video up on a new channel about how to grow basil in that piece.

And it’s very, it’s a very good piece of content. You just beat the algorithm cuz you’re throwing traffic at it that no one else can compete with, right? And so I started building a base out there. YouTube monetizes very similarly with ads and affiliates. So at least I had two versions of the same thing going that aren’t dependent on one another.

Right. If my rankings drop, my views don’t drop commensurately. Um, so I started building out a bit more of a, you know, just like a stable sort of foundation.

Jared: How did you YouTube makes sense. Like I, I think gardening and I think, man, I, I, I can very well say I’d want a, a video along with my written article and Yeah.

Yeah. Different people. But how did you think about like a podcast like, um,

Kevin: the pod, the podcast is kind of funny. So my cousin and I were trying, we’ve always been trying like, all sorts of different entrepreneurial ideas, right? And so the podcast at the time, my cousin wanted to make one, um, about reading, and he was trying to figure out like, okay, how do you launch a podcast?

What are all the steps involved? Neither of us had ever done it before and I was like, you know what? I’m gonna try to launch one over the weekend to like, See how easy it is. Mm-hmm. . Uh, and so what I did is I looked at the Space of Gardening podcast at the time. This was 2017, so there were like four, um, and they were all like 30 to 60 minute shows about a particular topic, usually with a guest.

Um, so, so standard interview format, right? And so I was like, you know what? I want to be in my listeners’ ears when they’re in the garden. So they’re like part of the journey. I’m part of their journey as a gardener, right? Uh, how do I do that? I gotta offer something a little bit different. And so I was like, well, what’s the easiest podcast I could possibly make?

And so I made five minute episodes, sometimes even less every day. Um, so I just recorded. How to puna tomato, how to, you know, pick a lettuce at the right time, whatever. Um, again, going to that top 50 pages idea where I profiled things and like put ’em in and, and then there you go. It was, it was like a little intro music.

Actually, I think the first episodes had no intro music. It’s just me talking into a mic, into like an audio recording app and I just stopped and then I just trimmed the ends and uploaded it to Lipsen. Um, and there you go. I mean, the podcast off to the races. Uh, so that was it. It was just kinda looking at a different format and, and trying to find something easy to do.

It seems like

Jared: you’re really good at, I’ll say, I mean, I’ve heard you say it four or five times already. I don’t wanna say repurposing content, but taking one piece of content and using it as much as you possibly, possibly can. Mm-hmm. , um, for people who are stuck on that, um, you talked about how to use it across different mediums, but also how to take one topic and then write a whole bunch on that general topic, but getting really specific.

any other ideas for people who are, who are perhaps not harnessing that model

Kevin: for growth? Yeah. In the context of blogs, I guess it’s a little different right, though. Like it, it’s a bit more technical of an approach versus, versus video. Do you want me to go on blog or, well,

Jared: it seems that you used all the other channels to help grow.

Maybe that’s the better question. How much did, taking one topic and then going out into as many channels, as many areas, as many mediums as possible, how much did that actually end up helping grow? Maybe the blog itself, like how much was that a factor? Maybe that’s the better

Kevin: question. Yeah, I, I, I think it’s the reverse.

I think that mostly the blog helped those grow initially, but the reciprocal doesn’t really happen that much where the YouTube doesn’t really help grow the blog all that much. Now, the blog’s linked on every YouTube video we’ve ever done. I don’t know how many times it’s been clicked through. Um, but what I would say is, Generally speaking, like if, if you want, if this is a path you wanna go down, cuz this is quite different from, you know, running, running a, an affiliate site or a niche site.

But, um, think of, think of a topic, let’s say how to prune tomatoes, right? Like there’s the topic has sort of like maybe potential energy in it, I suppose is the way I might think about it. Almost like a ball that you haven’t dropped yet. And so it’s like, okay, well what’s every format you could do that in?

You could, of course you could do it in a, um, You know, in a blog, an article, of course, podcast, and then podcast formats can be stretched. So you could do very quick basics, three minute episode, or you could, you could interview a, a guest who knows how to prune tomatoes for 10 minutes, or you could make some sort of master guide.

Um, and then the same, same would apply for video. And then in video, it’s, it’s sort of unlimited because it’s, I, I, I actually have a video about how to prune tomatoes that has like three or 4 million views. That’s a very detailed guide. Exa here’s how to prune it and determine it. Here’s how to prune it, determine it.

Here’s all the anatomy of the tomato. Here’s where to make the cut, right? But you could do the same thing in a 15 minute or 15 second TikTok video too. It’s less, um, it’s less dense. The information is less dense, but it’s sort of like, it’s almost like a lead magnet to the, to the greater ecosystem. You know what I mean?

Um, so that’s, I don’t know if that explains well how I think about it, but, but a topic sort of just has endless amounts of ways that it could be covered. I guess a follow up

Jared: question to that too, which Yes. That, that makes total sense. A follow up question. I, I hear this a lot, so that’s why I’m asking this one is people saying, um, and I wrestle with this too.

I think we all do. Hey, I’ve got this topic. Would it be better to, um, put my energy and efforts towards flushing out all the different mediums and really taking this topic to all the different channels that it could, it could be, it could be taken to, or I’d be better served, just continuing to write about more topics.

And obviously that’s gonna be different for every person and every brand. Yeah. But you clearly made decisions along those lines and, and maybe could help Yeah.

Kevin: Have insights into that. Yeah, I mean, like, so if we look at, if we go back to my 20 16 20 17 transition, I, I would say about a year I was the sole writer, um, for the blog.

So I wrote like the first 400 in-depth gardening articles, right? And. At that point I was like, you know what the bottleneck is now me in writing. It’s, it’s actually not that valuable for me to continue writing as it is for me to figure out how to get more people to, to read, to read it. Right. And so that, that sort of went to promotion link building.

So I had to hire a writer who still works for us to this day. Um, and so it’s like, yes, you can expand to all these platforms, but only if you leave a person or process in your wake as you go focus on something new. Otherwise you just dropped the ball. Right. Um, so to me, when I went to, you know, podcast and YouTube, I had a writer fully handling the entire.

Blog and the only thing I would manage would be the actual SEO thinking, the keyword analysis and research, the topical sort of selection. But after that, I could trust that she knows a lot about gardening, she knows a lot about writing, and she could write it in a way that would, would do well and she could even handle the uploading and stuff.

Right. Um, so then I could take my brand fully, devote it to YouTube and actually figure out how to do it well. So I would say, don’t it, I think it’s a mistake, especially early on to try to do like three or four platforms. It just, it just doesn’t work. Yeah.

Jared: Good distinction, . Yeah, good point. It’s a great way to put it.

Uh, well, let’s look at, let’s look at the, the, the subsequent couple of years, um mm-hmm. , you know, sounds like, uh, you know, you had some real breakthrough in 2016 and then 2017. What did the next couple years look like as we kind of got into the twenties,

Kevin: if you will. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so 2017 through, 18 was kind of more of the same scaling, um, on, on the, the models that I already had.

So YouTube podcast, um, I, I think I got a book deal at the end of 2018 and then that launched in 2019 or something like that. Um, so that was like a traditional piece of media, right. With a publisher and all that. So that was like an exciting thing. I, the thing I guess I would say about that is it doesn’t move the needle for you revenue wise as much as it does authority wise.

Mm-hmm. , you know, someone, but books, especially if you go with a traditional publisher, you get like an eight to 10% cut and a book advance, which typically you just spend on making the book. So really, unless you, unless you earn out your advance, cuz in advance doesn’t mean it’s free money. It means that, Actually your royalty cut applies to the advance in, in the negative balance.

So let’s say, you know, you’re making two bucks a copy and you make 5,000 on your advance. You gotta sell 2,500 copies before you make a single dollar, right? Right. So from a revenue perspective, books aren’t that great, but, um, they’re actually really good for, you know, a news outlet picking up, oh, this guy’s a boat, he must know something, you know, so that, that happened.

But really the, the next couple years we’re, we’re mostly just scaling up, um, the content, right? Right. Blog, videos, et cetera. I, I purchased a site to get me into the house plant world in, instead of writing all those articles I bought and migrated over the best of one. Um, so that was a killer growth move.

I think it’s probably more in vogue these days to, to do stuff like that. Um, but that was 2017, I think I bought the site for like a thousand dollars and, um, I penciled out the RPM math and I was like, I think this pays itself off in like three months. Uh, and so I bought it and it paid itself off in, in like 40 days.

Yeah. Um, because the, the traffic boost from improving and, and having those articles sit on a better domain was just, was just too much, you know? Um, so that was, that was a growth move that we made in 2018. But then, you know, 2019 was the year that everything really changed for the business, cuz I decided at that point I had been on Instagram long.

Um, I had been on YouTube long enough that I was getting some comments, like we had a real community, right? Like a real passionate community of gardeners. And if you think about that, you, you sort of have a potential customer base sitting right in front of you and you’ve got, you know, you, you’re starting to become that more influencer model.

I don’t like the term, but that’s sort of what you become. And brands want to come to you and say, oh, hey, like, you know, we’ll pay you x to, to promote our product. And I said no to like, literally almost every single one ever. But I realized that why are they paying you? They’re paying you to have access to an audience that you have full access to.

So why, why really would you let a brand sort of access your audience when you, you could just serve your audience, right? Um, and so what I did is I, I found these raised beds, which is like a gardening, just a way to garden, um, to contain soil. And, and I just emailed the company like five times a month and I was like, can I sell these in America?

Can I sell these in America? They’re from Australia. And they finally said yes in 2019. And so I bought a shipping container full of the product. For like $35,000, I think. And it was for for sure the most money I’d ever spent at, at one point in time, you know? Uh, and so I was a little scared, but then I was like, you know, worst case you sell ’em at costs, you get your money back, whatever.

Um, and so spun up a simple Shopify store on a sub-domain and, uh, sold ’em out on the water, which means like in Transit to America, and then used that money to buy another container, sold that out on the water, and then used that money to be like, oh, I guess this is like a real thing now. And so in 2019, products made up half of the entire revenue of the company, um, in, in its first year.

And that wasn’t even a full year of selling them. So to me, I was like, oh, this is the actual model of the company. The, the, the blog, the affiliate, the, the brands, like all that stuff is just supplemental to the main business, at least in the garden space. For me. Before we

Jared: jump into the podcast, I wanted to let you know that today’s episode is sponsored by Search Intelligence.

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Mm-hmm. , they have traffic around a certain, um, concept or product. And what are some of the big things you learned in adding product? An e-commerce shop, the whole mm-hmm. , literally getting product from overseas, getting over here. Like what are some of the, the big high levels that, that you learned along,

Kevin: along that journey?

You know, so I remember back in college, I forgot what these guys’ names were, but they were like some of the first guys teaching you how to, to like source and sell product online. Like something net, something net stuper net or something like that. Mm-hmm. , uh, I don’t know. They were some weird guys, at least to me.

But, uh, , I remember they made it seem really complicated. Uh, and I was, I had no experience doing anything in business back then, so it just felt all it, it sort of felt fake. Mm-hmm. , uh, like, like no one could do this. Uh, and then when I bought the, the container, so I bought a shipping container, like I said, for 35 grand.

And I, and I didn’t even know how to ship it to the customer. Um, so my thought was I would rent a storage space in San Diego and like a personal storage space, you know, have somehow have a 20 foot shipping container show up there, hand unload it into the container. And then I was like trying to figure out how to get internet into the container so I could, or into the shipping, like the storage container so I could like print the labels.

And I was like, looking back now, I’m like, that’s like the dumbest thing I’ve ever thought of. Um, but yeah, I mean, you, you figured out along the way. I just tapped a couple friends. I was like, Hey, I. Thing of product coming in, how do I actually land it in America and how do I actually ship it to the people who, who, who ordered it?

And he’s like, oh, well you need a three pl third party logistics company. They’ll handle the receiving. You need a customs broker. Um, and then it’ll show up at their door, they’ll unload it and they’ll slap all the labels on it cuz it was ready in box. Uh, and, and there you go. And you just pay a service fee for that.

And I was like, oh, I guess I don’t have to do that part myself. And then I, you know, it, it’s sort of weird how I was so in the niche sort of authority site, content world that I had. No, I was almost like a kindergartner in the world of commerce. So these basic, basic things I didn’t know. But I think, um, simply the act of doing it forces you to figure out how to do it right instead of, uh, you know, trying to solve the universe before you take the first step.

Yep. Um, so yeah, and just kind of jumping in. Certainly can, can have some problems, but for me it’s worked out pretty well. .

Jared: You talked about how 2019, by the end of 2019, it was half your revenue. Mm-hmm. , I’m guessing that pivoted you into some of the things you, you chose to do with Epic gardening

Kevin: going forward.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was, it was very fortuitous and I think the thing I would always say about, I think a lot of people’s stories that end up on shows, there’s a lot of luck involved with what they, they did, but they don’t really say that’s the case. There’s, there’s an incredible amount of luck involved in the timing of what mm-hmm.

we did at Epic, or I did at the time because, you know, lining up product the year before a pandemic that just so happened to lock people into their homes where they would look for home based activities. And then I had very large platforms and a core product in the, in the market. There’s, there’s an incredible amount of luck there.

Um, Nevertheless, like had I not been proactive to do it, I wouldn’t have even had the chance. Right? So it’s, it’s that whole chicken egged sort of thing. But yeah, I mean, in 2020, um, we went from, I think in 2019 probably did about half a million in revenue, uh, across the company. So about quarter in product and a quarter in, in ads and stuff.

And then in 2020 we had 2.8 million. Um, mostly because we couldn’t, I, I literally could not get enough of the product I was ordering as much as humanly possible. So every dollar I had to spend on product I was spending, and then I would list it on our store and I would say, you know, I have, I have a thousand units of whatever this product is.

It will get to you probably in 90 days. I don’t really know. Um, but I was being upfront about that cuz the whole, you know, the whole supply chain was broken back then. Um, and it would sell out literally in two days. Um, and so then you’d have the cash that you could then try to buy more, but you’d, you’d always have to play this game of like, okay, well I can’t buy too far ahead because I can’t just promise customers something that’s coming in half a year.

Little did I know that was probably not that bad at the time. Right. You know? Yeah. So maybe I, maybe I could have. So you always look back and I go, well, if I knew what I knew I would’ve bought. I would’ve mortgaged my house to buy as much inventory as possible in 2019. Right. You just can’t play that game.

Yeah. But yeah, I mean, you’re, you’re totally right. As soon as products became 50% of revenue in the first year in 2020, it was 88%. Right. Um, and now it’s over 90%. Uh, so we, we still make, we’ll make seven figures on everything that’s not product revenue, but it still doesn’t move the needle relative to product revenue.

Right. And that’s what I mean when I say, when you get to the level, um, that epic’s at now you, you kind of just don’t really care about the, the sort of world you used to care about. You know? Um, cuz why, why do I care that much if my RPM goes up by a buck when that might make me very, very small, like less than a percentage point of revenue difference re relative to the, the rest of the world.

You.

Jared: along your e-comm journey, along your, your journey of, of selling products and scaling that out, did you follow a path where, you know, that first, uh, planter bed, the raised bed that you got, obviously that was a third party that produced it and made it, and you’re, you’re getting it shipped over here.

Yeah. Did you follow along where now you’re producing and actually making your own products? Are you white labeling, like mm-hmm. , how did that progression happen? And um, I’m just curious to learn, uh, yeah. Along the way where you made those

Kevin: decisions. Yeah. So I mean, the ideal. Any commerce company’s ideal would be to own the entire stack, right?

Like in a perfect world, you’d get to a point where you literally own the foundry that makes the metal and, you know, full vertical integration. And there are some companies in our space that do that. It’s pretty cool. We have a, there’s a tool company I know of, they literally own an aluminum foundry. They make their own, they make their own alloys and stuff.

It’s really cool. Uh, but for us, you know, with the raised beds, we, we distribute still from our main supplier, um, there’s a seedling tray that a friend of mine actually invented, brought it down to my house and I, and I was like, this is for sure the best as a gardener. Like it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen.

And so we did an initial relationship where we’re just sort of drop shipping. Um, because I had the audience and I had the ability to communicate about the product, and, and he, he had the product itself and the manufacturing capabilities. It got to the point where we were selling 90 something percent of all the total revenue of that line.

And so I was like, you know what? We need your expertise in product development. Uh, and, and you. We, we sell all of your product already, so why don’t you just join the team? And so what we did is we bought all of the injection mold assets, which is like these big old machines that make the product mm-hmm.

Um, and we brought him onto the team. And so that’s our first sort of owned line. Uh, it’s called American Trade Company. We’re getting that in wholesale now, hopefully. Um, but yeah, like to your point, in a perfect world, you’d, you’d slowly migrate towards that, but there’s some relationships that you don’t, you don’t want to do that with, cuz it doesn’t make sense.

Or, um, there’s just some products that are too complicated and you don’t, you don’t want to, you know, own and operate the whole thing. So bringing it full circle to where we’re at now.

Jared: Mm-hmm. , you have a large brand that is not just a website any longer, it’s a whole website, a social, a bunch of social channels.

You have a, a huge e-commerce play that accounts for the majority of your revenue. Mm-hmm. . , you know, what are, what are like, what are the next steps? Um, you know, where are, where are you going with this thing? I’m so curious to hear what you’re doing. I have a couple follow up questions

Kevin: based on that. Sure.

Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, to do this in 2021, very tail end of 2021, we raised some capital. Mm-hmm. . Um, because we, I sort of saw, like, I, I never thought I’d raise any, any investment, but, um, the, the market, the garden market sort. Required it almost, if I wanted to do what I wanted to do, um, which is there, there’s an opportunity in gardening to just build the next generation garden company from media all the way down through the products.

There’s actually a lot of products in our, in our world as gardeners that you go to the nursery and you, you think you’re doing like the sustainable act of growing your own food and stuff. But, you know, a lot of the products in the nursery just aren’t that good, to be honest with you. They, they’re injection molded cheap, you know, virgin plastic, which means new plastic that’s very thin that will break and go to a landfill.

Uh, most of the live goods are put in, you know, there’s just, there’s a lot of sort of waste and, and poor design. And so I’m like, okay, well why don’t we be the ones to make better products for the home gardener? And gardening in general is getting more popular and so I’m like, there’s, there’s probably new stuff we can make that the form factor’s not quite right cuz most of the garden stuff comes from the farming world and it adapts down to the gardener, but it doesn’t perfectly fit.

Um, so there’s a lot of product opportunity there. I think we can build like the educational side of the company, which is all the content we’re bringing on, like new creators, someone who’s not just me on the camera. Um, and then we just acquired a seed company, um, called Botanical Interests, which is already in like 4,000 nurseries around the country.

Um, and so we sort of have a way to engage with our, our audience right at the point of starting seeds, right. Uh, and we have the education to bring them through the whole journey. And so I’m like, you really can build like the next generation of, of what the garden market looks like through, through Epic.

That’s, that’s the goal at least. Wow. Thinking so

Jared: big. I love it. Uh, you just, you my next question, you just, you literally just teased it. Yeah. If you go to your, like, I was on your YouTube this morning, you’re still the guy mm-hmm. in the videos that were, that are, are popular and getting released and whatnot.

Yeah. You’re still the face of the brand in so many ways. Yet the company has, you know, has grown so much. That’s gotta be. Taxing. It’s gotta be an interesting juggle. I’m curious to hear how you pull that off, why you’ve chosen to do that, how that is gonna continue

Kevin: to sustain itself. Yeah, . Yeah. Well, I, I’ll say, not that I haven’t pulled it off that well, to be honest, and at least from my perspective, because you know, I’m running.

I’m c e o of the company, right. And we have 80 ish people on the team now. Um, so we’re hiring some competencies that I could get good at. I really do believe I have the ability to get good at, um, you know, the operational side more, the finance side more, et cetera. But the, the answer is more like, should I, uh, and the answer is probably no.

And so, you know, we’re hiring some, some better players in, in those roles to help out there. Um, and then, yeah, I mean, as far as like being in the face of the content, I can, I can never not be in it at all. Um, but I am trying to grow like the next generation of creators. So actually my garden assistant, I, I hired a garden assistant for like 20 bucks an hour who lived down the street from me.

He was a geology PhD. Um, and then like three, four months in, he quit. And I hired him like full-time. Uh, and then I, I started showing him in the content and people really liked his energy. And now he’s got 70,000 on YouTube, a hundred and f. 15 on Insta and like 70 on TikTok. Um, and so we’ve created, you know, Jacques, the Garden hermit, we call him as, as like another creator in the network of Epic.

Uh, and so if I can do my job right, I’ll always be sort of like the godfather of the system, but hopefully I can bring on some people who know way more than me about house plants or succulents or, or bonsai or, or anything like that. Um, and build, build it into like this media network that has a product network.

Powering it below does.

Jared: I mean, I mean, from your standpoint, is it almost like, do you still enjoy doing a lot of the social stuff, being the face of the brand? Or is that, is that getting harder, um, to enjoy it because of all the, the other responsibilities you have?

Kevin: You know, I think, I, I think in a perfect world, like, like I said, I never thought I’d raise capital and so I never really thought I’d be on the journey I’m on now.

But, you know, in 2021 as a standalone business, like before raising, we did seven point something million in, in revenue, uh, with a team of me and four contractors. And so it’s like, It was well past what I knew how to operate myself. Like I, there was, I was, I had sales tax nexus in 33 states. I had to figure out how to register and file that.

Like there’s all, when you get to certain levels, there’s just operational things you just have to do. And I didn’t, I scaled the team too slow to catch up to that cuz I was like, yeah, I’m just making videos and selling products and having fun with this thing. Like, it just so happens to have blown up.

Right, right. Um, and so I, I think in my heart of hearts, what I would love to do, The strategy of the business. Where are we going as a company? What’s the culture of the company look like? How much fun can I have? Making the content and developing the team, the operational side of like running finance and like, what’s your cash conversion cycle and your inventory, you know, what’s your inventory planning?

There’s a seasonality curve on all of your demand because it’s a seasonal business. Like, there’s all that stuff that I know, but I’m not the best person anymore to probably do. And it’s probably better to, to have me running, you know, the, the brand side of it. Mm-hmm. ,

Jared: I wanna ask you a couple questions towards the tail end here.

Um, and if I can, like, I’m trying to get into the heads of some of the various people that are probably listening. Mm-hmm. , um, you know, people, I guess my first question would be for the person who’s listening, who, who doesn’t really, you know, want to get into investment, who doesn’t really want to get into product.

Mm-hmm. , who is interested in going from 2000, 4,000, $5,000 a month and taking that next step and actually, You know, uh, trying to, uh, get to the point where their income is a little bit higher Sure. And a little bit more stable. Like, what would be some of the advice that you would, uh, pass

Kevin: along to them?

Yeah. I mean, if someone doesn’t want to get into product, or certainly investment I think is like, you know, Mo most people wouldn’t be doing something like that. Um, I would say stick to basic business principles of like, making a more resilient business. Right? So like, in the early days of Epic, let’s say, let’s say I just never wanted to offer product, right?

Jared? So like, I’m, I’m never doing that. I’m gonna, the revenue streams I have, I’m gonna just gonna keep pumping those. Well, I would, I would certainly try my best to like hedge every weakness of, of the, of the company. Mm-hmm. . Um, so I would say like, okay, well what, what are the levers that can destroy me if my rankings go.

That, that affects both affiliate and ad ad revenue. If Amazon changes a commission tier, like they did by the way, in, in 20, um, 20, they cut gardening from eight to 4% and I lost 35 K a month immediately. Right? Just so happened that I was selling more than 35 k a day because I had products set up. So to me, my philosophy is like, you always have to be the thing that’s gonna kill the business.

And what would’ve killed me is just living off of, you know, daddy Bezos’s, you know, good, good graces, right? . Um, so, so I set up a system where that was more resilient. But if you, there, there is a stopping point for a lot of people. Like, I know a guy, uh, I think his name’s Mike Niche twins or something on Twitter.

Um, who, you know, he, he has, he writes his own content still. Uh, he doesn’t wanna hire anyone. He operates at like a 99.2% profit margin of his business. It’s absurd. Um, And he’s just doing his best to like become as resilient as he can. And I just saw he got slapped by, by Google and, and revenue dropped by 50%.

So it’s like, just do whatever you can to make sure that those types of moves don’t hurt you. Um, and you know, hopefully the site comes back. I have full faith his site will come back. But you, you gotta think about it that way. Maybe it’s, you know, that’s why maybe people start operating like networks of sites so they have something that’s like countercyclical to the one they’re in.

Or, you know, developing more, more, more articles, more revenue streams. I don’t know. I mean, it’s tough to me, it feels inevitable that the whole niche site thing at some point def it. It’s, I would say it’s semi, semi deflates cuz the barrier to e entry is really low, right? The knowledge barrier is somewhat high, but the, like actual physical barriers are, are somewhat low.

You don’t need a lot of money. Uh, and there’s so much, um, sort of copying and, and playing the same game by other people that I feel like at some point, The, like, the margins will start to get competed away in, in the whole space. But I don’t really know if that’s the case or not. You probably know more than me.

Well,

Jared: I was gonna be my next follow up question. And you’re kind of hinted at, like, you’ve always put, you seem like always from the be beginning or very close to the beginning, you put your face at the forefront. Mm-hmm. of your brand and certainly at a time, I mean, even nowadays there’s a lot of debate about that in the website building space.

How much do I need me to be a part of the brand? How much? But even back then, it was even more common to not be a part of your brand. Oh yeah. You,

Kevin: you, you know, like it was avatars and stuff. Right. Totally. Like

Jared: it was weird to put your face on the brand back then. . Yeah. Yeah. How important has that been? And maybe that also ties into some of the things you were just talking about with safeguarding your project, especially if you don’t wanna get into some of the bigger e-com games and how you

Kevin: safeguard it.

Yeah. I mean, I would say this, like I know very few businesses that are in the media world and niche site blogging is media. Um, that. That wouldn’t benefit from having a human person to connect to. Right. So, so I think about like, what can’t be faked. I think a lot about that. Like an honest signal. Like what cannot be faked.

Well, certainly it, it can’t, you, you know, it’s me that’s running this thing, right? There’s like thousands of reference points that it’s me. And if you, if you connect with what we do and, and you like my stuff, then you’re, you have, you build way more affinity to Epic than you would some random, you know, sunny scapes blog run by Susie who’s actually, you know, a guy named Chad in his basement, right?

Like, that guy’s just simply never going to beat us. And, and it’s, it’s not cuz he is not good or anything like that, it’s just that he’s chosen ingredients that bake a worse cookie than we could ever bake. Right? Yeah. Uh, so it’s like, why, why would I hamper myself? I just don’t understand. So my hot take that I think I’ve tweeted out maybe a couple times that a lot of the.

Certain, certain site owners don’t agree with, which is valid, is, is I’m like, if you can’t put your face on your business or you can’t out your site, for example, to me, you do not actually have a resilient business. Um, if simply the act of shining a light on it destroys it. How valuable is that thing? I mean, what businesses do you know today that actually by knowing about them, they, they become in, they become worthless.

It, it’s just not, it’s not true. Right. Uh, so that’s my hot take and I know some people don’t agree with that. That’s a, you bring up a very interesting

Jared: paradox there, . Right? That’s a good succinct way at least of, uh, quantifying that, that debate and that question there. Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . Um, final question on that, maybe flipping gears, but putting, putting yourself in the shoes of, of a listener that perhaps.

Really I an e-commerce play, um mm-hmm. , uh, you know, does have, uh, some elements to a brand and a community going for them. Um, uh, you know what? You jumped in, you just kind of jumped in one day and did it and learned. Yeah. Um, you know, built your wings on the way down as a mentor of mine, used to say, jumped off the cliff and built your wings away to a degree.

Yeah, for sure. . But, um, but speaking to that person and some of the things that they should at least consider, uh, before making that decision, what would you, what would, what would you

Kevin: say to that person? Yeah. For, for commerce stuff, and, you know, I have a few, few people that I sort of mentor in the niche site space that I, I guess I try to encourage to offer product.

Actually, my cousin runs a fishing site and he offers a product that’s done pretty well for him. Um, and the thing I always say is like, it’s, it’s the power law of the power law almost with product. Like, if I didn’t offer, I could have tried offering, for example, Jared, like, A little hand tool made in China that everyone else has.

Right? Right. Yep. Yep. And that could have been like, it looks easier to, to sell. It’s, it’s not as heavy to ship. Um, it’s easy, it’s cheap. It’s, you don’t have to buy that much of it. You can test it on all the express, whatever. Right. But a again, it goes to like, what cannot be faked. What cannot be copied. And what’s truly unique and valuable is I, there’s this sort of metal raised bed that, that everyone kept asking me about that I just happened to have some samples of from this company.

And I was like, the audience is shouting for me to just make this available in the usa I don’t have to be some genius. And yeah, it’s a little more annoying to ship this thing, but it will work way better. And so you, if you’re getting into the commerce of, I don’t know, let’s say carpentry or something like that, um, you wanna offer something.

Is unique enough that they, they can only get it from you and there’s a really obvious reason to buy it that makes it way better than something else. And I know that’s kind of, it’s kind of like a blase answer where it’s like, okay, obviously you would do that, but you’d be surprised at how many people I see try to sell a product.

They, they’re literally selling some random me too product off of Ali Express that thinking that magically someone will buy that and then they don’t flip the switch and think like, do they even purchase stuff like that? Would they purchase their own product? I mean, just, just think about it that way.

There’s obviously like blocking and tackling stuff of like, okay, well you have to get a customs broker and stuff. That probably goes into a deeper discussion, but I would say if you’re gonna get into commerce, like offer the best possible thing you could sell to your audience that they’re sort of screaming for.

You. Ha.

Jared: A follow up question you haven’t done, or maybe you haven’t, we haven’t talked about, um, digital products.

Kevin: Uh, no. And that’s, no. Yeah. .

Jared: Any reason why you just, no good idea. Run with the, the physical

Kevin: products maybe? Well, so, so. The physical products in the garden space specifically, the world is vast, right?

And there’s a lot of opportunity to improve them. And I, that’s sort of the thing I already had going, I guess my perspective has always been, generally speaking, information wants to be free. And so if I can make, like I have a, I have a 45 minute video for example, on, on how to grow microgreens, which are like really small baby greens.

Um, that’s, I believe at least better than probably half the courses on how to grow microgreens out there that you pay for. And so if I’m gonna make, I mean it’s got like millions and millions of views, right? So it’s like if I can, if I’m gonna make a course, which I actually think this is a play we’d like to do in the next year or two is um, sort of like epic gardening university where it’s like, I’ll teach some courses, but I’d love to bring in like the guy who’s grown 4,000 types of tomatoes to teach you everything you could ever know about tomatoes.

And that is functionally more valuable than my tips on how to grow tomatoes. It’s something you can’t get anywhere and he’s probably not gonna make that. So if I can get him to make it with us, then I will do that. Um, and yeah, I think you’re right. Like it would be. A massive seven figure driver of business force that is very, very high margin, which products are less lower margin.

So it’d be a huge move. And you know, guys like the Authority hacker guys bug me all the time to like, make, make, make a course. You know? So maybe it’s coming, maybe

Jared: it’s coming. All right. Yeah. Good. Well, uh, it’s, we’ll stay tuned for that one. Uh, it’s good to at least have still some more runway for you to, to go down.

Mm-hmm. I mean, that’s exciting that obviously the physical products are doing so well, but I mean, there’s this whole untapped, I think so.

Kevin: Third side of product. Yeah, I think so. Mm-hmm. ,

Jared: um, man, Kevin, that hour flew by, uh, . Yo. Uh, again, thanks for for joining us. I think, um, where can, uh, where can people fall everywhere, it sounds like, but where can people, where do you wanna direct people to follow along?

I know you’re not connected on Twitter

Kevin: and stuff. Um, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I’m, I’m trying to build a little bit of like a, a normal non gardening audience as well, like talking about some business stuff. So that’s on Twitter at Kevin Ofpi two. Um, but everything else in the garden world, if you wanna check out Epic gardening, it’s just epic gardening.

Our seed company’s called Botanical Interests. Um, you can check that out as well. Or just walk into any nursery. It’ll, it’ll be the packs with the illustrations on it. Um, and yeah, that’s pretty much it. ,

Jared: thank you so much for coming. I, um, I, I will tell you that, uh, you know, I think if nothing else, uh, and there’s a lot here, so I don’t mean that mm-hmm.

tongue in cheek. But if, if nothing else, besides all the unique things that you’ve done along the way that have gotten me thinking, it’s really, it’s such a good challenge for all of us to not get stuck thinking, I’ll say small minded, right? Yeah. And, and not get boxed into that.

Kevin: Yeah. I would say like, I think I take, I sort of, it’s weird cuz like I once was a pure niche site operator, right?

And so, like I know a lot about that space. Um, and then I sort of jettisoned off of that to build the, the next sort of generation. But I obviously have a lot of love for that whole thing. It’s how I kind of came up, so to speak. And so I think it’s just like realizing what you actually. Versus what you think you have If you’re building a site, and there’s obviously sites like, you know, there’s sites that are pure niche plays and kind of really can’t get into that just because of the nature of the category or whatever.

But if, you know, if you’re in like a passionate category, cooking, baking, whatever, um, there’s this guy, I think Matt Gio, Vani or something like that. He’s got like three or four brands in the space. Yeah. Like, he’s a really good example of it because he’s, he knows what he has. It’s, it’s more than just the niche thing.

If so, I guess I would say that like a, a builder out there is like, if you want it, you probably have it and you don’t even know you have it, and you just have to like break out of the pure s e o pure builder mindset and think more holistically about online business in general. Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . Yeah.

Jared: That’s great.

Kevin, thanks so much for, for coming on the podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Jared. Appreciate it. Yeah, sure thing. We’ll catch up again soon. For sure. Introducing niche sites.com. Are you looking to scale your niche site portfolio or build your first website? Look no further than niche sites.com.

Again, it’s niche sites, plural Niche sites.com/trial. Go claim your free content today. I wanted to let you know that today’s episode is sponsored by Search Intelligence. Here’s a short clip of Ferry from Search Intelligence showing you how their agency built digital PR links to a client’s. What a masterpieces PR link building campaign with 20 links in big publications such as the Sun Express Mirror, Wells online and still landing.

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No wonder that so many journalists covered our story at this headline is a massive link magnet to their audience. This case study highlights the fact that a clever hook can be applied to any insight or story to make a campaign more successful and more compelling to journalists. Can you imagine when people see this headline in the news, you should turn on your boiler this summer?

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