Fibery as a CRM? 🤔

I hear you, totally makes sense.

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We actually considered if we could use Attio as a replacement for Fibery at one point (when they first released custom objects). But, Relationships and Actions lack heavily, since it is more of a CRM and less of an OS like Fibery. Plus they’re missing a formula field, which is crucial.

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E-signature

Build this simple signing functionality into Fibery and you can have the $500/year we spend with them: https://esignatures.com/

Alternatively just build a nice one click integration with them. I currently use Zapier to integrate the two and its limited and brittle.

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Happy to read that (except for the Coda people, I wouldn’t like building something for years with a team and then you get to see it collapse from up-close)!

No weird merges for Fibery! Let’s just keep the party going and it will keep growing, I believe that :partying_face:

You might be interested to know that my team has weaned off Slack thanks to Fibery’s solid implementation of comments! And there is a a lot of work to be done with those still…reason #1 we were able to use Fibery comments and ditch Slack - the usefulness of Indexing comments in search. Huge feature. Nobody of the “no-code” guys (feels like that expressions is old school now) do that - Coda, Notion, AirTable, etc. Newer things like Anytype and Tana don’t even have comments!!

We do interestingly use the slack integration to solve part of the mobile issue - simply picking up notifications from the inbox in Slack, and reading the summary, before diving back into Fibery. Very useful for keeping up with what’s going on while away from your desk. Doesn’t allow you to respond, but at least you can see what is going on while we wait on a mobile solution. But literally we do nothing else in Slack! All meaningful conversations are conducted in Fibery (or if need be just plain old text messaging!)

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And just to stay on topic, would love to see Fibery as a bonafide CRM. We use a CRM alongside Fibery, it’s painful. Use Fibery to track leads, and feedback, but some of the set up has been unnatural for our Customer interaction team. All CRM’s are basically db’s with various relations, tags, etc. and Fibery does that as well as anything.

I think some of the “quality of life” stuff would also need to be worked out for more CRM-type staff to buy in:

  • Further speed improvements
  • Some modern UI touches - not as much text cutting off from linked entities, update of icons, etc

Thanks!

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Interesting take here. Having made the transition from ClickUp to Fibery in the past year, that is not my experience. I think Fibery is still more closely overlapped with Notion & Airtable and directly a competitor to Coda. Just my market analysis.

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Just adding another friendly complaint. I find that the UI often isn’t optimized for a CRM. For example, if I search “Lee Smith”, of which I have three different contacts with that name. I need to open each one to see who it is…this is an issue with the main search, but also when adding relations from a quote or company. I end up needing to always open the entity to make sure it’s the right one, and sometimes I am still connecting to the wrong one and need to try to connect to the other one.

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Are those three Lee Smith the same person with different Deals in progress or only one Lee Smith with two Deals?

On my CRM setup, we add people to one database only, the People database. If that person has multiple Deals, I would create multiple deals on the database linking the same person.

Anyway, indeed we could have different people with the same full name, and in this case, it would be hard to differentiate them just looking at the search results.

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Potential solution here:
Change the entity name to a formula so you can include an identifying property in the name. In NetSuite it’s often First Last #Contact ID.
I’ve also liked First Last | Lead or First Last | Customer.

It won’t solve the problem if the results are served from different databases though (email integration, discourse integration, contacts).

I do this a lot, but names end up getting very long to try and be unique. Airtable and Notion allow you to select additional fields to view on your relation selection. So in this case, adding the company name. I would LOVE if Fibery added this. Would help with more than just CRM.
Relevant conversation here: Open larger view on relation field dropdown

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These are three separate Lee Smiths.

I tried creating the name with a formula, but it creates issues when I’m creating entities from another entity. If I have a new prospective customer, normally I need to add a quote, a company and a contact entity (which are separate databases). I like the freedom to start with any of the entities (usually the quote), then adding the company and contact in the relation field. With a formula, it’s hard to create a contact directly, since it overwrites it, so I end up creating an empty entity, then opening it to fill in the data in the editable field.

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Agree with this. I think Monday and ClickUp are among the range of “project management” first tools (throw in Wrike, Teamwork, Asana, etc etc) that have been around a relative long time, and still are pretty rigid and remain uninteresting vs. Fibery for my team due to some of the unique things Fibery provides:

  • Amazing wiki-like referencing and creation of items with the “#,” in particular the inline capability, then backlinks with context that let you see the source of literally everything in Fibery if properly utilized by users

  • Good enough search that indexes just about everything, although a lot of improvement could be gained here

  • No notion of a “task” that dominates these other tools, even though some of them now refer to “items” etc when in reality at their core the atomic entity is generally a task of some sort. That makes it artificial to track stuff that isn’t work in those apps

  • Like the old “no code” core group such as Airtable, Coda, and Notion - the big “three” alternatives for a good few years some time back, Fibery treats all entities the same, and you wind up with a very simple solution. I actually think Docs are unnecessary because entities in DB’s can do all what Docs can, and the fewer types of features in an app to deal with, the better. Clickup, Monday, Asana etc all make you use some kind of alternative entity to handle Docs, Notes, chats. In Fibery I’d still like to see the evolution to where the comments could become “referable,” in particular like here in Discourse where they are able to be quoted by just dragging (feature request Ability to quote text across Fibery like in Discourse). This would provide a truly unique edge on the Notion’s, Tana’s, Capacities, - all the bleeding edge stuff of the market, none of which can handle this well.

A bit off topic I know but always interested to discuss the ins-and-outs of Fibery vs the other guys and the continued evolution I hope to a tool that can truly serve to document all a team’s activities, and provide the absolute superior approach to traceability and clarity within the content that is contained within.

Thanks!

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