Fibery
Michael Dubakov is a serial entrepreneur who founded his first company, Targetprocess, in 2004. While running Targetprocess, he and a 5-person team spent 6 months researching the future of work management, exploring how companies could use flexible, composable tools that wouldn't require switching platforms as they grew. This research project, born from years of accumulated customer feedback, became the seed for Fibery.
Starting from conceptual ideas in 2017, Michael showed a presentation to 15 Targetprocess customers and received positive feedback (though he later acknowledged this feedback was somewhat biased). The technical challenges proved immense: how do you let companies build flexible domains for their own processes? The team prototyped extensively, testing Graph databases, NoSQL, and eventually settling on PostgreSQL as the best choice. They selected Clojure as the core language for its flexibility in handling transformations. The first demoable prototype took 8 months; private beta launched after 24 months of development in 2019. Looking back, Michael estimates they could have done it in 20 months had they scoped better, but the complexity of the problem resisted shortcuts. Private beta ran for over a year with several hundred teams onboarded, though churn was high as the product was still finding its shape.
Fibery's public launch in April 2020 was notably successful—they achieved Product Hunt's Product of the Day and experienced virality, generating 1,000-2,000 registrations per launch. However, registrations didn't translate to customers. Content marketing proved more effective than paid channels; a humorous "Yet another collaboration tool" landing page went viral on Hacker News and resonated with audiences who appreciated the transparency. Michael's monthly progress reviews—featuring all numbers and honest discussion of failures—also gained traction on HN. Early blog content drove 7-8K page views monthly, though conversion remained challenging.
The breakthrough came through niche focus. After 3+ years, the team discovered that Fibery's churn was lowest among product teams (annual churn under 15%), so they released "Fibery for Product Teams" in February 2021 and now serve 50+ product companies. Word-of-mouth from existing customers proved to be the strongest channel—existing customers recommending Fibery drove sustainable growth. Product Hunt launches generated visibility but poor conversion. CPC advertising took 6 months to produce leads with mediocre conversion. Outreach agencies generated minimal results (zero calls from the first, 3 calls from the second). A nascent Partners program showed promise with 20 active enthusiastic partners, though results weren't yet clear. The real problem: Fibery is flexible enough to serve almost any industry, but from a product-market fit perspective, narrowing focus is essential. Once they targeted product teams specifically, metrics improved dramatically.
Fibery grew from $80K to $290K ARR in 2021, reaching $24K MRR by January 2022. The team expanded to 24 people across 5 countries (transitioning from a Belarus-based company to fully remote), and they raised $3.1M in seed funding. Michael's 2022 goal is $1M ARR, betting on the Partners network and a startup program (free Fibery for 1 year for startups under the product's revenue threshold) to drive growth. They planned to hire a Head of Marketing and an Educator to accelerate traction.
- •Extreme focus on a specific niche (product teams) proved far more effective than attempting to serve all use cases—once they narrowed their target, annual churn dropped below 15% and customer retention improved dramatically.
- •Word-of-mouth and community trust generated sustainable, high-quality growth; while Product Hunt virality brought volume, it didn't convert, whereas customer referrals and organic blog reach built genuine momentum.
- •Long development time (3+ years) allowed the team to solve hard technical problems upfront (database selection, flexible schema design) that would have constrained growth later, turning a weakness into a competitive advantage.
- •Transparent, authentic communication—honest progress reviews with metrics and failures—resonated with technical audiences and created differentiation in a crowded market, driving organic discovery.
- •The founder's prior exit (Targetprocess acquired by Apptio) and existing customer base provided credibility and insider knowledge of the problem space, allowing him to validate assumptions before building.
- 1.Conduct your first 100+ user interviews before narrowing your market; test your positioning against multiple customer segments to identify which one has the lowest churn and highest retention, then double down on that niche exclusively.
- 2.Build a compelling product narrative and share it authentically—publish monthly progress reports with all metrics (revenue, churn, experiments) and honest reflections on failures; this builds trust and drives organic word-of-mouth.
- 3.Set up structured growth experiments (targeting 1-2 channels at a time) and track whether they work or not before moving to the next channel; avoid spreading efforts across too many tactics simultaneously.
- 4.Create a partnership or referral program early and actively nurture partners with training and resources; even small partner networks can become your most valuable channel once they gain confidence in your product.
- 5.If you have a predecessor product or user base, leverage it ruthlessly for early feedback and validation before spinning out; use insider knowledge to de-risk major technical decisions (database, architecture) early in development.
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