Depression and dread is coming through me. All the repressed memories are flowing back up.
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?
> 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?
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/
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.
"Avoid investors! Avoid investors. Avoid investors for as long as humanly possible."
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!
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 "main" software, involves doing things 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.
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 :)
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.
Like, I can work at a FAANG, coast, make no real contribution to society and collect a 400K/yr check. Or I could go all in on a cool idea and risk getting no customers. Option 2 sounds more fun, but it's still so much stress and uncertainty for little payoff.
Do others feel the same?
I hope this becomes more common -- laid off engineers starting their own digital products.
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...
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.
As for PerfectWiki: fantastic hyper-targeted product and writeup. Congrats to Ilia
Congrats!
I’ve been down that rabbit-hole and Je-sus what a horrific experience. Never again.
> 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 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.
OP has done actual research and found a real problem to solve. Amy Hoy has been popularizing this exact approach under "Sales Safari", but it boils down to "find your user's watering holes and listen to what they complain about to each other."
Who the heck is Microsoft Loop for anyways?
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?
And $790+ annually and still can't remove the "powered by Perfect wiki" logo! It takes $2390 before you're unsticking that sucker!
This is the money quote for me.
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.
From my perspective, this is excellent product.
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.
This is the biggest Russian IT resource that contributes to the Russian economy and thus to the war effort.
By comparison, I unpublished everything there and asked to delete my account in Feb, 2022, just after the full-fledged invasion of Ukraine started.