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March 13, 2024 • 51min
MrBeast of Gardening!? How The Plant Daddy Built A $27M+ Garden
My First Million
In this episode, Shaan Puri and Sam Parr discuss a variety of topics including the story of Epic Gardening founder Kevin Espiritu, the history of the Hass avocado, issues with Google search results, and the potential for new search engines like Kagi to provide ad-free alternatives. They also touch on the unconventional management styles of Google's founders and how disruptive technologies tend to make incumbents irrelevant rather than beating them directly.
MrBeast of Gardening!? How The Plant Daddy Built A $27M+ Garden
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Key Takeaways
- Kevin Espiritu started Epic Gardening as a blog to document his gardening journey as a beginner. He eventually quit his job to pursue it full-time, growing it from $60k in the first year to over $30 million in revenue today. (7:02)
- Creator businesses like Epic Gardening have an unfair advantage of "negative CAC" - their content acts as marketing to acquire customers profitably. (10:25)
- The Hass avocado, the most popular variety today, was discovered by chance by a mailman named Rudolph Hass in the 1920s. Marketing efforts by the California avocado industry helped popularize avocados. (15:58)
- Google's founders initially believed advertising-funded search engines would be inherently biased and not serve users well. They thought subscription-based search was the answer. (32:13)
- Kagi is a new subscription-based search engine with no ads, aiming to provide a better alternative to Google for the small percentage of users willing to pay. (38:11)
- Google is unlikely to be overtaken directly by a competitor. Its relevance will more likely be diminished over time by disruptive technologies like AI that make traditional web search obsolete. (45:02)
Introduction
In this episode, Shaan Puri and Sam Parr discuss a variety of topics including the story of Epic Gardening founder Kevin Espiritu, the history of the Hass avocado, issues with Google search results, and the potential for new search engines like Kagi to provide ad-free alternatives. They also touch on the unconventional management styles of Google's founders and how disruptive technologies tend to make incumbents irrelevant rather than beating them directly.
Topics Discussed
The Epic Gardening Story (0:30)
Shaan shares the story of Kevin Espiritu, who started Epic Gardening as a blog to document his gardening journey. As a complete beginner, his relatable content resonated with others and traffic grew. He eventually quit his job at Scribe to pursue Epic Gardening full-time.
In the first year, the site made $60k. This grew rapidly each subsequent year:
- Year 2: ~$100k
- Year 3: $250k
- Year 4: $700k
- Year 5: Continued growth
The COVID pandemic caused a massive inflection point as people became interested in gardening while stuck at home. "His channel, all of a sudden, he started adding, like, 15,000 subscribers a day." - Shaan Puri (8:11)
Espiritu then launched his own gardening products to his audience. Today, Epic Gardening does over $30 million per year in revenue. He has also made some acquisitions in the gardening space to fuel further growth.
The advantage of "negative CAC": As a creator business, Epic Gardening's content acts as marketing to acquire customers profitably. "He gets paid one to $2 million a year for his YouTube stuff, for his content, right? His blog and his YouTube stuff. He's making money on that. And that's his customer acquisition channel. - Shaan Puri (10:25)
The Hass Avocado Story (14:11)
Shaan shares how the Hass avocado variety was discovered by chance by a mailman named Rudolph Hass in the 1920s. Hass had planted some avocado seeds, but only one tree survived. That tree happened to produce uniquely creamy and delicious fruit.
Hass patented the tree and partnered with a nursery to cultivate more, but he only ended up making about $5000 in royalties in his lifetime. However, the Hass avocado went on to become the dominant commercial variety worldwide.
Marketing the Hass avocado: The California avocado industry helped popularize avocados through marketing efforts like:
- Establishing "avocado" as the standard name vs. previous nicknames like "alligator pear"
- Putting "ripe" stickers on the fruit so consumers knew the dark skin was desirable
- Educating the public that green avocados were not yet ripe
"Everything around us is the product of some ad guy trying to boost sales. And, like, once you realize that, you can learn two things. You can learn a lot about marketing, and you can learn a lot about the products that you see are not as they appear." - Shaan Puri (20:14)
Google Search Issues & Potential Alternatives (30:24)
Sam expresses frustration with the current state of Google search results being overrun with ads and images, making it hard to find actual website links.
He shares a quote from Google's founders in their early paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine":
"We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
They initially believed that subscription-based search was the answer to avoid this conflict. However, Google ended up becoming an advertising behemoth, with ads making up the vast majority of its $150+ billion in annual revenue.
Potential threats to Google's dominance:
- New AI-based search and Q&A tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT
- Subscription-based, ad-free search engines like Kagi and Neeva
Sam is intrigued by Kagi, a search engine started by Vladimir Prelovac that charges $10/month for ad-free search. It has around 30,000 subscribers so far. While unlikely to overtake Google, it could serve a profitable niche.
"Google's search, over time, has become more and more just... you search for something and you get an ad, and then ads, and then the result." - Shaan Puri (38:11)
However, Sam and Shaan agree that a direct Google competitor is unlikely to beat them at their own game. The bigger threat is that Google will become less relevant over time as disruptive technologies like AI make traditional web search obsolete.
Google Founders' Unconventional Management Style (41:17)
Sam shares some anecdotes about Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin's unique approaches to management in the company's early days:
- Brin once put in his website's code that his goals were "a large office, good pay, very little work, and frequent trips to exotic lands"
- Page and Brin would openly call each other's ideas "stupid" and argue intensely until one conceded the other was right
They tried to instill a culture of extreme directness and efficiency, but many employees struggled with their lack of tact. For example:
- Mandating that employees tell managers immediately when they thought their idea was bad
- Telling employees to abandon projects and "get coffee" for others if they weren't providing value
"Unfortunately, like, this whole thing called human emotion kind of gets in the way. And so it's probably not practical when you have 500 employees." - Sam Parr (44:07)
How Disruptive Technologies Make Incumbents Irrelevant (45:02)
Shaan argues that the companies that end up disrupting giants like Google are rarely the ones that try to beat them directly at their own game. Instead, they succeed by making the incumbent less relevant:
- Microsoft beat IBM by focusing on software vs. hardware
- Google, Amazon, Facebook beat Microsoft by capitalizing on the Internet, which Microsoft underestimated
- Mobile-first companies like Instagram and Uber outpaced desktop-based incumbents
Shaan believes AI could make Google less relevant by providing answers and task completion without traditional search.
"It's that Google becomes less relevant. You don't need search. Why do you not need search? Well, cause the AI just does it... I don't even have to go search for an answer. It knows the answer, and then it does the task." - Shaan Puri (46:30)
Sam compares this pattern to how electric cars disrupted the auto industry's focus on adding more cylinders and horsepower. Disruptive innovations often come from a completely different paradigm.
Conclusion
This wide-ranging discussion covers the power of creator-led businesses, the importance of product marketing, threats to Google's dominance in search, and how disruptive innovations tend to emerge from new paradigms rather than direct competition. While it remains to be seen if subscription-based search engines like Kagi will gain significant traction, it's clear that Google will need to adapt as technologies like AI transform the landscape. The stories of Epic Gardening and the Hass avocado also illustrate how sometimes the most successful ideas come from unexpected places.
