I created Perfect Wiki and reached $250k in annual revenue without investors

&gt; It’s available right where employees already spend most of their day — in Microsoft Teams.<p>Depression and dread is coming through me. All the repressed memories are flowing back up.

Looks like a great product and congratulations on your success.<p>I miss the days when HN was more stories like this of people using their expertise to make money - whether it was code, book launches, writing courses etc. Is that harder to do these days, or has the HN news appetite shifted?

Congrats, this is a great story! One small thing:<p>&gt; Every time I check out competitors&#x27; sites — those who also build knowledge base or customer support platforms — I notice something odd. Almost all of them use third-party tools like Intercom or Zendesk to support their own customers. That surprises me. If your product is so great — why don’t you use it yourself? For me, that’s a golden rule: your product should be so good you want to use it yourself. If not, that means something’s wrong.<p>Is this not just because Intercom and Zendesk have their own ticketing systems tightly integrated to the docs? Integrating the two allows e.g. customer query auto-reply based on RAG with the documentation, or auto-replying with the 3 support articles most likely to solve the problem. I assume Perfect Wiki has no equivalent ticket integration?

What I took away from this story is that I forget that there are ecosystems outside the Apple App Store. I’ve become so accustomed to thinking of releasing on Apple first that I didn’t even know you could make money through Teams addons.

This is cool, I never even heard of MS Team&#x27;s marketplace. My wife uses Teams a lot for work and likes it. I should put BrowserBox on there. I need marketing ideas.<p>The way he did product research to find out what customers really needed, after testing the waters with a translator, was really good.<p>Definition of make something people want. Classic way business has always been created, by keen observation of the market. Well done!

Congratulations on your achievement.<p>However, this is one of my frustrations about Teams - it absolutely sucks, and what few integrations it has from Microsoft absolutely sucks. You are already paying too much to MS for it to not be working properly.<p>God knows how much my company is giving to Microsoft for us to have crappy and expensive (read: time wasting) experiences with Teams, Windows 11 onboarding, Azure DevOps (better than what wr had, at least), Visual Studio 2022, etc.

This product reminds me a bit of &#x27;You need a wiki&#x27;, which allows you to maintain your wiki in Google Drive, but still browse it easily:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youneedawiki.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youneedawiki.com&#x2F;</a><p>As the files are all stored in Google Drive, so there&#x27;s no vendor lock-in.<p>The documentation site is also made with their product: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.youneedawiki.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.youneedawiki.com&#x2F;</a>

Very cool story! I love it. Here’s a direct archive link for those who want to support their fellow tech folks but don’t want to support habr, which directly funds Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;wDHrB" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;wDHrB</a>

Love it. Bob Dorf, successful entrepreneur and investor, once told me:<p>&quot;Avoid investors! Avoid investors. Avoid investors for as long as humanly possible.&quot;

&gt; Currently, the team behind Perfect Wiki is just two people.<p>It would have been 20 people if investors were brought in. Missed opportunity!<p>Edit: forgot to mention that it would have had the same revenue and been a failure :)

Congratulations! Great work so far. I too have been looking to do something like this for a long time now. The biggest challenge for me is that I am locked into the golden handcuffs that FAANG companies put on you. Guess I will wait till I get laid off. I don&#x27;t have the guts to resign and follow my dream (<i>heavy sigh</i>)

Keep that surplush cash in the business with a window of a few years to absorb any downturn, don&#x27;t get a Bugatti :) Not that I am qualified to provide advice on this topic. Great success story.

&gt; In May 2020, I lost my job and started thinking about new projects to launch or where to direct my efforts<p>I hope this becomes more common -- laid off engineers starting their own digital products.

<p><pre><code> Me: can dynamic content such as inventory feeds be included in wiki pages? *AI Assistant is typing* AI: Hmm, I couldn&#x27;t find an answer to that. Can you rephrase your question or give me a bit more detail? </code></pre> This is why I can&#x27;t stand the idea of conversing with AI bots just to &quot;browse&quot; a company wiki. I mean how big are company wikis? Not big enough that simply browsing it yourself using regular content browsing or keyword searching can&#x27;t surface what you need quickly and accurately.<p>And $790+ annually and still can&#x27;t remove the &quot;powered by Perfect wiki&quot; logo! It takes $2390 before you&#x27;re unsticking that sucker!

&gt; It’s available right where employees already spend most of their day — in Microsoft Teams.<p>What do these people do?? Like what is a job that requires you to spend most of your time in an internal chat app? Every job I can think of either has its own &quot;main&quot; software, involves <i>doing things</i> IRL or, even if it is manily a communication job, that communication happens with a wide variety of outside people, meaning you probably use email a lot more than Teams.

&gt;Currently, the team behind Perfect Wiki is just two people. I handle the development and product, and my colleague manages user support<p>Good product, but I&#x27;m concerned about relying on something developed essentially by a single person due to the bus factor... If it&#x27;s open-source, that&#x27;s fine — we can fork it if needed. But if it&#x27;s a SaaS product, what happens if something happens to the developer? Will all my data be lost? Then again, one of the tools we used before was discontinued despite being developed by a fairly large team...

Good work, there are plenty of businesses like this for the pickings exactly because they are not VC investable.

Perfect Wiki = Perfect History for a coder: He lost his job and looked for ways to make other people&#x27;s lives easier in a growing niche market. Perfect Receipt. Congratulations

&gt; My assumptions were confirmed — people were actively looking for an alternative to the built-in Wiki, and they searched for it directly in the Teams marketplace. They found my app using the keyword “wiki.” It was an awesome free acquisition channel.<p>This is the money quote for me.

People love oracles. I don&#x27;t really get why yet, but I watch almost anyone outside of tech just eat up AI summaries like the ones atop Google search results or chat agents connected to an LLM.<p>The common denominator in the room is probably so high for a lot of tech people that it&#x27;s easy to be dismissive, but this looks like giving people what they think they want - the oracle. It&#x27;s impressive looking for a lot of users, and impressive for certain people to brag about connecting and setting up for a team.<p>I think there&#x27;s a mid to bottom market desire for this stuff, even if it doesn&#x27;t survive a possible future bubble pop. Call it selling shovels in a gold rush.

First of all, congratulations. That&#x27;s a huge feat and you seem to have overcome a lot of hurdles to make it.<p>That being said, I find it a bit discouraging that small-team passion projects with even the best product-market fit and minimal marketing spend only reach this level of profitability after 5 years.<p>Like, I can work at a FAANG, coast, make no real contribution to society and collect a 400K&#x2F;yr check. Or I could go all in on a cool idea and risk getting no customers. Option 2 sounds more fun, but it&#x27;s still so much stress and uncertainty for little payoff.<p>Do others feel the same?

You guys are so negative and he literally made the boring and dreadful things easier for corporations... Congrats! Looks really good for me, very sensible approach.<p>From my perspective, this is excellent product.

&quot;We&#x27;re committed to compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and have implemented a wide range of technical and organizational measures.&quot;<p>Kind of iffy claim when you&#x27;re on GCP, especially since the current president wrecked the data protection agency that gave US corporations a veneer of legality.

Pretty impressive. One watch out is that MS has control of many knobs that can ruin it. At the moment, your app is what comes back first if I click &quot;Apps&quot; and search &quot;Wiki&quot;. I imagine MS can change that on a whim. Then things like app reviews and so on. Have you considered expanding it as a plugin&#x2F;app for other tools...to sort of spread that risk out to more than one vendor?

Honestly the most admirable part is shipping a Teams app.<p>I’ve been down that rabbit-hole and <i>Je-sus</i> what a horrific experience. Never again.

I love this story, so happy for your success. It reads great, and makes me feel great (oddly - maybe it gives me a sense of hope I can do the same thing one day).<p>Congrats!

Well done. No mean fear getting to 250k. I hope you can get to 1M as hiring people with just 250K is challenging (unless you are not paying yourself).

I think the overall consensus would be being cautious of creating a product on top of a third party platform and marketplace, worse it being MS itself. But! If this is a one person team, I think this is exactly the other way around and basing the product on top of Teams is unbelievably competitive to the point that if MS shuts you down in a couple of years you can still have made a profit.

My company is building something in the messaging&#x2F;comms space, but focused on B2B rather than internal team chat like Slack&#x2F;Teams. Seeing all the dislike for those two makes me wonder if we should enable intra-team messaging as a (free?) bonus feature.<p>As for PerfectWiki: fantastic hyper-targeted product and writeup. Congrats to Ilia

Open source wiki we have used forever with great success:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twiki.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twiki.org&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twiki.org&#x2F;cgi-bin&#x2F;view&#x2F;TWiki&#x2F;WhatIsTWiki" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twiki.org&#x2F;cgi-bin&#x2F;view&#x2F;TWiki&#x2F;WhatIsTWiki</a>

Congrats on the success! Are you not afraid that MS ships a wiki upgrade at a certain point?

Money quote:<p>&gt; <i>That’s when I decided to dive deeper into analyzing what other problems Microsoft Teams users were facing and what kind of service I could offer them. I was confident I’d find a niche because the traffic and activity on the marketplace were high — a ready-made customer base was just in front of me. I just needed to find a product idea that would solve a real problem.</i><p>&gt; <i>I started reading forums, comments, and online discussions. It turned out the built-in Wiki in Microsoft Teams annoyed users really a lot. It was slow and inconvenient.</i><p>OP has done actual research and found a real problem to solve. Amy Hoy has been popularizing this exact approach under &quot;Sales Safari&quot;, but it boils down to &quot;find your user&#x27;s watering holes and listen to what they complain about to each other.&quot;

Sorry to tell you that some of us are looking to Migrate away from it. We’ve definitely noticed the speed and usability issues as we’ve grown

Did you get any corporate or MS celebrity endorsement early on? In my limited experience this seemed key to bootstrap you on the store.

Is there a demo of Perfect Wiki somewhere? I looked around and only saw &#x27;signup for demo&#x27; on their website.

Related: Had anyone had any success with (selling) Skype Add-ins&#x2F;Plug-ins or whatever it was called? :)

Might be an unpopular opinion, but if you can accomplish your goal without investors, you should do it.

Although I despise MS teams and never want to use that godawful piece of shit outside of work. I love this type of story&#x2F;indie hacking.<p>No need to bother with greedy investors. Just working directly with customers and solving a problem (created by incompetence at MS).<p>Only downside here is that MS at any time _could_ decide to improve their shitty built in wiki. Might take years and you won’t feel it until your revenue starts to drop.<p>Or MS goes completely anti-competitive&#x2F;anti-trust and buys out the competition. Entrepreneur here gets paid out but customers left scrambling to migrate data out or shift over.

There&#x27;s a lot of money to be made in making a bad process more efficient.

BRB. Installing russian knowledge management software on internal servers.

Error code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG on trying to open the page.

Great article, I got kind of motivated<p>Who the heck is Microsoft Loop for anyways?

Congrats OP. also: microsoft teams is an unholy abomination

Congrats on building a successful product!

Where data are stored? How safe are they?

Respect and positive jealousy!

Amazing, congratulations!

Also despise teams, here’s my anecdote. A few years ago (about 2020) the Linux teams client had bug where it would write to a .so continuously which is odd enough. It would then fill up the disk on my work laptop writing to that one file. Seemed to be related to the update mechanism. Luckily as a dev I had admin access and uninstalled and deleted the 450gB .so file.

Congrats on the success, but I feel like you hit gold because MS has little to no interest in providing actual good software for their users. Hopefully for you that stays that way and you can maybe expand to other areas where they come short (basically anything in Teams)

Congrats!

last company had slack which is way superior to share codesnippets, can some developer tell me what they do about it when they only have shity teams in their company? compared to sharing code over slack it&#x27;s 10x worse I want to kms every time when in teams u paste a snippet and that shit just goes to one line instead of wrapping like the original snippet that was 3 lines in your IDE ffs

Dunno about the author, but linking to habr.com is bad taste at best.<p>This is the biggest Russian IT resource that contributes to the Russian economy and thus to the war effort.<p>By comparison, I unpublished everything there and asked to delete my account in Feb, 2022, just after the full-fledged invasion of Ukraine started.

This seems like a commercial for the product. Why is this front page HN?