Perfect Wiki: $250K a Year From Fixing the Teams Wiki Everyone Complained About, With a Team of Two

Perfect Wiki brings in $250K a year, about $25K a month. It is run by exactly two people, developer Ilia Pirozhenko and a colleague who handles support. More than 500 companies use it, and no outside capital is involved. The platform it lives on, Microsoft Teams, is so disliked by developers that when Pirozhenko’s writeup collected 721 points on Hacker News, the comment section filled up with complaints about Teams itself. Read his account, though, and that very unpopularity turns out to be the foundation of the business. On a platform where frustration with built-in features runs high, each complaint doubles as a product opportunity. Placed among the app-store SaaS cases on Small Start, $25K a month sits at roughly the same level as SuperLemon, the Shopify app that reached $25,000 MRR in 14 months.

Five years from a layoff, in numbers

The starting point was not glamorous. The first thing he built after the layoff was a translator app for Zoom, and that market simply had no people in it. Rather than change the product idea, he changed the location, moving to the Teams marketplace where user activity was high. Researching user complaints there, he found the built-in Teams Wiki: slow, inconvenient, without even full-text search. That bundle of specific grievances became his requirements document.

Why a disliked platform makes a fine market

Perfect Wiki’s edge is not feature count but the absence of switching. Confluence and Notion are powerful knowledge bases, yet their Teams integration is weak and using them means moving to a separate site or tab. Microsoft’s own Viva and Loop are “too bulky and confusing.” Perfect Wiki completes the whole job inside the Teams window where employees already spend most of their day. It is designed to fill the hole in the place users already are, rather than to be a destination they migrate to.

Acquisition works as a set with that design. New customers arrive almost entirely through search inside the Teams app store, companies typing “wiki” and finding Perfect Wiki. Marketing and content are outsourced, but nothing in his account suggests paid ads drove growth. It is the same pattern as Snapbytes, which grew up inside the Atlassian ecosystem, and the effectively two-person team that built Shopify apps past $100K a month: win the number-one search slot in someone else’s garden. In exchange for depending on the garden’s owner, acquisition cost falls to almost zero.

The product discipline is equally explicit: every new feature must be genuinely requested by users. Search-within-page was added after several complaints, and a weekly digest came from a user suggestion. Feedback flows in through in-app chat, demo calls, and quarterly outreach asking loyal users for ideas. The team also stores all of its own documentation, tasks, and plans in Perfect Wiki, keeping quality honest by using it daily.

Running $25K a month on $2,350 of costs

The published monthly cost sheet is unusually concrete.

Even at the top of each range the total is about $2,350 a month, under a tenth of the roughly $25K in monthly revenue. Headcount is the minimum configuration: Pirozhenko on development and product, one colleague on support. That Algolia, a search company, is the second-largest line item quietly confirms where the product’s value sits, in the full-text search the built-in Teams wiki never had.

The stalls, and the modesty of the original goal

These five years were not one straight climb. He writes that there were months with no growth, times when everything felt stuck. Counting the failed Zoom translator, the bet that landed was his second one. And the original goal was modest: a stable $70–80K a year, about what his previous job paid. $250K is more than three times that, and everything beyond the target he calls a pleasant bonus. The small goal likely made the niche decision easier. Someone chasing a huge market would struggle to pick something as unglamorous as replacing Teams’ built-in wiki.

Today the product is extending beyond Teams, offered through Slack, via ChatGPT, and as a chatbot embedded on customer websites. That reads as the year-five answer to the biggest risk on the sheet, dependence on a single platform.

The same idea flopped on Zoom and landed on Teams

What carries over from Perfect Wiki to other products is less the idea than the choice of where to put it. The founder’s first attempt, a Zoom translation app, ended the moment it became clear the marketplace had almost no visitors.

• Complaints about built-in features work as a spec only when the platform’s store carries real search traffic (on Teams, people searching “wiki” were nearly the whole intake of new customers)
• Restricting the roadmap to user requests holds only while two people can still talk directly with 500 companies

The limits deserve stating. The $25K monthly figure is the founder’s own claim as of April 2025, with no third-party verification. The moat, a top search slot in the Teams app store, could vanish with one Microsoft policy change, and improvements to Viva or Loop would narrow the gap with the built-in tools. The launch speed, a paying customer within days of listing, rode the 2020 remote-work boom and a thin competitive field, and there is no guarantee today’s Teams store would allow the same pace.