Fibery.io chronicles #19. First Customers in February 2020.
By: Michael Dubakov
Tags: SaaS, Startup, Fibery, Product Development, Software Development

TLDR: First true customers 🐡. 100 active accounts 🎆. +Polina 💃. Up to speed 🦘. −Telemetry 🌪. Still no public launch 🥑. Independence is coming 🗽!

Flashback:

Main numbers ( → sign shows the changes between November, December, January & February):

Fibery.

No-code platform to build a collaborative workspace for your company



Leads/month: 2700 → 1900 → 900 → 900

Active Accounts: 30 → 65 → 70 → 100

Team size: 12 → 12 → 11 → 12

Burn rate: ~$45 → ~$50 → ~$45 → ~$50K/month

MRR: $0 → $80 → $160 → $470

North Star: ? → 40 → 80 → ?

There is a small spike in Active Accounts (active 3+ days in a week), and this is a good sign for us. We have also reached 100 active accounts milestone 🎆.

The best event in February is some purchases from target leads (small teams and companies). The revenue is small, but at least this is a major validation point that teams are ready to pay money for the service → it’s valuable enough 😍!

+ Polina

Polina has joined Fibery as a Customer Success specialist! Finally, there is a person in our team who is not a theoretical physicist or mathematician and can actually talk to humans. Say “hi” to Polina in Intercom (and maybe even Zoom)!

Polina

Fibery Review

Keep Productive channel made the first Fibery Review. It is to the point. I think Francesco got the main idea and where Fibery can be helpful (teams and companies).

Fibery: All You Need To Know

Seed Round and VC talks

We’ve clarified our internal needs and continued talking with investors. I spoke with a dozen more in February with no clear results.

That combination — making big decisions about things they don't understand — tends to make investors very skittish. — PG

We’ve clarified our possible scenarios:

🛵 $0.5–$1M seed round till the end of Summer. This will give us a 1-year run rate with some team increase and should be enough to live till Round A. 🚁 $2–4M seed round till the end of the year, increase the team size to 25–30 people and speed everything up.

So far it seems that Scenario #1 is more likely.

As you maybe know, Fibery is a Targetprocess spin-off, but we will have a fully independent company in about 2–3 months (the process has been started) 🗽.

Investors are enthusiastic about the market overall, but:

Want to see a better traction (valid) Afraid that the no-code market is overcrowded (not valid) Not sure about holistic solution vs. RPA like Tray.io or Zapier (unknown)

One quite typical example:

1. Does this scale with larger teams to command top down enterprise contracts or does it mostly work with bottoms up situations and in sub teams in organisations - do those larger organisations always revert back to specialised tools?

2. Does the tool create too much clutter and noise that people end up losing interest after a while? At least the masses? I can see how certain types of people/minds will love it but does that replicate more broadly in the organisation.

3. Has the no code market been getting too busy lately?

Our main goal now is to get to $10K MRR and this will secure our seed round for sure (that looks like a milestone for many investors at least). We can do it in 4–6 months I believe.

Metrics

We have temporarily lost almost all important telemetry like the North Star metric and account usage statistics 🌒,

That’s the sacrifice we made to refactor the way events work in Fibery. When you create a card on a board or invite a user, Fibery generates an event that is used in stats, search, notifications and other services. Previously, these events were unreliable which led to spotty statistics, incomplete search results, and missing notifications.

It took us almost 2 months to pay this tech debt (remember, the flexible domain is hard!). We will erase the old events and start from scratch in March. The numbers will be back after that.

Our next three milestones with current numbers (the first one is a guess):

Active collaborative accounts with 2+ people ~50/100

Paid accounts with 2+ people 8/100

MRR $470/$10,000

Product Updates

In February the development team pick up a good pace and did several releases. WIP is quite large, so it seems March should be a huge month feature-wise.

DONE

New Getting Started

Deployed on production, but two videos are missing so far. New accounts will start from Templates and can watch intro videos to grasp some fundamental ideas about Fibery. We hypothesize that this approach will work better than pushing people to create new Apps right away. The A/B will show the truth.

Whiteboard v.0.2 (Shapes and Connectors)