#47. Embracing Future in September 2022

TLDR: We are prepared 🤺. $40K MRR 🤑. +1 developer (Dmitry) 🇵🇱. We are hiring! 🦄 CTO group 🕹. Status page 🚦. New relation lists 🏃‍♂️.

Flashback: #46. Behind the scenes in August 2022

CEO Section of reflections 🧘‍♂️

There are signs that the world economy is in recession. Markets are declining. Many technology companies are shrinking and cutting costs. Many startups are struggling with the new rounds. War in Ukraine doesn’t increase optimism as well. Many experts think that the recession will last ~2 years and we’ll see some growth only in 2024.

The last 13 years were relatively good with constant growth and cheap capital. Many young founders never experienced worldwide downturns and have no experience of how to operate in a crisis. You can say “bye-bye” to insane startup valuations and “easy to get” rounds.

Fibery is my second company, and I survived the 2009 crisis (and other local crises) with my first company. What steps did we take (and are taking) to improve Fibery and still grow in these turbulent times?

1. We secured financial stability and now have enough money in the bank to run the company through the next 3 (potentially very bad) years. We do hope for the best, but we are prepared for the worst.
2. We always were a lean and cost-efficient company, and it is important to keep it this way.
3. We don’t have managers and only have people on board that do the real job.
4. Crisis is a good time to find cool people that can boost Fibery growth. So we’ve opened several positions already.
5. Fibery goal to replace several tools in a company becomes more sexy since companies are cutting costs now. So we are going to capitalize on that in marketing materials.
6. We are supporting startups and provide Fibery for free for a year. We are cooperating with accelerators and incubators to offer even more lucrative deals.

Our company mission is long-term, bold, and hard, so we are embracing crisis and moving forward with full possible speed.

Dmitry joined our development team 🥹

Dmitry joined the Fibery development team. He is a very strong front-end developer and will focus on use cases related to growth and getting started. Dmitry lives in Warsaw 🇵🇱.

We are hiring 🦄

Fibery team is growing and we have several open positions. We want to build a strong marketing team and looking for a relatively experienced person to lead all marketing initiatives in Fibery and help us grow from $0.5M to $10M ARR.

We also have open positions for Business development and product UI/UX designer. Fibery is a fully-remote team, so if you like what we do and want to join, feel free to apply.

Burnout monitor

We’ve run a short survey to feel the vibe of the team. The vibe is OK in general (taking into consideration the world’s events).

CTO group 👨‍💼

We never had a formal CTO, but with growth and more developers on board, we feel like CTO functions should be formalized somehow. We had several discussions about it and decided to form a CTO group that includes three strong developers.

This group will work as a CTO in fact and do all kinds of things that a CTO usually does in a product company (hire developers, evaluate developers, resolve technical clinches, initiate process improvements, set technical direction based on product vision, etc).

Status page 🚦

Our SOC 2 certification process is moving forward and I hope we will receive the certificate around November. As a part of this process we’ve added Fibery Status Page. Now you can subscribe to it and see all incidents and downtimes (there will be some for sure…).

Deep discussions 🍳

We’re having several deep discussions in the Fibery community. They help us to understand customers’ needs better and prioritize our work better.

For example, we are discussing the lack of basic work management features in Fibery (good notifications, good comments, reminders, etc). Jump in to share your opinion and use cases.

Andrew is digging into per-entity permissions 🏋️‍♀️

We know that per-entity permissions are the most popular feature request in Fibery. We promised to start implementing it a couple of months ago (did not happen). In September Andrew (our lead core developer) finally dug into conceptual documents and transformed them into implementation spec. Per-entity permissions are very complex and demand full-focus. Andrew is struggling, complaining, and procrastinating, but moving forward.

I promise nothing, but in October we will get a decent idea related to the implementation scope and schedule.

Custom Hoodies

Ilya got bored and designed custom hoodies for our team. The hoodies feature elongated cuffs with a thumbhole, a hood black from the inside, one velcro pocket, one transparent pocket, and some fancy stickers.

Metrics

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

Paid accounts:     195   → 205   → 210   → 222   → 232
Active accounts:   490   → 520   → 500   → 550   → 550
Active users:      3.6K  → 3.7K  → 3.7K  → 3.7K  → 4K
Team size:         25    → 25    → 25    → 26    → 27
Run rate:          $135K → $135K → $135K → $140K → $145/month 
MRR:               $31K  → $35K  → $37K  → $39K  → $40K/month

🎁 Product Updates

DONE

In September we had 3 releases. Here are the highlights:

Relation views

When you open an Entity, to-many relations are now visualized as proper Views with levels, units, filters, sorting, and color-coding. Our goal is to make Entity View a better dashboard for DBs like Project or Epic.

So far it’s only a single List View with other kinds of Views coming next.

New date range picker

New date picker solves some usability problems. You can adjust start or end date with a single (precise) click or simply type something like next Thursday.

Buttons as units on all Views

Previously, Buttons have been available on Table View only. Not anymore: pick them as units on Boards, Timelines, Calendars, and Hierarchical Lists.

GitLab and GitHub actions

When something happens in Fibery (ex. a Story is completed), update GitLab or GitHub.

Live users

Discover who is looking at the same thing as you and is ready for some collaboration.

Reorder Databases in Space settings

Creators are now free to rearrange the DBs via drag’n’drop to fit their mental model. The order is the same for all Creators in a Space, and integrated DBs can be reordered within their source only.

IN PROGRESS

Check Fibery Roadmap to get more details.

• Multiple relation lists and Reports in Entity View
• SOC 2 Certification
• Description for Fields, Databases and Views
• Import from ClickUp
• Context Reports inside entity view
• Form View

Long-awaiting teaser 😛. Form View prototype. WIP WIP. pic.twitter.com/53Hqk8UgnR

— Fibery (@fibery_io) September 13, 2022

🧈 One-liners

Anton and Chris created some new templates in September:

• Template: Vacations Pro. Not only track vacations but also figure out how many days off each teammate has available taking weekends and public holidays into account.
• Template: Asset management. This template helps you maintain a register of your company’s assets, allowing you to manage any ongoing maintenance requirements. These could include calibrating measuring equipment, renewing software licenses, or ensuring that items undergo a regular service.
• Template: Reminders. Set reminders for yourself.
• Template: Deduplication Demonstrate how to avoid creating duplicate entities, based on matching criteria.

💆‍♂️ Random

Random image from our Slack

Random link from our Slack

High-Temperature Superconductivity Understood at Last. A new atomic-scale experiment all but settles the origin of the strong form of superconductivity seen in cuprate crystals, confirming a 35-year-old theory.

Random tweet from our Slack

Pitch, a tool/platform to make presentations, raised $85M at a $600M valuation last year. They grew to ~180 people and today announced letting 59 of those people go to extend their runway to 4 years.

I'm not too surpised, given it doesn't feel Pitch has found product-market fit.

— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) September 14, 2022

Random post in #cortisol 🥲 channel

In general I have to say that the move the list view was very painful for us and beside this issue it included messing up the field sort in many of the DBs cards + the restore of the delete function without any heads up.

Random post in #dopamine 😍 channel

You guys are going to win the race. Guaranteed. The more I use Fibery on a day to day basis, the more I feel I couldn’t live without it. Any lack I experience in Fibery is a reflection of my lack in implementing. We’ve got a pretty solid setup and I still feel like I’m just scratching the surface with what’s possible. I was just working today and still discovering simple new workflows that increase ease and efficiency. A truly great tool, thank you