#36. 20k MRR in August 2021

TLDR: Special Startup Diary edition 👻. 20k MRR 🤑! 15 new customers 💖! Chris joined our team 🕺. Started with a sales agency 🔍. 4 case studies 📝. Airtable integration and notify people action 💎.

Flashback: #35. Raised $3.1M in July 2021.

Overview

What’s up with the special edition?

Michael, the usual author of the Startup Diary, is on vacation🌴 (have a fun one, Michael, if you are reading this!), so this edition of the Startup Diary will be kinda special.

This time the Fibery team 🐜🐜 will face the reader and tell you what was going on in our startup in August. We hope you’ll like this more personal format and comments directly from our team members.

Some numbers 🧮

In August we reached a new milestone: 20k MRR, so now it’s honest to say that we had a 20x growth per year. 😆 Vova was the happiest with the news and started to search for the tattoo places (he will get a tattoo once we reach 100k MRR).

We also had 15 new customers 💖! Some of the users who started with Fibery in May after we introduced a 90-days trial, decided to upgrade and stay with us.

Main numbers ( → sign shows the changes between May, June, July, and August):

Fibery. Build your company workspace with no code

Paid accounts: → 140 → 145 → 155 Active accounts: 280 → 300 → 310 → 340 Active users: 1.7K → 1.9K → 2K → 2.1K Team size: 22 → 22 → 22 → 23 Run rate: $110K → $130K → $130K → $135K/month
MRR: $15.5K → $17K → $18K → $20K/month

Active accounts are increasing (slowly).

Daily and weekly active users are increasing too. New records in August: DAU: 1268, WAU: 2143.

North Star is increasing (slowly).

Chris joined our team

🎤 Chris, the newcomer: I love product development, and have spent most of my working life developing medical/health tech products. However, I really hate when the tools for getting things done don’t actually support (or even get in the way of) being productive.

As a result of this, I have often found myself taking responsibility for implementing or configuring tools/platforms to make work more efficient.

So now I’m starting as a solution architect at Fibery 🤓 and am looking forward to surprising you with Fibery workspaces tailored to your needs.

New sales agency

🎤 Vadim, in control of the situation: As you (don’t) remember, about a year ago we tried to launch an in-house outreach sales process. It didn’t work out for us: we are good engineers, but kinda bad salespeople.

In August we decided it’s time for the second attempt. This time, we approached the sales process from a different angle and signed a contract with a sales agency. Let’s see what we get as a result, will keep you posted.

Use cases published

🎤 Kate, does everything marketing: In August I collaborated with our customers (and spied on them a little too) to create some awesome case studies. Full of insights and tips on workspace setup, work processes, and features — hopefully, you will struggle with Fibery less once you read them. 🙂

Several cases are already published, I’d be happy if you go check them out:

• Project Management case with TrueBrow
• Vacation planning case with Bamboo Agile
• Product management & development case with EduDo

Product Updates

Done

Export Documents and Entities to Markdown

🎤 Vova, the strong one: We didn’t invest much in the markdown support before but it appears to be important for import/export routines that are requested quite often. So markdown API got some attention and now admin users can export rich-text content from an entity or document view to a markdown. The result is a ZIP file with markdown content and related images (that were uploaded to Fibery).

We have special syntax for video, entity references, and mentions which are actually not a part of the markdown standard.

To be honest, we don’t load video files to ZIP and do nothing about comments and linked highlights. The next planned big step is to allow export in batch.

Well, export to markdown is a part of the “Fear Management” initiative. Your data is yours. We want you to believe us and the power of our values — honesty and transparency.

The Fibery team tries our best to fuel a synergy of collaboration process using collective data you bring in daily. I personally hope you will not use export ever to leave Fibery. :)

Use it wisely. Here is some “dirty” insider info: Michael writes content for blog posts in the Fibery documents first. Then he manually performs copy-past to the blog engine using markdown syntax. As Michael said to me in a private talk: “Using export to MD, I’ve published a blog post in 2 minutes. It took an hour before!”

Of course, Michael can afford a vacation now! :)

Airtable Integration

🎤 Oleg, integrations & automations pro: You can now use our native Airtable integration for one-way sync of Airtable tables into Fibery and fully migrate to Fibery even faster. 😈

Find the setup guide and ask questions in this thread on our community, I’ll reply and do my best to help you.

Notify People Action

🎤 Oleg, integrations & automations pro: We’re improving automation rules and introduce Notify actions. People will receive notifications in Fibery, and they will obey notification settings. It means notification can go to Slack or Email as well.

Here are some cases and a short guide on how to notify your teammates using in-app notifications (or email and Slack if configured in user’s notifications settings).

Whiteboard View: show Fields on cards

🎤 Alex, knows stuff: Entities on a Whiteboard is a nice way to mix structured and unstructured knowledge during collaborative brainstorms. The first step in reworking the display of data on the whiteboard is to show fields on cards. The next steps include reworking the Tree view and dynamic interaction with fields data without opening a full-entity view.

And some more cool improvements

• Color coding in Table View paints the rows
• Automation buttons & rules: set an empty value/clear field
• Timezones: use UTC on the backend everywhere
• SCIM support for SSO

In progress

Add “collection item added/removed” trigger for rules

🎤 Sergey, Software Engineer: Boring stuff, just adding missing triggers to automation rules. This one will allow to react on changes in to-many relation fields. The next step is to add time triggers, to allow rules that run periodically.

Release estimation: several days.

Slack app that notifies everyone by default

🎤 Eugene, Software Developer: With the release, it will be possible for the administrator to enable Slack integration for everybody on the team. This way everyone can automatically receive notifications when they get a new comment, when somebody mentions them, or when somebody assigns a task to them.

Release estimation: 1 week.

Multi-panel navigation

🎤 Sergey, Software Engineer: At the moment we are in a prototype phase. It is a part of a new (?not sure “new” is a correct word here?) product focus mentioned here.

We want to focus on the ability to accumulate knowledge and generate insights from it. In this context navigation is a big deal. You want to understand deeply how things are connected and navigate via knowledge graph easily.

This feature will allow you to open several entities at once and also navigate back and forth in a convenient manner. Right now we are prototyping basic stuff like splitting the screen into several parts and seeing several entities. Will see how it works and check out nuances.

No clear estimation here, I guess we could implement and check basic interactions in about 2 weeks.

Milestones on Timeline

🎤 Ihar, powered by anxiety: We have an ambitious plan of timeline rework, and milestones are the first step on the path.

Milestones will bring an additional layer of visualization, allowing to show important dates as vertical lines.

Release estimation: 3 weeks.

Undelete

🎤 Victor, bounty hunter: If everything goes according to the plan, we will make a draft version by the end of the next week. Then it will go into testing and I think it will take at least two more weeks to fix bugs in collaboration with the authors of other parts of the system (the feature is cross-system and affects different components like charts, whiteboard, search, export, and so on).

Release estimation: hopefully, not eternity.

→ Join our Community for a weekly Changelog and a nice vibe. 📝

🥠 Random from our Slack

Random link

Work-life balance be like: 996 working hour system. 🙌

Random image

Random dopamine feedback

Hey, I just wanted to say I love your tool.

I have discovered Fibery on Friday and I fell in love. I’ll move my company management on Fibery and I’ll try to be your Advocate in France 🥰 See you around.

Few fresh posts from our blog

• (Un)Popular opinion: abolish working week
• How to start your own product: to-dos and not-to-dos

That’s it, folks! 🖖

Stay hydrated and be kind! See you in a month.