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Fibery – yet another collaboration tool

705 points| pookeh | 6 years ago |fibery.io

145 comments

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[+] nlh|6 years ago|reply
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.

[+] JMTQp8lwXL|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] utborin|6 years ago|reply
“We have miserably spent 3 years of our lives and are still ashamed of the result.”

This should come with a trigger warning.

[+] taneq|6 years ago|reply
The tagline in the top left, though:

> Try.

> Suffer.

> Quit.

[+] pen2l|6 years ago|reply
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.

[+] agoodthrowaway|6 years ago|reply
What’s great is that their actual landing page has a section that says inspired by inventors.
[+] icelancer|6 years ago|reply
"Mobile last" is actually a strong feature. Screw working on your tiny phone; make the desktop the target environment.
[+] wruza|6 years ago|reply
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.

[+] symmitchry|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] Richard_East|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] sfifs|6 years ago|reply
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.

[+] saagarjha|6 years ago|reply
Not just desktop, desktop via an Electron app!
[+] Bootwizard|6 years ago|reply
I can't tell if this is sarcasm...is it?
[+] phinnaeus|6 years ago|reply
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/

[+] mroche|6 years ago|reply
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.

[+] joenot443|6 years ago|reply
https://fibery.io/build

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

[+] alexpetralia|6 years ago|reply
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...
[+] TrentLarr|6 years ago|reply
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.

[+] gtirloni|6 years ago|reply
I didn't come out of it thinking this is real.
[+] mobjack|6 years ago|reply
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.

[+] lifeisstillgood|6 years ago|reply
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

[+] mdip|6 years ago|reply
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).

[+] spion|6 years ago|reply
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)

[+] sverhagen|6 years ago|reply
"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!

[+] spion|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] cheez|6 years ago|reply
Have you seen the Java code behind JIRA? It's very Enterprise.
[+] jraines|6 years ago|reply
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

[+] jupp0r|6 years ago|reply
Beats Jira any day. Lack of features is a blessing.
[+] cyberferret|6 years ago|reply
The page made me giggle when scrolling down, but the 'user testimonials' actually made my LOL. Especially the JIRA one.
[+] entrep91|6 years ago|reply
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.

[+] tablet|6 years ago|reply
Hi, I'm Fibery Founder (and late to the party), so if you have specific questions, shoot.
[+] pas|6 years ago|reply
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.)

[+] jan6|6 years ago|reply
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...
[+] AnimalMuppet|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] cdevs|6 years ago|reply
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.

[+] kresten|6 years ago|reply
So which way to go .... the MVP that EVERYONE says to launch, or mockery because you’ve launched something less than perfect.
[+] blhack|6 years ago|reply
The people who get stuck afraid of doing it wrong usually end up launching nothing.
[+] ixtli|6 years ago|reply
This is truly incredible. I made a personal account just to play around with this. More of this kind of thing, seriously.