Epic Gardening

When Kevin Espiritu wanted to learn more about hydroponics, or the practice of growing plants in nutrient rich solution instead of soil, he turned to the internet. “I kept searching for more information and getting buried in really academic papers on university websites,” he recalls, “and I finally decided I would just create a better, easier to understand resource for people.”

Kevin started his website, Epic Gardening, as a side hobby while working full time at a publishing startup. “I left my startup job in 2016,” he explains, “and initially intended to become an urban farmer with a side income from the website. From my publishing experience, I knew websites could earn money with ads, so I started using Google AdSense with a goal of making $3,000 per month to help pay my bills.” Working for several months to drive traffic to his site, Kevin was able to hit his monthly earnings goal within four months. “After I hit that initial milestone,” he says, “I realized there might be a bigger opportunity here to modernize gardening education - so I decided to invest my full time into the site.”

With his continued focus on helpful gardening information, Kevin has amassed an audience of 600,000 - 1,500,000 monthly visitors, depending on seasonality, and increased his revenue per thousand impressions (RPM) 6x. “By 2016, our RPM was around $2.50,” he explains, “but in 2018 we decided to partner with AdThrive, a Google Certified Publishing Partner, and they helped us increase our RPM to over $15.”

The Epic Gardening team has earned tens of thousands of dollars per month in ad revenue from their site and YouTube channel, which Kevin says “can be enough money to really launch a business.” He and his team used their ad revenue as seed funding to expand the business into new revenue streams, including selling products, ultimately bootstrapping all the way to $7M in revenue in 2021 alone. “Ad revenue is an amazing jumping-off point to launch a content creation business,” Kevin says. “In my opinion, Google and YouTube really created the creator economy - without ad revenue it would be super challenging for low- to mid-tier creators to earn any money when they’re just getting started.”

In 2021, to help the business scale even further, Kevin led the company through a Series A funding round. “It’s been an incredible trajectory to start with a passion project, turn it into a business with our ad revenue, and grow to the point that we’re able to take on funding from investors,” he recalls. With that additional funding, Kevin has been able to grow his team from three to ten full time, salaried employees, and an additional 5-10 contractors and freelancers at any given time.

While the business now earns most of its revenue through selling gardening products, ad revenue still serves an important role in their monetization model. “We expanded beyond ads to be able to diversify our income,” Kevin says, “but ads help us monetize content that otherwise isn’t monetizable. For example, an article about a really niche plant issue might not have any relevant affiliate links or associated products to sell, but we can still earn money from that article through ad revenue. I started this site to help educate people about gardening, and our ad revenue helps me to stay true to that.”

As the business continues to grow, Kevin stays excited by the endless opportunities ahead. “Between the business growth and the broad scope of gardening,” he says, “there’s always something new to cover - from new climates to new geographies and new insights. It's a never ending amount of content, and I’m excited to see what the future holds for us.”