#54 Fibery.io in the First Half of 2024

It’s hard to believe that eight months have passed since my last Fibery digest. Many things happened, so it is time to reflect and share our future plans. Reflection goes first 🤔.

Past: Narrowing down → 3 core use cases

As you maybe know, we tried to narrow down Fibery product focus and re-positioned Fibery as a no-code product discovery & development platform. Well-defined scope and use cases, well-defined target personas, well-defined competitors and quite clear value proposition.

Why? Because all books about strategy and almost all sources in the web advice you to narrow down and focus. Y Combinator is not an exception.

Startup founders’ intuition will always be to do more whereas usually the best strategy is almost always to do less, really well.

And it makes perfect sense! When you have limited resources you just can’t do many things well. You have to pick your battles and nail the niche that is small enough for you to win customers. Then you can expand and probe new niches.

We focused on just few use cases:

• Product feedback management.
• Backlog prioritization based on feedback.
• Features specs and planning/roadmapping.

All marketing materials were re-done with the focus on this new positioning, including the website.

In a product we implemented very clever things for feedback processing and prioritization. I honestly think our features/ideas prioritization approach is novel and way better than RICE.

We recorded bunch of good tutorials. We launched on PH and got 🥈 2nd product of the day. We’ve added cool AI features to process feedback. I did a Life after RICE webinar to showcase main ideas and how it can work.

The solution is powerful, flexible and coherent. However, it did not fly so far. Why?

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 an important enough to do it. Typical situation after the demo:

He said it was refreshing to see this kind of solution, which tries to solve one of the biggest real problems, and we should keep doing this to evangelize this approach. He is sad that they are not ready for it.

At the same time, we even internally were uncomfortable with this focus. Our end-game did not change, we do want to become an operating system for many companies in many segments, and we do have such leads and customers, but now with this narrow focus we have to abandon them for few years. Why? Fibery is a platform, selling a single solution and nothing else is against Fibery product nature.

Reaction of our customers was anxious, and many expressed their fears about this direction.

Not to be too dramatic but I think that for me would somewhat be the death of the Fibery dream in my mind. 😕 I hope that’s not the case and I’m just reading too much into it.

Ironically, July was the best month for us in terms of new paid accounts: 32 companies became our customers. How many product companies among them? — 6. How many use Fibery for feedback processing? — 0. How many use Fibery as an operation system for the whole business? — almost all of them 🫳🎤.

Now: Tuning in → platform + solutions

We decided to embrace that Fibery is a horizontal platform and sell platform + solutions. Product discovery and development is a solution, digital agency OS is a solution, etc. We will still focus on 1-2 at a time, but we will work on platform improvements as well.

From our internal team discussion:

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

— Yes.

Somehow against all the advices, narrow niche for Fibery does not look like a great strategy. Interestingly, Monday does a good job with their monday CRM, monday dev, and monday service, albeit for a different audience (non-engineering background).

We carefully analyzed all our 400+ customers and came to a conclusion that our target persona and her background is pretty clear:

• Titles: Founders, C-level leaders, PMOs and Product Ops
• Background: >80% engineering or analytics
• Company size: 20-200

Company domain is not super relevant, it can be B2B product company, digital agency, custom software development studio, game development company or some solar power research lab.

Platform

Fibery is a flexible platform to build a company’s operating system. It not only has all the key building blocks but these blocks also play well with each other: rich-text + DB (mentions, highlights), whiteboard + DB (cards, relations), automations + formulas, integrations + relations (auto-linking).

With the power of the platform comes the learning curve. Here our focus on technically savvy leaders is key: they already know the (majority of) building blocks so they will only need to learn Fibery-specific UI and approaches.

Our competition as a platform is with other all-in-one tools, here’s an oversimplified review:

• Less chaotic than Notion
• More connected than ClickUp
• More powerful than Monday
• Better for knowledge than Airtable

Note that none of these tools focuses on technically savvy audience specifically 🤓.

Solutions

On top of the platform, we build solutions for sets of connected processes. These solutions are more powerful than typical Notion/Airtable templates and compete with purpose-built tools:

• roadmapping + software development: e.g. Roadmunk + Jira.
• feedback management + prioritization: Productboard.
• knowledge + work management: Google Docs + Trello.

The goal of solutions is to showcase the end value: e.g. Fibery helps you to build products that people love thanks to connecting customer feedback to the roadmap.

We always strive to connect previously scattered processes and replace two or more existing tools — note the + in all the solutions.

We will focus primarily on product company use cases, while our partners are free to explore their industries of expertise.

Marketing team → Growth team

We also re-organized our teams. First of all, we transformed the marketing team into a growth team.

Historically, we have spent the majority of our efforts as a company on producing value (e.g. inventing and implementing new functionality). Explaining value (e.g. making promotional/educational videos or highlighting new features in the product) has always been the second priority.

Now that our product is quite mature, we rarely lose deals because of the lack of some functionality. Our main problem is getting those potential deals in the first place: attracting and activating leads, so they are interested enough to either schedule a call or onboard a team on their own.

That’s why we are going to rebalance our efforts in favor of explaining and capturing ($) value:

Unlike the former marketing team, the growth team is responsible not only for lead generation but also activation:

The goal of the reorganization is to align marketing and product to ensure that we attract the right leads and that these leads get the product they came for.

We always had a gap between product and marketing. One glaring sign of this gap was that marketing team had zero developers. You can imagine how hard it is to “distract” a developer from product features and ask to do something for the marketing. It never really worked. Now the growth team has two developers, and maybe more will join.

Robi, our Head of Marketing, left, and Anton Iokov took on a challenging task to lead the Growth Team. They just started in July and now they’re working on several initiatives:

• Referal program.
• New home page (yes, again). Here we have an idea to showcase what is Fibery via our customers real quotes mainly.
• New pricing page with more details about plans and features.
• Better signup flow.

Nothing really to show here yet, but in the next digest, some results will be there.

Amplifying our brand

We have diluted our brand in the last year — apparently, to appeal to enterprise customers. We haven’t gotten any while our communication has become indistinguishable from any other SaaS.

In a sea of work management solutions with copy-paste brands, we will stand out by exposing our strong company culture:

• we are honest: we admit our weaknesses, state things as they are even if they are ugly, and promise only something we can deliver;
• we are bold: as underdogs, we are ready to do something different, go against “best practices”;
• we are witty: we do challenging things playfully, with a smile in the mind.

We won’t try to appeal to every person (or product manager) on the planet. We’ll attract like-minded folks who share our values and spread the word among their peers.

BTW, I still like this version of our home page…

Product teams re-organization

Last 6-8 months we were heavily focusing on product-related use cases and relevant features. Now we are shifting the focus back to the platform for some period of time (at least 3 months). We will work on three themes:

• Permissions. Database-level permissions, hiding users from other users, etc.
• Whiteboard. Mostly polishing and missing features (comments, URLs, Lock, etc), plus some advanced database-related features to make Fibery whiteboard unique.
• Usability and simplification. Many improvements and polishing, including quick filters on views, quick search, search improvements, space setup re-design, etc.

Most likely you already feel these themes in our recent releases.

Some hot features we released recently

We do weekly releases and I will not enumerate all the things we’ve released recently, just mention top 4 I liked most.

Multiple Entity Views (Pro plan only)

Multiple Entity Views allow users to create and manage multiple layouts for any database entity. For example, you can configure several Entity Views to display Feature entity differently:

AI clusterization: find repeating patterns in sources and create target entities

Now you can run Clusterization for Sources in Highlights area. AI clusterization will analyze all data in Source databases and find repeating patterns. Then target entities will be created and Highlights automatically linked to these entities. For example, here we analyze all Discourse posts and create Features and Bugs from them.

Expand cards to show nested collections on Whiteboard

Manipulating and organizing entity collection hierarchies on the whiteboard is challenging. Today we’re introducing Collections, they will help you to quickly add related cards to the whiteboard, thus exploring hierarchies fast.

Automatically provide access to assigned and linked Users

Instead of doing two things: assigning a person and then providing them access manually, configure automatic access for assignees, owners, reviewers, etc.

This will save you and your teammates hundreds of clicks in the future and prevent awkward situations when an assignee cannot see a card because someone forgot to share it.

One-liner news

• Video from Sonorus consulting: Fibery.io: My Favourite Airtable Alternative.. so far!
• Fresh Fibery templates: JTBD, SCAMPER, Now/Next/Later, Opportunity-solution tree, WSJF
• New article: Abstraction and Complexity. This article mixes painting, poetry, mathematics, data visualization, physics, programming, and other disciplines, smoothly transitioning into software development.

🇬🇧 Random

Random reading 🚀

A list of our most viral marketing campaigns from Rows. Nice team!

Clay’s Path to Product-Market Fit — A 7-Year ‘Overnight Success’. I remember Clay from 4-5 years ago, it did not fly and went to hidden mode for 2-3 years. Now you see what happened.

Random from our dopamine channel 🥹

Thanks for all the great work.(I know I keep raising issues, but that’s because I love your product and team so much… I never really bothered with companies like Atlassian)

Random from our cortisol channel 🤯

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?

Random image from our Slack ☕️

Posted by Ilya.

Random self-irony corner 😺

Vladimir announced the new release availability to the team.

Random photo from our Slack 🐶

Polina has 1:1 meeting with the co-founder

P.S. I hope digests will be more frequent. If you have any ideas how to make it better, write to me: michael@fibery.io.

With ❤️, Michael, Anton and the whole Fibery Team.