> 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.
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?
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.
Are you talking about Indie Hackers? Why speak in riddles, it isn't a secret.
I also was confused by why he was being so cryptic about a very popular forum.
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.
I wouldn't mind if it was "Here is how I got to $250k ARR with my self-funded AI startup" :-)
I prefer AI both raw material and recycled garbage than the cryptocoin epidemy from recent years.
To be fair, more than 1/3 of my technical thoughts involve ai these days.
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.
> 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).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html mentions not to use HN for political or ideological battle.
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.
>but would love to see some data on it.
There was a great post by someone who did some analysis on HN content, just yesterday. Can't remember keywords to find it though.
If you get a one- or two-person SaaS to $10K MMR, and then tell the detailed story in places like HN, you get copycatted many times.
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.
> 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.
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...
I would upvote interesting Show HNs about, say, raising pigs! I like learning from folks with firsthand knowledge.
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!
> from pigs I raised.
If you rose them at home, contrary to a dedicated farm, I want to hear about it!
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.
I'd also like some horror stories, like someone vibe-coding their way into burning a million dollars by accident and having to sell a kidney on the black market so they don't lose their house.
[sorry for the late reply]
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
It used to be easier to use expertise to make money, now you need to use expertise just to get by.
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.
thank you for the reply, it feels good for others to understand
My story on the first page, so I guess people still loves success-stories ;)
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Using silicon chips manufactured in like 3 fabs
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>it bothered me because I come here to get away from all the propaganda.
Somehow, I doubt this statement is true, given the rest of your post, which was in no way adding to the conversation, is exactly the sort of propaganda you claim to try and get away from.
>We have to educate and inform.
Which you did not do in any stretch of the words - all you did was add noise.
Quite the hostile comment.
The parent comment was more about submissions than comments, and it is in a sub thread that is already a tangent from the main topic: a wiki app on the teams store that was successful.
I feel the same way as parent, that the idea of keeping politics off HN made more sense when the US wasn't going through a "bloodless coup" to destroy it from within.
Is this comment a primer on ranked choice voting or ascendant fascism? No. Do I welcome those posts more now than before? Yes.
Oh, facts are propaganda now? Well, I know who you voted for then. At first I thought you were talking about maintaining quality but now I’m pretty sure I touched a nerve. lol.
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How are the things I mentioned not real? I didn't say that we are talking about those semantic arguments on this Hacker News thread, I'm talking about the world outside of that.
> But seeing just how incompetent, corrupt and lawless this administration is, it no longer bothers me. We have to educate and inform.
That has been politicians through time. It is you care at this point.
I shifted through life from: Not my problem, to "I know who and what is right", to "We touched bottom", to (currently) the world has always been this way and I have little agency.
Edit: Do what you want with your little agency. And enjoy life what you can. Not mutually exclusive
you half joke, but having one administration (lying) about solving abusive interest on student loans, vs current one boasting (probably lying too) about sending millions to jail for failing to pay that abusive interest, do change peoples priorities in a way that lead more people to work flipping burgers instead of trying to code a wiki for a niche audience for example.
Yes and:
TLDR: Technology is intrinsically political.
I'm grateful that HN informed me about right-to-repair, EFF, privacy, cybersecurity, and so forth.
I was so upset I when the Clinton Admin promoted the Clipper chip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip I can't believe we're still arguing about the issue (right to use encryption) today. That was probably the first time I realized that politics had real impact on my world.
Coincidentally, Neil Postman's book Technopoly was my gateway drug into criticism (Ted Nelson's Computer Lib, McLuhan, Chomsky, Donald Norman, etc, etc). Transmuted me from a naive optimistic technophile into a skeptic.
Then the (now evergreen) electronic voting and tabulation debacle radicalized me. I just couldn't believe that otherwise intelligent people supported that crap.
Then I tried (and failed) to protect personal privacy (electronic medical records, secret ballots).
It makes me crazy when people, like geeks and policy makers and bosses, who I think should know better, advocate for stuff that can't be true. I've tried to explain that perpetual motion machines simply aren't possible. Making me sound like the nutter.
(One of our local papers called me a "sweaty paranoid kook" for having the gall to correct their misunderstandings over how voting with postal ballots works. That was fun.)
(Workwise, I got a soft demotion when I/we tried to explain to the boss that the blackbox demographic database they licensed (without our knowledge) simply doesn't work. "How can that be true?! Everyone else is using this database." Ya, sure, believe the sales pukes over your own team. Terrific.)
So. I don't know how to separate technology from politics. It's unfortunate that everything swiftly gets coded as partisan. Whereas I see everything in terms of punching up vs down; our popular culture persists in making everything a team sport.
--
FWIW, Joshua Citarella (Do Not Research, Doomscroll, etc) is probably the most cogent contemporary critic I follow today.
Initially, Citarella just wanted to figure out how to be a working artist. As in "get paid to produce culture". He (and his community) ingested acres of knowledge and have synthesized a largely coherent worldview (criticism of platform economics, neoliberalism). Helping me to gel and articulate my own worldview, forged over the decades of working on the frontlines of technology and policy.
--
Absolutely, I'd rather spend my time programming, solving problems, tinkering, hanging out with my peers, talking shit. Alas, the real world continues to conspire to deprive me of these simple pleasures. Makes me cranky. I choose to fight back.
For anyone into this vein of criticism, I highly recommend `The Technological Society` By Jacques Ellul [0].
Among other things it makes the point (paraphrasing poorly) that politics is intrinsically technological. More precisely, he says modern politics and technology are both instances of the same underlying process of "technique". It's heavily informed my way of looking at technology, politics, and their interconnection.
[0]: https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...
My moment was when the Australian Liberal Party destroyed the previous government's plan to rollout fiber to the premises to 90-odd percent of the Australian population. They stole a decade of fiber internet from me because they wanted to play politics. They rolled out new copper in some areas for goodness sake. They said they were technology agnostic, they said something better than fiber may come along, yet they rolled out copper. Said a lot about their competence.
It was disgusting. It set Australia's technology landscape back by a decade (it didn't just affect me, it affected the entire industry in which I worked, which is a foundational industry to almost all others - what does not depend on communications infrastructure these days?). Somewhat at the behest of Rupert Murdoch, who's not even an Australian citizen anymore, to protect his interests in the dinosaurs of traditional media. The roots of the issue also stem from the privatisation of the owner of most of Australia's communications infrastructure a number of years before that - also a great decision of the same political party. I don't know how / why people can still take them seriously (I do know, but that's actually worse).
Both sides of politics are biased and corrupt to some extent, but only one side has burned me to that degree on something I actually cared about.
Separately, it's only niche political parties that actually seem to care much about the privacy invasion that's rampant on the internet. No major parties seem to have any willpower to take that on.
The ongoing attacks on encryption, including the ridiculous comments from Australian Prime Minister at the time Malcolm Turnbull about the laws of Australia overlooking the laws of mathematics. SMFH.
When technology is woven into our daily lives it cannot be apolitical.
I should have included this link to one of my favourite pieces of graffiti as regards the bastardised NBN rollout:
https://preview.redd.it/l0q7wkqc92z11.jpg?width=640&crop=sma...
Once wealth inequality reaches a certain threshold, revolution becomes inevitable.
I'd argue that we're seeing various indicators that suggest we've passed a tipping point. We can look at things like the high national debt vs unprecedented low tax rates on the wealthy, the wealth of the top 1% surpassing that of the bottom 90%, how government agencies and safety nets are being gutted when we have the highest GDP in history, how the wealthy build gated communities instead of relieving even the most basic suffering (like infant mortality), how tech profits get vacuumed up by a handful of people through financial instruments and crypto rather than going towards investment in new businesses, how private equity firms own a 5% stake in most companies and are buying up all housing and real estate along with foreign investment to turn owners into renters, how politicians are so involved with insider trading that we can no longer distinguish campaign contributions from Wall Street bribes and kickbacks.. the rabbit hole goes so deep that we fall forever if we get sucked into it.
Meanwhile how many of us are struggling to win the internet lottery with our 2nd, our 3rd, our 10th startup? When deep down we know the odds of succeeding are perhaps 10% or less, and the system feels rigged to deny us access to any capital at all, especially when we need it most to cover a mortgage payment or health emergency that should have already been covered by our exorbitantly high insurance rates and taxes going into a private healthcare system that's twice as expensive as the rest of the developed world.
In many ways, I consider us to be in a worst-case scenario. It wasn't supposed to turn out like this. We could have had a technotopia like solarpunk with full automation and UBI, instead we're racing towards fascist dictatorship. Where we once had democrats and republicans at least symbolically opposing one another, now we effectively have a single center-right party funded by the same private donors, which uses wedge issues to keep the population divided and conquered.
I'd even say that we got here by banning political content on HN and elsewhere. So we have a generation of young people who never knew an America before everything was privatized. We can imagine what a center-left government would look like, a we society instead of a me society, where most profit flows into a pot shared by all, with equal pay regardless of gender or race, a national surplus as large as our current debt, free college and healthcare paid for by that endowment, nearly free renewable energy, climate change reversing back towards baseline, etc etc, an ivory tower so high it would reach the stars.
But sadly that's all just a dream now, so far away that it's hard to see a way to get there without going through societal pain that as recently as the late 1990s could have been completely avoided.
Ours was supposed to be the quick and easy path. Is it any wonder that we succumbed to the dark side?
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Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
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)
The US constitution guarantees life and liberty, the great joke being that the two things are almost opposite.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
agreed, however I never worked for FAANG
...or the seeds of a company that may one day be a letter in the successor of the FAANG acronym.
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.
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.
fingers crossed, I'll see something near $1m in a year or two
Maybe! But on the other side I can work when and how I want, it's a big bonus as for me.
I also love side projects and have done a few. What I was commenting on is "people using their expertise to make money". For me it's more of the opposite. I could have earned way more in traditional things but I do side project because I can select what I want to do.
This bonus is priceless tbh congrats on your success and hope you'll never need to work for anyone
Not bad when the median salary is equivalent to 600$/mo
Different strokes for different folks
I quit a job a President of a software company 11 years ago. I’ve never been so happy or healthy.
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.
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.
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.
without a 20 person team
my bad!
He said the opposite, I read it wrong the first time too
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?
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.
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
When working for my former employer, we rolled our own help center, but after awhile, it was deemed easier and cheaper to just cut it and transfer everything to zendesk.
because internal ones are about knowledge, external ones are about driving sales and reducing support costs.
Not yet, but it is in our roadmap
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.
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.
Yep, Teams store is a hidden gem.
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.
what else is there then? google, microsoft, apple, some chinese companies. can't think of anything else with a large market for apps.
Post is old by now, but I've had this spreadsheet bookmarked for years:https://medium.com/point-nine-news/a-landscape-of-the-major-...
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.
There’s even a niche within Roblox, which is making plugins for the IDE used for making games for it, Roblox Studio. There’s a built-in marketplace where you can charge money for them.
Shopify, Wordpress
>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.
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!
thank you!
You're welcome - it's inspiring :) Thanks for the write up!
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft charged with EU antitrust violations for bundling Teams (The Verge, 25 Jun 2024) – https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/25/24185467/microsoft-teams-...
It's true. But I was more talking about how they're respectively considered in HN commentland.
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.
At least there is a lot of room for improvement for entrepreneurs likes me ;)
For c#/cpp visual studio is really, really good
Jetbrains rider blows Visual Studio out of the water, but it's not Microsoft, so our company doesn't use it.
as someone who works in visual studio on c# every day of my life, I have the opposite opinion. it's awful
In how many programming ecosystems have you worked in?
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:
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/
> files are all stored in Google Drive, so there's no vendor lock-in.
Except for Google Drive
There is nothing in google drive that has a lockin. You can move files anywhere anytime - local disk, dropbox, S3 etc.
This is only true if you use GDrive as nothing more than a file store, which most people don't. The above mentioned wiki is exactly the kind of software someone in the company finds, buys, gets the company reliant on and now you can't switch away from GDrive because that thing wouldn't work anymore.
And because Google does not participate in standardization efforts for document formats, the exported Docs/Sheets/Slides files you get from GDrive won't have any of Google's admittedly cool features, they're simply discarded when exporting.
Sure, but the product is targeted at people who already use Google Drive.
There is also https://tiddlywiki.com/ that you can save anywhere
If you can afford to host it yourself, than Library[0] (developed by the NYT), is a similar FOSS project.
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:
Directly?
Surely they meant indirectly. I suppose any Russian company that pays taxes could be said to do so.
Indirectly. Mea culpa.
Love it. Bob Dorf, successful entrepreneur and investor, once told me:
"Avoid investors! Avoid investors. Avoid investors for as long as humanly possible."
> 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 :)
It wouldn't exist at all. It isn't AI.
By my count they mention AI seventeen times on their homepage.
Plus, what will the other 18 people on the team do? Burn their cash using and inserting "AI".
Judging from their web site, so called AI is at the center of their offering.
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)
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.
Thank you!
> 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.
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!
> It’s available right where employees already spend most of their day — in Microsoft Teams.
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.
Talk with your coworkers, send quick questions about code snippets, screen share and cowork or pair program or troubleshoot, have meetings, have sales calls, send updates that are a little less important than email would warrant.
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.
>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...
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
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.
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
Good work, there are plenty of businesses like this for the pickings exactly because they are not VC investable.
Perfect Wiki = Perfect History for a coder: He lost his job and looked for ways to make other people's lives easier in a growing niche market. Perfect Receipt. Congratulations
thank you!
> 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.
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.
First of all, congratulations. That's a huge feat and you seem to have overcome a lot of hurdles to make it.
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?
Building a business that earns $250k/year isn't just a fixed income though - you get the money, but _you also now own a business_.
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.
> Like, I can work at a FAANG, coast, make no real contribution to society and collect a 400K/yr check.
99% of the world is not able to just go work at a FAANG. That 99% also earn way less than 250K a year.
Case in point:
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.
"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.
Pretty impressive. One watch out is that MS has control of many knobs that can ruin it. At the moment, your app is what comes back first if I click "Apps" and search "Wiki". I imagine MS can change that on a whim. Then things like app reviews and so on. Have you considered expanding it as a plugin/app for other tools...to sort of spread that risk out to more than one vendor?
OP already mentioned at the end of the post that they’ve expanded to Slack, ChatGPT, etc
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.
Can you elaborate a bit? Been tossing around the idea of doing a Teams app. What were the challenges?
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.
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.
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.
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!
Thank you! I think you could do it, just ship something today!
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).
He’s in Russia where it’s a lot more doable.
I think the overall consensus would be being cautious of creating a product on top of a third party platform and marketplace, worse it being MS itself. But! If this is a one person team, I think this is exactly the other way around and basing the product on top of Teams is unbelievably competitive to the point that if MS shuts you down in a couple of years you can still have made a profit.
My company is building something in the messaging/comms space, but focused on B2B rather than internal team chat like Slack/Teams. Seeing all the dislike for those two makes me wonder if we should enable intra-team messaging as a (free?) bonus feature.
As for PerfectWiki: fantastic hyper-targeted product and writeup. Congrats to Ilia
Open source wiki we have used forever with great success:
Congrats on the success! Are you not afraid that MS ships a wiki upgrade at a certain point?
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.
It's more likely that they just acquire Perfect Wiki and integrate it directly.
Ms already has onenote and loop. So another new product is unlikely to be come, let alone compete
Money quote:
> 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."
Sorry to tell you that some of us are looking to Migrate away from it. We’ve definitely noticed the speed and usability issues as we’ve grown
Did you get any corporate or MS celebrity endorsement early on? In my limited experience this seemed key to bootstrap you on the store.
Nope! It was all done organically
Is there a demo of Perfect Wiki somewhere? I looked around and only saw 'signup for demo' on their website.
Related: Had anyone had any success with (selling) Skype Add-ins/Plug-ins or whatever it was called? :)
Might be an unpopular opinion, but if you can accomplish your goal without investors, you should do it.
Although I despise MS teams and never want to use that godawful piece of shit outside of work. I love this type of story/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.
There's a lot of money to be made in making a bad process more efficient.
BRB. Installing russian knowledge management software on internal servers.
Author also mentions his thoughts on expanding to the russian market. So many red flags here. Pun intended.
Error code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG on trying to open the page.
Great article, I got kind of motivated
Who the heck is Microsoft Loop for anyways?
Congrats OP. also: microsoft teams is an unholy abomination
Congrats on building a successful product!
Where data are stored? How safe are they?
I am using Google Cloud Platform to store the data
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...
Delusions of grandeur much?
If you think Putin is going to kidnap someone's family to force a developer to hand over data that you put into a MS Teams wiki, you certainly have delusions of grandeur.
Respect and positive jealousy!
Amazing, congratulations!
Also despise teams, here’s my anecdote. A few years ago (about 2020) the Linux teams client had bug where it would write to a .so continuously which is odd enough. It would then fill up the disk on my work laptop writing to that one file. Seemed to be related to the update mechanism. Luckily as a dev I had admin access and uninstalled and deleted the 450gB .so file.
Congrats on the success, but I feel like you hit gold because MS has little to no interest in providing actual good software for their users. Hopefully for you that stays that way and you can maybe expand to other areas where they come short (basically anything in Teams)
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.
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.
They already expanded it to Slack and other platforms.
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.
Agreed!
Congrats!
last company had slack which is way superior to share codesnippets, can some developer tell me what they do about it when they only have shity teams in their company? compared to sharing code over slack it'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
Are you putting it in a code block (three back ticks)? The only issues I've had are character limits and sometimes Teams doesn't do a good job actually putting things in your clipboard.
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Dunno about the author, but linking to habr.com is bad taste at best.
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.
Moreover, habr is a great example why you should not let your site be 'out of politics' (which basically means making a silent deal with fsb to let their ambassadors roam free in the comment section for the luxury of not being blocked). At a certain point in time the site pivoted from being somewhat anti-censorship to a cesspot full of turbonormies, all because of the owners desire to stay highly monetized. There is nothing they would not force you to accept if you are only interested in views and money, but you will get neither in the end.
I don't believe the regime in Russia (and potentially many other places) will allow your site to be "out of politics" in the classic western-democratic sense. If I understand correct, it either exists (and in unison with the regime) or it just ... doesn't exist. There might be an option if it's really small, then the FSB simply isn't interested. If it becomes big enough, you don't get the option.
Habr is a great example why you should force your site to be 'out of politics' if you want senseful discussions
Otherwise half of threads will be about Nazis by Godwin's law [0]
Like this one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I guess I should delete my hn account. They pay taxes in the US which is used to fund countless wars all over the world.
Maybe one day, but so far I see one important difference.
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.
>Russia is highly centralized, so whoever operates in Russia has to not only abide by its laws, but actively collaborate with the regime.
You are saying this based on what? Do you have any relationship to Russia, have you visited it after the war started or you just read the newspapers?
Yes, there are some businesses receiving the direct calls from the government and I'm aware of several examples where they just tell "f. off" to a very senior official. Among the rest the level of cooperation or resistance varies from unstoppable patriotic propaganda and fundraising to CEO tipping employees about military recruiters during the mobilization campaign and relocating staff abroad. Russia is certainly not as centralized as you might think.
There is a tiny differenence between donating equipment to countries being invaded or under constant missile attacks (US) and actively invading a country with the stated official goal of exterminating local population (Russia)
History didn't start in 2022.
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USA gives tons of money and ammunition to Israel.
I didn’t know this and thanks for sharing. Glad I run ad blockers (no ad revenue for them).
Not sure why there are so many salty comments. Russian invasion of Ukraine represents a regression to colonialism.
> Not sure why there are so many salty comments. Russian invasion of Ukraine represents a regression to colonialism.
Reads to me like the people have no problem with the idea of boycotting countries or products one doesn't align with as much as OP's apparent hypocrisy and selective application of his reasons.
But I say "apparent" because he doesn't flat out condemn invasions. He says he had no problem with the smaller scale invasion going back to 2014, or the many other invasions around the world, they were fine. Only the "full-fledged invasion of Ukraine" in 2022 crossed the boycott threshold for him.
This could leave a bad taste at best for some fellow HNers.
You misunderstood the OP. He boycotted Habr once it started enforcing censorship. Before it did it there was no reason.
Maybe I did, maybe he made absolutely no mention of "enforcing censorship". Without reading his comment we'll never know. Let's do it together.
> This is the biggest Russian IT resource that contributes to the Russian economy and thus to the war effort.
> I unpublished everything there and asked to delete my account in Feb, 2022, just after the full-fledged invasion of Ukraine started
Habr contributes money to Russia and their war effort. OP (@sam_lowry_) was fine with this and implicitly Russia's lower scale invasion until 2022 when the full-fledged invasion of Ukraine started.
Coz colonialism never went away - Iraq, Afghanistan, the CIA overthrow of multiple elected governments, the French yoke over Africa, the Hague invasion act, etc.
As OP points out you can boycott Hacker News too if you want to take a principled stance on any group tangenially linked to colonialism.
To be fair, one can take a principled stance based on the nexus to the bad thing and the practical effects. It’s pretty undeniable that Russian invasion of Ukraine and the context around it makes it the worst active example of colonialism.
Not even close. The Israeli genocide is the worst active example of modern colonial behavior. It mirrors very closely the Nazi genocide both in intent (i.e. ethnic cleansing of the untermensch) and actions (trying to dump the untermensch in africa first and then graduating to genocide).
> This is the biggest Russian IT resource that contributes to the Russian economy and thus to the war effort.
US economy contributes to endless wars in Middle East, crippling economies in South American countries. Commenting in HackerNews is bad taste at best.
OK, and you would be right to boycott US economy and refuse to cooperate with the US companies if this is your conviction. But I guess you are not doing this, since you are commenting on Hacker News, run by Y Combinator, a US company?
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Ah yes, classic. Here's a helpful guide:
- This never happened
- They deserved it
- They did it themselves
- What about Iraq?
I don't. Neither does my current client.
Actually, I wonder if I should start a consulting business to help others clear the skies from US clouds.
Anyone?
/s
Let's focus on the content rather than the form.
Similar things could be said about the US, excluding 90% of websites.
Cancel culture at its finest. Look at the company registration address:
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?
Russian companies are commonly registered in Cyprus, and the money flow back to Russia.
Source: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/11/14/d...
I am certainly well aware of that. However this proves nothing and my question still stands. Not every company founded by Russians on Cyprus is a money-laundering or a war-funding enterprise. Tax optimization - yes, everyone does that. Friendly jurisdiction - yes, and now more than ever, if you are Russian, you want to do business but stay away from Russian government. A lot of people actually moved to Cyprus because they were opposing the war.
Is there any specific evidence that Habr supports the war? This is not a rhetoric question, I expect the answer and I'm fine if the answer is yes.
Maybe you should read this then:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_punishment
Just like with BDS in case of Israel, this principle is incompatible with Western values. If you apply collective punishment to Russia, how are you different from them?
They perpetrate Russian censorship.
Upvoted your comment. Don’t agree with you, but it seems like good faith discussion and a legitimate question to air out.
Thank you. Yes, this is a genuine and legitimate question to ask.
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This seems like a commercial for the product. Why is this front page HN?
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.
Oh no, russian spyware running inside american spyware!
american spyware to sell ads, russian spyware for looking for ways to kill american citizens. if you think this is hyperbole you are [vulgarism].
Sir, this is a forum for people who make things
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...
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.
My personal favorite UX-failure-of-the-moment in Teams: If I open the teams tab > Browse, it shows a big list of company-wide channels that I could join. There's a search box, but unlike any normal search box, it only does a prefix search, so if your channel is named "some test channel", and you search for "test", it doesn't find it! Several times I've given up at guessing the right channel name and had to ask coworkers to tell me the exact name in order to join.
The number of new and novel ways companies (Microsoft and Apple specifically) have found to screw up search is mind boggling.
And we're not talking edge cases, just "It's been solved since the 60s" meat and potato use cases.
Ah the good old us vs them thing popping up again. Manners
Two of my team Channels completely vanished last week. Not in the recycle bins, just gone. The only way I knew was because I got a sync notification from Onedrive.
I contacted support two weeks ago. So far they have asked me to check the Teams admin recycle bin (3 days) and then the SharePoint recycle bin (7 day). I had shared screenshots of both of these in the initial support request, both are empty.
Only 3 people have admin rights in the company, one of us deleted the channels, and even if we did there's supposed to be a 93 day recovery window. But they're just....gone.
I asked for them to escalate 3 days ago. No reply.
My favorite bug (still unsolved!) is that maximizing the window on a video call only shows the top left quarter of the video feed. I have to manually resize the window to that exact region of my screen just to see someone’s full face or screen share. Nobody can fix it, my teams install is just stuck like this. Another one: when using airpods, everyone’s voices sound super slowed down, like the audio samples are being played back at half speed. Google meet and Slack huddles work fine. Cherry on top: sometimes the entire window just vanishes mid call (no video, audio, or any UI) but I’m still broadcasting. This isn’t just bad, it’s repeated complete failures of basic functionality that happen on the regular. Frankly, it’s the most incompetently written piece of software I’ve ever had the displeasure of using.
Your video window issue may be related to display scaling and/or video hardware acceleration. If you care enough, try tinkering with those settings in teams, windows, and your display driver (if it has them…).
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?
Microsoft recently claimed 30% of their code was AI written. Maybe this is what you get when your systems are non-deterministic
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.
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.
Might be time for me to apply ...
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.
The only app I hate more than outlook, is teams.
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.
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.
I appreciate it but at this point I’ve given up on it. It doesn’t cause any issues, or hasn’t thus far, outside of the annoying nag. That said, if I ever get to digging in again I’ll check in to those settings - thanks!
Funny enough, we’re all on the same VPN in the same state.
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.
Last week there were so many apps added to my teams that I couldn't see the chats anymore.
Should have repented, because now you’re in hell
Teams is the old new SharePoint, and it will be the same unmanageable mess
Lotus Notes enters the chat
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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.
Having used better solutions for those things in the past, being forced to use Teams feels like a significant step back.
I always found slack to be sort of awful and hated it. Then I used teams and understood that slack was actually a decent version of such apps.
RIP HipChat; we don't know how good we had it.
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_.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm no UX expert but I'm going to claim it's because of the UX that Teams doesn't work for so many people, and I'm left wondering why Teams hasn't had a UX overhaul yet.
The other competitor to Slack is Discord, and if you remove the playful "gamer" elements I think it'd be a lot less jarring to people used to Slack, because they follow a lot of similar UX and design patterns.
At one point Discord tried to rebrand into something a bit more serious but it didn't work, but I think they should try again; create a Discord Pro or something like that, get the certifications, add SSO support, etc.
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
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.
I never understood how they wanted me to use channels so I didn’t.
What was the reasonable thing that they should have done?
In my experience the discussions move to insecure channels like WhatsApp too, which is hilarious.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's moved to activity -> mentions, I think.
You used to be able to remote control during desktop sharing.
Yet it's better than every single alternative. Teams is a flaming pile of UX poo. Just like the rest of Microsoft products except Excel and _maybe_ Outlook.
> except Excel and _maybe_ Outlook.
They're fixing that by replacing Outlook with "New Outlook" which is a terrible half-clone of its predecessor.
Been using it for over 10 years and I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. I suppose I didn't use the features you're mentioning.
For me, it's basically exactly the same except the sidebar is now wider because of the multi-slack thing, and the home/DMs/activity nonsense bar, which I could do without.
Otherwise it's just channels with messages in them. Which has improved since I started using it, when there were no threads or reactjis.
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
Slack is $180/year without discounts or "enterprise". So if you have 3300 users it could be that.
$x/per-user/per-month. If you have many users it quickly adds up.
That's a huge financial incentive to build an alternative.
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 naïve take?
Our enterprise deletes all PMs after 24 hours. That's one way to not worry about that.
i hated using MS Teams (in the past) so much, i would probably look for a new job immediately if my company decided to do this today. I’m not joking in the slightest. And i’m not a slack fan boy, i just dislike MS Teams that much.
These moves are always penny wise and pound foolish if you ask me.
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.
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.
That is exactly the thing. It never just works. There are new bugs plaguing our company on a daily basis. And they change daily. Can't share screen today. can't unmute. unread messages will never become read. Can't call anyone. Meeting invites only updated for one attendee. meeting alerts don't pop up. trying to open basic windows takes upwards of a full minute(workflows panel for example). these are just some of the things from the last couple weeks. The problem is that it's never a consistent experience. It becomes a time sink of eternal FOMO because it cannot be trusted.
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.
> but it does just quietly get the job done.
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.
I've worked at companies that use both Slack and Teams, and the chat culture that Slack creates is hugely different than Teams. Have you experienced both? Teams chat rooms are ghost towns compared to Slack. The UX of teams discourages chat, syncing is a mess so ordering is all funky, and good luck finding anything written in the past. Slack is so good at search that we have channels with just feeds of auto-generated information, and there's a good chance anything you need to know is in one of those channels. (company is 800+ people doing 300m ARR)
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.
Do you use it for anything other than team meetings?
Meetings, chat, sharing. The core functionality basically.
it is like Jira, everyone loves to shit on it :)
Jira is much worse. There's not a single reason to buy Jira. I wouldn't use it if it was free.
I'd buy Jira and Teams for my competitors if they'd let me.
exactly my point :)
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).
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.....
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
IMO, this is the right idea. I've worked on small projects using Jira primarily as a means of ticket management, and I've worked on giant orgs with scrums and groomings and all that.
As far as a tool, it's perfectly fine. A lot of my bad feelings came as a result of wanting it to be simple ("What should I work on next") but it being twisted into a series of incantations and rituals by those looking to bend it for the purposes of more and more intricate views into how we spend every moment of our day.
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.
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.
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
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
Depends on what you compare to. Jira and Confluence at least work even if chubby and get only a bit of your attention.
Hey, think of the countless souls this author saved from Sharepoint.
Sad but true. If you run Teams you're more likely to be what some people would consider a slow death corporate hell hole. Thankfully last place I had like that was a husk of a company so I enjoyed a flexible work schedule since literally no one knew what I was doing and no one cared. I logged in, ran an offshore stand up, did the days activities to maintain schedule, and left whenever I wanted to. Liminal office spaces aren't so bad when you can leave anytime and get decent fast food for lunch. Good times!
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!
I haven't used teams but if it's so bad there has to be a good open source alternative? Let's build one???
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.
>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'.
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.
We had to start using it because all of our clients demanded it. Managers/Owners don't say no to big money.
But then you'd be onboarded (as a guest) on their Teams environment, right? You wouldn't need to have your own to make that work. In fact, when I had the need to switch between environments I found that experience to be extremely confusing, frustrating and buggy.
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.
Is it common for startups to provide all of their employees with Office nowadays?
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.
Seems like you're unfamiliar with enterprise IT
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!
> 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.
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.
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?
Slack is not open source. Neither is Zoom.
Your comment is just fake empathy noise.
I work at a large company, and we use Mattermost, which is open source.
There are plenty of better alternatives. Companies won't adopt them, and the bare concept of those applications is problematic already.
(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...
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.
There are proprietary competitors.
Oracle have a dark team working on what will become "Oracle Team Fusion".
I'm looking forward to the competition.
Most of the functionality is available in NextCloud which is open source and self-hostable.
There are many! None of them have power of Microsoft monopoly
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
Azure is not a monopoly and not even the largest cloud provider. Sql Server/Dynamics and PowerBI aren’t exactly market leaders.
Just a quick internet search shows that PowerBI has around a 25% market share.
What we need here is a Teams upgrade/replacement that, purely as a sales impedance match, integrates really well with Teams…
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.
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.
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
Where did you go after Skype?