#22. Accumulating $1M+ Seed Round in May 2020

TLDR: $1M confirmed from angels for the seed round 💰. Deeper negotiation with a VC fund 🐿. Tons of content 📚. Largest customer 🗻. Roadmap for the next 3 months is nailed 🏃‍♀️. Chaos 😈.

Flashback: #21. Public Launch in April 2020.

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

🍊Fibery. Connected workspace for teams.

Leads/month: 900 → 600 → 1800 → 1100
Active Accounts: 100 → 70 → 110 → 120
Team size: 12 → 14 → 14 → 14
Burn rate: ~$50 → $60 → $60 → 60K/month
MRR: $470 → $900 → $1K → $1.7K/month

We’ve got the largest customer (70+ licenses) in May 🤟. This is a significant milestone for us, now we will see how Fibery works for such account, find top problems and fix them.

I’ve recorded a short and somewhat messy video how we use Fibery inside Fibery Team.

VC

This was a productive month, I talked with many funds and angels. We have confirmed $1M+ from a couple of angels (checks range from $100K to $500K) and started deeper negotiations with one VC fund about $1.5M seed round.

I feel positive that we will close the seed round in the next two months. Even if we will not have a final agreement with a fund, we will have enough angels money to work on Fibery for 18–24 more months. It should be enough to find good traction and be ready for the round A. 🤟

Fibery vs Notion, Coda, Airtable articles

We got tons of questions about Fibery differences vs. Notion, Airtable and Coda. I decided to write deep articles with detailed comparison. Here are all the links:

Fibery vs. Notion

Fibery vs. Airtable. We connect your bases!

Fibery vs. Coda. The Power of Workarounds.

Anton Iokov wrote an interesting article about features prioritization. Check it out. Maybe one day we will have it in Fibery:)

Enhancing prioritization with networks

Targetprocess separation starts

Fibery is a Targetprocess spin-off (I’m the Targetprocess founder as well, FYI). In May we started a legal separation procedures and incorporated in USA as Fibery, Inc. 🎉

You can imagine separation is not a super fast process with many legal issues to be nailed, but I hope it will be finalized in July.

3-months roadmap

Our current focus is on product teams. In May we finalized our roadmap for the next 2–3 months (it might change, but major changes are not expected). Main initiatives to complete:

• Integrations with Intercom, GitLab, GitHub and Figma
• Hierarchical Lists View
• Bi-directional links and highlights
• Batch actions in Table View
• Better permissions management

Product Updates

May was a productive month for us.

DONE

Whiteboard: Collaborators List and Cursors, Navigation Shortcuts, Text instrument and Text formatting

Now you can see all collaborators and what they are doing on a whiteboard.

Some shortcuts were added to Whiteboard:

“pan” mode.      : Space + left mouse (change cursor to hand) click
zoom in/out      : Ctrl/Option/Alt/Cmd + mouse scroll
duplicate object : Option/Alt + Drag: 
delete object    : Backspace/Delete:

It was impossible to annotate diagrams with text and select text formatting options: font, size, alignment. Now you can do it all.

Formulas: Logic and Today in formulas, New formula editor

It was hard to create formulas. Now it is easier. Formula creation becomes a pleasant experience with the new formula editor: large panel, autocomplete, inline help and some examples:

Today operators was added as well.

Cycle Time calculation example:

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

Collapsible Headers in Text

Long documents are easier to handle with collapsible headers.

Back navigation

It was hard to get back when you navigate between open entities. Now it is easy. We’ve introduced Back action inside entities with a short history to quickly return to the desired entity. Duh! Hard to explain, just check the gif below:

Copy entity URL

It was hard to share a link to the exact entity. Now it is easy. Just hover an entity id and click to copy a clean URL:

Calendar and Timeline setup

It was hard to setup Calendar or Timeline View. It was not clear what dates to select, what fields have time, what is range and what is not. Now it is easy. Select a single option when it is a range and see all important information on date fields:

New Getting Started + Survey

We decided to pre-install some apps based on user interests. Lena Dorogenskaya designed a beautiful survey:

Usability Testing App

Plan and execute usability tests and customer research via brand new Usability Testing App:

IN PROGRESS

Bi-directional links for all mentioned entities

This feature is still in progress, but close. Hopefully it will be released in June. It will help you to use weak links to connect information. For example, you can mention some feature in a customer feedback document, and inside this feature you will have a back-reference to this document.

Whiteboard: map

Sometimes whiteboards become large and hard to navigate. We also have a funny, but nasty bug, when content scrolls away and you have to scroll ~100 pages to get it back 🤯.

Map component will solve it, since it will be possible to quickly navigate the whole canvas.

Performance improvements

Fibery performance is not great on large data volumes. We are working on several areas:

• Board View
• Table View
• Entity View

Hopefully Fibery will be 30–50% faster in June.

Better import

There are numerous problems with import, like slow load and impossibility to import hierarchical data. New import will solve this.

Better permissions

Initial permissions implementation in Fibery was unrestrictive. For example, we decided to make id and name of all entities visible to all people (to simplify navigation and prevent confusion). However, in many cases it violates access restrictions and name can contain sensitive information. Now we are re-working permissions to hide names and fix quite many bugs.

Blog

We are going to migrate to our own blog. Medium is fine, but at some point we want to write posts in Fibery and publish them into the static blog (we use GatsbyJS for it).

Gallery View

This View is required for Product Teams case to accumulate design ideas, share design system, etc. We’ve designed it, but implementation is not started yet:

🍳 Random

Random image from our Slack channel:

Random link from our Slack channel:

If your product is Great, it doesn’t need to be Good. By now, everyone is tired of hearing about the iPad, but the negative responses are so perfectly misguided that it…

Random video:

Random quote:

“It seemed so simple and clear to me then. It still does. But like many beginning computerists, I mistook a clear view for a short distance.” — Ted Nelson

To be continued…

Fibery.io Chronicles #23. Fighting Stability and Performance in June 2020.

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