Here’s a brief timeline of how I came to be who I am right now in the world of business and content. For more, check out my press page.
Online Poker: Seeing the Matrix
When I turned 18, I deposited $100 in an online poker account after having played with friends in high school. I devoured a few books on limit poker and hit the ground running.
I started to win. I quit limit poker and switched to no-limit texas holdem. After a while, I realized that playing poker was just having a job with an abnormally high hourly rate, so I got into both coaching and investing in poker players. This went reasonably well and gave me my first taste of running a business, albeit small.
Through poker, I was able to fund my 4 year degree at the University of California, Santa Barbara as well as some post-graduation travel adventures. This experience opened my eyes to a world outside of the accounting job I was slated to pick up after graduating, and I’ve been on an interesting ride ever since.
When I came back to the states, I decided to continue playing poker until early 2010 when I quit playing for good. I saw the writing on the wall with poker legislation coming out and decided that it just wasn’t the way I wanted to spend my time anymore.
However, I didn’t have anything else to turn to, so I spent 2010 exploring a myriad of hobbies and professions:
- I spent a month and a half surfing for 4-5 hours a day.
- I wanted to see what life would be like if you lived opposite to everyone else, so I purposefully slept in the day and lived at night for two weeks. Most of this time was spent pursuing night photography and light painting.
- I spent a month playing drums for 6-8 hours a day.
- I began studying to become a real estate agent, then quit when I realized it was not even close to what I wanted to do with my life.
While it was fun to pursue whatever interests I had at the time, after a while I learned that devoting myself to my hobbies 100% wasn’t the best way to go about living. I wanted to do something else that had more personal meaning, as well as the potential to actually help people other than myself.
My First Real Business
Since I knew a good amount about the web, I began offering web design services. I closed my first client without actually having built a website of that scale before, but it didn’t matter — I learned how to do it. This went well, and I began doing websites for small businesses, professionals, and nonprofits in the San Diego area.
I learned quickly that designing websites was a non-recurring revenue business where I was doing all the work myself. To solve this, I began offering online marketing for my clients and expanded outside of the local space, doing marketing consulting for a number of software startups via my boutique agency, Supreme Strategies.
Selling to Restaurants
Building off of the skills I learned helping my clients perform better online and mixing in my love of gardening and growing plants, I started a local company I called Espiritu Microgreens. This business was a direct response to spending so much time on the computer moving bits and bytes around for money.
For about a year, I grew and sold high-end microgreens to some of San Diego’s finest restaurants. I shut this down because I wanted to travel, and building that business required me to be in the same place to succeed. It was my first taste of a business that involved real, physical moving parts and pieces, and was a thrill to execute.
Trying The Startup Dream
Through a consulting project, I met a fantastic developer and we formed a fast friendship. We rustled up some investment, and we started a company called GreatMate.
GreatMate was your personal relationship manager. You gave it a bit of information about your partner (significant dates, interests, musical tastes, etc.) and it spit back out hyper-unique gift ideas, date ideas, and reminders.
The idea behind GreatMate was simple: technology has done a great job at getting people from single -> not single via online dating apps, but not a great job at getting people from OK relationship -> great relationship.
We got a few iterations of our MVP out and weren’t able to get enough traction with the app before running out of funds and failing to secure more. There are a whole host of reasons that GreatMate failed, most of which stem from the fact that I didn’t know what I didn’t know about building a tech startup.
The Startup Dream, Employee Edition
After GreatMate failed, I was hired at my friend Zach Obront’s budding startup, Book in a Box (now called Scribe Media). I gave an absolutely atrocious interview to him and Tucker Max, Zach’s cofounder. Despite this, I was hired as the second employee and would lead marketing there for 18 months, helping the company grow by developing book marketing services, running book launches for our authors, and running marketing for Scribe Media itself.
My time at Scribe Media was a constant widening of my perspective as far as what it took to build a company, both from an idea perspective and an execution and strategy perspective. It was one of the most illuminating experiences of my business life, and I’m forever grateful to have been given the opportunity to work there.
Epic Gardening, Part 1
I left Book in a Box at around 12 employees, right as my role was being split into 2-3 different hires. Staying would have required me to significantly narrow my role, and I was getting antsy and slowly losing interest in the work. It was the perfect example of it being “time to go” from both ends of the table.
I moved on and began pouring effort into a side project called Epic Gardening as I planned my next move. As I put more effort into the site, I realized how much I enjoyed it. It began to return more income, and I decided that I’d build it to the point where it matched my income from my previous job.
At this point, I felt like I could finally “see.” Not only that, but my business thinking was much stronger, in the sense of I could:
- Set correct targets for growth
- Break those targets into projects and tasks
- Sequence those projects correctly
Epic Gardening started to grow rapidly, growing ~300% year over year in revenue in every year from 2016-2019. I started the Epic Gardening Podcast, YouTube channel, and Instagram, in an effort to expand in both media formats (audio, video) and audience types. This went quite well, as all of those channels are now the largest gardening-specific account in the world on each platform.
I also made one critical move in 2019 that set Epic Gardening up for incredible success in the years to come: I began selling physical product.
Gardening brands were coming to me for sponsorships, brand deals, giving away product for mentions already, so I figured, “Why sell my audience to brands when I can BE the brand for my audience?”
I found a beautiful metal raised bed from Australia, got some samples and started working them into my content. “Where did you get those raised beds?” was far and away the most common question in any content featuring them, so it didn’t take a stroke of genius to figure out that it might be a good idea to sell them directly to my audience of passionate gardeners.
I followed up with my supplier for months before they agreed to allow me to distribute in the USA. I wired them $30k for a 20′ shipping container of rougly ~550 beds and spun up the first iteration of the Epic Gardening Shop, which looked like absolute garbage. That didn’t matter much, as I had a hot product and a passionate audience – people will forgive aesthetics if you’re offering something they’re craving.
Before my first order even landed in the USA, I’d sold it out, so I wired more money for another container. That also sold out “on the water,” or in-transit to the USA. At this point I knew I had something special on my hands, and realized that all of the revenue that Epic Gardening was generating from content was a drop in the bucket compared to product revenue…it was just a matter of time.
Epic Gardening, Part 2
In 2020, the global pandemic more or less broke the world…except for certain categories. Gardening was one of them. With hundreds of millions of people stuck at home, interest in any home-based hobby skyrocketed. I woke up after the lockdowns were announced in the USA to +15,000 subscribers per day on my YouTube channel, which was at around 250,000 subscribers at the time.
This kicked me into high gear.
I switched to a 3x/week publishing schedule on the channel, increased our blog article production to 1 per day, and began buying as much product as I could afford from my supplier. It was getting to the point where I was buying 40′ high cube shipping containers, listing them on the store for presale, selling them out in 1 day, and then repeating the process over and over again.
This was a phase of scaling up. I hired a full time video editor, gardening assistant, executive assistant, and increased our freelance writing team. Looking back, this was a dramatic under-scaling, but that’s an entirely different story.
In 2020, Epic Gardening grew revenue by roughly 450% to around $2.8 million.
I thought 2021 would slow down, or at least be something more “conservative” like 50% growth, but that wasn’t the case. The pandemic ended up lasting longer than expected and gardeners around the world, for the most part, had another season “on lockdown.” All of the problems and opportunities of 2020 were compounded, with incredible amounts of sales but also incredible product shortage.
I made a few key plays in 2021 that helped us expand: I bought a warehouse to fulfill our products ourselves, as I thought the expenses of using a 3PL were too exorbitant to justify. This turned out to be mostly wrong, but dependent on a lot of variables that were hard to quantify at the time.
In 2021, Epic Gardening grew revenue by roughly 160% to around $7.3 million. On a team of 5 (3 of which came on that year). Fully bootstrapped.
Epic Gardening also started to attract the attention of investors, which was a path I never considered going down. If you can’t already tell by reading this story, I’m quite stubborn and independent and don’t like the idea of being controlled in any way, shape, or form.
That being said, after a lengthy negotiation and deal process with The Chernin Group (who led investments in Food52, Meateater, Barstool Sports, Hodinkee, and many other culture-defining brands), I decided to raise a Series A round of funding from TCG to help scale and operationalize Epic Gardening, with the goal of creating a truly world-class brand in the space.
Here’s where we are right now as we close out 2022:
- Epic Gardening has grown to 6.2 million followers across all platforms
- Our team is at ~25 and growing
- Our revenue grew 78% year over year
If you’re still reading this, please realize that some version of this story could be your own. I’m not in the business of promising insane financial results, personal or business, but the core throughline of this story is that constantly learning, trying, failing, and retrying does eventually put you on a path to success. It IS possible for you.