
Fibery – yet another collaboration tool - pookeh
https://fibery.io/anxiety
======
nlh
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.

~~~
mhluongo
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...](https://twitter.com/fibery_io/status/1198999705822416897?s=19)

~~~
spiralganglion
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.

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

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

This should come with a trigger warning.

~~~
taneq
The tagline in the top left, though:

> Try.

> Suffer.

> Quit.

~~~
agumonkey
my career in 3 short lines

------
pen2l
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
What’s great is that their actual landing page has a section that says
inspired by inventors.

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

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

~~~
IggleSniggle
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.

------
phinnaeus
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/](https://fibery.io/)

~~~
joenot443
[https://fibery.io/build](https://fibery.io/build)

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

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

------
alexpetralia
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...](https://medium.com/fibery/fibery-io-chronicles-14-anxious-
september-d25908071c80)

~~~
imperio59
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. :/

~~~
james_s_tayler
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.

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

~~~
TrentLarr
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.

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

------
lifeisstillgood
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

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

Check out [https://fibery.io/freedom](https://fibery.io/freedom),
[https://fibery.io/connect](https://fibery.io/connect), and
[https://fibery.io/build](https://fibery.io/build)

~~~
aitchnyu
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.

~~~
tablet
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.

------
spion
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)

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

------
sverhagen
"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
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.

------
jraines
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

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

------
jupp0r
Beats Jira any day. Lack of features is a blessing.

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

------
entrep91
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
Hi, I'm Fibery Founder (and late to the party), so if you have specific
questions, shoot.

~~~
pas
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.)

~~~
tablet
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...](https://help.fibery.io/en/collections/1831852-map-your-process-into-
fibery)

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

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

------
jan6
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
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
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.

~~~
tablet
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.

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

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

~~~
OJFord
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.

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

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

wow

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

[https://fibery.io](https://fibery.io)

vs

[https://fibery.io/anxiety](https://fibery.io/anxiety)

~~~
zaroth
Mobile browser hiding the URL makes this approach work almost _too_ well.

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

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

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

------
olingern
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.

------
magic_beans
HN links rarely make me laugh but this was hilarious.

------
wrs
Related HN post:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20776521](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20776521)

Also: [https://medium.com/fibery/fibery-io-burnout-so-exploring-
a-s...](https://medium.com/fibery/fibery-io-burnout-so-exploring-a-startup-
focused-pivot-6278c318c669)

~~~
tablet
That was just an experiment. Now everything is real.

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

------
eitland
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.

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

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

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

------
xer0x
Brilliant. I love how there are so many different themes to the landing page.
I'm signing up.

------
vassilyk
They nailed it.

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

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

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

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

~~~
tablet
This would be too much :)

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

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

------
caseyf7
Sadly, this is better than most of those sites

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

------
wolfpwner
They are missing careers page!

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

~~~
tablet
Our codebase is Clojure + Javascript

------
thinkr42
What’s so powerful for me is that my old company’s “brand” is exactly this
style

------
monkin
I love each version of it! :D

------
rubyfan
Is this an ad for Atlassian?

~~~
tablet
Why?

------
anvarik
you got me at Warren Buffett

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

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

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

------
betaby
It's a good product nonetheless.

------
andbberger
I love this so much. Cheers to them.

------
jason-festa
No clue that this was real

------
werber
Who didn’t work on this

------
jokab
hahaha i love it!

------
djohnston
well done!

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

------
xenonite
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?

~~~
whymauri
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.

~~~
xenonite
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.”

