Vecteezy is an online marketplace where users can license stock photos, vector graphics, and stock footage, with millions of free assets and additional commercial licensing options for Pro subscribers. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Vecteezy Founder and CEO Shawn Rubel to learn more.
Shawn Rubel’s Background
When asked about his background and the experiences that led him into entrepreneurship, Rubel shared:
I’ve always found myself gravitating toward creativity.
My college degree is in Visual Arts, so design is something I’ve always been passionate about. After college, I joined a small agency where I worked as a graphic designer. That’s when I really fell in love with e-commerce and entrepreneurship.
How Vecteezy Started
When discussing how the idea for Vecteezy came together, Rubel explained:
I noticed that there was a major opportunity to offer affordable and free creative design resources. Vector graphics and stock images were very pricey, and most designers, myself included, work on a tight budget.
At the same time, stock image professionals working with the biggest companies were frustrated about receiving poor compensation for their work, while the agencies they worked for took the majority share of their earnings. The entire stock image industry was in a bind.
I knew I could solve this. Great creative content shouldn’t live behind a wall, and the creative community that crafts that content deserves to be fairly compensated.
I launched Brusheezy, a site with free Photoshop brushes, in 2007 as a side project. The site took off quickly, and I used the same concept for Vecteezy, a site that began with free vector graphics.
In 2009, I left my day job to pursue my business full-time. Over the next few years, Vecteezy grew extremely fast, and that’s where my focus has been since then.
Today, Vecteezy has grown into one of the largest creative marketplaces in the world, offering over 60 million high-quality, affordable resources to more than 20 million users each month.
Inc. 5000 Recognition
When asked about his favorite memory from working at Vecteezy, Rubel reflected:
Being named to the Inc. 5000 list for the first time in 2021 stands out. What made it so special wasn’t just the recognition itself, but what it represented.
It was the culmination of our team’s incredible hard work and dedication. By that point, we had grown significantly from those early days when I was running the site on my own, and being on that list as one of the fastest-growing businesses in America validated everything the team had accomplished together.
It was a moment when I could look at what we’d built as a collective effort and feel genuinely proud of each person who contributed to getting us there.
Competing As A Smaller Company
When discussing the challenges of building Vecteezy and competing in the current market, Rubel acknowledged:
Being a smaller startup in such a competitive industry means we need to be scrappy all the time. We pride ourselves on our ability to move much more quickly than our larger competitors.
While the industry giants have an abundance of resources at their disposal, they also have many more hoops to jump through before they can implement new tools or adapt in other ways.
For example, in 2023, we leveraged artificial intelligence to power a reverse image search feature that allows our users to find similar images, and it blows everything else out of the water as far as accuracy.
Users can upload any image, and the AI-powered search engine will provide highly relevant, related images in return. Reverse image search isn’t new, but our take on it is much more powerful. Competitors’ reverse image search engines were ineffective at yielding quality image results.
Our unique artificial intelligence technology understands the actual context of an image, converts that context into embeddings, and retrieves images with similar embeddings. Other solutions are only able to recognize an image’s patterns and search for images with similar patterns, which produces much less accurate results.
Core Products And Features
When describing Vecteezy’s core products and features, Rubel explained:
Vecteezy is one of the largest creative marketplaces globally, with millions of free stock photos, vectors, and stock video footage that are safe for personal or commercial use.
We provide content from a global network of contributors, making professional-quality creative assets accessible to everyone. Vecteezy stands out from its competitors and offers additional value to the creative and design communities through its robust licensing and legal guarantees.
Growth Of AI Tools
When asked how the growth of AI-based photo-editing tools has affected Vecteezy, Rubel replied:
Absolutely. For better or worse, there’s been an explosion of interest in AI-based tools across our industry.
On the one hand, these tools can save creatives a tremendous amount of time, their most valuable asset besides the work product they create, especially for creatives who work on their own or at small agencies. On the other hand, images edited or fully generated through AI are everywhere, and a delicate balance needs to be reached and maintained thoughtfully.
I am optimistic about the way AI tools are developing and spreading. In our own product offering, we allow contributors to upload content that was created with the help of AI, but we also allow users to filter search results for AI or non-AI content based on their preferences.
This has helped us provide more content to our end users and diversify the content in our library, since AI can easily generate images for niche categories.
Additionally, we’re exploring what we can do with AI in our web-based template editor, along with how we might use it to create fully original images. We released our AI-powered photo editor Reimagine earlier this year, and there’s more on the way. There’s a lot of opportunity, but we’re making sure we build around this technology with intention.
Major Company Milestones
When asked about Vecteezy’s most significant milestones, Rubel cited:
Hitting the 100 million user mark was pretty incredible. It’s hard to even picture that many people, let alone comprehend that so many people come to us for creative content.
Supporting Creative Contributors
When invited to share customer and contributor success stories, Rubel commented:
We have some absolute champions in our contributor program who are high earners. For some of these people, the money they make from Vecteezy has supported them through important life events like a wedding or a life transition. Other times, it’s simply enough to help a creative person piece together a lifestyle around doing what they love.
Contributor Yurii Radkevych, one of our top contributors in Poland, sent us a note the other day: “Collaborating with Vecteezy has not only allowed me to showcase my creative skills but has also provided a platform to reach a vast audience of users worldwide. The feeling of seeing my content reach millions of people each month on Vecteezy is incredibly gratifying.”
“Knowing that my creations are being appreciated, downloaded, and utilized by countless individuals is immensely fulfilling. It motivates me to continue producing high-quality content and push my creative boundaries further.”
“While creating content for stock websites like Vecteezy is a significant part of my professional life, I also run my own business full-time. Vecteezy has provided me with an excellent additional source of monthly income, complementing my other endeavors. It has allowed me to diversify my income streams and build a sustainable career centered around my creative pursuits.”
What I’m most proud of, though, is the greater creator community we’ve built and been able to support. We have over 35,000 contributors worldwide who make money through Vecteezy.
Bootstrapped Growth
When asked about Vecteezy’s funding and revenue, Rubel revealed:
We are fully bootstrapped, profitable, and growing fast. Our Pro subscription revenue grew by 40% year-over-year, and we were honored to be on the Inc. 5000 list as one of the fastest-growing privately owned businesses in the U.S. for four consecutive years, from 2021 through 2024.
Stock Photography Market
When discussing the total addressable market Vecteezy is pursuing, Rubel assessed:
The global stock photography market is estimated at $4.34 billion and is expected to reach $5.62 billion by 2029.
Editorial images represent the largest sector of the market, and we just launched editorial images on Vecteezy, so we’re really excited about the future.
Beyond that, there’s endless potential to help more people create and design, and we plan to support that need.
Vecteezy’s Differentiators
When asked what differentiates Vecteezy from its competition, Rubel affirmed:
We make the creative process simple. If you look at our reviews on Trustpilot, G2, Google, or Facebook, you’ll see that we are the people’s choice. I believe a huge part of that comes down to our efforts to simplify the creative process by providing truly exceptional content, value, and service.
Our pricing provides ample value compared to competitors. We’re a great option for users who need affordable imagery with flexible licensing.
Our licensing is also more straightforward for our customers and users. We provide our community with the confidence that they can use images for commercial purposes without risks.
For example, every photo of a person or recognizable landmark on our website must include a model or property release. This is something that most free photo sites do not require, and it creates significant potential for legal consequences down the road for end users.
We’ve built an exceptional search engine to make finding the right content easy. This is critical because people do not like losing time on irrelevant search results. Users can filter by a number of attributes to find exactly the right piece of content quickly.
Future Goals
When discussing Vecteezy’s future goals, Rubel concluded:
Our primary focus is continuing to scale our content library while maintaining the high quality our users expect.
Beyond content growth, we’re strategically investing in AI-powered tools that enhance, rather than replace, the creative process. I already mentioned our reverse image search, and we also launched an AI-powered background remover. We’re always looking for opportunities to add new tools and features that help our users.
Ultimately, our goal is to become the go-to creative marketplace globally, not just by being the biggest, but by being the best at serving both our end users and the talented creators who make our platform possible.
We’re playing the long game, building sustainably as a bootstrapped company, and staying true to our founding mission of democratizing access to high-quality creative resources.
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