Should I Invest in Fibery? (individual PKM use case)

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I’m sorry if you think my reply was misleading. I merely tried to answer the question about if ‘feedback and feature requests are taken seriously’.
It’s correct that requests for features that benefit only the PKM use case will probably not get prioritised ahead of those that benefit multi-user teams, but that doesn’t mean they are not taken seriously.

Anyway, I think if you look at Fibery’s direction of travel, you will get an idea about what areas will (and will not get) attention.

In this article, you can see areas that may not be relevant to single users, e.g. collaboration/chat. But you will also see things that could be beneficial to many types of users, e.g. whiteboards/diagramming.

It’s hard to give a direct answer to whether or not this end-game is likely to suit PKM users, since even within this user group, there’s still a fair bit of variation.

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Yes, that’s fair, and I didn’t intend my reply to sound particularly critical. I more just wanted to be realistic, and you’ve spoken to that better in your second reply just by providing more detail, I think. I never doubted your intentions.

Yes, I think this is one of the great advantages of Fibery as a tool and team. Obsidian also has a public roadmap and interacts a lot with the community, so it’s less of a differentiator, but many, many other tools are quite opaque with what they’re planning and doing.

Perhaps even more important to my choice to go all-in on Fibery for PKM + tasks is the long-term vision. Few other products, even Obsidian, have such a clear and specific goal-based and publicly-articulated long-term plan. And on that I think this article is at least as important as the “End Game” one:

The recent interview with Ness Labs is also a good read:

The key concept is “insight generation”, which is exactly what I want for my PKM setup. I think that many of the same systems, tools, and capabilities that Fibery builds for team use will be of great value for personal use as well.

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I’ll put together a list when I get a chance and add it here. :smile:

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Hi Sarah,

Although part of a larger company (65), we’ve been using Fibery as a small product team (3) for over a year now. The Fibery support crew have always been super-responsive. We always feel listened to. Fibery seem to have a great way of prioritising feature requests. And cool new features are popping into existence at an accelerated rate!

I can’t say that Fibery will support some of your more complex workflows. But it supports ours! And we couldn’t do without it!

I am 92% confident you’ll be pleased that you invested time to play with Fibery.

Cheers,

Harry

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I have been mostly using markdown or other text-based tools for my main notes for a while now (10+ years). I.e. no databases, at least not in any tool I’ve fully committed to. I use Notion occasionally, but I have long had significant concerns with their development priorities and lack of public feature request voting and discussion, etc. and I find their DBs both harder to setup and work with, and poorer in UI/UX (e.g. layout of DB fields vs. body; Fibery’s two-column layout is so much better). So I never went all-in on Notion and hence did not realize the complete, interconnected system I planned.

My build-out in Fibery is really the first time I’ll be fully diving in to realizing my long-held hopes for a more well-documented and integrated system. I have tracked a lot of this stuff more ad-hoc for a decade or more, but putting it all in DBs and interconnecting them, adding Charts, etc. is going to save me so much time or simply make insights available that were too time/energy-prohibitive to have in the past.

I am in the early days of implementing all this Fibery, but here’s a quick outline of what it does or will contain. Most of these are separate databases and much of this is interconnected in various ways (i.e. Relations); I do not specifically note all of them by any means:

  • Daily logging, i.e. “daily notes” implemented
    • Time allocation and tracking
    • Work log
  • Weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual reviews
  • Daily habits implemented
    • Physical activities log
    • Meditation log
  • Therapy log
  • Mental health tracking insights, parts map, etc.
  • Hike database tracking and commenting on hikes over time
  • Finances
  • Contacts partially implemented
    • Friends track status, important dates, gifts for, etc.
    • Dating
      • Dates
  • Businesses/vendors tracking vendors for products, orders, etc., connects to Finances
  • Food and drink products tracking inventory, creating shopping lists, etc., connects to businesses/vendors
    • Tea reviews, notes, info
    • Supplements
  • Food and Drink Recipes
    • Home meal log
    • Home cocktail log
  • Restaurant and bar notes + reviews
  • Events for events I host
  • Content Creation
  • Content ingestion + notes articles, YT vids, etc. for personal and professional enrichment, research, etc.
  • Media recreational, notes, reviews, etc.
    • TV and movies
    • Music
  • Travel
    • Locations DB
    • Travel planning and review as Projects

I use e.g. Comments to track “interactions” and various updates, as well as #mentioning various entities in my daily log to establish a date connection. Anything that has more a more in-depth time tracking or note-taking component, e.g. a hike or a date, has its own database rather than just being mentioned in my Daily Log. I also use several Automations and Buttons, with plans to add many more in the future. Things like auto-creating my Daily Log and Habits entities (and auto-linking them), adding template data to Daily Notes and other Entities, etc.

I’m sure there’s more I’m forgetting at the moment. The project is large and ongoing. But so far the limitations on implementation are primarily my time (and occasionally my cleverness or lack thereof :sweat_smile:). I think Fibery already supports most of what I want to do. I’d say the biggest missing piece is integration with some kind of “Read it Later” tool. I’d love Readwise integration too, for example.

Of the apps out there on the market now, the only ones that have seriously given me pause on doing this in Fibery are Coda (sort of), Tana, Mem.ai (mainly for their amazing ingestion/quick notes approach, e.g. text/email into Mem, and the promise of some of their actual AI plans), and potentially Capacities.io. Anytype was on that list previously, but I lost faith in their direction a while back (after being a very early alpha tester). My current deal breaker with Tana is the enforced outliner structure. I’ve written more about that here:
https://twitter.com/OGreenius/status/1593866886403723264

I must admit, despite my long-time enthusiasm for Fibery and fairly deep participation here, there is still a part of me that has some minor anxiety and discomfort with going all-in on Fibery like this, particularly for a personal use case (my biggest concern is probably that things like Readwise integration will never happen). There are a couple major things that do a reasonable job allaying my fears:

  • Amazing and responsive Fibery team
    • Experienced but open-minded CEO
  • Open and honest approach, e.g. monthly “startup diary”, public revenue, etc. reporting (“open startup”)
  • Funding secured for a reasonable number of years, and controlled burn date, demonstrated sustainable hiring
  • Public roadmap, feature voting + discussion, etc.
  • As good as can be expected Export, i.e. all data that can be represented in common formats CSV + Markdown (missing Relations, automations, and so many other things, but acceptable and understandable limitations)
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I’ve seen a dozen or so bugs fixed and features implemented that I personally requested. Though maybe my requests were similar to that of others.

The way to get features you want implemented is:

  1. Keep in mind that you have to have a use-case that many other Fibery users would benefit from
  2. Be detailed in explaining “As someone that ________ I would like to be able to ________ in Fibery because ________” - bonus points if you have examples of how other popular services do it
  3. But also keep the feature request general and brief so other people can make use of it and support it
  4. Advocate for the feature and follow up on its implementation, the feature development cycle is long and it might take many months to get it finished
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Are you revealing the secret recipe? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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That’s reassuring to hear. And thanks for the tips!

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The most promising apps I see for what I want at the moment are:

  • Obsidian (Dataview inline fields + Metadata Menu + DB Folder + Text Generator + Graph Analysis + Dropbox + Make)

  • Capacities (although they said it’s unlikely they’ll implement formulas sad face)

  • Tana

  • Fibery

  • Coda

  • Logseq (can they add Tana-like features?)

  • Remnote (what will their upcoming V2 + Tables look like?)

If a tool doesn’t have all/most of what I want, but I feel really good using it or it’s stellar at one or two things, I need awesome API access to make it work.

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Yeah, I mean Obsidian can do almost anything, it’s just complicated, potentially fragile, etc. :smile: Blessing and curse. I don’t have the energy+time to make it all work and maintain it in Obsidian (though I do keep up on developments there with the Obsidian Roundup, at the least). But it’s a great tool that I love and recommend.

Oh, bummer. I didn’t see that. Hopefully they reconsider.

Ah yes, I seldom think of them, to be honest, but I know they’re working on some notable updates. So I’ll keep an eye out for v2 + tables!

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4 tricks Fibery Developers will NEVER tell you

How to get your features in 4 simple steps

The Fibery Industry HATES these 4 tricks.

I will run this on an AI content generator for more!

(Sorry for the spam, I am closely following this conversation and I could not resist. Very interesting, and while I am currently on Obsidian for personal things, I’d like to know why @Oshyan chose an online-first tool for personal stuff)

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Love it! :joy:

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Before Obsidian there was no local-first tool that seemed to offer enough functionality to meet my needs (at least on Windows; Macs seem oddly to have way more interesting options here!). And even now the only things that make Obsidian a functional enough local-first option are the many plugins available, many of which either do not put their data in markdown, or do so in a proprietary way that threatens their future usability.

I self-hosted Redmine for a long time, so my data was owned, but I also was no stranger to online services holding my data. In fact I made rather a poor choice going with Quip many years ago (before Notion was even available) because it does not offer bulk export. But I migrated data manually into it, and ultimately was prepared to migrate data manually out of it…

So I suppose the short answer is: I never began with the assumption that I must have local data. I know this is something many people prioritize, and I understand its value to them. And I put some value on it too, just not nearly as much as many others. For me Fibery is actually an improvement in this respect over Quip, which some of my data still exists only in! Fortunately most newer data is in Obsidan/.md, and I will keep those .md files. I will also do monthly full Workspace backups and get .md and .csv, which will hold a majority of truly important data from Fibery.

It also matters that I trust the Fibery team and feel they have a good relationship with their users. If Fibery one day becomes unsustainable and has to end as a business, I have some faith that they’d find a solution for their users to make sure their data could get out as much as possible (if it were possible to get more out than just the .md + .csv). In the meantime I have reasonable export of most data and that’s good enough for me.

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@Sarah_Arminta So what tool did you end up using?
I am in kind a same situation between Obsidian, Tana and Fibery for all in one tool :slight_smile:

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You see @mdubakov , you are starting to get the personal use people :point_up: Now imagine if you marketed to them and had a pricing tier that gave them value above Free. :wink: (I know you already see some value in this market segment, as we discussed before)

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I’m still straddling a few apps. Obsidian, Coda, Notion. Wanting to move to Fibery, setting up my system in it, just waiting lol…

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The personal use people are important. They are the ones that see their note-app as part of their identity and become raving fans. They make YouTube videos and talk about it on Twitter. They are bursting to share it with their friends, family, work team. They experiment and push the boundaries of the app and find new ways to use it and tell everyone else. I think Fibery needs some of that passion. Heck if I thought Fibery valued me as a user now and going forward I would be one of those raving fans.

Also I looked on YouTube and there are very very few videos about Fibery (most from the company’s channel, others are old or just not… good). Most posts I see about Fibery on say, Twitter, are about yarn or how nobody knows about the app yet.

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Indeed, I have been looking at several tools on reddit and youtube. Fibery was not one of them, and first time I saw Fibery, I didn’t realize the power of it. There should be more videoes of how to create eg. book tracker, a more personalized stuff.

I would like to see some videoes about how we can be creative in Fibery in different ways and learn doing awesome stuff!

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Yes, precisely. It is not so much that personal users are going to be a major revenue channel, but they can be a very good “wedge”. I’ve said it many times before, but this is what really made Notion and created its huge success. In a highly competitive/crowded industry like this, you need some way(s) of getting noticed, standing out.

Personal use is not the magic bullet for all problems, but right now visibility is one of Fibery’s biggest issues. The feature set is good, it can be a high bar to entry, but personal use first also helps with that. And visibility in the market has been a problem for long enough at this point that to me it’s clear Fibery needs to do something drastic to change it. They’ve tried all kinds of different traditional marketing strategies and partners, basically all have failed to have any significant impact.

Virtually no one who is working with a tool professionally is making regular video or other social media content about different tools or how great their workflow is. This is by far an activity motivated by personal users, personal enthusiasm, etc. And the little content there is that is focused on professional users is often quite boring and gets little engagement (probably unsurprisingly). Fibery team can generate fun or “honest” content, that’s great, but it just can’t scale. Personal users also generate and share more resources like Templates. Most businesses are not going to share their internal business flow processes as templates, even if proprietary info/processes is not a concern. There is just little motivation for them to do so. Mostly the opposite is true for personal users, they have a lot of intrinsic motivation to share, at least if they are enthusiastic about the tool.

So we need enthusiastic, passionate users evangelizing. The way to get there is a combination of positioning (website copy, etc.), pricing (simply adding a personal pricing tier makes it much more clear to potential personal users that this is a tool they should even consider), features (what do personal users need that is relatively easy to implement or improve?), and support/outreach to those types of users (e.g. a dedicated personal use onboarding webinar, etc.).

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