One Man's Casual Side Hustle Became an International Phenomenon — And It's on Track to See $15 Million in Revenue This Year Shawn Rubel, CEO of international creative marketplace Vecteezy, wanted to solve a common problem for designers.
By Amanda Breen Edited by Jessica Thomas
Shawn Rubel, CEO of international creative marketplace Vecteezy, has always considered himself a creative person.
Rubel's passion for design led him to study visual arts in college, then join a small agency where he worked as a web developer and graphic designer. It was while working there in 2007 that he launched a side hustle to give himself a "creative outlet" and address a common issue facing designers.
"As a designer, I know vector art is expensive, that designers work with a tight budget and they are often poorly compensated for their work," Rubel explains. "These were problems I could solve. I started with a website that provided free brushes for Photoshop."
Rubel's website gained traffic quickly, and he was determined to grow his side hustle into a bigger business. So, over the next decade-plus, Rubel did exactly that: Today, Vecteezy is an international phenomenon that's on track to hit $15 million in revenue — up 42% year over year.
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Rubel filled Entrepreneur in on how he scaled his side hustle into the multi-million-dollar business it is now.
Monetizing the business and building a team
Vecteezy started by giving away content for free, which helped the platform gain a loyal following.
"Vecteezy was growing through word of mouth quickly," Rubel recalls. "Designers and creatives were sharing the site with friends. Then we got featured by Digg.com, which was huge at the time. As we started building more content and features into the site, our growth started coming from one of the most powerful organic methods on the internet — search engine optimization."
Rubel figured out how to work with search engines like Google effectively. That strategy attracted thousands of visitors; soon after, those thousands became millions.
"We learned what our community really wanted and how to create an experience that was above and beyond our competitors."
But monetizing the business was another challenge entirely, one that took "some trial and error."
"We started out running ads on the site," Rubel says, "but knew the bigger opportunity was to create the option to upgrade to a paid experience for our best content. This did not come easily, but we learned what our community really wanted and how to create an experience that was above and beyond our competitors."
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Rubel says the biggest challenge was determining when to build out his team. Vecteezy relied on freelancers for a while, but people would "completely disappear" or "do poor work that created issues down the road," neither of which would sustain the platform's long-term growth.
Although hiring was "terrifying" ("It's one thing to quit your job and start a business, but it's another to have full-time employees trusting you to pay their bills," Rubel says), it was the right path forward. Rubel considers the decision "the single most important choice" in scaling Vecteezy successfully.
Organic traffic remains an essential part of Vecteezy's growth strategy today, but Rubel and his team have also honed in on marketing. "We've put in time on everything from social media and email marketing and paid ads, which has helped us improve retention and compete with brands much larger than us," he says.
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Looking forward to a record-breaking year
Now, Vecteezy is ready for its biggest year yet.
Last month, the company announced an exclusive deal with Shutterstock. Vecteezy will use the global creative platform as its premier image source, increasing the total number of premium and relevant results on Vecteezy and building a "shared pipeline of high-intent visitors" between the two brands.
"It's a huge win for our customers," Rubel says, "giving them even more content to choose from beyond Vecteezy's standalone library of 20 million files."
That expansive file offering inspired Vecteezy to address another pain point for its users: searching for the perfect image.
"For so many in this industry, our thinking is done visually, and it can often be hard to put exactly what we're looking for into words," Rubel explains, "which is why we spent the past several months using AI to develop an industry-leading reverse image search engine. Unlike other leaders in this space, our AI better understands the context behind an image to generate pinpoint accurate, image-based searches better than the industry giants."
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Take a reverse-image search for a "blueberry field," for example.
"A competitive reverse image search for a 'blueberry field' doesn't understand what the source image is, resulting in unrelated images of flower fields," Rubel says. "The same image search with Vecteezy better understands the context and returns only blueberry-related results."
In addition to being excited about Vecteezy's record-breaking revenue year, Rubel and his team look forward to continuing to find new ways to make design easier for the company's more than 100 million users — at an affordable price.
And to any side hustler who wants to take their business to the next level? Rubel offers some practical words of advice: "Be realistic."
"Pick something you're passionate about, but do your research and make sure the market is there for whatever product or service you're pursuing," he says. "A good balance of passion and some business acumen will not only keep you motivated to stick with your hustle but will also arm you with the tools you need to build a solid foundation for a successful business."
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