Fibery in 2024. Year in Review

TLDR: 280 new paid customers (and 530 total) ❤️. 450 new features and 1400 fixed bugs 💪. 51 new releases 🌶️. Some failures (AI, Product teams strategy) 😱. Some wins (back to roots, your company’s operating system focus) 🎢. Dopamine and cortisol 😍😨.

There are many ways to review the year. This time I will try to focus on Failures and Wins. It is not always black and white, so most failures are not that bad and most wins are not that shiny. Anyway, it is an interesting angle to review the past and set some future plans. Check Fibery in 2023 article if you like more context and continuity.

Let’s start from failures.

Failures 🦐

“Product teams” strategy and use cases

In July 2023 we nailed the new strategy → narrow down and pick a niche to penetrate. We decided to focus only on product teams and take few use cases: Product feedback management, Backlog prioritization based on feedback, Features specs and planning/roadmapping. Product management was already a frequent use case in Fibery, our top customers are product companies and all books about strategy and all sources in the web advice you to narrow down and focus.

We brainstormed conceptual solutions and decided to implement a very clever and very advanced feedback management flow. From November 2023 till May 2024 we focused mostly on a single new product area — Highlights. We did other things to complete the major use cases, like Tables and Whiteboards improvements, but still the majority of the core team worked on Highlights.

We launched Fibery 2.0 in May. I honestly think our features/ideas prioritization approach is novel and way better than RICE. We recorded a bunch of good tutorials. We launched on PH and finished as the 🥈 product of the day. I did a Life after RICE webinar to showcase main ideas and how it can work. We had dozens of demos with good vibes. The solution is powerful, flexible and coherent.

However, it did not fly… Here are the stats related to Highlights usage from June. In general it is stagnating, just about 30 accounts use them and it is not growing at all.

The process is novel. Implementing a comprehensive transformation of the process for collecting, managing, and utilizing feedback is challenging. It involves many people in many departments, so it can only be done from the top. However, prioritization problem is not perceived as important enough to go for it.

In August it became clear that Fibery 2.0 strategy was a failure and we would not get a good traction with it. Sometimes you feel that you are on the right track and just have to add few things here and there, but it was not the case with Fibery 2.0. Maybe in a few years more companies will be ready for this novel process, but not now.

In August the whole team got quite depressed. After 6 months of significant effort and tons of technical problems we got almost nothing. Existing customers met the new release without any excitement, for most of them feedback management was just a side use case. And even we as a team questioned this narrow focus deep down, because Fibery vision is wide and bold, while this new focus was narrow and, well, not bold.

What really surprises me is that zero developers quit in August. Our team is super resilient. So we lamented for a week or two, and got back to figure out the new strategy. Jump to Wins section to read what we did 🍿.

AI theme

AI in Fibery is not a pure failure, but we had greater expectations.

I think almost every product in our market is heavily experimenting with AI trends and features. Fibery was not an exception. We added AI text assistant, AI in automations, AI for space creation, views creation, formula creation, scripts creation, Q&A. We’ve added semantic search, automatic feedback processing, audio/video transcription and some other minor features.

For us it was a great experiment and we learned many things, but for our customers most of these features are quite useless. According to our stats, only these things are relatively popular:

• Use AI to create and change spaces, formulas and automation scripts. It really saves time and help to learn formulas and scripts syntax
• Semantic Search and Highlights extraction. Not many customers use it, but it is quite valuable for them. We use it every day to handle incoming feedback
• Fibery User Guide Q&A. It is indeed helpful for our customers

And that is it in general, all other features are not that popular. Right now I see two promising themes for AI in products like Fibery:

1. System Configuration. Here AI really shines, since it can save time on setup
2. Search and connections discovery: find content, find duplicates, find related entities, Q&A around factual data

Overall, all benefits from AI are quite incremental in productivity tools and I can say that nobody found a killer application of AI for knowledge and process management. Yes, in some cases you can find information faster via quite basic Q&A agents, but it does not smell like a revolution right now in productivity apps like Fibery.

AI features usage stats (runs) in November, 2024
--
AI Seach           12,000 (for the reference, keyword search volume is 320,000/month)
Create View         3,000
Create Formula      1,500
Change Space          570
Create Space          320
Create Script         270
Q&A                 1,000
Transcripts            20
AI Text Assistant   1,100
Execute AI Rule     6,500 (for the reference, rules runs volume is 1,000,000/month)  
AI find clusters       20
AI find highlights    320

We spent a few months on a generic Q&A assistant that can provide decent answers around structured and unstructured data. Our goal was to let people ask questions like “how much revenue did we add last month?”, “what tasks did Tommy complete last week?” and “summarize and explain top requests from paid customers”. We tried several different approaches, but never reached desired quality level and good precision of the answers. It seems the potential is there and technology is almost there, but we haven’t nailed it yet.

As a result, we paused our AI explorations and are focusing on core concepts and UI more.

We offered AI as a separate quite expensive $10/user pack, but it seems the value is just not there to justify this price. From now on, we’re just including AI into all pricing plans without additional cost.

No offline event

In 2023 we had a pleasant offline event for the whole company on Cyprus, but this year we decided to save some cash and did not do it. Offline events are very important for remote teams to meet each other in person, have some conversations about things, drink some wine and beer, relax and observe the starry sky and listen to the waves crushing against the shore. Together. This did not happen this year, and now I feel like it was a mistake 😢.

I hope we will do it in 2025.

Hard to fill managerial positions

In 2023 we hired two people to lead teams: a Head of Marketing and a Product Manager. In 2024 we parted our ways with both of them. Both are great professionals with a good track record, great work ethics, and very nice personalties outside work. Yet it did not work well in the end. We tried to overcome the problems, but no luck.

We should learn how to do it better next time when we will grow larger as a company. Unfortunately, it is hard to say what mistakes we did exactly.

— What did we learn Palmer?

— I don’t know sir.

More failures

Here are more failures as one-liners:

• Another attempt at hiring an Educator failed. It is a doomed position, like Defence Against the Dark Arts professor in Hogwarts.
• Migration to Chargebee has proven to be much more challenging than expected, we are still not there
• We created Openion (a tool that generates insights based on mobile apps reviews), but didn’t figure out how to use it to generate leads
• We sponsored a few influencers but were not happy about the content quality and got no meaningful results
• We did more direct sales outreach and nothing came out of it

Wins 🍿

“Back to the roots” strategy

We set our vision a few years ago. When the “product teams” vision experiment failed, we decided to think wide and big again. All marketing books are telling us to narrow down? Fuck them. All consultants and experts are telling us to narrow down? Fuck it. We founded Fibery to change the way how people run operations in companies and create a tool that can handle enormous complexity of modern organizations, change and and grow with them. That is what we want to do, so why pivot?

— What is Fibery?

— Your company’s operating system.

We decided to embrace that Fibery is a horizontal platform and work on platform + solutions. Product discovery and development is a solution, digital agency OS is a solution, etc. We are still focusing on 1-2 solutions at a time, but we also dedicate a lot of resources on generic platform improvements.

From our internal team discussion:

— Does somebody else feel like we are going in circles?

— Yes.

We started from the basics. We refined branding, fixed pricing plans, introduced a free plan, implemented reverse trial, and focused on tons of usability improvements in the product.

As a result, the last 3 months were the best for our company in terms of growth, we added more than 100 paid accounts, and in December we added 50 new paid accounts.

So our team is not depressed anymore, but just anxious (as usual 😬).

New pricing plans

I think this year we finally nailed pricing plans. We got rid of AI pack and included it into all plans, but we slightly increased prices on Standard and Pro plans. We added more differentiators to Pro plan and launched a proper Enterprise plan. The best thing is that we already have a few purchases of Enterprise plan, while we expected it wouldn’t happen before 2025.

Pricing changes are always painful. Surprisingly, we had very few complaints from existing customers. I think we did a good job communicating the change and added enough value to compensate the price increase.

Fibery free version and reverse trial

Free versions for teams are quite hard to design. In the past we had a free version for 1 user, but Fibery is a collaborative platform and it did not make any sense. With this new Free version, we wanted to provide it for free for small teams and without major restrictions, but at the same time make teams convert to paid accounts when Fibery generates a lot of value.

We spent days discussing various options and digging into data, but the ultimate idea appeared very simple — just restrict a number of databases. In this case Fibery can be used for 2-3 processes without limitations, but when you need more processes (like we have projects and product management in Fibery, now we want to add HR processes), you need more than 10 databases and have to upgrade 🤑.

We launched the free plan in November and it works nice so far.

Another unexpectedly cool change was a reverse trial. You get Fibery Pro after registration and then after 14 days you are presented with a screen to make a deliberate decision whether you want to use Fibery in Free plan or convert to paid plan. I think this change alone boosted new paid accounts by a significant margin.

New all-hands format: Questions ping-pong

All-hands meetings for a small remote company are quite hard. Initially we had weekly calls, but quite quickly we discovered that we have nothing to discuss with a 30 people group every week, so we moved to monthly calls. These meetings we mostly about status reports about company progress and situation. Quite boring, to be honest.

Then we replaced these meetings with written documents about Product and Growth areas and status reporting became redundant. So we cancelled all-hands meetings completely. It appeared that after several months of no all-hands meetings we started to miss each other. What to do?

We tried questions ping-pong idea. Questions ping-pong flow:

1. The first person asks a question from anyone else (for example, Teddy)
2. Teddy answers the question and maybe sparks some conversation around it
3. When the conversation stalls, Teddy asks a new question to a different random person, etc.

It appeared that this format is quite fun. You can learn new things about teammates, jump into some conversation about unexpected topic (cycling, hackathons, Fibery mobile app, cats, etc). This simple format breaks the remote ice very well. Try it in your remote team, it should work OK for up to 50 people I think.

Fibery positive feedback

We organized positive feedback, learned what customers appreciate the most, and used it heavily in our marketing. Here are the top praises that we collected:

Fibery as a product is ready for prime-time

A year ago Fibery was not ready for prime-time, but now it is. There are still tons of things we want to improve, rework, polish, and add. There are still hundreds of open bugs in our backlog. Anyway, I can finally recommend Fibery trial to almost any company that is looking for a work organization tool. Fibery is good, stable, fast and reliable.

• 😈 Fibery is less chaotic than Notion
• 🦚 Fibery is more connected than ClickUp
• 🎸 Fibery is more powerful than Monday
• 🤓 Fibery is better for knowledge than Airtable
• 🥲 Fibery is less Grammarly than Coda

Great product development progress and weekly releases

2024 was a mixed year, but very productive nevertheless for our development team. On the one hand, our investment into Feedback Management use case and AI were not rewarding, but during the last 6 months we made cool progress in permissions and UX improvements and made Fibery much better for the end users.

Here are several key improvements by areas we did in 2024 without any particular order:

• Permissions. Entity permissions, custom access templates, automatic access for assignees, share database, allow non-Admins to create automation Rules, Guests

• Timeline View. One entity per lane mode, resizable lanes, better drag and drop, better backlog, secondary dates visualization

• Highlights. Multi-relations, AI to find highlights

• Entity View. One-column layout, multiple entity views

• AI. Transcribe files, space setup, generate automation scripts

• Table View. Self-relations on all levels, groups, rich text column, totals

• Whiteboard. New text editor, new notes, entities graphs, relation tool, text on connector line, tons of fixed bugs

• Search. Search in basic fields, instant search in recent items, faster search, mix semantic and keyword search, exact search

• UI & other things. New Space setup, sidebar redesign, new integrations page, quick search in views, watch entities, better notifications, and more

• Many many other things, we released 450 features in 2024

There were 52 weeks in 2024, and we shipped 51 releases.

                 2021      2022      2023      2024
                   --        --        --        --
🦋 Releases        34   →    40  →     45  →     51
💚 Done Features  100   →   200  →    300  →    450
🦐 Fixed Bugs     900   →  1200  →   1300  →   1400

The chart below shows total highlights score (value of customers feedback) delivered every month. After a short depression that followed Fibery 2.0 release, we got back to business and delivered many long-awaited missing things in Fibery.

In the second part of 2024 we stuck with the few product themes we chose and didn’t distract ourselves with spontaneous next-shiny-thing features. Focus was good indeed.

Perseverance is the key, and we will keep it in 2025 💪.

Low churn rate and good paid accounts growth

Our logo annual churn rate is ~10%. Since Fibery is still mostly focusing on SMB, this is an excellent churn rate that “indicates strong customer retention and product-market fit” (on the other hand, we had a similar churn rate last year as well).

New paid accounts growth accelerated this year, especially during the last several months. Now it looks like a proper growth curve for a successful startup that found Product/Market-Fit. I hope we finally did!

Other one-liner wins

• We’re adding more educational content to our Youtube channel
• We’re way more focused than the last year in product and marketing activities

Future. Major product problems we are going to solve in 2025 🦋

Fibery vision is very long term and we are moving forward with a good pace. In 2025 we are going to address some of the most requested and hard conceptual problems:

• Permissions and sharing theme finalization. Share with a group, get rid of users space, etc.
• Dependencies management. Dependencies on Timeline View
• Multi-relations. So it will be possible to connect Task to several databases with a single relation
• Basic mobile app with the most needed use cases for mobile
• Required fields
• New left sidebar (nested Spaces, Separate “My” from “All”, get rid of space setup)

This roadmap is not certain, but it expresses our near future goals. Overall, we will invest into core conceptual improvements heavily and release the first mobile app.

Cortisol 😨

The worst things from our Slack #cortisol channel.

I really don’t like tabs, especially for relation Views: it makes Fibery look like enterprise software from 2000s

— Anton Iokov, Head of Growth

just guess why i have day off today:

1. i am sick and tired
2. i have an existential crisis punch into depth of my soul
3. I’d rather try to love myself. Don’t forget to love yourself either. (c)
4. usual entry to the flat door’s installation became unusual with shitty consequences

— Andrew Shotkin, software developer

I’ve become so confused about what a view is and how I should be using them.

— A confused customer

Guess a customer: $360 LTV, 271 Intercom chats

— Head of Growth @Fibery

Hello, we have reach the limit of the database (1000), is it possible to extend this limit on your side or we must remove or clean some data ?

— A curious customer

It is quite hard to manage a Space with 40+ databases

Dopamine 😍

Best things from our Slack #dopamine channel.

How fucking awesome I wrote webhooks in integrations

— Eugene, software developer

Карыстаючыся момантам хачу сказаць, што Файберы — геніальная штука! Ужо і не ведаю, як без яе весці справы. Я кінуў Workflowy, Notion, Notes і ўсё-усё-усё, цяпер толькі Файберы.

— A happy customer

Hello Support Team,
I’ve been using Fibery now for a couple of years now. I’m an ex-software engineer — now a business coach for small businesses.
I use Fibery on a daily basis to run my tiny business. If I could describe Fibery in one word - JOY! Such a joy to use, so well thought out, well engineered on solid principles, the UX is delightful. The new features are flowing. Keep it up, you do amazing work!

— A happy customer

I WENT TO CAPYBARAS AND TOUCHED THEM WITH MY HANDS (had to pay them with food but it’s ok)

— Polina, Head of customer success and a true fan of Capybaras

Many of my colleagues are frequently blown away by the fact that anything they can think of is effectively possible in Fibery — we are so unconstrained by this tool.

— A happy customer

Here is the chart that shows number of messages from #dopamine and #cortisol channels. Main outcomes:

• Fibery is an optimistic company 😘
• Cortisol level dropped in September, after we did some re-organization and started new strategy execution
• Pre-release anxiety and post-release depression are noticeable in dopamine channel

2024 dreams vs. 2024 reality

A year ago I listed our dreams and here is how they matched the reality:

Dream:    🙂 Launch Fibery for product teams 2.0 in Q2 2024.
Reality:  🥲 We did it with full scope, but the result was... not that good.

Dream:    😀 Find the true product/market-fit. We want to feel it.
Reality:  🙂 Last 3 months we started to feel it, maybe we are close.

Dream:    😁 Onboard at least 6 relatively large customers (200+ users).
Reality:  🙂 Onboarded 1 large account, but we doubled our paid customers base this year.

In 2023, we achieved around 50% of our goals, in 2024 it was ~70%. Can we do 90% next year?

2025 🍾

Here are our dreams for 2025:

• 🙂 Resolve 4 conceptual problems in Fibery (and release Fibery Mobile)
• 😀 Keep the team sane
• 😁 2x MRR
• 😍 2x number of paid customers (and reach 1000 paid accounts)

This year was a 🎢. High expectations → failure → depression → rebounce → 🔥. If you are a Fibery customer, thank you for staying with us (let me hug you). If you are not, 2025 is the perfect time to give Fibery a try. We are persevering and moving forward, even faster than before. Thank you for believing in our product, our vision and our team. We love you all! 🤗♥️