Fibery – yet another collaboration tool | Hacker News Reader

Fibery – yet another collaboration tool

fibery.io

705 pointspookeh145 comments

I experienced such a fascinating wave of emotions reading this link and then this thread. Let me share so others' can compare:

"Ha! This is funny. It's poking fun at all these sites that try to reinvent a productivity tool. Wow...yup...they nailed it...yeah this looks hilariously over-complex. Ok, good parody!"

...goes to HN comments...

First comment...joke about the joke. Ha, funny's!

Second comment...yup people laughing at the joke...

10th comment...wait...um...someone said there was a different landing page. Ok, that's weird, this one seems less like satire.

15th comment...wait wait...I think this might be...a real product?

...Reads Medium post...goes back to HN comments....re-reads landing page.

"Ok..wait. This is actually a real product. They just spent 5 minutes making me think they were mocking other products with their fake over-complex screens...but....this...is....real?"

And now I just posted this. I think it's time for Thanksgiving vacation to start.

The Twitter is really something

> First version of Whiteboard is here. So far you can only create Tree component to see hierarchies. Well, we had to start with something and will add more components based on your feedback.

https://twitter.com/fibery_io/status/1198999705822416897?s=1...

They didn't just start shouting out into the world about their features and efforts.

They didn't just sugar-coat that self-promotion with forced jokes (looking at you, Slack).

They first designed their voice — subtly self-deprecating, but from a place of struggling to one's best, without forced jokes (even though it's totally intentionally funny).

This is brilliant.

Thanks! This is the most inspiring comment for a long time for us.

I've done something similar with my "yet another dashboard" project [1]. I'm developing it in public from day 1.

[1] https://dashboard.darekkay.com/docs/

This can't be real, can it?

> So. The only thing that holds Fibery 1.0 release is slow accounts registration. Currently we can handle 2-3 accounts creation per minute...

> Not really. We also setup the new cluster for every account. Manually.

https://twitter.com/fibery_io/status/1197162343882543104

Had you seen the address bar, you would've realized you weren't at the domain's root path, and maybe then it would've clicked that this was a satirized version of the homepage.

“We have miserably spent 3 years of our lives and are still ashamed of the result.”

This should come with a trigger warning.

The tagline in the top left, though:

> Try.

> Suffer.

> Quit.

my career in 3 short lines

Okay I'm usually annoyed by these things, but seeing pg's picture... and then thinking "Oh, hmm, YC-funded huh"... then seeing Marc Anderseen's picture... then... seen a lot of other pictures, and then seeing "Inspired by investors."

Wonderful job. Stellar.

What’s great is that their actual landing page has a section that says inspired by inventors.

Sold Masa!

"Mobile last" is actually a strong feature. Screw working on your tiny phone; make the desktop the target environment.

Mobile is actually highly demanded today. Our “friend” company (one owing a lot of contract-locked money to ours) just drowns in complex reports and tries to move everything on iphone, like round pie charts, bar graphs, etc. Their business is too complex to manage on a desktop screen. Right now it requires one of our directors to be present at theirs office full-time, resolving all contract conflicts and accounting errors, but once charts will be done (by me apparently), it will be much easier for them to control the flow of the money and other shit to take profit.

Single data point, but sure it’s frequent. Businesses need a breath of fresh air or something like that, you know. Old methods don’t work.

Wait, so it’s too complex to manage on a desktop, so it needs to be on a smaller screen? I don’t understand - why?

> it’s too complex to manage on a desktop, so it needs to be on a smaller screen

It’s burdensomely complex on desktop. It’s impossibly complex on mobile. But mobile productivity is irresistible, so the troublesome processes get reworked and refined.

More cynicism is required before reading the GP.

> Mobile is actually highly demanded today.

I predicted this 1 year ago, despite the nay-sayers. The way things are going (and you can call me crazy) but I truly believe the internet is going to change the way we do business.

A year ago? People have been making this prediction for decades.

He's being sarcastic.

"but I truly believe the internet is going to change the way we do business."

Mobile is actually highly demanded today

And it's a mistake, IMHO. Eases the erasure between work/private life by enabling the phone/tablet as another work tool. And divests resources from a better desktop experience.

Sure, mobile is in high demand today, but lots of people do stuff on mobile that is sub-optimal in terms of workflow. By "sub-optimal" I mean it really isn't designed to be done properly on mobile yet. I think this is what the parent comment was getting at...

Agreed.

I have a 25 year old nephew. He literally attempts to do everything on his iphone. I keep telling him I have a handful of decent mid range gamer tower's collecting dust, take one so you can actually do normal stuff on it when you need to write a form letter, or save some documents or play games on it?

He always just tells me, "Nope, I'm good."

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is a legitimate issue. There are people who grow up never owning a laptop or desktop. I don't care how good mobile gets or speech-to-text, writing clean documentation, code, and using a keyboard/mouse will not be replaced anytime soon for high productivity work.

I've been holding my breath waiting for mobile, with its impossibly small tiny inhumane little box, to give way to the next big, and hopefully literally bigger, thing. It hasn't happened yet and I'm starting to think it won't. Maybe Dynamicland will save us? One can dream, but I doubt it.

>Dynamicland

Looks very promising, even a kindergarten resident may run a business with that. Should suggest it at the next hangout as our main development cycle.

tablets

I want to believe this is satire... but i can't tell.... bravo

Best satire is reality sometimes. I tried hard here, but many people do not see a problem (both itt* and irl). Old-fashioned business is really over.

* /s-like is not easy to feel in text, I know, but it is not there because the story is real and expressed as it is. That seems ubiquitous, as I hear more and more demand. Also, this entire subthread may be > 80% real-life satire, can’t tell for sure.

I worked for a company who had "Mobile First!" in their top 4 or 5 "product statements". We had two mobile devs. Both employed for < 6 months, one of which was basically fresh out of university.

I agree - but there's no native Windows app. I don't want to have to shift through a dozen tabs in Chrome to find one for Fibery, I want to just click an icon on my desktop. I also want Desktop-specific features like Right-click.

I know a neat trick. Install a different browser and use it for just that. Pick the extensions and bookmarks, configure the home page then enjoy having nothing else inthere.

You know... I know a guy who has several different Google Chromes installed on his Mac. Google Chrome, Google Chrome (2), Google Chrome (3), etc. (He has an intellectual disability. This kind of thing happens.) I guess you could have as many as you wanted and name them anything you wanted, right? It's like taking your favorite web apps and Electron-izing them.

Check out this: https://github.com/dmarmor/epichrome

It does exactly what you are talking about but with only one copy of Chrome.

OTOH - I never lug laptops around if I can avoid it - even for work meetings nowadays with things like Dex or USB C video cables, you can just project from the phone. Also since I can get to my emails, messenger, conferencing software and files from cloud storage on my mobile, I can say leave to attend my child's school performance in middle of the workday and still get work done during the commute (public transport or cab/ride-sharing) or run some necessary errand or make a presentation on my way to a meeting. Sophisticated apps becoming available on mobile has freed me from having to be chained to my workdesk, find more time for my personal life or risk bad posture by working with a laptop on my lap during commute etc.

Lots of companies in this business make reasonably easy to use mobile interfaces - so if some company like this chooses not to support mobile, it's a non-starter for me.

Not just desktop, desktop via an Electron app!

I can't tell if this is sarcasm...is it?

I hope not! Funny thing. When I find myself needing to use JIRA or GitLab or whatever on the go and mobile is my only option, I end up requesting the desktop version on my phone anyway...because the mobile app doesn't do what I need it to do, or if it does it hides the functionality so I never find it.

My experience is that for productivity software that lives in a browser, there's absolutely no point in a mobile version. Just serve up the desktop version and make sure the user can zoom in on the portion they need to interact with, and perform all actions necessary with clicks.

I hope not. I see far too many business applications that waste I can't imagine how many person-hours on terrible mobile apps/sites. In some segments, the people who want to use your app on mobile just aren't the people that your business can add value to (not because of their choice of device, but because of what their choice of device indicates about how they plan to use and value your product). Don't spend your time ticking boxes of competitors' features. Specialize.

It isn't. We don't code on an iPhone or tiny screen. Heavy lifting is done on a full sized screen. Make applications that actually work on them first and foremost.

i can answer for myself: it's really not sarcasm. In my personal experience, Phones suck at everything, really.

Phones are just for consumers and commuters, workers need desktops.

Probably not... there’s plenty of things that don’t really need to be mobile first.

They have several of these landing pages, you can toggle between them by clicking the "I don't get it" button that floats in the bottom right or by clicking the logo.

https://fibery.io/

I was hoping someone was going to post this, my sides are in pain from laughing so hard at this site. It does such an excellent job of highlighting all of the marketing tropes currently trending in SV and tech and I for one absolutely love it.

I'm not going to lie, just from what they have on their several landing pages it looks like a cool project. Bookmarking for future reference and to check if they're still around in 5 years.

https://fibery.io/build

Found this one particularly charming. First time I've ever been pleasantly surprised by a mouse-over-background-effect.

That's nifty! I spent a while trying to figure out how it worked before realizing it's a Voronoi diagram. Simple yet beautiful.

I thought the same thing...

Kinda neat hovering the mouse around and watching the little "." move the white part. Unfortunately, they cost me some extra work. I began to realize how many times I have sneezed with the laptop on my lap without cleaning the screen ... I kept seeing dots that weren't there and had to break out the wipes.

Sort of crazy. I always hear about how startups need immense traction (e.g. DAU, revenue) before getting funding, and yet somehow Fibery seems to exist (persist?) in spite of that. Here are the October numbers[1]:

  Product:           Fibery — SaaS B2B (SMB) work management platform
  Stage:             Private Beta
  Launch:            Q4 2019 (public)
  Development:       31 months 
  Leads/month:       500 → 380
  Total Accounts:    490 → 520
  Active Accounts:   15 → 20
  Team size:         10
  Burn rate:         ~$40K/month
  MRR:               $0

[1] https://medium.com/fibery/fibery-io-chronicles-14-anxious-se...

I built a product of similar complexity by myself in a few months. It's built for a small but growing niche. After 2 months of having launched I already have about 70 paid accounts and $1.5K MRR with minimal marketing.

It boggles my mind to think people can burn $40K a month before having an understanding of whether what they built has product market fit.

I literally spent maybe a total of $5000 building and launching my product (+ my time, arguably that's a hidden cost but if you're a software engineer founder, that's also a major asset for you) and with 70 accounts we're getting 2-3 feedback and suggestion emails a day and iterating to please our customers and find PMF before I consider taking any investor money or hiring anyone.

Also their actual marketing page sucks. They don't have a particular differentiator from similar products, I don't really understand what their app does... Blargh. :/

Awesome results in comparison!

Can I ask what stack? What does the production infrastructure look like? How many years of experience you have? And was it 2 months full-time or the equivalent of or just 2 months calendar time hacking nights and weekends?

I swear some people are really, really fast builders. I'm trying to improve my speed and I keep coming back to the answer of keep it as simple as possible and study your stack to know it backwards.

Well, some things take time. It is relatively easy to build something trivial fast, but it is not that easy to build something more complex. Markets are different. It took 4 years for Coda.io to release even private version. And they had like 50 people in a team. Our market is highly competitive and hard to enter.

It's pretty insane to spend 31 months building something like this when the market is so crowded. Hope it was a spare time/weekend thing. Thought it was just a joke so didn't consider signing up; however, product looks really strong! Hope they make it.

But for example

> "It only gets worse from here. It's not just the creator who suffers, but everyone else too."

Funny but maybe a bit too literal. That's when the page turned into complete satire to me and I had to come to the comments section on HN to realize that they actually had a product offering.

It looks like the founder (according to LinkedIn at least) is also the founder of another ~100-person company, so I'm guessing they had some spare cash to incubate this.

They have a team of full-time employees working on it. Also, it's written on Clojure.

MRR $0.

That's the worst feeling.

This will change soon. We were going to announce public release Dec 4th, but failed, as you see...

Pffp. You're "in stealth", another million please.

It's a brutally honest look at the shortcomings of a startup backed by a product, that seriously, looks to be at least decent.

Their intent is to get you to convert, but instead of giving the usual flowery bullshit, they make you laugh.

Fine, I'll try it.

I didn't come out of it thinking this is real.

At some point, the amount of people who have the curiosity to click any of the links probably outweighs the poor traffic if it was just like "we made a new tracker".

I think they've hit that point.

Absolutely, they got my eyes on the product for far longer than they would have otherwise.

I thought it was a joke, too, until I came here and started reading comments.

Their intent is to get free advertising by being on the front page of HN.

This page could be worse at conversion but wins by going viral.

Wait what now?

This is a real product, but marketed by Seinfeld's script writer?

I mean parts of the real product are what I want / build from sphinx spare parts - and I cannot work out now if those features are worthwhile or dumb.

I am very confused

It is indeed a real product. They've got several different landing pages. The one you've read is https://fibery.io/anxiety

Check out https://fibery.io/freedom, https://fibery.io/connect, and https://fibery.io/build

They redirect to random landing pages. That will be a nasty Easter egg when you see a serious landing page and you ask somebody to Google it and they get the spoof page.Whats the error message? And do native English speakers associate "fibery" with "healthy"? Don't get me started on fans spinning hard on FF in Ubuntu.

They are not random. If it's your first time at the website, you will see serious page and can see funny one after several deliberate updates (there is a special button for this). So if you just send fibery.io to a new person, he will see something serious for sure.

I'm with you - in a way, goodness, sure looks like they're getting a lot of attention, but like others -- "until I hit the comments on hacker news", I thought it was satire[0].

[0] Actually, I thought it was clever advertising by Atlassian -- and I actually started feeling cynical about the whole thing (I'm not a huge fan of their products but theirs are among the tools we use where I work).

Their approach to the product seems to be novel too! They decided to go against common grain of familiarity and immediate perceived ease of use, but didn't just add a billion fields to configure everything with a dense manual - they try to offer just-in-time help pages that offer analogies and examples for the stuff you are configuring.

I wish them all the best! Hope people find it worthwhile to invest some time in learning the product (it will definitely be somewhat necessary)

Even so, I bet it's better than Teams.

"Nobody ever got fired for buying Atlassian."

Well, sure, but that doesn't mean it's too late to start doing that now?

I really try to like the Atlassian tools that we have, but they just make it so damn hard. I often wonder if the people at Atlassian use those tools themselves, because if so, why don't they fix the obvious issues. Just today, maybe not the most obvious issue, perhaps, Bitbucket decided to execute the "master" pipeline for a build that clearly wasn't off the "master" branch, thus pushing unmerged code into the Staging environment. Nice trick, Atlassian!

I'm sure they'll get around to it once their PM figures out the way to copy a link to the bug they filed on Jira about it.

Have you seen the Java code behind JIRA? It's very Enterprise.

I am evaluating work tracking tools and signed up for this after someone on my team linked to the joke lander and once I figured out it was a real app.

Looks quite promising although no mobile is a tough pill to swallow.

I could go on but just an interesting side thought: people who design these should get a special title - Meta PM? Seems like you have to meet a very high bar of minimum stuff “everyone” has, at about the same price, while still having some degree of Jobs-ian stubbornness because you will NEVER satisfy everyone

We'll definitely add mobile support in the future. It's hard to to everything with small team, so we have to focus.

Beats Jira any day. Lack of features is a blessing.

The page made me giggle when scrolling down, but the 'user testimonials' actually made my LOL. Especially the JIRA one.

I think this company made me laugh and destroyed their brand in one shot.

I'm not sure what to think, especially considering this is a legitimate product.

Hi, I'm Fibery Founder (and late to the party), so if you have specific questions, shoot.

Is this better than JIRA? (Yes everything is better than JIRA, especially a rock, as that is fast and does not get uglier with redesigns.)

Is this open source? (I guess not, but still any thoughts/plans? AGPL? Mongo/Redis-like anti-AWS license?)

GitLab has issues. I mean the feature not the bugs. Is Fibery oriented at code based projects?

Can I model a CRM flow with it? (I don't know what's the "correct" answer to this, it's just something that comes to mind sometimes.)

1. Fibery is not better that JIRA (or is better). JIRA is focused on software development, while Fibery can cover more areas and more processes. It really depends on your needs. For example, Fibery has no integration with source control yet. However, documents integrated with real work processes better than in JIRA.

2. Fibery is closed source.

3. We try to keep Fibery a broad product and so far we think our competitors are Notion, Coda and Airtable. Not Gitlab.

4. Yes, you can. Note that Fibery has no automations so far (only Zapier and API), it means some cases will be hard to have. Like email communication via Fibery with automatic linkage of all messages to some Account. You can check more info here https://help.fibery.io/en/collections/1831852-map-your-proce...

Would you consider open sourcing the application with a license like AGPLv3+?

We indeed considered that, but no decision so far. We'll see.

finally, someone who advertises how bad they are, the idea I've had for a while and like to call "reverse advertising"... I love it... now, if only I had a team to convert...

A decade or two ago, I heard a Sprite jingle on the radio, which contained the lyrics "We'll say anything because we're getting paid". Depending on your audience, this can actually be effective signalling.

Pretty cool stuff, i know ive asked for some of these features as my team uses asana for as much as we can and jira was super slow and clunky back in the day - though i checked it out recently and it seems like a much better experience.

In the tool the modals could really use a X button to close the modal, the 2 or 3 seconds i second guessed where to click each time was annoying. It would be cool to discover if asana had some of these features all of a sudden but i think putting so many features front and center is going to hurt your adoption. Slack for instances can be easily underused as simply a chat application, later on the tech guy shows up and starts dropping in chat bots and cool helpers and what not. The relationship stuff is pretty cool i hope i dig more into this stuff later.

Also are you guys planning on expanding the signup options beyond google/microsoft? it was easy for me to signup just curious how much of a roadblock that is to the rest of the internet.

Thank you for the feedback. There is always hard balance between power and simplicity. It is remain to be seen how we handled it.

Email signup is in near plans, it was just much easier to start with Google/Microsoft signup to not be responsible for passwords.

So which way to go .... the MVP that EVERYONE says to launch, or mockery because you’ve launched something less than perfect.

The people who get stuck afraid of doing it wrong usually end up launching nothing.

Hi! I'm here. Definitely in that camp, and I've just been complaining about it this very evening, you know, instead of doing anything about it.

There's just always a reason not to - if I tidy up I'll be happier and focus better; if I build that desk I've been meaning to first, I'll be more productive; if I cook, food's sorted for a bit; if I get an indoor bicycle trainer I'll be able to take an energising break between work (from home) and my own projects; etc. ad nauseaum. Or perhaps ob nauseam.

This is truly incredible. I made a personal account just to play around with this. More of this kind of thing, seriously.

this appears to be an actual product, not just a joke landing page?

wow

It's a joke and a real product - they have a real landing page too.

https://fibery.io

https://fibery.io/anxiety

They have 4:

https://fibery.io/build

https://fibery.io/freedom

https://fibery.io/connect

https://fibery.io/anxiety

It appears to round-robin on page load of https://fibery.io/

Mobile browser hiding the URL makes this approach work almost too well.

I think this will backfire if it gets more traffic than the real page.

The joke one is so much more concise and just better. I know what the product is about instantly.

Someone is really committed to this.

Also FWIW, i signed up and am playing around and kind of enjoying it. will give it a serious try tomorrow

Let me know if any questions, we are ready to help with setup!

I've seen such ironic,self-deprecating media in advertising on TV -- but a SAAS's landing page? Bold.

The stickiness and success could make this a mini-trend which dies out quickly, comes back five years from now, and then lives on forever as paradoxically ironic.

HN links rarely make me laugh but this was hilarious.

Also: https://medium.com/fibery/fibery-io-burnout-so-exploring-a-s...

That was just an experiment. Now everything is real.

It surely is "mobile last". My phone froze and restarted on its own while checking out this page.

Well done. I actually want to test this product.

Hard to say why but something resonates with me. Maybe it is that I love working in a desktop environment (KDE) that people love to trash lime this yet is really comfortable for me.

Or maybe I'm just so fed up with landing pages and this was just different.

This would be hilarious if I weren't hip-deep in dealing with such a product IRL right now. :(

The page just crashed Edge on my phone. Was that part of the joke or a serendipitously funny coincidence?

Funnily enough their demo gif is their app crashing Chrome on desktop.

They probably are specifically detecting the user-agent for that feature.

Cheers, me too. Too close to home haha. We should chat

Brilliant. I love how there are so many different themes to the landing page. I'm signing up.

They nailed it.

Maybe a bit too much? The entire SaaS industry will have to come up with new, better BS to sell now!

"Inspired by investors" (as opposed to "Inspired by inventors") got me good.

Well, it got them on the HN front page - looks like they’re doing at least a few things right.

They are missing careers page!

Pretty sure they can only afford a few core developers at a time and the code base is a 3D maze with portals.

Our codebase is Clojure + Javascript

Oh, that could be beautiful to read! Please, Fibery, do it!

Haha, nice, but you should even lower the contrast on the text to identify as a typical "dumb designer low contrast low quality" outlet. :)

This would be too much :)

This looks like a tool similar to Notion.io and Coda.io

Yeah, we'd like to focus on teams and companies more and provide a middle ground between flexibility of Notion and rigidness of Asana.

Sadly, this is better than most of those sites

I thought this was a parody on our current landscape ... then I realized it's a real product?

What’s so powerful for me is that my old company’s “brand” is exactly this style

I love each version of it! :D

Is this an ad for Atlassian?

Why?

you got me at Warren Buffett

This is the sort of chaotic neutral I want Cthulhu Ventures to buy into.

Wait, it’s not an Atlassian advertisement? It’s an actual product?

I had no idea which parts of this website were real.

It's a good product nonetheless.

I love this so much. Cheers to them.

No clue that this was real

Who didn’t work on this

hahaha i love it!

well done!

That is really, really funny. Make sure you click the "I don't get it, explain differently button".

Although I find the page funny, I find the HN title rather clickbaity. The HN rules explicitly discourage editorializing this way. Isn’t there a better title?

I suppose the only viable, non-editorialized title would be:

* "Yet Another Collaboration Tool" or

* "fibery.io/anxiety"

But that really doesn't convey the content very well.

Well it seems the title got changed anyhow, to a combination of your proposals.

For reference, the original title was: “A brutally honest landing page.”

You're most likely mistaken. Clickbait is not just about attracting attention, it also needs to be misleading. So while your complaint passes 1 test for clickbait it fails the other. Please be more thoughtful before posting unfounded meta comments, the HN rules explicitly discourage low-value content that doesn't contribute substantially to the discussion.

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