#21. Public Launch in April 2020

TLDR: Public launch April 1st 💪. Product of the Day on PH 🤷‍♂️. Some offers from VC 🐿. Super-productive month ♨️. Better activity, but stagnating MRR 🌦. Cool Whiteboard View 🗞. Remote 🐶.

Flashback: #20. Staying Alive in March 2020.

Main numbers ( → sign shows the changes between January, February, March & April):

🥕Fibery. Connected workspace for teams.

Leads/month:       900  → 900  → 600  → 1800
Active Accounts:   70   → 100  → 70   → 110
Team size:         11   → 12   → 14   → 14
Burn rate:         ~$45 → ~$50 → $60  → $60K/month
MRR:               $160 → $470 → $900 → $1K/month
North Star:        80   → ?    → ?    → ?

Fibery Public Launch

Fibery launched April 1st 2020. This date was chosen deliberately, you have to “have fun” to create great products. This feeling is hard to explain, but overall it’s a mix of intelligence, drive, grit and humor that can melt into something significant.

Our ProductHunt launch was somewhat successful, we’ve got product of the day. My personal expectation was product of the week at least, but it didn’t happen. We received great feedback from Fibery early adopters. Thank you for that! 😍

For us this is a serious milestone. It took us more than three years to get Fibery to public release. Now we have more feedback, more active accounts and more drive to move forward.

On my opinion, we need one more year to have a real traction and become “alive by default” (by Paul Graham’s definition).

Here is the official announcement, you can share it with your friends (or enemies):

Fibery — connected workspace for teams 🦑

VC

Finally, we have one TS and one offer from VC funds for $1-1.5M. We also have few offers from angels ~$300K in total. We have to sign TS no later than June and get funding till the end of Summer.

In general fundraising in the current context is challenging. A few funds told me they put all new investments on hold and focus on existing companies. However, majority of funds still explore new opportunities.

New go-to-market strategy

Startups are in trouble. It means selecting a work tool is not the main problem they are facing right now. It means our original go-to-market concept of all-in-one tool for startups will not work. So we decided to switch and selected this option:

Connected all-in-one workspace for product teams. In this case Fibery will be able to replace tools like Jira, Trello, Asana, Aha, Productboard, Dovetail. Re-focus on slightly larger and more stable companies (50–200 people).

Use cases wise, Fibery will provide a solution that unifies all important processes for product development company: handle customers feedback, connect it to features, set high level goals, ideate product ideas, create product roadmaps, track implementation. Fibery will unite product managers, designers & developers.

Feature wise we will focus on:

• Back-references, highlights and Intercom integration (connect feedback to features)
• Figma integration and Whiteboards improvements (connect product ideation and design to work)
• Documents improvements: resize images, collapsible headers, etc. (better ideation)
• Hierarchical List View (simplify backlog management)
• GitLab/GitHub integration (make software development process fully supported).
• General product improvements: better permissions, batch actions, formulas.

We hope to implement all of the above in 2–4 months, but, as usual, we will do weekly releases.

Pricing restrictions changes (again)

Last month we’ve replaced some limitations on Views with limitations on Types in Team Plan (15 Types — kind of data). We had long internal discussions around this change, but finally decided to go ahead and try it.

Our stats showed that 15 types is almost always enough for a team. But we got negative feedback. Here is the quote that nails the problem:

Even if your data shows that 15 types of entities are enough for most use cases, I still strongly suggest dropping this limitation for the Team plan or increasing as I advised, because it’s a powerful psychological barrier and decision-making factor.

This scheme makes Company plan less attractive, but we will solve this problem later.

New Intercom Onboarding campaign

Anton Iokov spent a week redesigning our Intercom Onboarding campaign. We are trying not to be annoying, so it is a hard balance between value and annoyance. Did we find it?

Metrics

Telemetry is there (finally!), but for new accounts only (from a middle March). We did not migrate history for older accounts, and don’t have complete picture.

Our next three milestones with current numbers:

Active collaborative accounts with 2+ people        ~60/100
Paid accounts with 2+ people                         14/100
MRR                                                 $1K/$10K

In February we had some sales, but in March and April almost zero. It seems companies are very cautious about new purchases and in general have other important problems to focus on right now.

Product Updates

April was super-productive in terms of product improvements. We’ve implemented many important features and Fibery became more useful and more powerful.

DONE

Calendar View

Calendar View was re-implemented and polished, now you can enjoy it to track meetings, events and important deadlines. Ihar Trafimovich implemented it in a month. Alone. And left to enjoy two weeks vacation after joyful React experience.

Whiteboard v.0.3 (Entities & Cards!)

Whiteboard is finally useful. You can convert boxes into real connected entities. Like this:

Whiteboard can be used for brainstorming sessions, use cases description, customer journey and… well, we just started to scratch the surface, here are some example:

Did you know that Whiteboard was implemented by just one developer Vadim Gaidukevich and one designer Alex Tsayun? Now you know whom to blame for all the bugs.

Dates & Logic in Formulas

Formulas got more power with dates and logic functions. Here are few examples:

Duration:

ToDays(Planned.End - Planned.Start)

Cycle Time:

If([Planned Dates].End > Today(), 
   ToDays(Today() - [Planned Dates].Start), 
   ToDays([Planned Dates].End - [Planned Dates].Start))

Text label:

If([RICE Score] >= 15, "Cool", If([RICE Score] >= 10, "OK", "Bad"))

Deactivate Users

Sometimes people no longer need Fibery login, but you don’t want to delete them. Now you can deactivate users.

Change state and assign people inline when you have entity in rich edit field

We are focusing on documents improvements and this is a new cool feature. You can quickly create or insert entities into rich edit field and change important fields right here. So far it works for Assignments and State fields only, but we are going to expand it to be fully customizable.

This feature saves time and makes it super easy to create action items from meeting notes, create work from specification documents, etc.

Remote Page

We’ve transitioned to remote work and decided to describe almost real day of WFH. The page is quite funny, go check for yourself https://fibery.io/remote

Lena Dorogenskaya designed the page and decided to add an interesting survey inside. I resisted it initially, but the final result looks cool.

We created it with an idea of landing page for remote campaign, but it seems it did not work out. Conversion rates are low so far.

IN PROGRESS

Bi-directional links for all mentioned entities

You may mention entities in Fibery in texts and comments using # shortcut. However, the mentioned entity doesn’t have back-reference. There are so many cases when it is useful: meetings notes, product scope documents, features and tasks, etc.

We have to keep implementation quite simple to not fall into Xanadu trap. It seems we found a way to do it, so in a month you may expect References section in all Fibery entities.

Highlights

This improves bi-directional links by text highlight. Select some text and link it to some entity in Fibery. For example, you may highlight message in Intercom chat and link it to Feature, or highlight text in Epic and link it to Feature.

Highlights are powerful when you have bi-directional links, since you may see all references on the other end.

→

#64 Conversation with Chloe
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— |Is there a way to create stories from Slack?| ---------> [#14 Slack Integration]
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←

#14 Slack Integration
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Referenced in:
() [#64 Conversation with Chloe]: "Is there a way to create stories from Slack?"

Whiteboard: text, undo, polishing

Whiteboard is already useful, but it has quite many usability problems and rough edges. In May we are going to make it polished and joyful to use.

💋 Random

Random link from our Slack channel:

Use Networks to Prioritize Features

Random video:

Random Image from our Slack channel:

Random quote:

“Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you’ve lost the source of. It works, but you don’t know why.”

To be continued…

Fibery.io Chronicles #22. Accumulating $1M+ seed round in May 2020.

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