I Created Perfect Wiki and Reached $250K in Annual Revenue Without Investors

Summary

Hi, my name is Ilia. I founded Perfect Wiki — a SaaS product for creating internal company knowledge bases that works directly within Microsoft Teams. We created a simple and convenient tool for storing, editing, and sharing knowledge within companies. It all started with the idea to resolve one specific pain point: the built-in Wiki in Microsoft Teams offered was inconvenient, and there was no worthy alternatives with full integration to the platform.In this article, I want to share how the idea came about, the mistakes I made, how I found my first customers, and how I gradually grew to a steady income of $250,000 a year over five years. All of this — without investors, a 20-person team, or a “Series A” round.How It All BeganIn May 2020, I lost my job and started thinking about new projects to launch or where to direct my efforts. The pandemic drastically changed the market: the mass transition to remote work boosted interest in online communication tools, and everyone wanted to launch their own video conferencing service. It felt like a gold rush, and I decided to follow the principle: in such times, those who sell shovels win, not those who search for gold.Zoom became hugely popular during the pandemic. I decided to try making a small app — a translator — and published it on the Zoom Marketplace. But it turned out people were only interested in the Zoom app itself, and the marketplace had almost no traffic.After that failure, I moved on to Plan B: I tried publishing the translator app on the Microsoft Teams Marketplace. It seemed like there were significantly more users, apps there had lots of ratings and installs. The platform felt “alive.” My intuition didn’t fail me — just a few days after publishing, someone bought a paid subscription. But I soon realized the translator app was very limited with no room for growth. Microsoft could easily replace it anytime.That’s when I decided to dive deeper into analyzing what other problems Microsoft Teams users were facin...