Featured Listing: VectorToons

About the business

Tell us a little about yourself. What’s your background? How did you start the business?

I was hiring cartoonists for various affiliate marketing projects. Before I knew it I had a small catalogue of cartoons. I decided to sell them as stock clipart as an experiment and here we are 3 million images later.

As an eCommerce business, where are your products made?

Digital cartoons created by artists in PH.

What can you tell us about your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Most of our traffic is organic SEO and Pinterest. Advertising on most platforms was difficult. Pinterest and Google have the best results organically. Ad wise this year we spent $2420 on Pinterest to get $409 in sales. But I’m not an expert ad buyer.

How have you marketed the product and where are your customers originating from?

SEO mainly. We have a lot of long-tail sales coming in for some obscure images in the catalogue. Google Images and Pinterest organic are the biggest sources

Is the asset on your listing owner-operated, how much time does it take to run the business, who else is needed on the team, and what is automated?

Most of the business is automated, including image processing, uploading, posting to Shopify etc. Except for custom requests, writing descriptions of new images and managing the artist(s). This takes about 4-8 hrs a week.

What does someone need to do to continue operating the business in its current form?

Manage customer service emails and come up with ideas for new cartoons to add to the catalogue.

Growing the business

Can you list a few opportunities for a potential new owner to continue growing the business?

Sublicensing the images to other stock agencies like Shutterstock, Vistaprint, and POD companies. Start offering NFT creation services. Create design templates using existing cartoons.

What has been the evolution of this asset since its launch?

It started off with just an artist image. Then evolved to backgrounds and bundles and scenes created by a bot that merges a subject with a background. This bot helped to grow the catalogue exponentially.

How does this business make money? What are the current revenue streams?

We sell images people need in their projects. People find us on Google images and want to license the unwatermarked image.

What marketing channels are most profitable for the business?

SEO and Pinterest.

How does the business currently acquire customers and what is your breakdown for marketing costs?

SEO. We don’t do much else besides a low monthly Pinterest budget.

How big is your current team? How many people does it take to run this business?

1 person runs it part-time with the help of an outsourced artist.

What’s the reason for selling your business on Flippa?

It’s owned by myself and my ex-wife. Neither of us wants to put in much effort, and it’s been neglected.