Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses? by jwr on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @05:46AM (#21332912)

I created PartsBox (https://partsbox.io/) and I'm quite happy running it. It's a tool for companies building electronics (also available for free for hobbyists/makers). The business was (and is) a "freedom project" for me: I wanted to be independent of everyone, so no investors, no partners, and no employees. So far it has worked out pretty well.

The nice thing about running a business in a niche is that you get to interact with nice people. My customers are engineers, I practically never get those mythical "toxic customers".

The bad thing about running a solo-founder business is the stress and anxiety. These are difficult to deal with.

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Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses? by denishennessy on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @08:25AM (#21333833)

I'm really happy to find this (honestly, I haven't been looking that hard in the past - just assuming that spreadsheets were the best approach). The site looks really polished - well done.

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Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses? by sellingwebsite on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @05:52AM (#21332945)

how did you find your first customers if you dont mind sharing that ?

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Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses? by jwr on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @06:42AM (#21333212)

They found me. I created the app, and people searching for certain phrases started finding it. There was some word-of-mount from hobbyists and makers, but not that much.

To this day I mostly rely on search engines for customer acquisition (before you ask: yes, I tried, and measured carefully: every attempt at advertising had a net zero effect, e.g. I was putting money on fire for no good reason).

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