#24. Breaking Through July 2020

TLDR: More customers ❤️. Terms Sheet is signed ✊. Better North Star metric ✌️.

Flashback: #23. Fighting Stability and Performance in June 2020.

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

Fibery. Connected workspace for teams.

Leads/month: 1800 → 1100 → 700 → 750 Active Accounts: 110 → 120 → 135 → 140 Team size: 14 → 14 → 14 → 14 Burn rate: $60K → $60K → $60K → $60K/month
MRR: $1K → $1.7K → $2.2K → $3.1K/month

Overview

In June July 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 October 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 August and we’ll start onboarding product teams faster.

As you see, I just copied this overview from the previous post. We are mostly focusing on the product right now, but from the marketing point of view we nailed positioning, defined main flows and go-to-market mechanics.

However, even for our previous release things started to pick up. There were several good sales and MRR increased to $3K. We see slow, but steady growth of active accounts:

North Star metric looks even better in July. It’s a number of users that use Fibery collaboratively:

Retention is also improving. One month retention for newer accounts is close to 5% now.

Go-to-market

We’ve defined the go-to-market strategy. We’ll mostly rely on content marketing and product-led growth. Our main persona will be Head of Product / CPO. Here is the flow:

We also discussed new pricing for this niche and came up with something like this:

Individial users is not our goal, so we are not gonna charge them at all. On the other side, it’s not feasible for us to charge $20-30 for a small team economically, thus we will have a minimal pricing for small team $100/month and additonal licenses will cost $10/user/month.

NOTE: All current customers will not be affected at all, they may continue to use Fibery with current pricing plans forever.

Product Companies Workspace Setup

We’ve started to set up a default workspace for product companies. Here is the diagram we created together:

We use Fibery a lot to brainstorm solutions, it’s an interesting meta-level for us.

In the left side you see a list of default apps for product companies workspace: Product portfolio, OKR, Roadmapping, Marketing research, Customer discovery, Customer success, Ideation, Software development and CRM.

We also discovered some important missing features to make use cases and flows smoother:

• Store Documents and Whiteboards inside entities
• Smart folders to group views by products (or other things) in sidebar

In 2-3 weeks we’ll finalize initial setup and start to onboard product companies. We are rebuilding our own workspace to match this new setup for product companies. We’re eating our own dog food.

VC

We’ve signed the Terms Sheet (finally!) and ready to take the first money infusion in August ✌️. Targetprocess separation is not a fast process, there are so many legal procedures to complete. Spin-offs are hard. Still we move forward and see the light!

New Deep Article

Anton Iokov wrote a great article: The Knowledge Organization. Lena Dorogenskaya did great illustrations. It took a lot of time, but we are happy with the result:

In this article we are going to explore five different approaches to knowledge architecture in an organization. We are looking for the most natural structure that encourages people to discover and share knowledge. The structure should help us to build on top of each other’s ideas.

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

Batch Delete and Copy in Tables

Now you can copy and paste content in Table View. There are many cases where it is helpful. You may just copy Excel table, you may copy some values and paste it to other cells. This will speed up data handling in Fibery a lot.

Finally you can delete many records at once from Table View:

Whiteboard: Shortcuts, group/ungroup

Check all Whiteboard shortcuts in a single panel.

Group serveral objects into a single group and move it, move it.

Lookups for Collections

Now you can see Collections from Types linked by to-one or to-many relation. For example, we have Lead - Account, and inside an Account we have a list of Apps. But we want to see this list in Lead as well. Here is how you can setup it:

You can also aggregate entities from lower levels and display them as a collection on a higher level. For example, you have hierarchy Product → Epic → Feature and you want to see all Features inside Product. you can create a lookup field to do that:

Automatically set values from Filters in newly created entities

Fibery creates entities on filtered Views more cleverly now. For example, if you have a filter for specific release and assignments, Fibery will set these fields automatically:

IN PROGRESS

Linked Text Highlights

This feature is close to completion and will be released in 1-2 weeks. You will be able to select any part of text anywhere and create a bi-directional link:

Link navigation redirects you to the exact text position:

Better Permissions

This is moving forward with a very slow pace. Our key developer in this area got sick for 2 weeks and progress is not stark. We are still working on better No Access mode that hides all information. Hope we will release it in August.

Apps Export/Import

Sometimes you put a lot of effort into an App and want to share it with a friend, give it to all people to copy, etc. Soon you will be able to create a shareable link to share any App. Here is the flow:

Then any person with the link can just select a workspace to create this App and here we go. We want to release Apps sharing in a couple of weeks.

Text Formulas

Text formulas are close to completion, here is the list of formulas that will be released soon:

text + text
MatchRegex(text, regularExpression) :: Boolean
Replace(text, searchFor, replacementText) :: String 
ReplaceRegex(text, regularExpression, replacementText) :: String 
StartsWith(text, prefix) :: Boolean 
EndsWith(text, prefix) :: Boolean 
Trim(text) :: String 
Lower() :: String 
Upper() :: String 

Basic Undo

We didn’t want to include Undo into current release scope, but after the batch copy/paste in Table View feature we decided to move forward, since this is a very dangerous operation. First, we will release Undo for Table View and then add it into all other Views as well.

Integrations (Intercom and many other)

Integration implementation finally started. In the first iteration it will be possible to create Integrated Types in Fibery. This Type will be synced from external system. For example, it will be possible to sync data from Intercom Chats, GitHub Commits, Jira Issues and GraphQL queries.

💂🏻‍♂️ Random

Random image from our Slack channel:

Best re-design ever:

The old one’s red circle is positioned slightly to the left, and is not as red. A perfect representation of Japanese perfectionism. P.S. Oh, and the flag ratio changed from 2:3 to 7:10.

Random link from our Slack channel:

When Hubble Stared at Nothing for 100 Hours

“The telescope allocation committee would never have approved such a long, risky project,” he explains. “But as director, I had 10 percent of the telescope time, and I could do what I wanted.”

Random quote:

When we search for knowledge—and if we are lucky—the best thing that can happen is that we find what we’re looking for. When we access knowledge by navigating the knowledge map, we discover things we did not know existed.

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To be continued…

Fibery.io Chronicles #25. Lost August 2020.

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