Doing $5 Million A Year With Three Employees: FineArtAmerica CEO Sean Broihier (Part 5)

Sramana: How did you find the animator who has done your commercials?

Sean Broihier: l lived in New York for a couple of years. I know a few people who run Internet-related businesses in New York. He did some animation work for them, and I saw it and loved it. I reached out to him in the middle of last year and asked him to do a project for me.

Sramana: I hired a cartoonist through oDesk not long ago. We now have a cartoon strip running on YouTube. We do a lot of freelance hires. Our payroll is zero. I agree that these types of projects are better done in freelance mode.

Sean Broihier: I love what he has done, and I will use that ad for an entire year. I don’t need an animator on staff. I just need someone for a project-by-project basis. It is sort of becoming a freelance world out there. Yes, he charges more than it would cost me if he were on my staff, but in exchange I don’t have to have someone on my staff year round whom I have to find work for year round.

Sramana: Would you provide us some key metrics? How many artists and customers do you have?

Sean Broihier: We are at 92,000 artists right now. We are adding anywhere from 150 to 300 new artists a day. We will be passing 100,000 artists sometime in March. Our sales for 2012 should be around $15 million.

Sramana: How many customers does it take for you to receive your current $5 million in revenue?

Sean Broihier: Fewer than 200,000 customers. It is actually on par with the number of artists we have, just slightly higher.

Sramana: That is interesting. This is a relatively small community. I am not saying that in a judgmental way. If I had to guess, I would have assumed that the number of customers would be tenfold the number of artists.

Sean Broihier: The vast majority of orders go to non-artists who have found us through Google or Facebook. You would expect that if you had five artists, you would have 25 buyers to keep them happy. However, because we are free to join and everyone has seen how fast the business is growing, we have attracted a ton of artists. The pace of buying has not kept up currently. Obviously, we are growing quickly. If word got out that FineArtAmerica was doing incredibly well, then I could have another 200,000 artists sign up overnight. I am not necessarily going to see a correlation in the number of buyers signing up at the same time.

Sramana: What kind of money does your most successful artists make in sales from FineArtAmerica?

Sean Broihier: Our best-selling artists are in the range of $5,000 to $10,000 a month. That is a small number of artists.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Doing $5 Million A Year With Three Employees: FineArtAmerica CEO Sean Broihier
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