From $0 side hustle to $20M/yr
powerhouse
Shawn Rubel started a side hustle called Vecteezy while he was making $40k/yr as a designer. Now, it's a $20M/yr powerhouse.
Here's Shawn on how he did it. đ
When everything changed
Iâm the Founder/CEO of Vecteezy.com. Weâre a visual content marketplace offering affordable graphics, stock photos, and video footage to brands, creators, and storytellers around the world.
My career started back in 2004 when I landed a graphic design job at a small startup in Bowling Green, Kentucky. I got connected with that first startup role by friends and spent two years learning the ropes. I eventually moved on to a marketing position at Camping World where I worked on large internet properties like RVs.com and CampingWorld.com. Thatâs where I really discovered my passion for online business â and everything changed.
When I built the first version of Vecteezy, I was still working at Camping World and making about $40k annually. I had just gotten married and needed some extra income to support my family, so I started combining my design background with a growing interest in digital marketing â giving away free graphics online and earning a bit through Google Ads.
Without realizing it at the time, I was one of the early adopters of the âfreemiumâ model in the stock photo industry. I honestly had no idea what I was doing.
Building Vecteezy
I designed V1 of Vecteezy in Photoshop and got a friend who was a freelance developer to build it out and host it for me.
As Vecteezy continued to grow, I started to reinvest to slowly continue improving it over time. It was a lifestyle business for about seven years, and I didnât take it too seriously.
It wasnât until I hired my business partner, Adam Gamble, whoâs now our CTO, that things really started to take off. We built a team of experts and doubled down on growth.Â
Fast forward to today â weâre on track to hit a $20M run rate this year. Weâre fully bootstrapped and, between my business partner and I, we own 100% of the company. Growth has never been explosive, but itâs been steady, consistent, and rewarding. And I couldnât be more proud of what weâve built.
Realizing he was onto something
It wasn't until I got a phone call that I realized I was onto something. I got a call from an executive at a major stock photo agency. They were accusing me of stealing their graphics and giving them away for free.
I wonât name names, but if you know the industry, you can probably guess who it was.
The wild part? They hadnât even checked to confirm their claims. When I asked them to point out the content in question, they dropped the whole thing.
At first, I was offended â it felt like a personal attack. But later, I realized it was actually a massive green flag. I was shaking things up, and the old guard didnât like it. Thatâs when I knew I was onto something.
Finding the right stack
From the beginning, our main tech stack has been vanilla Ruby on Rails on the backend, and plain JavaScript, HTML, and CSS on the frontend. Over time, we moved from things like jQuery to StimulusJS, but we've always avoided heavy frameworks to keep things simple.
That focus on low complexity has really paid off. We have great uptime, happy developers, and the ability to stay nimble.
For search, we've tried a few stacks over the years, but we currently rely heavily on Elasticsearch and FAISS. Our data science work is all in Python and its ecosystem.
Early on, our biggest challenge was technical debt from experimenting too much without cleaning up old features. About five years ago, we did a full rewrite â still in Ruby â but with a more modular, testable design. It was a big success and gave us a lot more speed and confidence.
I don't usually recommend rewrites, but in our case, it worked. Ultimately, our biggest wins have come from keeping things simple and understandable. The biggest headaches have always come from unnecessary complexity - something we're now very intentional about avoiding.
Finding the right model
In the early days, we were 100% funded with advertising revenue. Years later, we built out a proper marketplace where sellers could sell their content and we would split the revenues. We sell it with an âUnlimitedâ option and contributors get paid 50% of the sale based on usage. Very similar to how musicians get paid on Spotify.
Advertising is now less than 30% of our total revenue, and our subscriptions are the main revenue source and have been steadily growing at 40% YOY for the past two years. Eventually, I hope to phase out advertising completely, but weâre not there yet.
We now spend a lot of time running pricing tests, looking at churn rates, customer cohorts, and growth hacking our way to increased revenue. If youâre not laser focused on this, youâre just leaving money on the table. When traffic grows, and conversion rates increase, it has a nice flywheel effect of growth.
SEO and going viral
Our initial launch went viral. By accident.
I had submitted the site to Digg.com on a Friday night, and that weekend, it went viral. My developer friend spent the entire weekend trying to keep the servers up while traffic from Digg came flooding in. We got tens of thousands of bookmarks, links, and visitors from all over the world. That built a pretty strong foundation for ranking highly, and we continue to get a lot of traffic from Google to this day (about 20M visitors per month).
We spend a lot of our efforts focusing on SEO but it has become more of a big data game these days. We have a data team that looks at the data and runs experiments that try to move needs on whatever metrics we are focusing on at any given time. Since we are an image search engine, we focus a lot on search relevancy, which is a very hard problem in our space.
Hire good help
Hiring good help is a superpower. For many years it felt like I could do everything myself. If I could just work harder, get more hours, and do more things faster, I wouldnât need to spend money on people. That was a huge mistake.
The moment I realized I could spend money to hire experts who were 100x better at doing things than I could, the business took off, my stress levels lowered, and the business grew.
Once the business grew, we had enough money to build out teams of people, set up better operations and structure, and reinvest in growth.
Mistakes were made
Looking back, one of my biggest mistakes in the early days of Vecteezy was a lack of focus. Instead of doubling down on what was already working, I spread myself too thin â chasing new ideas, building side projects, and trying to replicate small wins elsewhere.
I spent a solid seven years building other products that never gained traction. Meanwhile, Vecteezy had real momentum, but I didnât fully lean into it. If I had poured all that time and energy into growing what was already showing promise, weâd probably be 10x the size we are today. Hindsight is always 20/20, and while I donât beat myself up over it, itâs a lesson I wish I had learned sooner.
Also, like many indie hackers, I fell into the trap of building in isolation. Iâd spend months obsessing over features, polishing UI, and convincing myself that just one more tweak would make everything click â without actually talking to users or validating demand. Itâs easy to assume that if you build something great, people will show up. But they wonât. Not without a plan to reach them, and not without proof that what youâre building solves a real problem.
And then there's the monetization pitfall. I undercharged â or didnât charge at all â telling myself Iâd figure it out later.
And, of course, trying to wear every hat myself eventually led to burnout.
My advice to all builders is to focus hard on whatâs working, talk to your users early and often, and donât fall in love with features â fall in love with solving real problems.
What's next?
I canât share too many details just yet, but we have had our heads down for a while focusing on some new product lines for new industries, as well as building various AI tools for our customers. Iâm excited to roll those out in the coming months.
In the meantime, we will continue to grow and scale the business. I may sell a piece of it off one day if the right offer comes along, but no major plans to do that just yet. Back in 2020 we received a fantastic offer from Envato, but ultimately, it wasnât the right time for us. Weâre having fun operating, and still see too much opportunity on the horizon for growth.
You can follow along on X and LinkedIn. And check out Vecteezy.
Leave a Comment
Really motivating to see how Vecteezy scaled from a side project into a thriving company. The shift in revenue strategy and smart hiring approach stood out, appreciate you sharing the journey.
Glad you found it motivating! Thanks for your comment. I appreciate you taking the time to read it.
This is wild â especially how you handled the early stages.
Iâm building an automated execution system for traders, but itâs a very niche market.
Curious â how did you keep momentum in the early days when growth was flat or slow?
Stephen - That sounds complex and way over my head! But at the end of the day, the rules are still the same. One additional story that I failed to mention in my interview was that I hired a coach to help me.
I had about 5 employees and I couldn't wrap my head around how large companies scale to hundreds - if not thousands of employees. It seemed impossible and daunting.
The coach we hired helped us built out frameworks to scale scale our team. We used a book called "Scaling Up - Mastering the Rockefeller Habits 2.0" by Vern Harnish and our coach met with us every quarter to track our progress.
This really helped me in the early days when we were stalled out and growth was flat. Once we got the engine revved up and properly tuned, things started to take off for us. I would highly recommend you dig into that book. A similar one you can read is called "Traction".
Looks cool! If you want more visual feedback, I can give you a quick look from my experience designing in UX/UI. Just don't fall into the trap of wanting to do it all yourself! đââïž
Powerful example of low-friction value compounding into serious scale.
Especially respect the 7-year "lifestyle phase" before going all-in. Most wouldâve given up or overextended. Your reminder to keep things simple (and solve real pain) hits hard.
wow this best story you
Sites looking really nice and clean now. Congrats... and tha revenue! Nuts : )
nice and inspirational journey from 0$ to 20ml/year is massive . keept it up..wish u all the very best
The part about spreading yourself too thin early on instead of doubling down on what works really hit home. I've fallen into that same trap of building multiple side projects simultaneously rather than focusing energy on the one showing the most promise.
Brilliant and inspiring stuff
What an amazing story!
This was a great read thanks for sharing your inspiring story.
Such an inspiring story, I found it encouraging and motivating.
Hey James, just jumping in here because I built something that fits this space perfectly đ
I created a working MVP that auto-migrates products from Gumroad to Payhip using AI agents + n8n + Lovable.
â Fully automated
â Website + database setup
â Real-time previews
â Cloudinary integrated
â Just 1% left (Problem is with Payhip CAPTCHA â otherwise itâs 100% done)
Not continuing only due to hardware limitations â but the system works like a beast and is ready to go live or resell.
Could easily be rented, flipped, or scaled as a SaaS. Iâve also made a version with just the AI agent alone.
If anyoneâs looking for a turnkey AI tool with real use case + working backend, DM me.
Happy to show the demo. đ
Great to hear your story.
Most people admire the $20M. I admire the trigger: when a competitor threatened to sue, and instead of panicking, he recognized that as validation. That moment separates builders from emperors. Iâm building something now that might trigger lawsuits too â and Iâm starting to think thatâs a good sign.
Great, this looks very inspiring
Wow! What an inspiring story. And sure indeed, suing always acts as a metric of success and looks cool in a pitch deck too!
Shawn Rubelâs Vecteezy Journey: A Masterclass in Accidental Genius & Deliberate Hustle
What a refreshing read! Shawnâs story is like watching someone accidentally invent fire while trying to toast a marshmallowâonly to build a thriving bonfire business. Three takeaways that struck me:
1ïžâŁ The "Freemium Happy Accident": The fact that Vecteezyâs early model was unintentionally disruptive (and even rattled industry giants) proves that sometimes innovation isnât about grand visionsâitâs about solving immediate problems ($40k salary + new marriage = excellent motivator). The stock photo execâs panicked call was essentially a corporate version of âWait, you canât just give people value!â
2ïžâŁ The 7-Year Side Hustle Incubation: Most founders wouldâve either abandoned Vecteezy after 12 months or scaled recklessly. That Shawn treated it as a âlifestyle businessâ for nearly a decade before going all-in is a testament to strategic patience. Itâs the business equivalent of slow-cooking a brisket while everyone else is burning microwave burritos.
3ïžâŁ The Complexity Paradox: Their tech stack philosophy (âvanilla everythingâ) is pure gold. In an age where startups often die by âooh, shiny framework!â, Vecteezyâs commitment to simplicity (Ruby on Rails + avoiding over-engineering) reads like a Zen koan for developers. Bonus points for admitting the rewrite actually workedâa unicorn in the land of ânever rewrite your codeâ mantras.
One Burning Question: Given the Digg-to-Google SEO legacy, how does the team view generative AIâs impact on visual search? With 20M monthly visitors and âsearch relevancyâ as their white whale, Iâd love to hear their take on LLMs reshaping image discovery.
P.S. The Spotify-esque contributor model is brilliantâfinally, a platform where designers wonât need 10 billion streams to buy a coffee. Hereâs hoping the advertising phase-out happens faster than expected.
To anyone still treating SEO as a dark art: Note that Vecteezyâs âaccidentalâ viral moment was really about preparing the battlefield (quality content + technical foundation) before the traffic tsunami hit. As Shawn proved, luck favors the bootstrap-ready.
why would you even post a completely AI generated review? Why would you think anyone would give a care to read a review by AI? Are you simply trying to farm upvotes on indiehackers? why?
Oh i see now, you're tyring to spam your AI summarizer script. No thanks.
Wowâwhat an inspiring (and honestly, wild) journey. That call from the stock photo exec accusing you of stealing is straight-up startup movie material. You literally got âattackedâ by the industry gatekeepers and realized it meant you were a threat. Love it.
Also really appreciate how self-aware you are about the â7 years of distractionâ period. I think every indie hacker wrestles with that âone more side projectâ temptation instead of doubling down on traction. Thanks for being real about that.
And that accidental Digg virality? đ€Ż Chefâs kiss. One of those once-in-a-career moments that canât be engineered but changes everything.
Honestly, this story is such a refreshing reminder that slow, steady, compounding growth still worksâeven in todayâs world of flashy rounds and overnight exits.
Thanks for sharing it all, from the mistakes to the mindset shifts. Super motivating. Canât wait to see what AI-powered tools you roll out next! đ
This was a great read - thanks for sharing your inspiring story.
You mention that you undercharged or didn't charge at all to start, and that this was a monetization pitfall. Looking back, do you think you would have charged for Vecteezy or had some sort of monetization strategy from the start, or do you think having the service available for free worked to your advantage in the long-term (by increasing the reach and accessibility of your product)?
I also found it interesting that you went viral from Digg.com - it's been a while since they were the go-to site for sharing and discovering content! If you had to launch Vecteezy again today, any idea where you would share your service to get that initial traction?
I thought Vecteezy is already a big player from the start. Like how Adobe Stock, Getty Images
If it was me i might have give in to the bigger company im glad he didn't and succeed
Very well put. Iâm no expert myself, but this was done right. Honestly, I do not think any of us knows what weâre doing when we first start. Thatâs when hard work, smart moves, and real innovation make all the difference.
Exactly! Be wary of any startup guy that acts like he has it all figured out. We're all just walking around slamming into walls at every turn - and then getting up and trying again.
PREACH!
If someone acts like theyâve got it all figured out, I immediately check for smoke and mirrors.
Weâre all just iterating in public, failing fast, and trying not to break too much on the way up. The good news? Weâre here for each other!
Appreciate the real talk, Shawn â this is why I hang out here!
An inspiring case that has been shared. I have learned a great deal from it, and I appreciate your efforts in sharing. I will continue to follow your work closely.
Damn, from zero to $20M/yr? My side hustle is still at the âconvincing friends to use itâ phase đ. This is next-level inspiring! Gonna print this out and tape it to my ceiling for daily motivation.
Lol! Glad you found my story motivating.
Every bootstrapper has the same story and I feel happy when they finally manage to break through the wall.
I didn't know before that Vecteezy was fully bootstrapped.
Starting followed you on LinkedIn and will follow you on X after 2 days.
Edit: I will unfollow from where you are less active
Inspiring! How did you find the right team ?
Don't focus on hiring a "team" - Focus on hiring the single best person that can solve your next biggest problem you have. Do that over and over again, until one day you realize you have the "right" team. And if you're anything like me, you'll hire the wrong people often. Own your mistakes and move them on with grace and compassion as best you can. This is the most important job you can have to grow your company.
Yes, that makes sense.
Very encouraging. I find myself in pretty much the same situation. Im looking to start a small operation to support my children going through college. I already own a small business (it's carpentry and custom woodworking). I know that isn't exactly tech but at my core I'm a builder. I just like coding and building different things with it. Bottom line, I find this to be very encouraging. Thanks and wish you nothing but good luck!
Awesome! My dad is a contractor and I spent many years of my younger life working for him in his woodworking shop. I too identify as a builder because of him. As the company grows you don't get to spend as much time hands on building. But if you can shift your mindset to keep building - but in a different way (zoomed out) - it's still fun. Now I spend my time building but in a different way :)
Yeah, I get it. I started as an apprentice to a master woodworker out of high school and did that for four years as I went through college. What's funny is here I am now, owning my own workshop, building as I always have but now, I'm also building digitally.
In the end, it's just a different material. I still get to build all kinds of stuff. For me, that's where the fun is.
I'm building a small QA UX / UI business right now. There are so many brilliant people out there who don't have anyone to go over their projects thoroughly to help them launch clean. It's pretty cool for me to see what people are making.
Thanks for responding. I really appreciate it!
I thought Vecteezy is already a big player from the start. Like how Adobe Stock, Getty Images, Shutterstock, etc.
It's an inspiring story to knew that it started from a side project.
Roy - Glad to hear. We try to punch above our weight! Thanks for reading, and glad you found it inspiring.
Inspiring story! Love hearing how Vecteezy grew from a side hustle to such a successful business, especially the evolution of the revenue model and the focus on hiring well. Thanks for sharing these insights!
Glad you liked it Kai!
Really cool to see an example of such success through grit and effort over time. Can relate to the struggle of spreading too thin with too many ideas vs doubling down on what's working and focusing on growing that - it's hard to tell if what's working has more potential than the new idea in the moment. Inspiring post and good reminder to focus.
Curious about the pricing tests and cohort tracking. Could you share how you went about doing this and if there were any specific tools you used?
It's super hard! I would still say we still experts at it yet, but we are slowly getting better.
We built our own framework to test whatever we want to test now. It's been super helpful and I give all the credit to our Data team, and engineers who are all much smarter than me :)
We test things like pricing, design, pricing by country, churn/retention, and then look at the user metrics of each user in each test to decide if it was a win or not. We lose most of time, but when it's a win, it's usually a big win.
Inspiring!
Inspiring journey! Scaling from a side hustle to a $20M powerhouse underscores the importance of strategic growth and community engagement.
For fellow indie hackers aiming to accelerate their growth, consider exploring Moonhive. It's a platform designed to help solopreneurs and small teams build and scale their SaaS products efficiently. With tools for idea validation, MVP development, and customer acquisition strategies, Moonhive streamlines the path from concept to revenue.
If you're looking to transform your side project into a sustainable business, Moonhive might be the resource you need.
Great tips - I'm wearing every hat now as a solopreneuer, and spot-on - I'm starting to feel overwhelmed. What would you suggest to do in my position - Have been building for 2 years now, website is live, app is soon to be launched to appstore. Tried building in public (content-creation), which lasted for 2 months before I had small burnout. I'm back on track on building, but don't know where to put my focus after building. Thanks for feedback!
Hey Nico - Burnout often happens when you work in areas of the business that you don't enjoy. It's important to work in your "zone of genius" (google it).
If you're looking to bring on a partner (or hire some help) the best framework is to figure out what you want to STOP doing. Bring someone on who can do things better than you in an area that you don't enjoy working in but will actually move the business forward. Maybe that's marketing to bring in more customers, maybe that's building? Only you know it best.