🐙 Fibery Product Report: March 2025

News & Announcements
1

We’ve made four releases in March. Total Highlights Score: 310 (for comparison, it was 788 in February). Overall, it was more about polishing and smaller things.

image
image2024×378 62.6 KB

Polina recorded a nice webinar again, watch it to see all changes in action:

Now, let’s talk about our current activities and plans:

Import

One major obstacle on the way to adopting and even exploring Fibery is getting the data in.

Hypothesis: if we make it easier to import data from elsewhere, more people will understand Fibery and there will be less friction to switch from other tools.

The workspaces that create, import, or sync at least 100 entities in the first 14 days after sign-up, are 17 times more likely to purchase (9.9% vs. 0.6%). So far only around 8% of workspaces fall into this category.

I bet we can make it 8% → 12% of workspaces while keeping the predictive power of the import/create action (at least 15x difference). In this case, we’ll improve the overall conversion rate from sign-up to purchase by around 15%.

There will be three main tracks:

  1. Make import more discoverable and improve the general UX, regardless of the data source.

  2. Make CSV import great as we will never add decent connectors for all the tools:
    – Merge CSV and CSV 2.0 import
    – Find, merge, and prevent duplicates based on Field
    – Update existing entities via CSV import

  3. Improve connectors to our top Competitors:
    – Import Pages and rich text from Notion
    – Slice ClickUp Tasks into multiple Databases based on Task Type

We’ll start in April.

Permissions

Group sharing, especially DB sharing, has received some adoption while the rest of the functionality is steady:

image
image3814×1754 509 KB

As Andrew is migrating Space permissions to the new model to unlock Allow not to extend access from Space to its Databases, we continue to focus on simplification:

  • Explain sources in access audit
  • Add Access page for Spaces and Databases
  • Manage Users like any other Database
  • Manage User Groups as part of User DB settings

The next important thing here is Explain access templates.

Adding and updating data

Required fields

We are finalizing features to make the addition of records with required fields easier. Almost all tasks are completed, and we will close this area for good in April.

Next

Eugene will finalize all this grand development with Simplify adding new entities when Name generated via formula.

Sidebar

We have finalized Sidebar changes with some improvements and not gonna touch it again in near future (only very small things and bug fixes).

  • Merge search results for both tabs in the sidebar
  • Make d&d in the left menu great
  • Separate Space configuration and collaboration in sidebar

Next

The last piece we want to do is Home Page in Fibery. I hope we will start it in April.

Gantt View

We are going to finalize timeline improvements with the major update. I hope we will release it in April (at least first version).

image
image2588×1450 487 KB

AI

We’ve restarted AI theme last month and expanding it now with a major development around getting started and Smart Agent.

Q&A Smart Agent

It is a very capable beast that can answer complex questions around Fibery data. Around 10 customers tried early prototype and 7 of them liked it, some liked it very much. We almost completed all needed functionality and are going to release it in April.

What is remaining:

  • UI
  • Data sources (to help people check reply correctness somehow)
  • Create new entities from the replies
  • Maybe chat history

image
image1638×1136 95.9 KB

Getting started

Our grand idea is to give users full control over Fibery Workspace via text commands, so a user can start building Fibery workspace expressing problems, not solutions. First, we will build a prototype to see how it works. Nothing to share so far.

Whiteboard

We have finished developing comments and whiteboard external sharing. The remaining work includes improving sections (in progress) and groups, plus embedding individual views (board, table, doc etc.) into the whiteboard. Once that’s done, we’ll take a break from adding new features.

  • Share whiteboard externally
  • Whiteboard: Sections improvements
  • Embed views into the whiteboard (reports, tables, etc)

Mobile

We’ve started developing mobile apps for iOS and Android. The first TestFlight/Google Play version for beta testers will have better sidebar navigation, an improved view’s toolbar, a new rich text editing panel, and updated popups behavior on mobile.

P.S. Ask your questions and provide constructive (or crazy) ideas. :octopus:

8 Likes
3

I wonder if you could slip in one more thing into whiteboards :winking_face_with_tongue:

We make pretty good use of whiteboards and have several. One thing that I have recently run into is the need to move an item from one whiteboard to another.

The whiteboard gets so unwieldy if you put everything on a single whiteboard, which we used to do. So instead, we have multiple whiteboards for multiple initiatives. But then we also have kind of a central grab bag whiteboard of quick win ideas. So let’s say I just wrapped up brainstorming for an initiative and I have identified a few quick ones that have come out of that exercise. It’s pretty tedious to get those quick wins over into the grab bag.

Maybe improved sections will make it less unwieldy to have a single whiteboard?

—-

Another longshot is to be able to have automation, script, or API actions for whiteboards. How amazing would it be if I could click a button and get an AI generated summary of the content on a whiteboard, or another button to say add to whiteboard? That would cut out a lot of steps in our workflows.

6 Likes
4

As always, I love Fibery’s transparency and openness to share your internal strategy and goals. Thank y’all for always being awesome.

Gantt view is such a happy surprise! :grin:

5 Likes
5

Looking forward to this!

2 Likes
6

.gif

3 Likes
7

I am sure they will give the Whiteboard lots of love after the break! Otherwise you can probably bribe them if you need it earlier :money_with_wings::money_with_wings::money_with_wings::money_with_wings::face_savoring_food::face_savoring_food::face_savoring_food: (this is a jok,e but who knows, I think back to Slow December…)

2 Likes
8

This matches a long-time belief/intuition I have also had, but it’s good to see data backing it up! TBH I’m not sure why this didn’t receive more focus sooner, CSV 2.0 import has been buggy and incomplete for… years? But anyway there are too many things to work on, I know you can’t do it all at once. I might have made different choices and put import sooner, but Fibery’s progress over the past 1-2 years has been remarkable regardless, and I’m excited you’re focusing on this now!

Woo! How do we get into the beta? :smiley:

2 Likes
9

Nice to see this coming soon! We were just talking about this last week.

Very happy to see these things coming soon, too!

Happy to be a beta tester :wink:

2 Likes
10

Two years now, right, embarrassing territory.
What are the biggest problems you’ve faced when importing CSVs? How do you decide whether to use CSV 1.0 vs. 2.0?

1 Like
11

I’ll notify you when we’re ready to share the test build :ok_hand:

4 Likes
12

I think it’s really worth leaning into CSV import, and there is a lot of great work to build on. I came across OneSchema on a podcast the other day, and it highlights the value very well.

1 Like
13

To be honest I stopped using 2.0 after various failures/issues some years back. It may well have gotten better, or it might have been some particularly challenging CSVs or something, but the frustration of those failures - and the relatively acceptable functioning of 1.0 by comparison, in those situations - just disinclined me from going back to 2.0 after a while. I don’t recall seeing any notable 2.0 changes in the meantime (which I think you’re confirming here), but if I had it might have been encouragement to try again, depending on what those changes were.

Anyway I imagine many people had similar experiences. If data import is high friction it can be a big disincentive to either deepen one’s investment in the platform, or to invest in it at all… But you guys know this, and I’m glad it’ll get some focus again soon. :slight_smile:

2 Likes
14

Thanks! I’ll give it a listen.

If you have some of those (or new) CSVs lying around, please share with us via the support chat. We’ll make sure they get imported smoothly after the upcoming round of improvements.

1 Like
15

As a non-whiteboard user I’ve been watching this long running feature improvement cycle. On the one had, I cannot wait to move on to other views/areas to see protracted support and solutioning. On the other, it’s very encouraging to see the Fibery team dive deep into the UX of a particular area and continue to refine over time.

I’ve certainly felt the shift as more features roll out and that can, at times, feel like a rolling rainstorm. If we see a little bit in one area, that’s all we’re going to get for another year or so.

I’m looking forward to experiencing more depth and polish before features are closed.

1 Like
16

CSV import was one of our biggest pain points early on when we started using Fibery. We tried various tools to get data in and eventually settled on Fibery, but at the time there was no way to import & update any existing records via CSV. To work around this, we used Airtable as an intermediary — pasting CSV data there and syncing from it. We also tested Monday.com around the same time, and their CSV import and update process was almost effortless — something we really wished Fibery had (and which may partly explain Monday’s success). Great to see that improving the CSV import experience is now becoming a higher priority — our usage would probably be much higher if it were easier to get data in this way. :ok_hand:

3 Likes
17

Thank you! I’ll read your post every morning instead of having a coffee to energize for the day :smiley:

1 Like
18

I’d be pleased to beta test mobile when it comes to that.

1 Like
19

Great news with this! Been waiting a long time for it!!

20

Also this would be huge! After 5 1/2 yrs in Fibery, we just started importing and are using, with great success, a large DB to handle a big portion of our product…but fell down when the source data was in multiple files and needed to be able to import across them while maintaining the key column intact. The use if the db is so good though it might get us even more reliant on Fibery, so the more of this, the better!