#5. Engine Warm Up in December 2018

Flashback: #4. Winter is Coming in November 2018

As usual, main numbers (→ sign shows changes between November and December):

Product:           Fibery — SaaS B2B (SMB) work management platform
Stage:             Private Alpha (no production version)
Launch:            January → January/February? (silent, invite-only)
Development:       22 months
Cold leads:        800 → 970 (subscribed from fibery.io web site)
Hot Leads:         25 → 30(gave feedback)
Customers:         ~6 play with Fibery regularly
Team size:         9 → 10 people
Burn rate:         ~$50K/month → ~$40K/month
MRR:               $0

December was an interesting month. It seems private beta release will happen in January and we will not shift it again. We invited some more companies to play with Fibery. While it is not ready and can’t stick, feedback is slightly different now and people focuses more on missed features than on stability and crashes.

Burn rate decrease ↓

Burn rate is decreased from roughly $50K/month to about $40K/month. Why is that? All team members agreed to get more equity and now 15% of Fibery belongs to employees. The rest is split among investors and Targetprocess co-founders.

One of the Targetprocess co-founders (Vadim Gaidukevich) joined Fibery as well. He is working on Slack Bot now (a smart one) and will help with everything as a generalist.

Completed functionality

Metrics (Calculated Fields)

Finally it is possible to define custom Metrics. It opens many possibilities, like calculate total assigned effort to release, calculate bug pain or ICE Score of an Idea in GIST Planning:

Metrics are relatively powerful. Here is an example how you can calculated completed effort assigned to release. It takes efforts of all completed Bugs and User Stories and summarize them (scary, right?):

[:+
{:q/from [:software-development/user-stories]
 :q/select [:q/sum [:software-development/effort]]
 :q/where [:= [:workflow/state :workflow/Final] :$true]}
{:q/from [:software-development/bugs]
 :q/select [:q/sum [:software-development/effort]]
 :q/where [:= [:workflow/state :workflow/Final] :$true]}]

This is a rough implementation without human-friendly formulas. It means Metrics will be created by Fibery Team (in fact only Andrey and Victor have this arcane knowledge so far) for predefined Apps in the initial release. Next step is to move Metrics into a new Formula Field and make it easy to setup for mere mortals (/me).

Filters

Filters are ready. You can filter almost everything on Boards, Timelines and Calendar Views. Nothing fancy.

Done items highlight

Information about item status is quite important. You need to know whether something is done or not everywhere. On Boards, Timelines and Calendars done items have more transparency, while in all other places done items are stroke-trough.

Writer Mode

It is not so useful to write text in small areas. We’ve added Writer Mode to quickly switch between bare text and more details:

Timelines Improvements

Timeline granularity have to be different for different cases. Now you can quickly switch between Days, Months and Years:

Create entities in batches

Wiki got some improvements as well. For example, you can quickly create many entities from a list. Here we create Tasks:

Wiki is almost ready for private beta. It needs some polishing, but functionality is complete.

December plans vs. reality

In general this was a decent month. I’d say 3/4 of plans were met.

• ✔︎︎ Filters on Boards. / Implemented! Some bugs to be fixed, but in general it is done on time.
• ✔︎︎︎ ︎All Done entities should be gray everywhere. / Done!
• ✔✘︎︎ Formula Field. / Metrics are working, but there are still 2–3 weeks of development to translate them into fields, add introspection and stability.
• ✔✘︎︎ Finalize some Apps (OKR, GIST, Software development, Retrospectives, etc) / Well, metrics and Decimal fields are blockers here, but these apps are almost ready.
• ✘︎︎ New field types: % and Decimal Number. / Implementation started, but these fields are not implemented yet.

January plans

The main goal is to prepare Fibery for private beta release. We hope to complete everything below in January, but intuition is telling me it will not happen… Well, let’s see.

• Formula Field. Finalize it.
• New field types: % and Decimal Number.
• Avatar extension. It will be possible to add Avatar to any entity. It means that it will be possible to create Humans more easily (Students, Employees, etc). Also Avatar can be used for other long-lived entities (Teams, Products, etc.)
• Users invitation.
• First user login experience.
• Finalize all private beta Apps.
• Fix 20+ known bugs.

🔭 Random

Random image from our Slack channel:

Random link from our Slack channel:

Computing is Everywhere: Bret Victor and Dynamicland

Random quote from our Slack channel:

“Even though copying what’s come before is a guaranteed path to mediocrity, it appears to be a safe choice, and the desire to be safe — to succeed with minimal risk — can infect not just individuals but also entire companies.” — Ed Catmull

To be continued → #6. Planning Private Beta in January 2019.

🎈Fibery — work management platform that replaces many tools inside a company and grows with the company from startup till the… success.

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