What kind of work (business/company) are you managing with Fibery?

The recent intro post from @bear reminded me that I’ve been wanting to talk about what I’m doing with Fibery, and also really curious to know what others are using it for as well. In particular, my understanding is @mdubakov and team are aiming it at product/software dev teams, at least primarily. But I run a real estate company! :smile: I wonder if many others here are doing unexpected things and running businesses outside of the “core demographic”, because of Fibery’s already great flexibility.

So tell us what you’re up to! What business or other activities are you managing with Fibery?

P.S. This may have been discussed already, but I couldn’t find it with a search or browsing this misc. category. :man_shrugging:

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Management/digital consulting. It runs everything including, research and discovery and building models of best practice (data and content) and we want to copy and work with clients on in other instances of Fibery. The stack is Fibery + gSuite but docs and sheets have moved to Fibery so mostly gMail and Hangouts chat. Unfortunately for the Fibery crew we haven’t told any of our friends and competitors (we work in a small niche) about how good Fibery is yet. Well, until we have an unassailable lead… but we will!

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I’m co-founder of a startup in the medtech space and am currently using fibery as the backbone of what I call our ‘knowledge network’. For anyone who knows about the medtech world, it’s basically used for all the usual stuff: QMS, design control, risk management, CAPA, etc.
Eventually I hope to use it for almost everything, but some of the issues around data retention, permissions etc. will affect the extent to which it can be our single source of truth.

Oh, and I also have a day job as a system engineer for a medtech company, but we don’t use fibery…yet :wink:

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We run a professional photo studio.

We use Fibery for a variety of things, but mostly related to project progress tracking, where each customer is sort of a project of their own. We have everything interconnected.

Customers

I wrote a program that calls our accounting platform’s API to get new/edited customers, and automatically write/update the customers in Fibery. Allows us to easily link orders to customers.

Basic progress tracking for image previews

We have to track if preview images are adjusted and previews ready for customer election process. For every photoshoot, we make a new folder that contains everything about it. This is a tedious manual labour, so I wrote another thing that check our storage server for new folders every 5 minutes and automatically create that new task.

Products

With the help from @antoniokov we managed to make a nice product system where we keep info about products in categories, their price, size, etc.

Customer orders

We have tried a few things for this (but not all, as I have come to realize later), but Fibery was finally a good fit for this, since it’s more about the project management side of it than the order itself, where we also have the need for micro-management. We have a master table with orders, where each row is a product. Here we show a myriad of information: customer name, customer ID, paper type, product, sub-product, its state, due date if any, indicators if due date is close or it’s been long since its creation.

Using the products list created, we can easily create summaries on what things will cost for the customer, or a chart with overall statistics.

Inside the orders we have previews of images, and even more details.

Hour tracking

We want better insight in to what we spend our time on, and we wanted it to be easy to link your task to a customer or whatever. Most importantly: it has to not be a hassle, at all. If it’s easy and can be done by a lazy person, then we can easily get accurate tracking. Some of us switch between so many minor tasks all the time too.

I based our system off of the example Anton made, but added more stuff to it like:

  • prevent others from starting or stopping your task
  • auto-populate name based on task or a category dropdown if empty
  • other minor tweaks.

It works very well. It takes me 1–4 seconds to stop previous task and start a new one. I can easily link the task to a product or other task if there is one.

Material orders

Track if we have ordered raw materials for the products, which is linked to the individual orders.

Other

Then there’s other generic tasks, shopping lists, wish list, etc.

I am looking forward to more features being implemented in to Fibery, as there are still things I would want; like calendar view that can show dates for multiple Types at the same time easily, synchronize calendars with Microsoft O365 calendar, small image icons/previews in table would be nice, auto-populate content (and images) inside entities in whiteboard view, and more.

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Awesome replies so far, thank you! As I suspected, lots of different types of work being managed with Fibery.

I’m running a real estate development company, as I mentioned. I’m just starting to do real work with it now after a month or so of implementation (on the side, time-allowing), and a month or so of research and planning prior to that. I wanted to be sure Fibery was the best tool for my team, and indeed I am more confident of that by the day. In fact I would argue that real estate development (or management) might be a particularly good fit for Fibery.

This is an overview of the Types we have and some examples how they interconnect. Anything capitalized is a Type. So we use it to track Projects and Tasks, of course. But both of those can then link directly to the Properties they operate on. The Properties list a ton of info, location, purchase price, related Service Providers (Vendors), who owns them, whether taxes have been paid, list of Tenants, on and on. And much of that, of course, connects to other Types, like Contact, Company, Government Entity, etc. We also use it to track financial info, Loans, Trusts, Investors, etc. So a Property can list its Loans, or a Company (e.g. bank) can list the Loans it is providing for multiple Properties. Companies “own” Contacts, so we can quickly get contact info anywhere in the chain, from head office to individual contacts. Properties for sale have a relation to Brokers, which of course gives Brokers a listing of the Properties they work on in turn. Etc., etc.

The vast interconnection of all this, and the ability to move quickly between necessary and related pieces of data is incredibly freeing and optimizing for our work. We previously used email, local files, GDrive/GDocs, and more, and would have to bounce between all those things to find related pieces of info. I was constantly being asked by someone how to find X piece of info. Now it all goes into Fibery. I get an email with an attachment, most of the time I can just toss it into the related entity, or at least put it in GDrive and put a text link in Fibery so it’s more directly connected to the Property Entity (or whatever it’s related to). And then when someone else is looking for that info, they can usually find it either by search, or just knowing what Property it’s related to and going straight there.

The phrase “single source of truth” honestly annoys me a little, I think just because I think Notion uses it a little too abstractly perhaps. But it really does describe very well what we have going in Fibery.

As far as what I’m looking forward to which will enable even further optimization of our work, emails attached to Fibery Entities would be amazing. So like a Gmail plugin (like ClickUp has) where I could get an email, then just click a button in Gmail to add a new Entity in Fibery that links back to the email, maybe even quotes some or all of it, maybe (optionally) link to any attachments it has, and have a connection between the two. Similarly, connection to Google Calendar (for e.g. meetings) and GDrive (a direct connection so I can search for Gdrive files from Fibery and add one or more as an “attachment” [link] that pulls straight from GDrive within the Fibery UI). On the non-integration side, Polymorphic Relationships, Field Groupings and Dependencies (e.g. a group is visible or not depending on the value of some field(s), Embeds (both native and, like Notion, external, e.g. look at how you can embed ToDoist into Notion) are the top of my list.

So hey guys, if it’s not too proprietary, would some of you want to post pictures of your App networks? (and if it is, maybe just blur some things?) Dorky, I know, but… network porn! :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: Here’s mine. Still in progress, but mostly filled-out. Properties will probably get some sub-Types:

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Here’s my app network as it currently stands. It’ll no doubt grow over time.

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Interesting Chris. I recall @mdubakov some time ago in one of the monthly posts I think mentioned typical teams needing about 15 Types. You are way over that now, and I imagine plan many more! I too have felt that I could use 50 - 70 types over time. I am a seasoned veteran of Jira, which thankfully I’ve been able to abandon, and I know that in Jira there are many cases of developing teams that will cultivate 10’s of “issue types,” the Jira equivalent.

Here’s what I’m talking about:

Which is from the April Chronicles:

My use case: SaaS Website with a consumer element, so:

  • Software Development. One of the big draws of Fibery for me is the ability to see my platform in both the Whiteboard, and actual work items/Entities in Fibery
  • Feature request management
  • Product backlog prioritization
  • CRM
  • Back office - HR, Office, etc
  • And last, but very important: Intra-team Communication - big! I would love to see some of this…

…which is from this post:

Thanks!

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Wow! Now that’s an impressive network. And, again, work I would not have thought to implement in Fibery, but it makes perfect sense. I am particularly intrigued by your use of interconnected types to deal with Documents in Regulatory Compliance and the connection with a “Terminology” App! Very cool.

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You know, size isn’t everything :wink:
But seriously, I knew where I wanted to go as soon as I started with fibery, because I had already tried (and failed) with other tools to achieve the ‘knowledge network’ I was hoping for.

I wasn’t aware of the pricing deliberations prior to me trying fibery, and it may have put me off if there had been a limit of 15 types in the free plan. Thankfully, I can achieve what I want with the Team plan, and now I’m here, I can see myself appreciating it enough to upgrade to Company if the fibery team end up offering specific premium features (e.g. fully functioning whiteboards).

I’ve learnt from previous workplaces that it is far too common for there to be misunderstandings across the team about what things mean, and/or for there to be multiple places where something is described/defined that contradict each other (usually when one place is updated and another isn’t). Being able to define something once only (and then #mention it as needed) is so useful, especially when the time comes to change the definition, and you can view all the references to see what impact you might be having.

As a side note, I am slightly concerned for the fibery team that they have such diverse use cases (just looking at the amazing things people are doing with it). It’s not something that is normally considered best practice for a startup, where it’s often better to serve a beach-head segment and then broaden the appeal. Michael has written that they are going after the ‘product teams’ as their target, for medium to large team sizes, and I know that I’m not really in that bucket. I just hope that the strength of fibery (its wonderful flexibility) isn’t its downfall, and that it does truly end up being the (almost) perfect tool for a wide variety of teams/companies.

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Yeah, I have wondered and worried about this too. That’s part of the reason I asked this question, to see what people were actually doing with Fibery.

It’s worth noting that the people most active here in the community aren’t necessarily accounting for the bulk of users, however. As you probably know, communities like this disproportionately represent the voices of people who are more prone to give feedback and/or people who actually have more problems/questions with the tool/service. There may be a larger number of users who are getting along just fine for the more core/intended use cases, and actually one could easily imagine a corollary between trying to make Fibery do something it wasn’t explicitly designed for, and having more questions which may prompt more participation here. It’s also possible that more people prefer to just engage directly with the Fibery team, and they make that easy with the Intercom integration.

And of course it’s early days yet. I have reasonable confidence that they’ll find and reach their market in time enough to survive and, hopefully, to thrive.

I promised to get back and share you something about my plans. Time to do that, please bear with me… :bear:

My dream is to make platforms for the common good. Hence the name “Bear”, to bear also means to support, which is what a platform does! I believe that if we all bear as much as responsibility as we can carry (out of our own free wills), we can live meaningful lives and conquer all those challenges that we face together. So, the way I work and what I will deliver will reflect that respect for the individuals freedom, while helping people actually achieve bigger things together!

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Sounds intriguing! Hope to hear (and see?) more when you’re ready. :slight_smile:

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