My two cents on Fibery's focus / market placement for product development

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Hello everyone

I understand Fibery might have felt not “Niche” enough so it was decided to cater to a more specific market. However, I can imagine that if 4 years ago I would have landed on today’s Fibery frontpage, I might not have considered it for my use case. I’m reading most of the Community posts and don’t get the impression that Product Development is the main use for Fibery (of course you have real data to this), but everyone has his own kind of use and Fibery is powerful and flexible enough to cater to all of us, even though we all do different things.

Yes, Fibery, especially now with AI functionalities in Documents and Automations,
seems to be great for managing product development and feedback. But the great thing about Fibery to me was the the powerful functionalities coupled with its flexibility, and being able to built a workspace with workflows and knowledge management space for my Team and facilitate our work, moving from managing many things in scattered Excel files to a central, single-source-of-truth database which I can adjust to our processes, and not the other way.
In my opinion this aspect should not be completely disregarded on the frontpage and the general marketing strategy. /rant off

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Might be worth taking at look at this other thread where a lot of people’s similar feelings on the subject came out: May 9, 2024 / Smart Sections and 15 quality-of-life updates

I can tell you that if I landed on the current version of Fibery’s homepage when I was looking for solutions last year, I wouldn’t have even tried it as it is hyper specific and really undersells what makes Fibery special.

Here’s a screenshot of a presentation I gave to my organization in December when I announced I had found an awesome tool that was perfectly aligned with what we had needed for a very long time. The response from everyone was overwhelmingly positive and exciting at the time because it resonated so perfectly with the painpoints we were having.

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The same here, I wouldn’t use Fibery with that pitch. I understand they want to focus on a use case and avoid fighting against monsters like Atlassian. Still, I’m unsure if many companies are looking for a tool like that and, if the people in charge of user research are “techie” enough to use it as expected.

Also, look at what happened with Figma. Designers are a small group inside companies, so now they are trying to focus on the “developer” seats so more people in the company use Figma.

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Not sure if that’s a thing but if it is, Fibery should head on the monsters straight on, the direct comparison (maybe even semi-aggressive marketing like the Fibery vs XY comparison posts → why I don’t believe Fibery is avoiding anyone) would probably make more people try Fibery, and it’s certainly a good enough product that it would retain some.

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I saw on reddit there was a new website update. Very nice!

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My suggestion is to tweak your language a bit for some of the sections titles so they’re more inviting and pain based. You’re using a lot of conditional statements (if this, assuming that, once you do this) when they should probably be more inclusive statements (for companies like this, for situations like that)

“Seamless…if you are ready to consolidate” implies Fibery won’t be seamless until they’re ready to put the effort into consolidating, but in fact seamless collaboration is possible immediately with no additional effort. Would suggest “Seamless…for teams who need to collaborate end-to-end”

Flexible…assuming you know what you want" implies Fibery won’t be flexible unless they know what they want, but in fact it’s always flexible. Whether that flexibility actually gets used or not is up to the company. Would suggest “Flexible…to handle any and all data that’s relevant to you.”

“Interconnected…if you care about the big picture” implies Fibery isn’t interconnected unless they care about the big picture, but it’s always interconnected regardless of what they care about. Would suggest “Interconnected…so you always have the context you need, when you need it”

“Versatile…once you master it” implies its only versatile once it’s been mastered, but in fact it’s versatile on day one. Would suggest “Versatile…to manage your company’s unique processes and systems without limits”

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Agree, I think all of those are probably aimed at injecting some humor and self-effacing sentiment, which of course Fibery team is known for. In this case IMHO they don’t generally read as humorous unless you already know they’re largely untrue (or something to that effect).

My bigger concern though is the somehow total lack of mentioning AI at all on the front page even once!!?!? What the actual f**k? Seriously, this confuses me, so much. I have long felt like Fibery team failed to capitalize on their genuine AI work, progress, and innovations, but thought maybe it’s just really hard to get things (like AI-based space creation! and more!) noticed. Probably true, but it sure as heck doesn’t help to not even mention your AI features as part of your central pitch!

The one biggest problem new users are likely to face, and even notice and contemplate looking at this home page and its extensive list of features, is “Wow, ok, so how do I build all that?”. Even seasoned no code tool users are likely to be thinking “Ugh, another lego kit to learn so I can build what I want.” The Templates mention is far down the page (and IMHO should say something a little more compelling about them like “Explore complete workspace templates to get a sense of what’s possible”, otherwise it sounds kind of trivial, like many other tool’s templates, whereas Fibery’s are extremely sophisticated). But more importantly AI can help with “the getting started problem”, and gets no mention! Not to mention AI formula and script creation, etc. I’m glad the team is experimenting further with home pages but still disappointed and genuinely confused by this aspect of the latest iteration.

Honestly if you’re going to try major experiments (like only text home page), why not try leaning hard into AI? “Fibery: the only no code platform with AI workspace creation. Describe your workflow and get a custom tool made just for your needs”. Like right at the top, first thing. “Fibery isn’t just another lego kit. Use AI to leap-frog the no code competition.” or whatever. I don’t think anyone out there is doing that or pitching that. And it sounds, to me, pretty revolutionary in a sea of “no code” tools that, yes, don’t require “code”, but do require learning a lot of specifics about how a given tool chose to set something up (often with maddening differences between different tool’s approaches to essentially the same problems and features). Maybe the team isn’t yet confident enough in the capabilities of the AI Space Creation, but honestly so many companies right now are pitching AI capabilities that fail to impress, from my experiments with AI space creation in Fibery it’s better than many!

Fibery is also, of all the tools I know of, the closest to a traditional, potentially familiar relational database in how it works (maybe Airtable too, certainly not Notion!). Which could also be a selling point in its favor. The point really is to emphasize both flexibility and accessibility. The capabilities are already in Fibery to more easily get the tool configuration they want, people should know about and use them.

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The new home page was built taking into account what we have learned about what sorts of users actually get the most value from Fibery (and therefore stay and grow with Fibery).
It seems from our data that Fibery is most valuable to users who are

  • somewhat ‘nerdy’
  • have typically tried a number of tools
  • have a reasonable idea of what their organisation needs
  • have the desire/authority to make it happen
  • know that their needs might change
  • aren’t afraid of a bit of setup time and effort

Conversely, users who don’t tick many/most of those boxes might get value from Fibery, but it is often a struggle (for them and us) and this doesn’t benefit anyone.

If the home page is appealing to (or at least not repelling!) target users, then it is doing its job. A side-effect of being off-putting/confusing to non-target users is not a terrible outcome.

As it happens, we don’t yet have much data to suggest that the use of AI to configure workspaces is actually correlated with long-term success. In fact, it may be the case that it offers false hope to people who won’t thrive within Fibery in the long run.

Of course, it would be great to hear from users in the community that did use AI space generation and felt that it offered great value.

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I for one have not found the need for AI and my team isn’t using it at all. We’ve played around with it a bit but it doesn’t save time. Certainly not for Space Generation. Our approach to Fibery is to think out very carefully the creation of any DB, and limit them as much as we can, which also means all our Spaces are very well vetted since we don’t proliferate them, so AI isn’t able to build anything that we wouldn’t have to undo. This is not to say AI could be useful to others in the other implementations it has around Fibery. I’m just providing 2 cents from a long-time user since you asked @Chr1sG!

Relatedly we’d still love to see Polymorphic relations. When creating relation, ability to have many Types from which to choose, and not just one Type, which would give even more flexibility and allow us to further minimize unnecessary db’s and relations. Paramount for my team remains the situation when we can only set up multi-level hierarchies with required DB’s on each level, when some of the stuff we are tracking doesn’t require all those levels. I described this here:

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