[HN Gopher] I created Perfect Wiki and reached $250k in annual r...
___________________________________________________________________
I created Perfect Wiki and reached $250k in annual revenue without
investors
Author : sochix
Score : 535 points
Date : 2025-04-30 07:45 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (habr.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (habr.com)
| gadders wrote:
| Looks like a great product and congratulations on your success.
|
| 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?
| freetonik wrote:
| There's limited space on the front page, and the topic of AI is
| so prevalent, it occupies a lot, every day. Right now 10 out of
| 30 stories on the front page are about AI and LLMs.
| gadders wrote:
| I wouldn't mind if it was "Here is how I got to $250k ARR
| with my self-funded AI startup" :-)
| dmos62 wrote:
| To be fair, more than 1/3 of my technical thoughts involve ai
| these days.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| I prefer AI both raw material and recycled garbage than the
| cryptocoin epidemy from recent years.
| -__---____-ZXyw wrote:
| Yeah, it's a Trump-related political outrage, or it's an AI
| thing. I feel anecdotally like the AI-related things are even
| more prevalent, but would love to see some data on it.
|
| The Trump stuff seems to get flagged very much, and the AI
| stuff, very litle.
|
| It's heady times, anyway, that's for sure.
| -__---____-ZXyw wrote:
| Actually, I should say, using
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/active
|
| to see flagged stuff too is great. Not sure if you see
| everything, but I definitely am more interested in a less
| curated frontpage. I don't find ignoring headlines I'm not
| interested in to be such a major affront to my
| sensibilities.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > The Trump stuff seems to get flagged very much, and the
| AI stuff, very litle.
|
| Speaking personally, I flag the political posts and not the
| AI posts because the political posts _always_ turn into
| flame wars. AI posts do not, so I leave them be (even
| though I don 't personally like them).
| -__---____-ZXyw wrote:
| Hmmm. Is there a statement of HN policy somewhere about
| that? Or is this just a thing you decided to do on your
| own accord?
|
| No judgment, just curious. I presume you've reflected on
| the idea that one person's flame war is another person's
| gentle exchange of opinion.
|
| I can see what you're saying though, and I have seen
| discussions where I've thought "oook, don't really
| understand what these people think they're achieving",
| but I wouldn't say I've seen anything horrendous. I mean,
| individual horrific comments get quickly flagged to
| death. Why bother flagging the whole topic? Why not
| simply not investigate those threads?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html mentions
| not to use HN for political or ideological battle.
| sochix wrote:
| My story on the first page, so I guess people still loves
| success-stories ;)
| gadders wrote:
| Yes, but maybe this rose-tinted glasses, but it seems like
| every week we would have a story like yours, an essay from
| Patio11 on how much money Bingo Cards are making, Nathan
| Barry talking about how a book launch earnt him $50k in a
| weekend, Brennan Dunn launching a course for 5 figures etc.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| [flagged]
| sochix wrote:
| Maybe! But on the other side I can work when and how I want,
| it's a big bonus as for me.
| sirfz wrote:
| This bonus is priceless tbh congrats on your success and
| hope you'll never need to work for anyone
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| I also love side projects and have done a few. What I was
| commenting on is "people using their expertise to make
| money". For me it's more of the opposite. I could have
| earned way more in traditional things but I do side project
| because I can select what I want to do.
| bboygravity wrote:
| It is if you live outside of the US or if you'd never make it
| into a FAANG, because of lack of credentials and/or
| connections.
|
| Or. If you like the idea of having no boss, no standup
| meetings, no Jira, no commutes, no open office plan, etc.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Not bad when the median salary is equivalent to 600$/mo
| naughtyfinch wrote:
| Nothing beats the freedom and fulfillment of owning and
| operating your own business. A job at a FAANG company with a
| high salary is so overrated. I know, since I have worked in
| multiple FAANG companies over the last 12 years.
| sochix wrote:
| agreed, however I never worked for FAANG
| jll29 wrote:
| ...or the seeds of a company that may one day be a letter
| in the successor of the FAANG acronym.
| RandomWorker wrote:
| True, and the author also said that they are working with a
| 20 person team. But looking at those growth projections they
| will likely double in a few years.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| _without_ a 20 person team
| sochix wrote:
| my bad!
| pac0 wrote:
| He said the opposite, I read it wrong the first time too
| dustincoates wrote:
| I misread that the first time, too. You should read it like
| this:
|
| > All of this -- without investors, [without] a 20-person
| team, or [without] a "Series A" round.
|
| Later on, the author says:
|
| > Currently, the team behind Perfect Wiki is just two
| people.
| jen729w wrote:
| I quit a AU$300k job almost exactly 2 years ago to work on my
| 'side project' full-time. My partner too: it's our only
| income.
|
| I earn perhaps 20% what I used to. We just quit our lease and
| sold all our stuff so we can live in a cheap country for a
| while. I've never been poorer. I'm 48.
|
| It's the best decision I ever made. I pity you fools at your
| FAANG jobs. Because I know how unhappy you are.
| motorest wrote:
| > It's the best decision I ever made. I pity you fools at
| your FAANG jobs. Because I know how unhappy you are.
|
| I think you might be projecting to try not to feel bad for
| your life choices. A telltale sign is the way you try to
| claim every single engineer employed by half a dozen
| companies is unhappy. This is obviously unrealistic. I
| personally know quite a few of them and they are having the
| time of their life. Keep in mind that you hear far more
| reports from those who quit/were fired than from those who
| are happily chugging along in their role.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| They are having the "time of their life" sitting in a
| desk chair at a corporate office. It's not the same as
| what the parent poster is describing -- which is
| presumably traveling and exploring the world. Try asking
| the younger generation which is the better job.
| motorest wrote:
| > They are having the "time of their life" sitting in a
| desk chair at a corporate office. It's not the same as
| what the parent poster is describing -- which is
| presumably traveling and exploring the world.
|
| Is it though?
|
| The FANG engineers I know have been leveraging internal
| transfers to relocate abroad to places like Madrid,
| Milan, Amsterdam, etc. Not to mention business trips
| abroad for all kind of things like hiring events.
|
| > Try asking the younger generation which is the better
| job.
|
| This is not a generational thing. This is about
| objectively comparing jobs. Accusing each and every
| single FANG engineer of being miserable whereas a random
| low-paying role is the envy of the world screams the fox
| and the grapes.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| It's probably not a low-paying role in the country they
| are residing in. They can probably afford to eat out 3x a
| day.
| close04 wrote:
| > A telltale sign
|
| Internet psychoanalysis based on "telltale signs" is just
| seeing what you want to see especially if you're
| responding to a perceived personal slight. The people
| telling you they're having the time of their life also
| might be projecting to try not to feel bad for their life
| choices.
|
| I didn't read OP's comment as "every FAANG employee is
| miserable". That's uncharitable but easier to fight than
| the more realistic one that those people might be in a
| "golden cage". The "wolf and the dog" fable above is
| impressively accurate.
| motorest wrote:
| > Internet psychoanalysis based on "telltale signs" is
| just seeing what you want to see especially if you're
| responding to a perceived personal slight. The people
| telling you they're having the time of their life also
| might be projecting to try not to feel bad for their life
| choices.
|
| Not really. I've worked at a FANG for quite a few years
| and I can tell you from my own personal experience that
| in many ways it was the best job I ever had. The misery
| imagined by OP has no bearing in reality, and screams
| projection. I see it a lot, sadly. People are desperate
| to get in and when they don't then they resort to shit-
| talking things to try to make themselves feel better.
| jen729w wrote:
| OP here. You may read my comment as a dramatic over-
| simplification of the facts for the sake of a robust
| argument and brevity. ;-)
| deadbabe wrote:
| There are definitely a lot of FAANG engineers who are not
| unhappy and miserable with their lives, they are gainfully
| employed and live rich fulfilling lives providing abundance
| for their families.
|
| In contrast I know plenty of people who quit jobs and are
| now working way harder to earn less at the expense of those
| around them, resulting in broken homes, divorces, and all
| around miserable lives, all pinned on the hope they will
| get their big break and it will all be worth it. They are
| very pathetic but can't see it because they are so wrapped
| up in some foolish idea that isn't going anywhere.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| They don't have the freedom to travel the world whenever
| they want. As I get older freedom is more important to
| me.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Except you're not free, you're bound by the constraints
| of how much money you have, which isn't much.
|
| And traveling the world is a bit overrated. It's cool to
| change scenery, but at the end of the day, you're just
| doing the same work you always do, just in a different
| country. You're just running away from the fact you have
| nothing worth settling down a bit for, no where to truly
| call home and invest in a local community, just a drifter
| chasing their next hit of stimulus. Eventually, you run
| out of truly novel places to go. You're not giving back
| to a community and making your mark, you're just leeching
| off the lifestyles built by people who chose to settle in
| one place. If everyone was a traveler, there wouldn't be
| anything worth traveling to.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| I like changing the scenery a lot but I disagree that it
| makes me a bad or immoral person. Most people do not want
| to leave their country. Some people do and that benefits
| local people through tourism and retirees. The system is
| working out well for developing countries. It helps them
| develop faster.
|
| Do office workers do anything to help other countries
| develop? Or does all their effort go towards making their
| rich friends richer?
| darkwater wrote:
| You make that salary only if you physically live near Silicon
| Valley, or some other HCOL areas where FAANG have offices.
| And guess what? The world is bigger.
| gadders wrote:
| Maybe? But not everyone gets into a FAANG, or lives in the
| places where FAANGs are hiring (as I believe not all offer
| fully remote jobs).
|
| And $250k is the current point on the graph - it could be $1m
| this time next year.
| sochix wrote:
| fingers crossed, I'll see something near $1m in a year or
| two
| cpach wrote:
| Different strokes for different folks
| apercu wrote:
| I quit a job a President of a software company 11 years ago.
| I've never been so happy or healthy.
| maaaaattttt wrote:
| A Wolf had nought but bones and skin So exact the watch of
| dogs had been.
|
| He chances on a Mastiff as powerful as handsome Fat, sleek,
| who had strayed by chance.
|
| To attack him, quarter him Lord Wolf would gladly do;
|
| But he would have to join battle,
|
| And the Mastiff was of such stature As to defend himself with
| ease.
|
| So the Wolf approaches him humbly, Enters into conversation,
| compliments him On his girth, which he admires.
|
| "You fine sir could be as fat as me" Replied the Dog.
|
| "Leave the woods, you would do well: Your like are miserable
| there,
|
| Dunces, hairshirts and poor devils, Their estate is to die of
| hunger.
|
| Every bite of food is hard won By dint of fang and claw. For
| what?
|
| Follow me: you would have a fate much better." The Wolf
| replied, "What must I do?"
|
| "Almost nothing," replied the Dog, "Chase beggars And people
| carrying sticks;
|
| To flatter those at home, to please one's Master: In exchange
| your salary would be
|
| A great many scraps of all kinds: Bones of chickens, bones of
| pigeons,
|
| Without mentioning many caresses." The Wolf already imagines
| a happiness
|
| Which makes him teary from fondness. Walking along, he saw
| the bald neck of the Dog.
|
| "What is it there?" he said. - Nothing. - What? Nothing? -
| Nothing much.
|
| But still? - The collar by which I am tethered Is perhaps the
| cause of what you see.
|
| "Tethered?" said the Wolf: So you do not run Wherever you
| want? - Not always; but what matters it?
|
| It matters so much that all your meals I would not want in
| any wise or manner,
|
| And would not desire even a treasure at such price." This
| said, master Wolf runs off, and he runneth still.
|
| -- Jean de La Fontain, 1668 ( translated by Tad Boniecki)
| Y_Y wrote:
| The US constitution guarantees life and liberty, the great
| joke being that the two things are almost opposite.
| tomhow wrote:
| _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| cornholio wrote:
| Well, perhaps people see such success stories for what they
| are, well curated commodity flowers in the walled gardens of
| the major players, who will not hesitate to pluck them the
| instant they threaten to have any kind of uncontrolled growth.
| It's "ISVs" all over again, commoditization of complements
| etcetera, the tech molemen that serve the big machines.
|
| AI looks to many as a wall buster, at least for the time being,
| so even if breakout success is unlikely you can't blame people
| for at least trying to escape the underground caverns where the
| "widely successful" ceiling is capped at perhaps reaching a
| FAANG manager level of compensation.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > AI looks to many as a wall buster
|
| Hmm. I see a lot of people trying to build products on top of
| models trained by other people, which seems very vulnerable.
| detourdog wrote:
| I think what that is demonstrating is that models are
| commodity objects. The model factory may have a value. I
| think it would need a specialized context. It would need a
| market large enough to support it and small enough to keep
| the context out of the mainstream.
|
| My guess is this will always be a moving target. The
| consumer will choose models based on their value
| proposition.
|
| We all have to start our sandcastle somewhere.
| Perz1val wrote:
| Using silicon chips manufactured in like 3 fabs
| kryogen1c wrote:
| > Is that harder to do these days, or has the HN news appetite
| shifted?
|
| I'll speak as someone who is part of the problem. As groucho
| Marx says, I wouldn't want to be a part of any club that will
| have me as a member!
|
| HN is a victim of its own popularity. Things just get diluted
| and more mainstreamy by people like me, who are perhaps hackers
| in spirit but don't have much to show for it.
|
| I work in IT at an international company everyone knows the
| name of. I've got a garden and there are meals in my fridge
| made of meat from pigs I raised. I've got furniture in my house
| my wife and I made years ago in a different state.
|
| I'll submit random articles, but never a show HN. How could I?
| Woodgearsca built a woodworking shop out of his woodworking
| shop. No one cares about the tables I built. I try to speak
| only when I know I can contribute, but im very unsure i raise
| the quality here.
| vintagedave wrote:
| You might be surprised what you could contribute.
|
| I've submitted articles that I thought were really valuable,
| and never had any success [0] (maybe the first is too
| business-y, not hacker-ish, but I genuinely believe what I
| wrote there matters and it's worth understanding, at least in
| the sense it was transformative for me when I did understand
| it) and then an article on a random weekend project a friend
| and I did made the top five on the front page [1] and stayed
| there for ages.
|
| People very much just might care about the tables you make!
| Especially if you can share something you learned.
|
| [0]: https://daveon.design/what-are-you-optimising-for.html
| and https://daveon.design/creating-joy-in-the-user-
| experience.ht...
|
| [1]: https://daveon.design/adventures-making-vegemite.html
| showerst wrote:
| I'd take a 100 random IT folks with gardens over a single
| growth hacker, crypto bro, or "I created an ai bot to do (X)"
| ChatGPT wrapper site shill.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| > from pigs I raised.
|
| If you rose them at home, contrary to a dedicated farm, I
| want to hear about it!
| kaonwarb wrote:
| I would upvote interesting Show HNs about, say, raising pigs!
| I like learning from folks with firsthand knowledge.
| mbreese wrote:
| Or about building tables... I don't think hacking has to
| exclusively be about programming and computers.
|
| If you submit a story about raising pigs or building a
| table on a weekend, it would probably get a lot of
| interaction. Please think about doing it. I'd love to hear
| the story!
| deadbabe wrote:
| It used to be easier to use expertise to make money, now you
| need to use expertise just to get by.
| bredren wrote:
| I was not expecting this comment here but it tracks with my
| observations.
|
| Things that previously could be taken for granted now require
| applied thought and physical capability.
|
| For example, people regularly ask how to find reasonably
| priced housing in /r/askPortland. The OP usually mentions
| constant looking at Zillow and other sites / apps.
|
| Very, very few good deals will be found there because the
| marketplace is too fluid and too accessible. You gotta hustle
| on the ground in the neighborhood you want to be in to find
| the best housing compromises.
|
| Used to be you could wing it on craigslist.
|
| From concert tickets to new Nike shoes, you want a good seat
| / common size? How about a nice family campsite?
|
| Well you better have set up automation. It's to the point
| where public swim lessons can't be got without a bot. Unless,
| you go to the pool and ask about lessons not scheduled on the
| internet.
|
| It is an absolute hustle, across the minor daily desires of
| good things and experiences.
|
| Those products rejected by the most motivated get binned into
| some consultant optimized vertically integrated reseller.
|
| The services get marketed heavily with dark patterns just to
| cancel their membership.
|
| It is tough out there.
| devsda wrote:
| > Is that harder to do these days, or has the HN news appetite
| shifted?
|
| The popular keywords for some time have been AI, Trump, Russia,
| Ukraine.
|
| As these are hot topics, the "Hacker" part of HN has taken a
| noticeable backseat. There are still interesting submissions
| but they don't reach the front page that often.
|
| For example, there's a huge thread on this very post about the
| source site because of its supposed origins.
| bredren wrote:
| There is good reason why these posts don't regularly make front
| page.
|
| The genre of content is regularly abused by hypesters. There is
| a forum / podcast dedicated to this kind of success story and
| it is just massive cheerleading and success bias.
|
| If you go look for it, you'll find it.
|
| HN readers achieving this success either don't need or don't
| want the attention that might come with this kind of content
| marketing.
|
| It's much more interesting to learn about detailed technical
| solutions engineering and the SOTA.
| ethn wrote:
| Good work, there are plenty of businesses like this for the
| pickings exactly because they are not VC investable.
| edg5000 wrote:
| Keep that surplush cash in the business with a window of a few
| years to absorb any downturn, don't get a Bugatti :) Not that I
| am qualified to provide advice on this topic. Great success
| story.
| sochix wrote:
| Thank you!
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Did you get any corporate or MS celebrity endorsement early on?
| In my limited experience this seemed key to bootstrap you on the
| store.
| sochix wrote:
| Nope! It was all done organically
| DataDaemon wrote:
| Where data are stored? How safe are they?
| sochix wrote:
| I am using Google Cloud Platform to store the data
| Calwestjobs wrote:
| kidnapping your family in Russia makes you vulnerable, what
| precautions do you take so i can be sure Russian government
| can not get to my data thru you ?
|
| Reason why i am asking this :
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/30/inside-
| taganro...
| RandomWorker wrote:
| 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.
| sochix wrote:
| Yep, Teams store is a hidden gem.
| xyst wrote:
| You can make money through anything that has a decent market
| size.
|
| Slack addons or plugins used to be a good example before it was
| acquired by Salesforce.
| em-bee wrote:
| what else is there then? google, microsoft, apple, some
| chinese companies. can't think of anything else with a large
| market for apps.
| Suppafly wrote:
| roblox :) Honestly though anything with a lot of users
| typically either has a way to make money selling addons, or
| by hosting your own content related to their product, like
| wikis and leaderboards and such.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >What I took away from this story is that I forget that there
| are ecosystems outside the Apple App Store.
|
| Which is very limiting considering that the Apple ecosystem,
| other than for phones, is the smallest one. A lot of software
| companies don't even target Apple at all because it's not worth
| it.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Other ecosystems are smaller (probably nothing has more
| consumers than the two major app stores) but often much higher
| intent. The same person who you have to coax into paying $1 for
| an iOS app won't bat an eye at a productivity tool that costs
| $20/mo.
|
| So while the platform has less reach the lower competition and
| higher RPUs make them great. If I were still making games I'd
| be looking at Steam before iOS, for instance.
| 1a527dd5 wrote:
| 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).
|
| Congrats!
| sochix wrote:
| Thank you! I think you could do it, just ship something today!
| kgeist wrote:
| >Currently, the team behind Perfect Wiki is just two people. I
| handle the development and product, and my colleague manages user
| support
|
| Good product, but I'm concerned about relying on something
| developed essentially by a single person due to the bus factor...
| If it's open-source, that's fine -- we can fork it if needed. But
| if it'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...
| apples_oranges wrote:
| Exactly, it can also happen with larger companies and if the
| creator here decides to step back for Example he might organize
| some sort of continuity by selling the product or hiring
| someone to maintain it
| gmm1990 wrote:
| They seem focused and dont have and debt or funding burdens.
| There risk of something catastrophic happening to an individual
| is lower than the average business going out of business.
|
| Some sort of data and data structure export/external backup
| would be a good feature though if it doesn't already exist
| Y_Y wrote:
| But if I depend on a business making a critical tool, and am
| paying for the pleasure, then my prior for their going out of
| business decreases greatly. Their susceptibility to bus
| attacks remains unchanged however.
| naughtyfinch wrote:
| 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't have the guts to resign and follow my dream ( _heavy sigh_
| )
| naghing wrote:
| This seems like a commercial for the product. Why is this front
| page HN?
| nlitened wrote:
| Sir, this is a forum for people who make things
| Calwestjobs wrote:
| Every talent needs to be helped to grow, make all kinds of
| peoples life easier, so democracy invites everyone with good
| will to do that in west. Making Russia stronger means making
| west weaker. Because russian "government". After russian
| people get rid of their murderous gov...
| Calwestjobs wrote:
| For ordinary US citizen without a broad worldview, this thing i
| wrote seem like writings of a mad man. As Kennedys presidential
| address says:
|
| "...we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship,
| support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the
| survival and the success of liberty."
|
| My duty is to warn ordinary citizens, this is it, you were
| warned.
|
| answer to your question follows:
|
| because product is Russian, programmers are Russian, so your
| data will be under influence of Russian government directly or
| indirectly - his family is in Russia.
|
| so HN bots want to be edgy but failed to comprehend that
| Russian regime IS directly involved in making life for US
| citizens difficult, even tho Russian regime had 20 years worth
| of chances to not do that, not be bad actor, but they did not
| want that. they want to be bad actor and they act as bad actor.
| im not saying anything about Colonial Pipeline attack of course
| that would be silly.
|
| Russian people are not outsiders, they are complicit in
| Russians regime activities. but it is so hard to explain this
| to people because even XTwitter is allowing Russian propaganda
| / soft power activities of Russia unimpeded.
|
| Also a lot of Israeli people have family, ancestors in Russia
| so they project their feelings for them, towards Russia
| uncritically.
|
| Russia is not democracy, Russia is not USA. Russia IS Russian
| people. Russia IS acting as a bad actor so call it as it act
| as.
| glowiefedposter wrote:
| Oh no, russian spyware running inside american spyware!
| Calwestjobs wrote:
| american spyware to sell ads, russian spyware for looking
| for ways to kill american citizens. if you think this is
| hyperbole you are [vulgarism].
| Orygin wrote:
| 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)
| sochix wrote:
| Agreed!
| hampowder wrote:
| You state it as if it were a coincidence. The important point
| is that the author identified the problem and filled the gap.
|
| > I started reading forums, comments, and online discussions.
| It turned out the built-in Wiki in Microsoft Teams annoyed
| users really a lot.
| Orygin wrote:
| I admit I didn't read the entirety of the post, but I read
| the following:
|
| > Many of our clients came to us after trying the Microsoft
| built-in Wiki. It was clunky, inconvenient, and didn't do the
| job well. We focused on simplicity: the essential features
| only, nothing extra -- and everything should function inside
| Microsoft Teams.
|
| So I know it wasn't a coincidence, and rarely are such
| software built without understanding the needs first.
|
| I just wanted to point out that in this case, the business
| relies on Microsoft not doing a proper job. Otherwise they
| would be at a serious risk of being Sherlocked by the
| provider.
| darkwater wrote:
| They already expanded it to Slack and other platforms.
| Orygin wrote:
| Slack is, I think, mainly focused on the messaging and
| relies on third parties to integrate other features.
| Microsoft is a behemoth that wants to sell their complete
| software suite and tries to integrate all of them
| together for a "seamless" experience. They do have an
| incentive for their own products to be good and used
| instead of third parties.
|
| Plus once they realize how much data is in these wikis,
| they will want to ingest them for AI (if not already
| done), so there is an incentive for them to have more
| users on their solution instead.
|
| Edit: And even if the OP is not relying only on MS for
| sales, they still depend heavily on them and their App
| Store. They are not competing with Confluence or other
| systems, they are competing with Teams itself.
| jen729w wrote:
| Honestly the most admirable part is shipping a Teams app.
|
| I've been down that rabbit-hole and _Je-sus_ what a horrific
| experience. Never again.
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| Can you elaborate a bit? Been tossing around the idea of doing
| a Teams app. What were the challenges?
| dabbz wrote:
| Used to work for a company that owned a Teams extension.
| Teams updates will just randomly break your extension
| behavior without any warning or heads up. The migration to
| their "new teams" app was brutal.
|
| Their SDK is built into 2 view render portions. 1 for in-
| message rendering using their own markup syntax for
| structuring views, and another that's just a web browser. So
| if you want to share components between 1 for messages and
| another for your pane, you can't.
|
| Ingesting events is not very well defined. Everything gets
| sent to 2 endpoints you define and it's up to you to
| determine how to handle it.
|
| Just some of the issues I came across in my short time at the
| company.
| jen729w wrote:
| None of the onboarding material actually works. I guess
| because it's all based on Azure/Entra which changes so
| frequently.
|
| So there's videos, articles, VSC extensions, all to help you
| navigate this Byzantine structure. But they're all just
| wrong.
|
| Look I'm not a pro dev so YMMV. Kick the tyres for a few days
| and see if you can get it to do anything. I never could, and
| the experience was just no fun at all.
|
| At least with web dev, that I'm also no good at, it can be
| fun. Teams was like pulling my own nails out.
| 9dev wrote:
| Tried to build a teams chatbot for our org. There are five
| different official starter templates, none of which work, but
| all use different outdated versions of the Microsoft packages
| required. They point to documentation that is missing (like
| 404 missing), outdated, containing code samples that don't
| match the SDKs; the build fails after startup, or only works
| together with a VS Code extension. Tasks require an obscene
| amount of boilerplate code that is never really explained;
| configuration options are not properly documented, sometimes
| the types are broken.
|
| Everything you could imagine being wrong with an enterprise
| JavaScript package and much more is in that hellish rabbit
| hole.
| keepamovin wrote:
| This is cool, I never even heard of MS Team's marketplace. My
| wife uses Teams a lot for work and likes it. I should put
| BrowserBox on there. I need marketing ideas.
|
| The way he did product research to find out what customers really
| needed, after testing the waters with a translator, was really
| good.
|
| Definition of make something people want. Classic way business
| has always been created, by keen observation of the market. Well
| done!
| sochix wrote:
| thank you!
| keepamovin wrote:
| You're welcome - it's inspiring :) Thanks for the write up!
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| BRB. Installing russian knowledge management software on internal
| servers.
| bestest wrote:
| Author also mentions his thoughts on expanding to the russian
| market. So many red flags here. Pun intended.
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| Congratulations on your achievement.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
| sochix wrote:
| At least there is a lot of room for improvement for
| entrepreneurs likes me ;)
| doix wrote:
| In my (admittedly very limited) experience, Teams was almost
| free when you're already paying for microsoft 365. At least
| last time I had any involvement with it, the price difference
| between having teams in the bundle or not was negligible. It
| makes it cheaper than any competitor.
|
| Now in reality, I think the true cost is hidden by the
| frustration it causes (some?) users, but it's very hard to
| quantify that in a dollar amount. Which is why companies stick
| with Teams.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| The hidden cost is also the removal of competition. Google
| get more heat for browser "monopoly" when they even provide a
| free browser base for others to customise, and Microsoft gets
| almost none for incredibly overwhelmingly anti-competitive
| behaviour around lock-in to Office, Teams, Sharepoint, Azure.
| wpietri wrote:
| Yup. That's because they had actual competition in the space.
| Throwing a (bad) Slack clone for free was a way of preserving
| and extending their monopoly.
|
| But you're still paying for it. The costs to build and fund
| the product still exist, and are still coming out of customer
| payments. Manipulating their pricing to manipulate their
| customers doesn't change that.
| high_na_euv wrote:
| For c#/cpp visual studio is really, really good
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| Jetbrains rider blows Visual Studio out of the water, but
| it's not Microsoft, so our company doesn't use it.
| brooke2k wrote:
| as someone who works in visual studio on c# every day of my
| life, I have the opposite opinion. it's awful
| zerr wrote:
| Related: Had anyone had any success with (selling) Skype Add-
| ins/Plug-ins or whatever it was called? :)
| lovegrenoble wrote:
| Congrats!
| angusb wrote:
| Congrats, this is a great story! One small thing:
|
| > Every time I check out competitors' 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.
|
| 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?
| angusb wrote:
| BTW - I see you have a LLM answering questions based on your
| docs on the help pages (which is great). So really I mean for
| customer support issues that are raised outside this channel
| sochix wrote:
| Not yet, but it is in our roadmap
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| because internal ones are about knowledge, external ones are
| about driving sales and reducing support costs.
| dabbz wrote:
| I also see it as a contingency plan. How do customers get help
| from you if your service has interrupted downtime? Relying on
| separate systems helps you be available still. It's one of
| those things that is not a problem until it's a problem.
| ph4evers wrote:
| Congrats on the success! Are you not afraid that MS ships a wiki
| upgrade at a certain point?
| rurban wrote:
| Given the state of the typical Microsoft PM he will be safe.
| They'll always prefer more features over a fast UX. Even if
| there will a fast enough teams wiki one day, the next PM will
| butcher it to death again.
| nottorp wrote:
| > Currently, the team behind Perfect Wiki is just two people.
|
| It would have been 20 people if investors were brought in. Missed
| opportunity!
|
| Edit: forgot to mention that it would have had the same revenue
| and been a failure :)
| parrit wrote:
| It wouldn't exist at all. It isn't AI.
| sciurus wrote:
| By my count they mention AI seventeen times on their
| homepage.
|
| https://perfectwikiforteams.com/
| nottorp wrote:
| Plus, what will the other 18 people on the team do? Burn
| their cash using and inserting "AI".
| cess11 wrote:
| Judging from their web site, so called AI is at the center of
| their offering.
|
| https://perfectwikiforteams.com/
| igtztorrero wrote:
| Perfect Wiki = Perfect History for a coder: He lost his job and
| looked for ways to make other people's lives easier in a growing
| niche market. Perfect Receipt. Congratulations
| sochix wrote:
| thank you!
| parrit wrote:
| 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).
| vlovich123 wrote:
| He's in Russia where it's a lot more doable.
| moralestapia wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This is the money quote for me.
| pantulis wrote:
| 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.
| cess11 wrote:
| "We're committed to compliance with the EU General Data
| Protection Regulation (GDPR) and have implemented a wide range of
| technical and organizational measures."
|
| Kind of iffy claim when you're on GCP, especially since the
| current president wrecked the data protection agency that gave US
| corporations a veneer of legality.
| xyst wrote:
| Although I despise MS teams and never want to use that godawful
| piece of shit outside of work. I love this type of story/indie
| hacking.
|
| No need to bother with greedy investors. Just working directly
| with customers and solving a problem (created by incompetence at
| MS).
|
| 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.
|
| Or MS goes completely anti-competitive/anti-trust and buys out
| the competition. Entrepreneur here gets paid out but customers
| left scrambling to migrate data out or shift over.
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://archive.is/wDHrB
| Den_VR wrote:
| Directly?
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Surely they meant indirectly. I suppose any Russian company
| that pays taxes could be said to do so.
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| Indirectly. Mea culpa.
| BiraIgnacio wrote:
| Amazing, congratulations!
| karel-3d wrote:
| > It's available right where employees already spend most of
| their day -- in Microsoft Teams.
|
| Depression and dread is coming through me. All the repressed
| memories are flowing back up.
| egecant wrote:
| Microsoft Teams is DaaS (Dread as a Service). Here is a great
| video about how it sucks your soul:
| https://youtu.be/3O0VbCvWlxk?si=E61rlKLjtFMczl3D
| daheza wrote:
| Our company is forcing us to drop slack and use teams. It's
| going to be terrible. But hey it saves 600k per year. Never
| mind that our customer experience will become terrible as team
| communication fails.
| seethishat wrote:
| I worry about this too. Diversity is a good thing. And when
| we do email, DNS, Web, calendars, chat, meetings, storage,
| etc. all on the same platform, how will we
| operate/communicate when it fails?
|
| Heterogeneous computing environments provide diversity to
| isolate and contain failures. So when email goes down, we can
| still chat and meet.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| Teams is so tightly integrated into the MS ecosystem and
| 365 that it can essentially bring down email and even
| office apps. Example: PP decks always want to open in Teams
| by default; every meeting in outlook wants to be a Teams
| meeting, etc.
| 9x39 wrote:
| Luckily, short of a DNS or auth problem, my experience is
| that Teams is just an alternate GUI for what already
| exists - Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive.
|
| And to be fair, you can just tell Teams to open in the
| desktop office apps by default (settings > Files and
| Links), and Outlook has a little radio button to turn off
| whether meetings are also Teams meetings. All the
| enterprise productivity apps seem to accumulate
| complexity and resultant scar tissue, usually in the form
| of busy settings or painfully opinionated defaults -
| painful when the defaults don't optimize for your use
| case.
| ctkhn wrote:
| It's gonna be terrible. There are so many teams integrations
| with github, jira, our deployments etc that took busywork off
| my plate when I was at a slack company and has slowed down me
| down a ton when I went to a teams org. Sorry man.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| We're all-in on Teams PLUS have management pushing for
| "service level objectives" on response time. It's impossible
| to stay on top of the stream of consciousness posts,
| impossible to find anything you previously answered or value
| you know is in there somewhere, impossible to measure
| response time or take ownership of... (what? a chat?). MS
| keeps cramming poorly thought out "AI-first" features without
| addressing things like cameras and mics that randomly stop
| working, blue screens in the middle of meetings. It's such a
| garbage piece of software that's now THE foundational
| infrastructure for so many companies. You'll save $600K on
| the financials and lose $6M across all the things that won't
| directly show: poor customer service, churn, slower
| everything, individual and team frustration... but your VP of
| IT doesn't pay for that.
| aaravchen wrote:
| The stream of consciousness posts is my pet peeve.
|
| A lot of open source projects insist on using Telegram or
| Matrix instead of an issue tracker or forum and have the
| same problem. If you want to spend 90% of your time
| answering the same questions again and again, be my guest,
| but as a user I won't do more than a cursory search of chat
| history, and won't try to follow intermingled replies
| anymore. I will simply ask again and explicitly say "the
| chat history on this can't be followed and there's no
| forum, so...".
|
| Professionally I also won't try to keep up with most chats.
| Someone mentions me on something and if I can't read their
| one message to get the context needed, I just reply with
| "I'm not readinf everything said in the last X days. What's
| the context?" and make them re-explain it.
|
| My company even recently added AI assist tools for our
| chats, and I occasionally will use it to summarize
| everything I haven't read just to see if there's any topics
| I should know about. But I won't use it to try and get
| context for a question I've been asked.
|
| The chat systems are basically like being in a physical
| room with everyone coming and going and having their own
| verbal conversations around you. I'll pay equally as much
| attention and effort ignoring it to get work done, and ask
| people to repeat things if they suddenly pull me into a
| conversation. I'll also drift out of conversations the
| same, but now they can't see me going back to work to take
| the hint its time to wrap it up.
| ramon156 wrote:
| Sorry if I'm ignorant, but how can slack cost 600k/year? I
| doubt they wouldn't give some form of deal for bigger
| companies. I know integrations can sometimes suck up money,
| but 600k is insane
| supportengineer wrote:
| That's a huge financial incentive to build an alternative.
| karel-3d wrote:
| There is Mattermost which you can self host.
|
| Once you do, you will realize the DB grows REALLY fast
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| Our enterprise deletes all PMs after 24 hours. That's one
| way to not worry about that.
| mynameisash wrote:
| I poked around with Mattermost like ~8 years ago, but
| never anything serious. I don't know how good it is now,
| especially w/r/t administration, but I have to imagine
| that if you're concerned about $1000s -- let alone $100ks
| -- in annual costs, you can scale up your storage and
| still come out _way_ ahead. Maybe that's a naive take?
| hersko wrote:
| $x/per-user/per-month. If you have many users it quickly
| adds up.
| dtech wrote:
| Slack is $180/year without discounts or "enterprise". So if
| you have 3300 users it could be that.
| aaravchen wrote:
| I just had to use Slack again after 6 years, and it's
| incredible how much worse its gotten. Honestly I don't know
| how they managed to make an industry leading tool actively
| worse by so much that its now _worse_ than Teams.
|
| Features it had 6 years ago that I desperately missed when we
| had to start using Teams are pretty much all gone now. Its
| such a slap in the face of how Enshittified it's become.
| __jonas wrote:
| I'm not really sure what you mean, I'm also coming back to
| using Slack for some contracting work after a similar
| period of time and it seems identical to how it always was
| to me, definitely feels nicer to me than Teams.
|
| Could you point out what has changed? I guess calls are
| called "huddles" now for some reason, that's a bit weird
| but doesn't really bother me.
| CWIZO wrote:
| Ine big thing for me is the removal of the reactions &
| mentions sidebar.
|
| I now have to constantly manually check in a special tab
| to see if someone ACKed my message.
| karel-3d wrote:
| The good thing: When you switch from slack to teams, all
| channel communications go to 0, because the experience is so
| dreadful, so you don't get 100 channels to read.
|
| The bad thing: it all moves to private messages
| Aeolun wrote:
| Teams realized that nobody was using their channels too. So
| instead of doing the reasonable thing, they noved all the
| channels to the chat view now.
| cycomanic wrote:
| As if slack was any better. I never understand how people
| accepted this piece of crappy software for regular
| communication. I mean it has the populate when scrolling
| behaviour that everyone hates in website design, but somehow
| it's acceptable for a chat app where looking at past messages
| is crucial?! I mean you just displayed those messages to me
| yesterday, why do you need to reload them from the server
| today. The amount of space saving compared to the bloated
| mess that your electron app is can't be worth it?! That would
| be not so infuriating if the search wasn't so crappy that
| it's often easier to find things by scrolling.
|
| The there's the whole mess when using multiple a mobile and
| desktop app. It often happens that I get slack message
| notifications from my phone in my pocket while the open
| desktop app sometimes takes another minute to get the same
| message. The same happens with huddles, why does my phone
| ring abut not my desktop app? And one of my colleagues even
| has the problem that when he picks up a call on the desktop
| it opens up on his phone.
|
| I agree that teams is a mess, but IMO mainly because of the
| mess that is calendering... around it. The calls and
| messaging parts are OK. In contrast slack can't even get it's
| core competency right.
| silisili wrote:
| I worked at a company that went through this. Honestly, it
| changed the entire mood of the company and working there. We
| went from thousands of messages per day to something like 10
| (of those channels I was part of, at least). People just
| hated it, and only used it if they really, really needed to.
| No more bouncing of ideas around, no more ribbing, just the
| desperate 'who do I talk to about accomplishing X, anyone
| know?'
|
| A business owner might conclude 'ah, less time jawing, more
| time working', but hardly the case. In fact, I think that was
| a big factor in what ultimately killed the company off a
| couple years later - through both people literally quitting
| over it, and a complete breakdown in communication.
| youniverse wrote:
| I haven't used teams but if it's so bad there has to be a good
| open source alternative? Let's build one???
| sceadu wrote:
| Seems like you're unfamiliar with enterprise IT
| cj wrote:
| Your comment is unnecessarily dismissive.
|
| Disrupting the space now doesn't seem any less hard now
| than it was 10 years ago when slack and zoom did it.
|
| But yes, if your point is that it's hard, then indeed. It
| is hard. Should that stop someone? No!
| jf22 wrote:
| I think it's dismissive to say that explaining something
| is harder isn't important.
|
| And something being harder stopping your from doing it is
| ubiquitous in life. It's a good skill to know how much
| effort something will take and weighing the risks and
| rewards.
| cj wrote:
| Let's try to turn this into a productive thread that adds
| some value here.
|
| What is it about enterprise IT that is preventing us from
| building a better alternative?
|
| How can we get around those hurdles?
| nemomarx wrote:
| If you built that alternative, would companies choose to
| use it? they get teams built into their outlook and
| office 365 contracts and all the other integration. Slack
| didn't lose because it was worse, so just being better
| isn't enough.
|
| The hurdle is producing a full suite covering everything
| Microsoft sells in one package, which seems impractical
| without their funding to start with.
| supportengineer wrote:
| Cronyism and nepotism is how you get "Enterprise IT"
| 9x39 wrote:
| Chat is a commodity. Right out of the gate, that's not
| great for margins.
|
| Enterprise chat might not be a commodity quite yet - SSO,
| DLP/data classification, auditing, retention, compliance
| checkboxes - but these seem insurmountable at first
| glance to get a FOSS solution to reach a viable
| enterprise feature matrix.
|
| Killer features as a moat might help, but while almost
| everyone uses chat, everyone probably uses chat
| differently, so that means discovering killer features
| for a niche and trying to own that segment before
| expanding. Unfortunately this is the "Draw the rest of
| the owl" part, because while I have quibbles with chat
| apps, I struggle to envision a chat app that does
| something radically different than any other chat app.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| Slack is not open source. Neither is Zoom.
|
| Your comment is just fake empathy noise.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Slack and Zoom both predate Teams. Teams only gained
| penetration through bundling with the rest of MS products
| on large enterprise contracts.
|
| There are already open source alternatives built for both
| Teams and Zoom. The issue is that open source projects
| don't have salespeople that will promise compliance and
| integration (whether or not they can actually deliver).
| mynameisash wrote:
| > Teams only gained penetration through bundling with the
| rest of MS products on large enterprise contracts.
|
| Hard disagree on the "only" modifier. Surely integration
| helped, but I've used Zoom, and I hate it every time I
| have to use it. Teams is comparatively a godsend.
| burnte wrote:
| He wasn't dismissive, he was countering dismissiveness.
| It was dismissive to throw out "just build your own". 99%
| of companies don't have that option, most companies are
| customers, not builders. This commenter was pointing out
| the obvious lack of perspective on the majority of
| businesses. That is a huge problem in SV and software
| development these days, the lack of awareness and context
| about real problems out in the market. "Just build a
| replacement" is a non-viable route for most people and
| most companies.
| euroclear wrote:
| I work at a large company, and we use Mattermost, which is
| open source.
| duxup wrote:
| People use Teams because they're already using Microsoft
| office products and it is "free" in that way. Then it's
| entrenched and folks can't imagine doing things any other
| way.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >Then it's entrenched and folks can't imagine doing things
| any other way.
|
| It basically works the same as every competitor, I'm not
| really sure why you'd need to do things 'any other way'.
| duxup wrote:
| I can imagine my calendar working / not dealing with
| Teams issues. A chat interface that is better.
|
| Granted plenty of office drones can't imagine / use much
| else at this point.
| inversetelecine wrote:
| We had to start using it because all of our clients
| demanded it. Managers/Owners don't say no to big money.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yep. Companies sign up for O365 and then the bean-counters
| insist on killing any other products that can be replaced
| by that (if you squint hard enough) because they see it as
| cost savings.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Yeah, that's the whole point of M365. If you are all in
| on the stack it's great. If you use 5 different products
| instead, it doesn't make any sense.
| 9dev wrote:
| It's not about bean counting, though. As a small startup,
| should you really spend like $15/user/month on a chat app
| that you get included with your office suite? Try to
| explain these expenses to your investors.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| There are plenty of better alternatives. Companies won't
| adopt them, and the bare concept of those applications is
| problematic already.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| (Disclaimer: Teams is in my "red flag" list when evaluating a
| company - I hate it _that_ much)
|
| Teams is not popular because it does something that no other
| app does. It is popular (IMO) because it does everything
| (calendar, chat, videoconference, and wiki - all of it badly)
| and, if you're a Windows user, you're paying for it one way
| or another.
|
| All that Microsoft had to do during the pandemic (which is
| when they unleashed Teams) was to approach a higher-up and
| pitch "why would you pay for Slack and Zoom when our product
| does the same? And since it's already included in your Office
| license you're already paying for it, so really, you're
| throwing money away". I know me and my friends complained
| about it, but so what? The company saved on licensing costs
| and IT people are always complaining anyway. And while the
| bundling of Teams got Microsoft in trouble in the EU [1] they
| still haven't paid any fines for it (I think) so it's hard to
| argue that they shouldn't have done that.
|
| </rant>
|
| [1] https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-teams-eu-european-
| union...
| scarface_74 wrote:
| While Slack doesn't do all of that natively. Everyone
| integrates with Slack. For instance if you get tagged in a
| comment in Google Docs you can reply to the comment in
| Slack. You can start a Zoom meeting from Slack and Google
| calendar (corporate) integrated with it.
| robocat wrote:
| There are proprietary competitors.
|
| Oracle have a dark team working on what will become "Oracle
| Team Fusion".
|
| I'm looking forward to the competition.
| longitudinal93 wrote:
| Most of the functionality is available in NextCloud which is
| open source and self-hostable.
| karel-3d wrote:
| There are many! None of them have power of Microsoft monopoly
| scarface_74 wrote:
| _Microsoft_ a _monopoly_ in 2025??
|
| In what?
|
| - operating systems? The Mac has over a 20% market share in
| the US. I haven't used a Windows PC for work since 2017.
| I've used Macs across 4 companies
|
| - Office Suites? GSuite has a higher market share and the
| company I work for now uses it.
|
| - Chat? Slack has 25%.
|
| Absolutely no one in the industry is afraid of Microsoft
| anymore
| cosiiine wrote:
| I think the cracks that ultimately led me to quit corporate IT
| and pursue being an artist were first formed when leadership
| insisted that the entire company switch to Teams under the
| guise of saving $9 a month per user.
| duxup wrote:
| Yup. Immediately a negative impression from me.
|
| Doesn't mean it won't sell, congrats to OP, but god I hate
| everything about Teams.
|
| Right now it's showing me calendar items with times that are
| wrong, they'll switch to the right time in a few minutes...
| probably. I didn't change time zones, I didn't do anything,
| it's just something wonky about their new calendar setup. If
| the time updates I'll click to open the calendar item, and it
| won't show me the join link to join the meeting ... well
| eventually it will pop in there, maybe.
|
| It's not just annoyingly designed and slow, it's constantly
| buggy with new and exciting bugs every few months.
| ValentinPearce wrote:
| Last week there were so many apps added to my teams that I
| couldn't see the chats anymore.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Should have repented, because now you're in hell
| MrJohz wrote:
| Ah, that's probably related to the bug I'm seeing where I've
| got my Teams calendar synced to my phone, but about half of
| the events show up an hour later or earlier.
|
| Isn't getting this right, like, _the_ purpose of a calendar?
| malfist wrote:
| Microsoft recently claimed 30% of their code was AI
| written. Maybe this is what you get when your systems are
| non-deterministic
| liquidpele wrote:
| Having interviewed many people from there, I can only
| assume they hire anyone with a pulse and give them major
| features to write in a language they don't know.
| duxup wrote:
| Might be time for me to apply ...
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I try to explain to people how consistent under-market
| salaries and a combative work environment has thoroughly
| brain drained Microsoft. It's really hard to turn that
| around.
| andai wrote:
| From using their products it seems they just don't value
| excellence. I think everything else is downstream of that
| (e.g. if they did, they'd pay more, optimize the work
| environment, etc.).
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Excellence is threatening to those who have prioritized
| politicking above all else so they'll actively work
| against it.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Well said and so true. It's a pity really since there is
| so much wasted human energy involved.
| x0x0 wrote:
| I'm unfortunately using Teams. It's really such a
| comprehensive piece of shit.
|
| I can't share photos in a channel w/ a customer. Why? No
| idea. There's no feedback at all. Drag and drop simply
| fails. Uploads won't go. I went through support and
| there's 5 different places in the admin to check. All of
| them seem fine.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I did a Teams call today. Neither of us could work out
| how to share our whole screen, only invidual apps, which
| was a massive pain.
| duxup wrote:
| Yes my phone teams app, the outlook app, and Teams at times
| all regularly disagree about my calendar.
|
| It's amazing as outlook used to be consistent, but now that
| its calendar is tied to teams too... it has inherited the
| suck.
| osigurdson wrote:
| This seems to be a very common response. I definitely believe
| it but Teams seems ok to me - can make video calls and do
| text chats. That is all I need it to do, really. Maybe I just
| haven't used Zoom enough to know what I am missing.
| phatskat wrote:
| I think it's less that you're missing something Zoom does
| better, it's mostly that Teams is a poor replacement for
| any calendar, messaging app, or video call service. It does
| those things "fine", but I wouldn't say it does any of them
| _well_.
| duxup wrote:
| I actually don't like zoom either ;)
|
| Video conferencing for me Teams isn't the issue as much as
| it is a compromise when it comes to everything else.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Having used better solutions for those things in the past,
| being forced to use Teams feels like a significant step
| back.
| 9dev wrote:
| I miss slack so much. Their attention to detail makes for
| a much more enjoyable product, paying for something we
| get for free with 365... still. I don't know if Microsoft
| should be content with a product that's so awful people
| literally only use it because of network effects.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I was once 5 hours late to a fairly important meeting because
| the Teams calendar was showing the time in UTC instead of my
| zone. Never determined why.
| phatskat wrote:
| Whenever I schedule a meeting, Teams warns me that some
| attendees are in a different time zone. Except they aren't.
| I've confirmed with coworkers and checking our settings.
|
| And then there's the "helpful" way teams resets the
| calendar view: let's say I'm going back through calls from
| last week to see how long they took. In Teams, I go back a
| week, click the calendar item, record the time in my app,
| then go back to the calendar view and...I'm on this week.
| Neat. Intuitive.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Whenever I schedule a meeting, Teams warns me that
| some attendees are in a different time zone.
|
| Are they on a VPN to another time zone?
| olav wrote:
| For thirty years now, the world knows that the last company
| to trust calendars and mail is Microsoft and yet they are all
| over the place. I have lost all hope for humanity's future.
| unixhero wrote:
| Well this is how I make tons of money, so no depression from me
| just acceptance... people said the same of Jira and Confluence
| earlier
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Depends on what you compare to. Jira and Confluence at least
| work even if chubby and get only a bit of your attention.
| karel-3d wrote:
| jira and confluence are annoying but they do their job,
| somewhat. You don't like them but you don't hate them
|
| Teams is a different beast
| codegeek wrote:
| Necessary evil especially at Enterprise Level. But I agree. I
| used to think JIRA gave me nightmares until I came across MS
| Teams. It is that bad.
|
| Source: I run a SAAS where we have to unfortunately support
| integrating with MS Teams (for training etc).
| jollyllama wrote:
| Hey, think of the countless souls this author saved from
| Sharepoint.
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| Im confused seeing all the hate for teams here. Whats so bad
| about it? Its a simple calendar and a messenger. Its not
| perfect but its not awful.
|
| Jira on ghe other hand.....
| jbm wrote:
| You must not use it that much.
|
| Features that worked in mIRC in the 1990s are broken, like
| sending messages. Right this second if I click to reply to
| someone's message, I can't add a message in Japanese unless I
| copy-paste it in. This happens every few months. I can't tag
| people who have non-English names reliably.
|
| It crashes my browser. There are weird security settings, and
| when you have multiple environments, it is completely
| unusable without having multiple browsers. Sometimes you
| can't log in without clearing your cache completely.
|
| It is sheerly anti-organic, adding features no one wants.
|
| I'm literally taking time out of my vacation to complain
| about it, fml.
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| I use it every single day, constantly, and it works just
| fine for me. Only compaint I ever had is that the search
| functions suck but thats common to literally anything
| microsoft has ever done
| burningChrome wrote:
| I would have to agree with you. I use it every day for
| work and besides some wonky syncing between Outlook and
| Teams and the search which you already pointed out, it
| works. More than I can say for some of the older tech we
| were using before Teams.
|
| I would also not that I've never been a huge power user
| or rely heavily on it for anything really outside of
| calendar or channel conversations so for me, on a basic
| level it works.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I don't understand all the hate for Jira to be honest. I've
| used it at various companies and I think it's fine. You can
| absolutely customize Jira into a monstrosity that sucks to
| use, but that's true of many ticket systems. I think that the
| out of the box experience is reasonable though.
| 9x39 wrote:
| I think that's exactly it - the first time people
| experience Jira is often in heavily customized workflow-
| from-hell situations where the Jira Admins are far removed
| from the users.
|
| You can truly create some workflow nightmares and there's
| nothing in the app to discourage it apart from org culture.
| barkerja wrote:
| This. Jira has dramatically improved its overall UX/UI,
| but it's still a tool that can be abused by the
| administrators.
|
| That can be said about any tool/platform that gives near
| complete control to the user.
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| Yeah thats the real pain point, but also just the basic
| operation of jira sucks. The interface is really confusing
| and difficult to navigate and changes drastically every
| time theres an update every few years. Then also its
| SLLOOOOOWWW. For a program that millions of people use all
| day every day that does nothing more than display text, its
| pathetically slow.
| barkerja wrote:
| If you're in a company with a very top-down model/mentality,
| Teams is fine. Your comms are mostly in small groups or DMs,
| which Teams seems to really push users towards.
|
| The whole channel experience is horrible and really degrades
| any attempt at having open communications in a company.
|
| However, if you are a "flat" company that does everything in
| the open, Teams is going to work against you; this is one of
| the qualities that makes Slack great. Its whole approach
| pushes more things out into the open for more collaboration.
| mattlutze wrote:
| Honestly I'm here for it, because it's an option for a market
| of groups that don't otherwise have the opportunity to deploy
| this kind of capability. Teams feelings aside :)
|
| I worked for a client once that refused to let us build and
| manage databases for things that needed it. The one option in
| the end that we could get approved was using Microsoft
| SharePoint lists and CRUD'ing to them through the Javascript
| API.
|
| A lot of problems have lame constraints, but having an option
| at all to solve them is pretty nice.
| GenshoTikamura wrote:
| Gosh, I just recently talked our management out of taking the
| Teams turn after Skype sunset was scheduled, in favor of
| another solution. I thought maybe I'm too biased against M$ due
| to all those coworkers' accounts being blocked for no reason
| without any way to reinstate - but reading through this thread
| is a sure confirmation I was right
| bambax wrote:
| That's a great strength of the OP: instead of running away they
| decided to fix things, one feature at a time, and got rewarded
| for it!
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| I never really understand allthe hating on Teams around here. I
| use it at work for team meetings, often with people in multiple
| timezones, on desktop and mobile, and it just works. Its not a
| stellar experience, but it does just quietly get the job done.
| The whole, largish company runs on it.
| bdangubic wrote:
| it is like Jira, everyone loves to shit on it :)
| aners_xyz wrote:
| Do you use it for anything other than team meetings?
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Meetings, chat, sharing. The core functionality basically.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I think on HN, it might be because smaller teams are using it
| and aren't actually managing it properly. I get the
| impression they are just rolling it out as a free for all and
| not restricting who can add apps and channels etc. Of course
| it will turn into a mess if you allow that.
| moscoe wrote:
| Comments like this are the real source of dread on HN. The guy
| built a successful side hustle that clearly has found a place
| in the market, and people just want to shit on it and virtue
| signal how much cooler they are than ms teams. If it's not for
| you, move along if you don't have anything useful to
| contribute.
| daft_pink wrote:
| Might be an unpopular opinion, but if you can accomplish your
| goal without investors, you should do it.
| pugworthy wrote:
| Error code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG on trying to open the
| page.
| unixhero wrote:
| Great article, I got kind of motivated
|
| Who the heck is Microsoft Loop for anyways?
| exodust wrote:
| Me: can dynamic content such as inventory feeds be included in
| wiki pages? *AI Assistant is typing* AI:
| Hmm, I couldn't find an answer to that. Can you rephrase your
| question or give me a bit more detail?
|
| This is why I can't stand the idea of conversing with AI bots
| just to "browse" 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't surface what
| you need quickly and accurately.
|
| And $790+ annually and still can't remove the "powered by Perfect
| wiki" logo! It takes $2390 before you're unsticking that sucker!
| mparnisari wrote:
| Congrats on building a successful product!
| misiek08 wrote:
| Respect and positive jealousy!
| game_the0ry wrote:
| > In May 2020, I lost my job and started thinking about new
| projects to launch or where to direct my efforts
|
| I hope this becomes more common -- laid off engineers starting
| their own digital products.
| desireco42 wrote:
| 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.
|
| From my perspective, this is excellent product.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| This product reminds me a bit of 'You need a wiki', which allows
| you to maintain your wiki in Google Drive, but still browse it
| easily:
|
| https://youneedawiki.com/
|
| As the files are all stored in Google Drive, so there's no vendor
| lock-in.
|
| The documentation site is also made with their product:
| https://docs.youneedawiki.com/
| leipert wrote:
| > files are all stored in Google Drive, so there's no vendor
| lock-in.
|
| Except for Google Drive
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Sure, but the product is targeted at people who _already_ use
| Google Drive.
| ravikapoor101 wrote:
| There is nothing in google drive that has a lockin. You can
| move files anywhere anytime - local disk, dropbox, S3 etc.
| zzbn00 wrote:
| There is also https://tiddlywiki.com/ that you can save
| anywhere
| mmooss wrote:
| Is there a demo of Perfect Wiki somewhere? I looked around and
| only saw 'signup for demo' on their website.
| 9x39 wrote:
| People love oracles. I don'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.
|
| The common denominator in the room is probably so high for a lot
| of tech people that it's easy to be dismissive, but this looks
| like giving people what they think they want - the oracle. It's
| impressive looking for a lot of users, and impressive for certain
| people to brag about connecting and setting up for a team.
|
| I think there's a mid to bottom market desire for this stuff,
| even if it doesn't survive a possible future bubble pop. Call it
| selling shovels in a gold rush.
| gist wrote:
| Open source wiki we have used forever with great success:
|
| https://twiki.org/
|
| https://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/WhatIsTWiki
| recroad wrote:
| There's a lot of money to be made in making a bad process more
| efficient.
| hdivider wrote:
| Love it. Bob Dorf, successful entrepreneur and investor, once
| told me:
|
| "Avoid investors! Avoid investors. Avoid investors for as long as
| humanly possible."
| fHr wrote:
| 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'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
| dvektor wrote:
| Congrats OP. also: microsoft teams is an unholy abomination
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