Fibery End Game (product company example)

[Oshyan]

@mdubakov

Good chat is VERY hard to build

I’m sure it is. However I think the harder problem is not building it or making it “good”, it’s:

@mdubakov

VERY hard to convince people to use instead of their favorite app (Slack, Telegram, etc)

So the question is: why? Is it simple inertia/habit? Do you yet have any ideas how Fibery chat can possibly win against Slack, etc?

@mdubakov

For example, ClickUp chats organization is totally awful. There is no good way to build good navigation for Chats in ClickUp and I believe this is the number 1 reason of failure.

I agree, 100%! But… doesn’t it also seem like a fairly easy problem to solve? Or at least improve on…

@mdubakov

I think it will take half of current Fibery team and no less than 6-8 months to build a good enough chat, so we are reluctant to move into this direction so far, since this is very risky. We have to build a more solid ground and polish Fibery before jumping into this novel and huge area.

OK, yes, with that long of a time estimate I have to agree with you . Still it also seems very important. I am curious to see how and when this ends up happening…

@mdubakov

You have to have a very decent mobile app on top of that.

You are probably right, though I pity whoever is trying to do real work on mobile apps (even chatting). So… is this some kind of acknowledgement that Fibery will have to have a mobile app one day? Maybe just for chat?

@mdubakov

This problem is very interesting and we are thinking about it. So far we found a very easy, but quite powerful solution… emojis. In nearest future we will allow to enhance relations with emojis, add filter, etc. So every team will be able to encode information in relations. Imagine, for a support you will just use and for oppose It is easy to get and with filtering it will be possible to aggregate number of opposing/supporting requests.

Huh. What an interesting idea. It seems quite honestly silly at first, but… maybe it’s brilliant. As long as the team has agreement on what each emoji means (e.g. if you start to use ones beyond the obvious ), it could certainly have some notable value.

However… it is a clunky solution for the need for richer relationship data like what Chris was suggesting in his Relationship properties topic, specifically the ability to specify a quantity for a relationship. I was working on a project to create Recipe and bakery production management in Fibery for a little while, but the existing solutions were quite unsatisfying for anyone but a data nerd, in my view. This was to be for a baker, hardly a techie person. If they could simply choose a quantity for a relationship of ingredient to recipe, that would solve a lot of problems and avoid a ton of otherwise duplicate data and workarounds.

Now… there are possible workarounds with an emoji-based system. If you can encode multiple emoji in a Relationship, for example, and you can run formulae on them and derive the identity of the emoji (and not just a simple count), then you could do e.g. to encode “19” as a quantity on a relationship. It is workable but a bit clunky perhaps. I’m curious if this is one way you envision your relationship-emoji-properties being used.