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TLDR: New getting started concept 🧶. New pricing 🧘🏻♂️. In search of Activation Metric 🧶🧶. Animalz cooperation 👎. Promising leads 🤞. Live onboarding experiment results. 🐡 Three new releases.
Flashback: #38. Experimenting in October 2021
Life is good 😎.
We’ve released the new getting started experience and new Space design UI in November. If you struggled to understand how Fibery works, now is the best time to give it a second chance.
Here is the cool video that explains why you should try Fibery again:
After the dense and deep discussion around new Fibery terms, we decided to stick with this:
App → Space
Type → Database
Space was a natural choice, but Type/Database/Table was not. We’ve decided to replace abstract Type term with a more concrete Database term. This decision still has some drawbacks, but we hope it will help people to understand Fibery better.
New Space Editor is much less abstract than the previous one. You can see the data right here and change data model on the fly, set relations and create automations faster.
We’ve simplified Fibery pricing. Our original idea is that Fibery will be used by product teams for product management and in many cases product management team is small. So we had a $100 entry ticket for such teams. However, Fibery is used by more people usually and this entry ticket looked weird.
If you are an existing customer, check New Pricing FAQ.
We spent a few weeks trying to nail Fibery’s activation event.
User activation is a one-time event that happens when a product delivers on the value it promised—it’s the critical “aha” moment when a user experiences the value of a product firsthand. After activation, users go on to adopt a product and convert to paying customers. source
The journey has been arduous enough for us to write a standalone practical guide for fellow product analysts: working backwards to find an activation metric.
In many products picking an activation milestone is quite easy to do, here are a few examples:
However, Fibery is a very non-linear product, and it has an enormous variety of cases. How to define the activation metric then? Note that it should have predictive power, the higher the metric → the more active users and customers you have.
We tried many things like several entities added, several views created, etc. Everything had poor predictive power. We didn’t find any one-time event. So we end up with a point system and a flow of events. For example, when a user creates a new view, she gets one point, for the new relation creation - 3 points, etc.
Our main events are:
Now we will optimize Fibery to have more points in the first 3 days and motivate users to do more actions to learn Fibery deeper.
The first results are promising, but we need a few more weeks to accumulate more data:
Animalz claims to be the “world’s best content marketing” agency. Maybe it is, but our cooperation with them failed badly. We paid for several months, received several poorly written articles, and never get what they promised to us.
No refunds. No replies. They just waited till our contract term is over (a few months) and sent us this:
[T...] and I worked closely with Anna, so I'm familiar with some of the struggles we had when we worked together. I also didn't realize we were still working on content with you - I remember talking about a report, but our contracts have a clause that when the agreement is cancelled, unused credits expire on the last day of service. Fibery's last day of service was June 17, 2021.
We won't be offering a refund. We are willing to look for a writer to replace [A...] (who has moved into a new role, and is no longer a writer) to work on this last report, but I can't give a timeline for that right now. If you would prefer we don't write the last report, we'll consider credits expired, per our agreement, and go our separate ways. Please let me know your preference.
Here is the only article we published in our blog, and it is just mediocre. All the others were just bad.
We paid them $9K/month. Got one article. And “fuck you” in the end. Maybe Animalz is the best content marketing agency in the world. But in this case, the world is doomed. Is there any hope?
While we were making Fibery easier to grasp, we decided to apply Superhuman onboarding pattern and disabled sign-ups from the website for two weeks.
We’ve onboarded 15 accounts so far and 5 of them are still active, so it looks like a 30% activation rate. It seems at least two will become customers with a very good probability, so in the worst case, it is ~13% conversion rate from lead to paid, which is pretty good.
We are reluctant to rely on direct sales so far and stopped the experiment. But it showed us that Fibery value can be explained in person and the problem most likely in getting started.
This is the second outreach agency we’re working with. We are two weeks into the active phase with zero results. The response rate is low (~2%) and we have no calls.
Still, these guys are much more fun to work with, so we are willing to give them some time. I hope they will iterate and come up with some ideas on how to make it work.
We’ve added an existing Partners to the Fibery website. If you need any help with Fibery, explore it and contact someone :)
We got our telemetry back. Here are the main numbers ( →
sign shows the changes between August, September, October, and November):
Fibery. Build your company workspace with no code
Paid accounts: 155 → 155 → 150 → 155
Active accounts: 340 → ? → 350 → 380
Active users: 2.1K → ? → 2.5K → 2.7K
Team size: 23 → 23 → 24 → 24
Run rate: $135K → $135K → $140K → $140K/month
MRR: $20K → $20K → $22K → $22K/month
We’ve started weekly onboarding webinars: Wednesdays 12 pm EST | 5 pm GMT. The webinar will be useful for people who just started exploring Fibery.
If you are curious, go register here.
It was a productive month with three new releases. Here are the highlights:
Undelete Documents and Views are possible. Navigate to Trash Bin, find deleted View, and restore it. It seems now you can undelete everything, we are happy.
Buttons became much more powerful 💪. Now users can provide values for action execution. Imagine you can create Buttons to write custom comments, assign people, change all possible fields, etc.
Click the options menu … near the control you would like to be filled by the user and select Ask User. You may select this option for several controls.
This is the very basic action to add new comment:
Now you can add Phone field and initiate a call with a single click. Note that this field has no validation, so you can put anything you want here.
Now you can Hide columns in Table View, edit fields and delete fields are right there.
We are moving forward with Blocks, but slower than expected. We are adding Views into Blocks now, Table, Board, etc.
Release estimation: still 2 months, ha-ha…
Implementation started and we have a crude prototype already. So far it looks not very good on a narrow screen, but we will make Views better soon.
Release estimation: 2 months
Unfortunately, no progress was made here. We closed some technical debt and other tails. However, the team will start permissions improvements in December. It’s a promise!
Release estimation: 🏋️♀️🏋️♀️ months
Some new things we’ve added in November:
Delmore Schwartz' heavily annotaged copy of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake; complete work digitized: https://t.co/gMBlYJQXWt @YCAL_JWJ pic.twitter.com/p0bMrkObrd
— Beinecke Library (@BeineckeLibrary) November 11, 2021
Why you can’t solve knowledge problems with information tools alone People don’t write, 80% of information stores in heads and connections between people “Maybe as much as 80% of the #knowledge in an organisation is undocumented”. Most stored text is not knowledge, but just working documents that can be thrown away after the project completion. Information is vast and hard to extract from such sources
It seems that optimism, rather than money, is the fuel that startups at the earliest stages run on. I have seen examples of startups successfully recovering from almost every kind of problem (i.e. no $$$/bad idea/team issues) other than founders losing hope/becoming cynical.
I’ve been testing what Chris has built for me - and it’s just amazing! I would like to onboard my team on fibery.
Animalz, who promised to deliver 2nd report max in October, are ignoring me. Last message I got from them was on Oct 1, in which they promised to update me on report 2 asap 😢. Probably the worst experience I had with marketing agencies (and I had quite a lot…)
Have a nice day!
🥊 Startups are struggling. 🇵🇱 +1 Developer. 🇵🇱 +1 Designer. 🇭🇺 +1 Writer. 👓 Content marketing. 💸 Financial management. 👩🔬 Home page experiments. 🏋️♀️ 6 product themes are in progress. 🥹 Per-entity permissions are close...
One of the fundamental requirements of financial operations is to ensure that you have all your paperwork in order. In this article, we will explain why Fibery is a great addition to any accounting software and how to set up an accurate process for managing financial docs in Fibery.
Fibery is an all-in-one task and knowledge management tool for product companies, and when we say all-in-one, we mean it. We run all our operations, including financial ones, in Fibery. Before any tool there is a process, often not an obvious one.
This post offers a comprehensive analysis of the root cause of the downtime and provides actionable steps to prevent similar incidents in the future. It aims to openly address our failure and assist other companies in learning from our experience. We also owe our customers an explanation.