I Want To Draw A Cat For You turns doodles into a $10 checkout

Steve Gadlin wanted to test whether a deliberately silly, low-cost service could behave like a real business. The limit was severe: every order depended on him drawing it himself.

Sell a custom hand-drawn cat as a repeatable internet widget: video pitch, PayPal button, paper drawing, mail.

He launched with a video and payment button, used a discounted Groupon side deal to create a first demand spike, then turned the act into a song-and-dance Shark Tank pitch.

ABC said the service had already made $10,000 at $9.95 per drawing; VentureBeat later reported more than 7,000 drawings sold, a 4-6 week backlog and a $25,000 investment from Mark Cuban.

I Want To Draw A Cat For You was almost comically small: customers described a cat, paid about ten dollars and received a hand-drawn picture in the mail.

The creative move was treating that small act like a product launch. A jingle, gallery, PayPal checkout and Groupon experiment made a personal doodle service feel repeatable enough for strangers to buy.

On Shark Tank, the absurdity became the proof. Mark Cuban backed the business less as a scalable art factory than as a bet on Gadlin's ability to turn a tiny widget into attention.

The offer was instantly legible and cheap enough for impulse gifting.

The public gallery turned each fulfilled order into more marketing.

Gadlin sold the performance around the product as much as the drawing itself.

A microbusiness can feel larger when it has a format. Gadlin gave a simple commission a name, a ritual, a public gallery and a pitchable story.

VentureBeat reported that Gadlin kept his day job while extending the brand into other products and upsells. The site remains live with a gallery of drawings and a renewed ordering flow.