#31. Slow Acceleration in March 2021

TLDR: Better traction and $10K MRR ❤️. 13 new customers 🤗. Fibery 2.0 foundation 🗻. Regular posts in our blog 🤖. First webinar 🐝. Super Polina 🦸‍♀️. More explanatory videos 🤯.

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Flashback: #30. Baby steps in February 2021.

Main numbers ( → sign shows the changes between December, January, February, and March):

Fibery. Connected workspace for teams.

Leads/month: 650 → 700 → 1300 → 950 Active Accounts: 170 → 200 → 260 → 280 Team size: 21 → 22 → 22 → 22 Burn rate: $100K → $100K → $100 → $100K/month
MRR: $6.5K → $8.5K → $9.5 → $11.5K/month

Overview

March gave us some positive signs that Fibery for Product Teams really works 😌. We have faster conversions from leads to customers and higher average MRR per customer. It’s still not a real product-market-fit, but we are on the right track.

We’ve hit the first modest milestone of $10K MRR and it took us a year. The next interesting milestone is $50K and I hope we’ll be able to do it by the end of 2021.

Here is the detailed chart for all accounts grouped by purchase month. Note that it shows total MRR, including upsales in the future months, so $2K base in March is our top result so far.

Our churn is quite low, in the last two months we’ve lost just 2 small customers.

Active accounts are increasing.

Daily and weekly active users are stagnating in March.

Our blog has a steady stream of new articles and posts, so pick some fresh posts to read (all 🌶 are good):

• 🌶 Augmenting Organizational Intelligence. In a knowledge economy, we compete with knowledge, not force. Our productivity tools should become knowledge management tools as well — thus, making companies more intelligent.
• 🌶 Bundling vs. Unbundling. In the age of specialization it looks like unbundling is the only viable strategy. Well, it is not.
• How to focus on work (especially when you can’t). While writing this post, I’ve launched the Slack app three times and checked Facebook two times.
• Product idea validation: how to do it?. The only trouble-free way to validate an idea is to start developing a product.
• How to measure productivity of software development teams. Measuring developer productivity by hours creates an illusion of control. It’s an attempt to reduce uncertainty by squeezing it into a simple model. Yet in our industry, we must accept uncertainty, learn to thrive with it.

Product Teams workspace A/B Test

Last month we’ve got retention numbers for product workspace setups and they were OK, but not great. We decided to simplify the setup and created two simpler workspaces. There is not much data so far, but it seems these lighter product workspaces indeed work slightly better than the previous setup:

The first-week retention is close to 10% for one of the new workspaces, and 2-week retention is about 6%. So far so good, we’ll wait 2-3 more weeks and maybe make the next steps with the setup.

Fibery 2.0 foundation

I finally published an article that nails Fibery 2.0 foundation and long-term Fibery goals: Augmenting Organizational Intelligence. The article is long and boring, but if you do want to know what we are thinking about, check it out.

First Webinar

Our first webinar was dedicated to product teams and companies. 200 people registered, 100 were live and 50 watched the replay. There were many questions and overall we think it was a very successful event. Here is the recording.

The second webinar will be dedicated to user research cases and we’ll schedule it somewhere at the end of April.

Super Polina

Fibery setup and customization not always easy. You have to learn building blocks for sure, but you have to understand what you want to achieve in the end (and that is even harder).

To address this issue, we’ve launched Super Polina 🦸‍♀️ — our concierge support for Product teams. From setting up an account and installing templates to adding data and creating custom views, we’ll help you get the most out of Fibery.

Fibery how to…

Many people told us that Fibery is cool, but complex and there are so few help materials. Fibery simplification is in progress, but also we’ve created a YouTube playlist to explain Fibery better.

Fibery How to… playlist has 12 videos now and you can expect more soon.

More default workspaces

When you create Fibery account, you can select from several connected workspaces now. We’ve added them all in March. Every workspace is tailored for its use cases. It’s interesting to see traction for all these workspaces, but it demands at least 4-6 more weeks.

Product Updates

Join Fibery Community to see all updates in the changelog.

DONE

Audit history log

Admins can see all the changes of all users for all entities on a single screen. It’s handy when you want to find who deleted important data, who changes priority of tasks, etc. Click top sidebar, select Audit Log, and enjoy the view:

Insert Video into Docs

Now you can upload and insert videos (.mp4 and .webm) into Document and rich edit fields. Loom videos are displayed as embeds, finally.

Integration Apps

We’ve simplified integrations setup. Now every integration has a separate App and you can find and install it from the Templates page.

Whiteboard View: Frames

Frames are stable areas that can be saved as an image or printed out. There is a new instrument for frames creation in the Whiteboard toolbar. There are two major use cases for the frames:

1. Use them as a logical group for large Whiteboards
2. Use them to export something as an image

IN PROGRESS

Automation Rules

A team of 3 people is working on Automation Rules. In the first release, it will be possible to define custom Actions that will be executable from UI. Actions will be assembled via UI, so no programming experience is required. We expect to have the first release in ~1 month.

Share entities and documents

Sharing is almost ready, the only thing to complete is correct access handling for a shared entity view. This is an example of a shared document. Release estimation: ~2 weeks

Undelete

Server-side implementation is close to completion, but UI is a part of the Audit Log in fact, so there is a dependency on it. Release estimation: ~2 weeks

Zendesk Integration

Zendesk integration is ready and we are waiting for approval from Zendesk side. It includes all tickets sync and completed chats sync as well. Release estimation: ~2 weeks

Toolbar for Views

Views setup is far from perfect in Fibery. People can’t find some things at all. Now we are going to improve it via the Toolbar menu. It will be always visible and provide quick access to all important functions. Release estimation: ~1 month

Full text search

Search in documents and entities content is a must-have thing for any serious knowledge management system, so we are working on it already. Release estimation: ~1 month

🍕 Random

Random picture of our team

Random image from our Slack channel

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Computers and Creativity How can we push digital creative tools to their full potential as co-creators, thus harnessing the full power of creative thought and computational actualization to enable human innovation?

Random quote:

In every moment, your brain uses all its available information (your memory, your situation, the state of your body) to take guesses about what will happen in the next moment. If a guess turns out to be correct, your brain has a head start: It’s already launching your body’s next actions and creating what you see, hear, and feel. If a guess is wrong, the brain can correct itself and hopefully learn to predict better next time. Or sometimes it doesn’t bother correcting the guess, and you might see or hear things that aren’t present or do something that you didn’t consciously intend. All of this prediction and correction happens in the blink of an eye, outside your awareness.