I’m not sure what this means precisely. More like what Linear does?
What I’m hoping is this to become almost like a ERP system / operating system. I sincerely hope you’re not going to eliminate features that currently exist, because a whole lot of our business processes depend on Fibery.
Checklists & other processes
Todo’s / projects
Content plan
Procurement planning
Collecting job applications
Meetings
Handbook / memo’s
Where the most value is for us, is in the ability to link everything together, the automations, scripting and the API. That is what makes it an operating system for us.
I think lots of people can find value in Fibery even though some things are unpolished, you don’t have a product problem per say. So not sure why you would change strategy at all. You mostly have a marketing problem, I see very little amount of video’s on Youtube for instance. Fibery has a steep learning curve, but much more possibilities then other competitors.
And also there is no way to earn money. That is why Notion and Clickup is so succesful, there are many video’s and people are earning money making Notion templates, which again is what drives the video’s being created.
Caveat is that Notion is also more focused towards individuals, students, etc. But the team aspect is what makes Fibery really stand out. So if I had to choose a strategy, I would focus on teams of 5+ people with demands for many deep integrations, internal automations, and customization preferences. Simple and beautiful is Notion’s territory already, so to speak. Fibery needs to be complex.
Fully agree. We’ve created an all-in-one workspace so that you can manage your whole company in one tool. CRM, PM, product development, marketing, finance and a lot of automations & templates that makes the life of users easy. Fibery is the only tool that can handle what we’ve build so far.
Yep. You can build almost anything in Fibery, but the problem is that it’s really hard to find out what’s possible. And you do need to know some hacks, workarounds, etc. because features are 80% ready.
If new users have a ‘Fibery academy’ where the focus is more on how to build certain automations, formulas, solutions, scripts etc. then that can be a game changer.
The current guide is focused on information instead of ‘let’s build this thing together’. And the result is also more need for support that necessary.
Also agree.
But even when there is no money to earn I still think there are partners & users that really want to help each other and new users (I certainly am).
There is so many good information in Discourse but it’s so hard to find the diamonds.
Also agree.
But let’s say you still want to focus on teams of 100+ people. That’s possible, but not when too many functionalities are ‘almost good’.
The users who configure the workspace will know eventually that Fibery is awesome since it’s super flexible and can handle complex use cases like no other tool can.
But the majority of the users in companies with 100+ people will only work in the tool. For them it’s ‘just a tool’ and they will mostly notice the annoying stuff (since that’s the default of most people, let’s be honest ).
Let’s face the facts
Fibery’s support is really good
Fibery’s product is really good
Fibery’s development speed is really good
Fibery’s users are overall really happy
Maybe Fibery has a marketing problem. But if I look at the stats Fibery must had tens of thousands leads in the last few years. That’s pretty impressive since there hasn’t been a lot of marketing IMO.
So the question is: why didn’t those leads became customers? And what is needed to turn leads into actual customers?
A lot of extra features?
Or outstanding current features that are at >95%, less bugs, basics like a mobile version and maybe an academy to help new users?
So that your first time impression is just as impressive as everything else.
Have just looked at the stats, I would argue even stronger that it’s the opposite, it’s not def enough leads.
750 leads in a month, assuming a conversion rate of lets say 2.5% (average is between 1-5%) is just about 15 extra paying customers a month. And let’s assume each customer has 5 users (just ballparking, have no idea if this is correct), then that’s about 750 USD per month growth. And then we don’t even take churn into consideration.
As a comparison, Notion has 35 mln users, clickup 10 mln, monday.com 168k customers (not users), Asana 2.5mln
Also, the fact that the amount leads is slowing could only be a marketing issue. It has nothing to do with retention / churn, and thus almost by definition cannot be a product problem.
The fact that not even Google Ads are running is a sign of this:
I fully agree. The current amount of leads and customers is way too low to have a healthy company.
12.408 leads in 2023
160 new customers (340 in total in 2023)
1,29% conversion in 2023
I only meant that given the marketing strategy/effort in the last years (which has been quite low as far as I can see) the amount of leads is quite high.
And I do think it can be helpful to first fix the conversion before you double your marketing effort (and costs). Especially since there is no free plan anymore and users have to decide within 14 days.
But I can also imagine that there is a different strategy now since the focus is to onboard companies with 100+ users. If you have a good product, a good vision, a good network and when you’re good in sales, you can close those deals.
Yep, this is exactly what the value of Fibery is to me.
We half-jokingly refer to Fibery as our ERP all the time here and are currently applying for a government grant to help us build out a custom “agile digital agency” ERP (with Fibery as the backbone).
While these are some alternatives, these are not Fibery’s closest competitors. This doesn’t take into account many tenants of GTM strategy and market positioning. I get the general sentiments of the feedback in this post but I have to point out that as users we’re all focused on our specific needs and verticals. The Fibery Team has to think bigger than our personal preferences. It’s simply a requirement of good product development.
My use case is far from the Product Dev space and I would love for Fibery to pivot more towards CRM, reporting, and dashboarding, but I’m here for the long haul and I know that the more success we find for target users, the more success there will be for me.
This is a bit of an odd response, you have 4 people above here saying that they like the all-in one solution aspect of Fibery, and your response is that you need to pick one use case? Now I feel like you’re not listening to your users.
I and others here have written many words and dedicated our time to giving you this feedback, and you don’t even respond to it. I hope you realize how valuable this feedback can be. Your users are telling you what they need.
I read everything, but I don’t agree to everything. As a long term goal all-in-one still holds. The problem is that all-in-one still needs some landing use case. What we learned is all-in-one is hard to sell to many people. Some get it, but not enough to allow us grow faster. Most tools (even that you perceive as all-in-one now), have some winning use case.
Airtable - alternative to Excel
Notion - great wiki
ClickUp - nice project and task management
Coda - google doc alternative on steroids
What is Fibery on your opinion? What is our winning use case?
Thanks for the response. Feel free to tell us that you don’t agree so we can help further.
I understand you point, it doesn’t hurt to have some sort of USP, or a one sentence use case people can associate Fibery with. But why can’t the use case be “all-in-one”? You say it’s hard to sell it like that, but have you guys tried?
Or let me ask it in another way, do you get churn and feedback of people saying they don’t need this all-in-one usecase? Or find it too complex? There always people who would prefer a simple note taking app like Notion, but that’s just not your audience.
I imagine something like this:
Headline: “The operation system for your business”
Subheadline: “From simple note taking to complex team structures, Fibery handles it all”
I know the typical advice is “the riches are in the niches”, the more you niche down the better. And while that’s true, maybe your niche IS the business that wants to build an internal ERP system.
Having said all that, I really think you don’t have enough eyeballs / leads coming in! Unless you are seeing major drop-off somewhere in the funnel, you have a marketing problem, not a product problem. But indeed, the messaging is part of this marketing, so it’s important to think about.
We also use Fibery as an all-in-one solution. We house and create actions around everything in our company. For context, we are a Saas company that generates over $1M ARR and are currently in a rapid state of growth. Fibery has been pivotal and it would be terrible to lose any of the features that are available to use. That being said, feedback management and development are not the core features we use Fibery for. We use it for how-to wiki guides, project management for teams, hardware (product) inventory processes and actions, ticketing for products and customers, team meeting documentation, 1on1 spaces for team members, team scheduling (for crying out loud), location management and R&D (we have multiple datacenters across the US), expense management, Postgres sync from external database using a custom app integration to pull in realtime customer and product record data and much much more. These are all separate spaces and databases.
Yes, “it’s cool” that we can manage product feedback but honestly, there is so much more that Fibery provides to us and there are other tools that we can use to manage customer feedback. We use Linear to mark Feedback when we get it, which is why I asked for a Linear integration. Linear is very polished and integrated with our customer comms so it makes more sense for us to use Linear for our platform development and feedback.
The thing that sets Fibery apart is the ability to shape it around any process and data you have AND relationships between all scopes across the company. This power has allowed a team of 2 to continue growing a Saas company with tremendous ease and consistency. I’ve tried hundreds (I mean hundreds) and nothing quite compares to Fibery.
I’ve more or less of given up on attempting to push my opinion here as it seems Fibery has decided on their direction, so — all I can hope is that they do not remove any of the current features we use.
They did try in the beginning I believe. It is what brought me to use Fibery and has kept me here.
I’m sure it can be challenging to promote the product as an all in one, but I don’t think it impossible. I believe it is a matter of marketing the product for top use cases. i.e. a marketing page dedicated to each use case and breaking down how Fibery does it / compares.
e.g.
-product development
-data management (includes product feedback, synced/imported data)
-project management
-documentation (which is broad and includes wikis)
-relationships and actions (includes everything above)
I’ve started building ‘The Ultimate Workspace’ for my own company and I will sell it to entrepreneurs with similar business processes.
We are not live yet, although we’ve been building since november 2022. But it took a lot of trial and error to figure everything out and we’ve needed to rebuild stuff because I let Fibery process too many raw data which didn’t went well.
I have tons of leads from my first company and a very big network. We’ll onboard 3 customers per month in the beginning and can scale to 8 with the current team.
I’ve choosen a very specific niche and that’s why I have so many leads. Since there isn’t a good all-in-one solution for their company available in the market.
(Fibery also focuses on a niche but there is a lot of competition in that niche; that’s why I agree to @Nevil_Hulspas “maybe your niche IS the business that wants to build an internal ERP system”)
The problem however is that I can’t iterate efficient as a Fibery partner. The workspace is very big and if I make changes, I need to change it for each and every client that I onboard (that’s not necessary, but that is a strategic choice as well).
That sucks, since we can onboard new clients in the same time that a team member manually changes workspaces.
That’s why my strategy is to make it almost perfect, so that there are no changes needed and we can scale fast after we go live. Which is also tricky, I know.
What can be a USP
Some functionality so that I can push changes to multiple workspaces at once as a Fibery partner. Or that somebody can ‘download’ changes that have been made in a template. Or the possibility to create a ‘master template’ for a certain niche.
So that Fibery partners can:
Create workspaces/templates and sell them. And also give those clients updates afterwards when a new feature is released by Fibery.
Create workspaces for specific niches and iterate while creating them; which I currently can’t. I have so many cool niches that I want to build a workspace for. But I will not do that if I can’t iterate since my margins are too low then.
The template owners can create marketing for their workspaces (I will write tons of blogs and create videos) which is free marketing for Fibery. And if you can actually show what you’ve build, users will be more easily convinced.
I don’t think there is a tool that provides this option. And I assume Fibery’s structure can handle the use case since almost everything is possible with Fibery .
The fact that you can build an outstanding custom all-in-one solution for every company (small or big).
My answer: Innovation through insight in relations. Collective brain. Fibery 2.0 may have potential to better align with the future need to handle Artificial SuperIntelligence. I see about 99.9% of people underestimate that.
Note that users in general want their current needs fulfilled, and Fibery over the years has attracted users that are not necessary interested in disruptive innovation beyond their current needs.
A truly disruptive innovative product will need to sacrifice everyting else but its key value.
And that requires a group of people working on that key value in an unforgiving way.
The alternative is that Fibery stays slowly continuing the way it is, likely being pretty generic, which is fine if the founders are okay with it (less stress), or have another more promising venture in focus to fulfill their vision or passion, since often driven entrepreneurs are not married with one business.
Also, agree with @YvetteLans, that it’s likely not a marketing problem but a polish plus onboarding problem. I have not used Linear but it looks lickable (to use that old adage). While I don’t think Fibery needs to become that, it still needs a good amount of visual and non-visual refinements to make the power and funcrtinality shine.
I think in that sense Notion has found a good balance of well-designed without going overboard.
For me it is the only “operating system for our business” that entails (like @Nevil_Hulspas said):
Knowledge base (wiki) for all to collaborate on specs, plans, etc.
Project and task management for all our development
Process automation for forms, notifications, reporting, etc.
This means we can handle pretty much all our business through Fibery:
Team management: Hiring, payroll, 1x1s, onboarding, holidays, etc.
Product develpoment: Specs, sprints, documentation, release tracking, etc.
Product management: Roadmaps, success tracking through reports, etc.
Business operations: CRM, finances and expenses, materials and ERP, etc.
Customer support: Email integrations (we don’t use Intercom just yet)
The only thing that doesn’t really run on Fibery for us, is our website and our actual product.
I mean, there is NOTHING that compares to Fibery that I am aware of! If we talk about PMF and how sad would your customers be, if Fibery wasn’t around, I’d say 20 out of a scale 0–10. There is no other tool that is this business critical for us. The only other tools that are similarly critical for us all have alternatives: Google (email, calendar), Slack, GitHub.
Agree . We’ve had internal discussions before where people said "why don’t we get a standard tool?’ for a certain aspects of our work (e.g. CRM, JIRA, etc.) and every time the conclusion was that while said tools may be better (i.e. more tailored), they won’t connect all our business. And thus they are not better for what we want to have.
To conclude, I’m not against some focus on product feedback, feature prioritisation, etc. but I concur with what many have said here: Fibery’s strength is that it ties everything together more than anybody else. That is its niche. It’s the starting point. And yes, more integrations could mean that over time we’d expand our corporate stack with specialised tools, but Fibery is the fabric that holds it all together (until we have to run it all on SAP one day).
That does make it hard to focus, I understand. But which is why I believe that the answer is actually to have three different types of improvements: strategic big efforts (based on your strategic beliefs, which clearly are good as you started Fibery hehe), medium and smaller refinements which may best be prioritsed with your existing customers. The latter maintains the evolutionary growth, the former brings revolutionary growth.
Thank you all for the very interesting thread. As one of our developers put:
What a thread in community. Never read so much praises and opinions there.
I think my explanations were not quite good, let me try again and explain better out short and long term strategy and execution.
Our long term vision is where you find value now: Fibery as an operation system (platform) for your business. It means:
– we will not remove any features, since they all here for a reason
– we will not add very specific features that make sense just for narrow niche, all our additions are quite generic and many use cases can benefit from them
We think that we need a better path to this vision via several connected, streamlined and deeply implemented use cases. We selected product development company as a target and feedback collection, insights extraction and prioritization as use cases.
– Technically, we’ve built a solution based on Fibery platform, adding some missing pieces to make these use cases great. Note that all additions are generic. For example, we worked hard on Highlights and multi-relations, this is a core of feedback processing. But it is a generic thing, you can use it to process any information that has source and target, like do market research, work with scientific papers in some domain and extract insights from them, aggregate information about specific topics in any domain, etc. However, we are not exploring these options deep, we are focused mostly on feedback collection and processing.
– We have a small team and narrowing down target persona and target company helps us to produce coherent marketing materials. We know what value Fibery can deliver to any Product Manager, Head of Product, etc, so we can show this value better in all the materials.
– For us this is just a path to the broader vision, and we will spend this year following this path.
Our product development effort will be focused on four themes:
Product companies use cases around feedback, prioritization, and other product discovery and development use cases. Here you can expect more integrations, dependency management, public portal & roadmaps.
Fibery permissions. We are going to close all missing pieces till the end of the year.
Fibery polishing and improvements in different areas (UX, Entity View, Whiteboards, Tables, etc).
Explorations how AI can help to solve concrete problems.
This is our current strategy, we started execution around October 2023 and we will continue doing it till we get clear signals whether it works or not. I hope till fall 2024 we will understand that and it will be new pivotal point in our strategic directions.
Here is my advice: the world becomes more interconnected, and organizations become network organizations. AI swarms will be everywhere, penetrating all layers levels and networks.
Fibery needs to get out of its isolated model and interconnect Fibery workspaces (or Fibery apps / db clusters of different workspaces) so that more mature applications build on Fibery can work together more easily. I already grew out of my fibery workspace with a few projects. let alone a mature company. Its not the fault of Fibery its features, but its isolation of worspaces.
Fibery can pioneer type of network intelligence, since the structure already paves the way for it. If Fibery dods not pioneer this, other apps will definately dominate that approach very soon.
Please let me know if you have thought of this option in the product and company strategy?
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