Somehow, I had stopped writing Fibery digests for 8 months, but now I am back.
It put a real big smile on my face. Love you guys, love the new strategy and your core values are spot on!
Iâm also really happy with the latest releases and the focus on usability & simplicity.
BTW, I still like this version of our home pageâŚ
Love it!
I hope the old anxiety page gets an update too. I really like the idea, but it doesnât represent Fibery as it is today (old screenshot & outdated information) and thatâs a shame 
P.S. I hope digests will be more frequent.
Me too 
Those digest were also a reason for me back in the days to use Fibery. Because I loved the vision and the end game so much!
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I love your scribbles and I hope whiteboard will have such component collection/diagram style in the future!
Gives Fibery the needed humor and minimalism.
I will respond later with more feedback on the review, but very nice writing, thanks
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I love your digest transparent posts, maybe because Iâm a software founder myself and like that sort of content.
Regarding your strategy, I personally think thatâs the way going forward, an all-in-one solution for companies. Thatâs how we use you for 4 years and love it.
The value of having product dev, feedback, knowledgebase, hr, etc into a single platform is huge. The overhead of managing multiple platforms is big, companies hate that.
I think thereâs a big potential on marketing as multiple separate solutions connected together, like Posthog does. Focusing on 3-4 at first which youâre most aligned sounds like a great idea. Probably positioning each solution as an alternative to more popular tools would help a lot.
I also think thereâs room for tweaking the getting started sections, making easy to import from those alternatives, more targeted tutorials.
As a sales tip for product startups, get a list of startups that recently got seed funding and reach to them in a smarter way. Cold emails will get ignored, but if you sign up for a trial of their tool, they wonât ignore you.
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Thank you for sharing, I am very impressed by the vision and how you translate it into a product and how broadly Fibery can be used to implement a workflow for our company.
It is maybe only me, and for sure needed to define the market aimed, but I felt a bit sad reading this post, so it is not possible to cover the company backoffice software as a whole ⌠Does it sounds like the end of the dream? Will we have to find some other solution for our staff not directly involved in product development?
Hmm, I am not sure why you made this conclusion. In fact weâve reverted back to a more horizontal solution, so you might be sad in June when we announced Fibery 2.0, but you should not be!
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Itâs not only possible; in my opinion, Fibery is the only tool where you can create a full (and awesome!) solution for your entire company. Weâve built it specifically for non-IT companies that are not focused on product development. So donât worry
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Someone below mentioned they are sad by this post. I am happy about it and think you are doing the right thing. When I first learned of the new direction and then watched the videos I felt as though I were being abandoned like the proverbial red-headed step child.
I also thought you were moving in the wrong direction - essentially crafting an entirely new Gartner category in a challenging environment:
- The market for apps and platforms is so overwhelming in nature, thereâs just so much, and also so much oss out there.
- I wasnât aware of âproduct discoveryâ and thought it through: How many people would be in that position and either (a) without a stack already or (b) willing to pay for such a product? Particularly given how many stacks and platforms others choose foundationally. With all the AI stuff going on and a whole new paradigm being established around it, I just could not see the fit.
In the the last week or so, though, Iâve felt the pull of Fibery for me⌠not just with one feature I had requested (account permissions, admins, and capabilities - you need an âOWNERâ permission). And then another, my complex advances search functionality is beautifully implemented in a simple yet effective way.
And Iâve just found a third - the âadd anythingâ button at bottom left. Wow! (By the way, a super usability improvement if user can hide/show / include/exclude things from that add button - because something like a task, or a project, or an entity, or an invoice is meant to be added often, while a table for âtypeâ or âspaceâ or whatever is not.)
And all the ui changes, too.
Fibery has some real strengths and Iâve not only tried but also purchased and heavily used Clickup, Coda, Airtable, Obsidian, that whiteboard solution I canât remember its name, etc.
Platform-wise:
You can really have an advantage if you deepen both integration and features of the whiteboard. Add more there - and take a look at an opensource project called Affine. Itâs got something neat where a page is a whiteboard at the same time.
UI-flexibility. As a non-mac user it seems clear you are designing for mac-first. I still maintain that you can improve your experience significantly with Obsidian-like sliding panels along with the useability improvements in UI just recently brought up.
I had been following along as the product strategy seemed a bit helter-skelter - and I think your decision is a good one. Why? Because you actually have an amazing platform, you can compete in multiple categories, and you can build some niche-specific solutions that are amazing. One way that Iâve watched myself and others attempt to use Fibery is kind of like Obsidian - you can just broadly call it knowledge management. Fibery is in a position to have the best knowledge management out there by far. Even another solution: ADHD (itâs actually a huge market). And this is not even getting into business uses.
There are a couple other areas where platform improvements would help you a ton:
- Developer community - you have plenty of people who would build âstuffâ and thatâs highly magnetic. Whatâs more, this would enable you to extend your solutions strategy because you could window up with the equivalent of KOLs in different industries - people who would tag along and help you build out your solutions and broaden your reach.
- Integrations: So many people, consumers, businessmen specifically seek out products, services, platforms based on a ton of integrations. For instance, you can go to many apps and see that right off the bat they have âintegration with 500 other toolsâ. You could always use something like n8n and back in those integrations - though Iâm sure other platforms let you do that. Keep in mind that those integrations have an opposite side, too: When people see that a product does not compete well with its competitors that screams out potential to get locked in.
This has happened to us with tons of products (e.g. Teamwork vs Monday/Asana).
Those are two areas where I feel you guys are behind.
Anyway, amazing releases and Iâm excited about your new direction. 
You know a whole bunch of top minds (mega business execs) seem to agree that an ability to adapt to change swiftly and effectively is the most vital skill for 2025 and beyond - your team is either well-prepared for the future â or going insane (!) â or maybe a little of both.
p.s. One more thing. I STRONGLY suggest that you follow the advise of another post and add opensource, local llm integration capabilities. You have the ability to have something very special if you do that. Thatâs a conversation for another day.
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I used Jira, Trello and Aha, Clickup especially for product discovery tasks and so far, I feel that Fibery was not positioning the same, providing more building blocks than pre-caned solution for specific use cases.
When I read your post I foresaw some intention to go and compete more directly with solutions which exist already and are not providing as much as what Fibery is doing today and above that changing or focusing the target audience.
That said it seems that I have over interpreted it.
I read your post - I think your ability to do what youâre asking is going to go up not down - by a lot - with this revised product direction. This product is really good.
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Thanks @mdubakov , that was a great read! As someone who found Fibery when I was reaching the limitations of spreadsheets, the generality has always been the best part. You can do the obvious things like manage projects and customers, but you can also do all sorts of special stuff:
- Build totally custom construction estimating and planning tools
- Make a tool library where users can check in and out tools for their work
- Build an inventory system that is actually linked to you expenses and invoices
Not every use case is as fully featured as you might want, but any one of these tools would cost as much or more and lack flexibility. As a major advocate of Fibery for construction, I would love to see more workflow features/improvements (dependencies, true gantt charts), many of which I think are on the long term roadmap. Iâm very excited about the future of Fibery!
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With the power of [Fibery] comes the learning curve. Here our focus on technically savvy leaders is key: they already know the (majority of) building blocks so they will only need to learn Fibery-specific UI and approaches.
This 100%. Just donât forget that under the tech-savvy leader is a lot of non-savvy workers (aka. potential user accounts) that just need to be able to easily do a very specific task with minimal trainingâŚ
Usability and simplification. Many improvements and polishing, including quick filters on views, quick search, search improvements, space setup re-design, etc.
Yes, exactly what non-savvy workers/users need.
Our main problem is getting those potential deals in the first place: attracting and activating leads, so they are interested enough to either schedule a call or onboard a team on their own. Thatâs why we are going to rebalance our efforts in favor of explaining and capturing ($) value
I am very satisfied with all the features - to the point where I havenât had the time to explore them all. I fully support the decision to aggressively shift focus to marketing for the next 6-8 months as its vital to the long-term success of this platform. 
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Thank you, folks, for all the feedback! It is very encouraging, and many good advices as well. 
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This is not a reply to the review yet, but just a single suggestion that applies to the growth of Fibery.
A tool that is scalable, will result more likely in scalable sales.
I think Fibery its good to focus on product development and insight, but understand that you need to very well aware of how this scales beyond the single or small team product designers in an organization. I think that a tool provideing âinsightâ is potentially scalable, but a tool that targets product designers, is not.
I do not have the answer to how to make Fibery more scalable as product, but I have some intuitition and some experience with collaborative network building, and I see some global trends in tech: Collective intelligence building in groups and networks, which is the next step after CKM (Collective Knowledge Management).
Collective Knowledge Management (CKM) and Collective Intelligence (CI) both involve the aggregation of knowledge, but they differ in focus and application:
- CKM is about systematically organizing, storing, and accessing collective knowledge within a group or organization. It focuses on creating shared knowledge bases, like wikis or knowledge graphs, to ensure that information is readily available and useful to all members.
- CI refers to the collective ability of a group to solve problems or make decisions, leveraging the combined intelligence of its members. Itâs more about the process of pooling insights, ideas, and problem-solving capabilities to achieve outcomes that surpass individual capabilities.
In essence, CKM is about managing and organizing knowledge, while CI is about using that knowledge collaboratively to solve problems or innovate.
Currently, I find that Fibery is not very well supporting collaborative workflows. Until that is in place, it wont be very scalable as a tool, and sales will not benefit from a viral growth.
So my suggestion is to rethink Fibery on the highest level, to allow it to scale across organizations and networks more easily. I could give a list of suggestions, but first like to hear if this resonates?
Any examples and missing things?
I actually agree with this. Itâs a Fibery downfall which I believe needs a solution.
When working with external parties thereâs no real option to include them somewhere for collaboration on small projects, without adding them as paid users.
It is always a matter of deciding whether itâs worth adding them as a paid user, or just using Trello as itâs simpler and free. Adding new users for small projects on an annual plan often doesnât make good business sense.
It would be nice if free users could have editing capabilities for a single view (or a space thatâs limited in some way) or some other solution, before needing to become paid users.
There are a lot of instances where a light use case is needed but itâs not worth adding paid users.
Imagine youâre organizing a work function that includes 20 people, only two of which are part of your own company. Youâre not going to do it in your Fibery space, even though you might love to. Youâre more likely to create a Trello board and do it there.
There are 101 different use cases like that, which it would be nice if Fibery could support in some way.
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agree with this, we should be able to add external users with limited functions which shouldnât be paid. We can have short term contractors that I really donât want to have to upgrade and downgrade for just a simple editing option.
This looks like an Enterprise level environment with a big organization and users count. If they want to target Enterprises, a lot of things need to be changed.
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Indeed this is a serious problem, we are thinking about it in a context of permissions initiative.
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