#23. Fighting Stability and Performance in June 2020

TLDR: Vizydrop team will join Fibery in August 👬. Terms Sheet with the VC fund is negotiated and confirmed 🧶. Stability problems resolved 🥢. Performance improved 🐌. New blog delivered 🐡. Fibery sticks better 😛

Flashback: #22. Accumulating $1M+ seed round in May 2020.

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

Fibery. Connected workspace for teams.

Leads/month: 600 → 1800 → 1100 → 700 Active Accounts: 70 → 110 → 120 → 135 Team size: 14 → 14 → 14 → 14 Burn rate: $60K → $60K → $60K → 60K/month
MRR: $900 → $1K → $1.7K → $2.2K/month

Overview

In June we were focusing on product development and got closer to the All-in-one solution for Product Teams release. It looks like it will be released in September 2020 (not a promise). It’s really important to complete bi-directional links implementation and Intercom integration to have useful and unique use cases. Hopefully, it will be done in July and we’ll start onboarding product teams faster.

Marketing activities were almost frozen and revenue growth is slower than desired (~20% compared with the last month). We’ve started to think about coherent marketing activities and Lena will lead this direction 💃.

We see better sticknes numbers. Dark blue — fresh leads, so you see that they stick better than before. 5.4% of new leads remains with Fibery after 2 weeks:

We’ve migrated from Medium to the new & fast blog. Now we can improve it and transform into content playground with deep articles and shallow digest posts.

Check this honest review about Fibery from Jean.

I think Fibery has a great potential, just that it’s a bit confusing at first. I’m a dev and overlooked it a few times just because I didn’t understand what’s the deal with all that arrows connected to colored blocks, it looked super complex and scared me away a little… I had to dig a bit to get it. For non-devs I’m sure it’s hard.

I think the biggest selling point is the flexibility it gives for a company to set up their own system exactly as they want and if you figure out how to present that clearly I think it will be huge.

Fibery + Vizydrop = ❤️

Fibery and Vizydrop will join forces in August 🎉. Vizydrop has a very strong R&D team of 6 people. Most likely new team will take Platform & Integration initiative and make import/integration with many external tools, introduce GraphQL API, UI extensions and start Fibery ecosystem development.

We are extremely excited! It will speed up Fibery improvements and we will deliver new things even faster.

VC

We’ve nailed all the details in the Terms Sheet and hopefully will sign it next week. So we are gonna close the $1.5M seed round in July/August.

Targetprocess separation should be completed around this time as well.

New Blog

Hopefully you are reading this article in our new and shiny blog! We’re not abandoning Medium, but it will be just a mirror for all our posts.

It was not so easy to pick a name. We ended up with “As We May Think. Deep and shallow thoughts about augmenting intelligence, products and tools”. Other close candidate was “Engelbart’s Violin”, but it was less poetic.

Product Updates

June was a struggling month, since we focused on performance and stability improvements. There were numerous downtimes, but we found the roots of the problem and resolved it.

DONE

Bi-directional Links

Fibery seems to be the first truly collaborative tool to introduce generic back-references 💪

Since we use Fibery to build Fibery, we’ve had a privilege to use bi-directional links for a couple of weeks. Our most common use case is connecting feedback with feature ideas.

Performance and Stability Improvements

Here we made several significant improvements. You can expect much faster Boards & Tables. We’ll improve Entity View soon and with that Fibery performance should be acceptable at least.

Fibery was not stable for almost a full week in June. It was a mysterious problem for us and two people spent 3 days investigating the root cause, adding extensive logging and monitoring. It appeared that the problem was caused by RAM restrictions we put in place. In a nutshell, the problem was in Java GC that did not handle process well. We’ve removed the restrictions and now digging into GC settings to solve the issue once and for all.

New CSV Import with Relations/Workflows/Assignments

CSV Import was insanely improved. Now it works much faster and you can import Relations, Single/Multi-Select Fields, Workflow and even Assignments.

Whiteboard: Stickies, Map, Text Color

Whiteboard View solved one of the most nasty “where is my content?” problem. Since it is endless, sometimes you can scroll for hundreds of screens (accidentally) and never get back. With new Map control you see the whole picture. There are also two useful actions: Fit to Screen and Full Screen:

Stickie is a new Whiteboard tool. Use it to write clever thoughts or wise remarks.

You can also set a color for the Text now.

Sort Rows and Columns in Board and Timeline

Now you can sort rows and columns in Board View (and rows in Timeline View). Sometimes you want to set sorting by priority, for example, for Epics or Projects. Open View Settings and find Sort button.

Software Development app updates

Software Development app was enhanced with Sprints, Docs, Views. Check the video:

IN PROGRESS

Linked Text Highlights

Better Permissions

Permissions is a tedious, but important task. We are still fixing problems and making No Access level close to true No Access. It will take about 1-2 weeks.

Next steps are:

• Simplify permissions settings
• Introduce free read-only users
• Make permissions more flexible with Type/Entity granularity

Apps Export/Import

In the early days it was possible to export Fibery App as a file and add a new App from the file. However, we removed this feature at some point before release. Now we want to get it back.

It is not clear yet how it will work, but the main idea is to enable apps exchange between different accounts. Maybe it will be something like “Share an app via link”. We’ll see.

Batch Actions in Table View

It is hard to change several entities at once in Fibery. The first step to fix it is to improve Table View. It will be possible to delete several entities and copy/paste values in one column (similar to Excel). We are working on it.

🍳 Random

Random image from our Slack channel:

Zeitgeist.

Random link from our Slack channel:

Menus, Metaphors and Materials: Milestones of User Interface Design

Random quote:

It is interesting to note here that both Engelbart and Ted Nelson found writing difficult; they were far from prolific, and would draft and redraft multiple times. In Nelson’s case this frustration was largely with the paradigm of paper, and it led him to design an alternative.8 For Engelbart, it appears to be a frustration at expressing his ideas in a form that the computing community would understand.

Lulz Digest

Polina started to create a funny Fibery digest. Check it out.

Internal Slack discussion

Anton: I want to have our team photo in About Us page. In this photo our small team will stand on the shoulders of giants: Engelbart, Taylor, Sutherlend.

Lena (20 mins later): Done.

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To be continued…

Fibery.io Chronicles #24. Breaking through July 2020.

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