Edit: having not even posted this yet, I just read this Blog Post (https://fibery.io/blog/startup-diary/first-half-2024/) and it covers most of what I’m writing about below. So now this post is just a plug for that, to read it if you’re feeling the same way I was.
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 [I, @carson bolded this], 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
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This is wonderful, and I would say, accurate:
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
Original Post
Just throwing this out there, curious where it sticks.
I’m having the odd experience where I’ve used Fibery and watched it’s evolution since the beginning. In recent years, I’ve had the impression that the Fibery team has struggled to know how to market their product - or how to accurately convey its power to new markets. An understandable challenge, I wouldn’t know how to either - only that it is powerful, and many people would benefit from investing time towards comprehending it. It seems, with Fibery 2.0, they’ve landed on spinning it primarily as a user feedback/feature prioritization platform. That’s great, I hope it works 
The thing is, that doesn’t fall within my use cases AT ALL. Nothing has changed about the actual existing functionality; all my stuff still works and I continue on with my use cases. But this is definitely an odd feeling of sitting on the edge of the “intended” use case, wondering where the product will go next. The word I hear in politics is “alienate” - some might say I feel “alienated” by the 2.0 release, but they’d be wrong; it’s that’s too strong a word for my experience, and misses too many of the nuances. I can’t think of another way to sum it up, though.
Here’s an example: It’s sort of like if you eat bread, then the baker of the bread came out and said "Now Releasing Bread 2.0: The Best Body Scrubber in the World.
My reaction is “Uh - I thought it was a food, I’ve been using it as food. Has everybody else been eating this or bathing with it?!”
Maybe it doesn’t matter in the end, because the announcement doesn’t impede my use cases at all - it’s either a release in name only, or begins to include features on top of what already exists. But what about if the baker decides to start including inedible grit particles in the bread to make it a better scrubber? THAT will cause problems to my diet/use case.
The inaccuracy in this example is my assumption that the bread’s “real” intended use was as a food all along. Maybe in reality, I’ve been using the bread as a scrubber and Fibery is just now telling me I should be eating it instead.
So maybe I’m just feeling a tinge of worry about the product we’ve built a backbone off of going in a different direction with it than we are. I’m not looking for anyone to change or apologize or anything - no wrong has been done. But a discussion would be interesting. Ultimately, I’m a small customer here and I’d rather see Fibery flourish and continue to outdo every other provider in this space. If against all likelihood that means eventually having to make changes to the platform that degrade our existing use cases, I hope they do it.
I have yet to fully explore and understand the highlighting/references features, so maybe as I do that, I’ll come to understand that the feature has power in other domains and use cases as well.