New payment tier for clubs?

1

As many of us fans of Fibery here, I’m always looking where else I could use Fibery. I also realise that getting Fibery adopted well in the work environment is really tough (I’m sure you’re painfully aware of that).

I overall like your pricing model, but I think there might be one word-of-mouth sales avenue that you may have not considered fully: hobby clubs and interest groups.

Most of the ones I know (sports, design, product) either run purely on messaging (WhatsApp, Slack, etc.) and then some Google Docs or maybe Notion. Most don’t have a budget, but will have people using tools and doing stuff much similar to the work environment. So if people can experience Fibery in this environment, they may be able to convince others to try and thus bring Fibery back into new work places.

In my particular example we had started using Slite like 7–8 years ago (because of my hatred of Google Docs and because both Notion and Slite were nascent back then). And sure, we’ve always remained on that free tier. But as Fibery has things like forms and entities, I would love to switch over to Fibery, as that would allow us to do things like attendance signups, membership tally, basic expenses and all that much much nicer.

However, none of the pricing tiers fits. What I would love as an option:

  • USD 100 a year
  • Max 3 spaces
  • Admins: max 2
  • Members: max 10
  • Unlimited read-only users, integrations, databases, entities, but fair use
  • Not for profit

I imagine that you are not convinced just yet. Looking forward to your questions.

I shall say this: Using Notion for organising one of my extra-curricular efforts has convinced my team members there to use Notion for their personal stuff. I definitely think Fibery would be 10x more useful when I need to collect signups, tally and collect fees, etc. and iPhone/Mac is the perfect example of how people’s personal tooling choice was borough back into the workplace. Especially as you’re aiming for startups and smaller teams I think it’s good to have had more people exposed to Fibery.

:v:

4 Likes
2

This is an interesting idea, related to the broader value of better solo user functionality. I think Notion is the master of this kind of personal-to-professional flywheel, i.e. people start using Notion for private use because it’s free and very capable, then their job needs something that they think Notion can handle, they introduce Notion there, maybe a few people start using it, eventually a whole department/division and it’s generating $1000s/mo in revenue (ideal case).

So my question is how would your “clubs” pricing concept map to Notion’s current pricing/feature restrictions (on free accounts), and how does that differ from Fibery? What one or few things could Fibery change about their model that would best enable your user group type and their typical needs? I would say that your initial outline of this account type is rather more detailed and specific than Fibery’s current pricing models would probably accommodate, especially things like Space limitations.

I suspect one answer to a “keystone” feature for these users/groups might be: free “collaborators”, e.g. ability to invite other solo (free) Fibery users to entities or maybe even Spaces ad-hoc and have at least some limited ability to collab, maybe just commenting, maybe something more. What do you think?

3 Likes
3

Just want to mention here that we have a discount for non-profits :slight_smile:

Also, we haven’t fully fleshed out how pricing will work when entity permissions get rolled out, but these ideas certainly can feed into the thinking around that.

FWIW my intuition is that there are plenty of Fibery admins who might invite a load of ‘occasional contributors’ into their workspace if the price per user wasn’t too high, but up until now, there hasn’t been any easy way to carve out a definition of ‘occasional user’ and so there was no suitable pricing point.

4 Likes
4

I think Fibery needs to be very careful about its pricing, particularly given that it doesn’t seem that you’ve quite figured out your model or your target market.

I totally agree with njyo regarding two points:

  1. “because of my hatred of Google Docs” - lol.
  2. The “magnetic” capabilities of Notion RE: “Using Notion for organising one of my extra-curricular efforts has convinced my team members there to use Notion for their personal stuff.” I can see how that works insanely well for Notion.

If you look at Coda - they have “doc creator” only pricing. I don’t know if that is even remotely doable for Fibery - and I don’t know that your model calls for it - but it was a huge pro-Coda benefit. That’s playing along the same lines of “loop in lots of people for collaboration” and charge accordingly for a certain type of user.

I think whatever you were thinking about pricing, you should think more. I think you should not rush out updated pricing (if that’s even possible) but should test the waters. And I think you should playup more Slack “building upon” synergies while looking at Notion’s recent acquisitions and release of Automations.

I think there’s real risk that you’ll play in the proverbial sandbox too long yet I don’t get the sense that Fibery is fleshed-out enough to go primetime yet - if it were, you could focus tons just on Product Hunt to gain some real traction.

I think the marketing dollars from your raise must be spent on understanding market fit. Real-world testing. Did you focus on the MVP? Do you have enough customer usage, and moreso, non-customer feedback to know? I’d spend an ungodly amount of money tracking down everyone who tried Fibery and passed. And figure out why they passed.

You’re getting good feedback from some of us in your community, but for the most part, we represent a certain type of user.

Osyhan, you make a good point about personal-to-professional. I’m trying to recall why that didn’t work at all for me with Fibery. I think it was because I could only have one space and I couldn’t get many team members to actually use it as opposed to just view and comment on it.

I upgraded to the premium tier - and on that note I’ll provide some feedback - I did so without digging in too deep. I just read the get rid of Fibery branding and assumed that meant more than it does (forms). Even though that bugged me I continue to pay and support the Premium because I believe in doing that. I think you guys can use my dollars better than me. :slightly_smiling_face:

But, consider this: the idea for us (and really everyone) is leverage scores of tools and apps in a collaborative manner. We have all sorts of other apps and tools that are super beneficial to our partners, our customers, our vendors. I want to keep migrating towards Fibery more yet you currently make me pick between Fibery and something else. I can’t iFrame Fibery, I can’t nuke the branding, so I can’t make it coexists peacefully with lots of other things - for the sake of collaborators - and there’s the rub.

It seems like a lot of feedback you’re getting revolves around that: better collaboration with the outside world.

2 Likes
5

While I’m not yet we’ll-versed in how the new rights management will work, the main limits I would suggest would be:

  • Max 3 spaces
  • Max number of editors and admins
  • Maybe a max number of databases (e.g. 20)

Of course these numbers can be abused, which is why a “fair-use” clause should be there too.

For a sports or special-interest club I see that it would allow to:

  1. Track member signup
  2. Track membership payments
  3. Track and announce events
  4. Plan event attendance
  5. Track equipment
  6. Build an internal knowledge base

I think 3 spaces make conceptually sense as It allows for one space for decision makers, one for all members and one extra. That should generally suffice.

And yes, there is a discount pricing for non-profits (many thanks), but the kind of setup I’m thinking of (e.g. 7th tier football club, local hashers, Guggenmusik carnival music band, student magazine, community centre, parents’ group, small scale art festival or volunteer fire brigade) is not the typical “non-profit NGO” like AI, Greenpeace or Oxfam. :slightly_smiling_face:

In the end, I see it more likely that I can expose and convert people into Fibery fans through soft-conversion (getting them to use it for one of my extra-currciculars) than by hard-conversion (a mandated switch at work from an existing system to Fibery).
With the hard-convert the focus will always be on what’s missing, while with the soft convert the focus is on how much better it is than what’s there currently. And the good news is that with the recent polish a lot of stuff’s good enough to allow for that.

2 Likes
6

And yet it is in almost all respects more capable than Notion, especially now with Columns and Embeds (both recently added). What in your view makes Fibery less “fleshed-out enough to go primetime” vs. Notion and its 10s of millions of users? To my mind Fibery has already been trying to “go primetime”, it just hasn’t found the way to sell its actual capabilities to the right customers to gain significant traction. Nobody so far knows exactly why, but I do know Fibery has not tried significantly to take the Notion “appeal to solo users to get to business case” approach, and I think there is serious potential in it. Michael has expressed both interest in and skepticism of this approach, so far.

While I don’t agree entirely with your previous paragraph (about embedding Fibery, etc.), I do think “collaboration with the outside world” is involved here. In particular I personally think that making Fibery a non-exclusive aggregator and manipulator of other systems’ data could be very powerful for driving adoption. It does not force you to choose as is currently the case (as you pointed out). For this I think one of the biggest missing capabilities is (more) Bi-directional integrations/sync.

This is a good and interesting way to frame it, “hard convert” vs. “soft”. In general I agree that Fibery needs more “softness” in its conversion path. :grin: Don’t force people to choose too early. Make it connect easily with their existing tools and workflow, so people can use Fibery only for what they need/like at the start (which may be different for many). Then they use it consistently as part of their other workflows and as they do, if Fibery team has done its job right, they will see more and more how well-designed and capable it is, and they will also have a gentler onboarding and learning process.

If you do not need to build your entire company/workflow (or, critically, not even an entire department or area of work like product dev, issue tracking, etc.) into Fibery, but can instead literally use it for “just” visualizing Notion data (because Fibery has graphs and Notion does not!), or “just” adding whiteboards to Coda data (because Fibery has whiteboards and Coda does not!), or “just” any other smaller things, and (critically) if changes in Fibery can sync back to those tools, then it becomes a reason to not just use Fibery to view/analyze data, but to adjust it too. Soon maybe you find that adjusting data in Fibery and immediately seeing analysis update is much more pleasant than using e.g. Notion’s database anyways. And it grows and grows… There is currently no such flywheel, no such gentle onboarding flow, IMHO.

1 Like
7

Interestingly, the conversion to Fibery generally seems to be a slow burn. I have seen a number of people that are very sceptical about Fibery preferring “dedicated tools”. Their convincing only really starts when I give them admin powers to flex, integrate and automate. Once they realise that they can tailor this exactly to their needs, the rest falls behind.
Of course there are plenty of gaps and the great thing is that the team is plugging them tirelessly.

Also, I don’t expect this pattern to ever really change due to the nature of the product.

So, overall, I think more opportunity for soft convert is better at this point.

2 Likes
8

I have been thinking about this too and I think you may be onto something! Thanks for sharing this observation.

Clubs could be included in non-profits, right? I mean they play sports n stuff often not about profit :money_with_wings: unless it’s like national teams

1 Like
9

Even national teams in many amateur sports are not making any profit. Even Olympic sports like water polo or flag football are likely to have mostly amateur athletes and organisers even on most national teams.