#33. on Fire in May 2021

TLDR: Emigration from Belarus 🇧🇾 → 🇨🇾🇵🇱. 90-days trial 👵. Lemonade 🍾! -Anna, +Ilya. Web site changes. Full-text search 🧤. Cumulative reports 🔺. SAML SSO 🔑.

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Flashback: #32. Productive April 2021.

Main numbers ( → sign shows the changes between February, March, April and May):

Fibery. Connected workspace for teams.

Leads/month: 1300 → 950 → 530 → 730 New customers: 12 → 13 → 11 → 5 Active Accounts: 260 → 280 → 280 → 280 Team size: 22 → 22 → 22 → 22 Burn rate: $100K → $100K → $100K → $100K/month
MRR: $9.5K → $11.5K → $13K → $15.5K/month

Overview

Let’s start with some geopolitical rants. Fibery was born in Belarus and the whole development team worked from an office in Minsk. No more. The political situation in Belarus forces people to emigrate to other countries. Now we have 5 people in Cyprus 🇨🇾, 5 in Poland 🇵🇱, and the rest of the team in Belarus. However, we expect that more people will emigrate from Belarus in the next 1-2 months (most to Warsaw). I relocated to Cyprus in May.

Things in Belarus are becoming really weird. The largest independent news site shutdown and the Ryanair incident were the last drops for many people and they decided to leave the country.

You can imagine how hard it is for teammates to focus on Fibery vision. Relocation is a hard process that puts pressure on cognitive resources. We have to pass through these turbulent times and survive. There are positive things as well:

• We are becoming a truly distributed remote team, so we are understanding remote communication problems better now and it will help us to shape Fibery.
• When you settle in a new country, you have fewer social contacts, so you work more!
• Emigrated teammates feel much safer now and can focus better than last year.

I hope the situation in Belarus will get better eventually, but I’m afraid that in the meantime it will get worse. We strive for freedom, human rights, and independence.

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The great news for us is that Lemonade ($LMND) selected Fibery as primary product management software. We won a competition with other vendors and are going to make the Lemonade team happy 🎉.

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OK, now get back to the boring stuff. We had just 5 new customers in May, and this is not a good number to have. It seems many companies are benefiting from our free 1-year startup offering, and the new 90-days trial affected conversion as well.

Here are the main metrics:

Active accounts are increasing (slowly).

Daily and weekly active users are increasing (slowly).

North Star is increasing (slowly):

Overall, we have linear growth. This is nice, but we’d like to convert it to an exponential :)

-Anna, +Ilya

Anna, our head of marketing, left the company in May. I will fill this position myself so far. You can expect more radical stuff and inconvenient truth.

Ilya joined the marketing team as head of design. As a single designer in the marketing team, it is easy to be the head. However, Ilya is totally awesome. You are already seeing this in the latest website updates.

90-days trial

We’ve changed Fibery trial from 14-days to 90-days. Fibery is powerful and demands time to explore. 14 days is a short period for a team and we expected that this deadline will help people to focus and evaluate Fibery with full attention.

However, a new tool is rarely a number 1 problem. In reality, a short trial made evaluation more complex, since you usually check several tools and just don’t have enough time to dig into details in two weeks. So we decided that you need time to procrastinate, receive some reminders, get into Fibery again, and, finally, “get” (or abandon) it at your own pace. We feel that three months is a solid period to do it all.

It also resonates with our internal motto: “Try for free till you ❤️ it”. We had philosophical troubles with a 14-days trial but still ran this experiment. Now you have more time to experiment and fall in love (or hate) with Fibery.

90-days trial starts once you invite a second user into your workspace.

The personal plan is still free.

Website updates

We’ve slightly redesigned our website and replaced home page with a more traditional now. We have more content and more solutions, so it should be organized in a new way:

There is also a new Templates section that accumulates all existing Templates.

User Research workspace: 0 conversions

Fun story. Last month we’ve launched Fibery for User Research and had a decent webinar with nice questions and vibes.

We also set up a decent CPC campaign in Google. We have leads for ~$9 per lead and it is quite good in our space.

The problem is that these accounts don’t convert. From 100 accounts we have 0 active now (compare it with Startup Workspace retention).

We don’t know exactly why yet, but so far it looks like there is a huge mismatch between expectations and reality.

Product Updates

Despite all circumstances, May was a productive month, we had 3 releases. Here are the main things we’ve completed in May.

DONE

Burn Up/Down charts, Cumulative Flow diagram

Build various cumulative reports, like Release/Sprint Burn down chart, burn up charts, cumulative flow diagrams, process efficiency diagrams. Check the chart setup guide.

Full-text search

Find entities and documents by content in rich edit fields. Push Cmd + K and try to find something lost:

Fibery Chrome Extension

Select and save text from web pages to Fibery entities using Fibery Chrome Extension.

SAML SSO

Manage how your users sign in: via email+password, Google or Microsoft account, or SAML SSO (Okta, ActiveDirectory, etc.) Check the Authentication methods guide.

Undelete for all users

Any user in Fibery can recover a deleted entity now. Click on a workspace name in sidebar and find Trash Bin 🗑 link. Undelete is easy (but not fast):

Document full width

Set full or narrow width for any document. Find the width icon in the top right corner and enjoy:

IN PROGRESS

Share entities and documents

It was released in beta last week, so I hope the official release will happen in 1-2 weeks finally.

Release estimation: ~1 week

Formulas in Actions

This is close to completion, so we are good to go in a week or so. It will be possible to set the correct hierarchy. Let’s say you have Product - Feature - Story. Sometimes Story does not have a Feature, in this case, you want to set Product directly. In other cases, you want to inherit Product from the Feature. It will be possible to set up an action that will do that (the next step is to add actual automatic rules).

Release estimation: ~1 weeks

Permission Groups

It’s extremely hard to control access via individual user-to-app settings. We will introduce Groups and it will be possible to define groups, assign users to the groups and then give groups access to apps.

Groups are almost ready on a server side, now we are working on UI. We’ll need about 2 more weeks to complete it.

Release estimation: ~3 weeks

Documents / Rich Edit fields change history

The last thing in audit history is to track changes of documents and rich edit fields. It appeared to be trickier than we thought, so not sure when it will be done. But we are working on it.

Release estimation: 🤷‍♀️

🍅 Random from our Slack

Random tweet

Never thought about it before, but you know that famous picture of a bunch of construction workers sitting on a girder way up in the sky and having lunch? Well, here's the photographer who took that picture: Charles C. Ebbets. pic.twitter.com/wULrBM66vU

— PulpKetchup (@PulpKetchup) May 29, 2021

Random link

Dead simple, drag & drop websites. Like a collage.

Random image

Not-so-funny story.

Random quote

“What’s the right approach to new products? Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else”

Random dopamine feedback

First off, I absolutely love the design/organisation/layout of the app, I had a very short learning curve and was productive right away. I am an software architect and want to use Fibery to implement my architectures. It was a dream to set up and play around with the types and relations.

Random cortisol feedback

We use ClickUp.

Few fresh posts from our blog

• Why are deadlines important even though I hate them?.
• Entrepreneur self-doubt and confidence..