Depression and dread is coming through me. All the repressed memories are flowing back up.
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.
Isn't getting this right, like, _the_ purpose of a calendar?
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.
The bad thing: it all moves to private messages
Heterogeneous computing environments provide diversity to isolate and contain failures. So when email goes down, we can still chat and meet.
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.
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.
These moves are always penny wise and pound foolish if you ask me.
None of that mentions the terrible UX(why do emojis take 10s to load?). When your company is remote first, it's a complete disaster.
I only have to use teams as a contractor thankfully for a single client. Not a single meeting I’ve had in two years of using it has been free of someone having some kind of issue specific to teams itself, including me.
Source: I run a SAAS where we have to unfortunately support integrating with MS Teams (for training etc).
Jira on ghe other hand.....
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.
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.
Teams is a different beast
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...
Oracle have a dark team working on what will become "Oracle Team Fusion".
I'm looking forward to the competition.
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.
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?
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.
The Trump stuff seems to get flagged very much, and the AI stuff, very litle.
It's heady times, anyway, that's for sure.
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.
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...
If you rose them at home, contrary to a dedicated farm, I want to hear about it!
Do you have a blog or Instagram or something with your work? Non computer projects sometimes get traction here if they are unusual or interesting or are made by a regular or whatever criteria the hivemind uses to choose the upvotes.
I'd like to take a look, in case there is one where my spider sense feels that can farm some karma. (Obliviously, my spider sense can fail!)
Take a look at https://hn.algolia.com/?q=woodworking
People will reproduce what you made - to the pixel.
It is really, really frustrating. Founders who have experienced this learn to avoid sharing the stories on HN, etc.
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.
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.
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.
Hmm. I see a lot of people trying to build products on top of models trained by other people, which seems very vulnerable.
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)
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.
Or. If you like the idea of having no boss, no standup meetings, no Jira, no commutes, no open office plan, etc.
And $250k is the current point on the graph - it could be $1m this time next year.
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.
Otherwise half of threads will be about Nazis by Godwin's law [0]
Like this one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Russia is highly centralized, so whoever operates in Russia has to not only abide by its laws, but actively collaborate with the regime.
There is still a fair amount of dissent and chaos in US business circles.
But business leaders are shamefully silent in US indeed. I'd hope bg and pg and zuck and besos to take clear positions on tariffs, for instance.
Not sure why there are so many salty comments. Russian invasion of Ukraine represents a regression to colonialism.
US economy contributes to endless wars in Middle East, crippling economies in South American countries. Commenting in HackerNews is bad taste at best.
Similar things could be said about the US, excluding 90% of websites.
Habr Blockchain Publishing Ltd. Diagorou 4 Kermia Building, 6th floor flat/office 601 1097 Nicosia Cyprus
You as a Western customer currently have no way to pay to a Russian legal entity, meaning that VAT and corporate income taxes from your payments are paid in EU and probably supporting Ukraine. I highly doubt that owners repatriate the profits to Russia or they cover operational costs in Russia from foreign income. It is also possible that part of that income goes into salaries of the staff which emigrated after 24.02.2022 and works for Habr remotely, as it happened with many Russian IT companies.
So question is, do you have any specific evidence that your money would fund the war or it is just application of collective responsibility?
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
Slack addons or plugins used to be a good example before it was acquired by Salesforce.
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.
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/
Except for Google Drive
I’ve been down that rabbit-hole and Je-sus what a horrific experience. Never again.
Everything you could imagine being wrong with an enterprise JavaScript package and much more is in that hellish rabbit hole.
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.
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.
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 :)
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...
Some sort of data and data structure export/external backup would be a good feature though if it doesn’t already exist
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?
In effect you've earned a $250k income _and_ ~$1 million dollar asset you can sell later (one which will also likely keep growing in value well above most other assets return rates).
The reality is a bit more complicated, but there is definitely significant value in 100% equity in a successful business that will often be larger than your paycheck.
And that's before you get into the flexibility and other upsides of being your own boss, the long-term CV & reputation benefits of this for whatever else you want to do next, etc etc.
99% of the world is not able to just go work at a FAANG. That 99% also earn way less than 250K a year.
> I started reading forums, comments, and online discussions. It turned out the built-in Wiki in Microsoft Teams annoyed users really a lot.
> 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.
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!
Reason why i am asking this :
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/30/inside-taganro...
"...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.
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.
If you're in-office you might do some of these less often. If you're fully remote and your org uses Teams, this is what goes on.
Congrats!
"Avoid investors! Avoid investors. Avoid investors for as long as humanly possible."
I hope this becomes more common -- laid off engineers starting their own digital products.
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.
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.
From my perspective, this is excellent product.
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.
As for PerfectWiki: fantastic hyper-targeted product and writeup. Congrats to Ilia
> 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."
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.
Who the heck is Microsoft Loop for anyways?