7 Go-To-Market Lessons from a Founder Who Rebuilt His Platform While Firing His Sales Team

 

7 Go-To-Market Lessons from a Founder Who Rebuilt His Platform While Firing His Sales Team

When your unit economics are broken, most founders optimize at the margins. Fabricio Miranda blew up his entire company and started over.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Fabricio Miranda, CEO and Co-Founder of Flieber, walked through a transformation that would terrify most venture-backed founders. His inventory management platform had customers, revenue, and a functioning sales team. But the business model was fundamentally broken. Here are seven GTM lessons from what happened next.

Lesson 1: Service-Disguised-as-SaaS is a Death Trap

The warning sign isn’t always obvious. You’re closing deals. Customers are paying. But underneath, the math doesn’t work.

“We built a platform that was highly dependent on our team operating in the back end,” Fabricio explains. “It was almost like a service approach.”

Every customer required manual data integration and human-operated calculations. They’d built a managed service with SaaS pricing.

“Customers didn’t want to pay $100,000 for a subscription. But our platform needed a lot of people to operate, so it cost us a lot.”

The lesson: If your “product” requires significant human intervention for each customer, you don’t have a scalable business. Either automate it completely or change your pricing model.

Lesson 2: Parallel Operating Models Kill Transformations

When transformation is needed, founders instinctively try to derisk it. Run the old model while building the new one.

Fabricio took the opposite approach.

“The first thing I did was I let go the wholesale team that happened last June, which was even before finalizing the development of the new platform.”

His reasoning: “If I kept the team, I would have two cultures competing inside of the company. One culture that wants the non self serve platform, and because they need that for their job to survive, and another culture that wants what’s the new product.”

The lesson: Parallel systems create parallel incentives. If you’re making a fundamental shift, commit fully.

Lesson 3: Nobody Cares About Your Pivot (So Stop Overthinking It)

This is Fabricio’s seventh company. He’s learned something most first-time founders haven’t.

“If you need a change, just make the change. Don’t overthink it. Nobody cares. Nobody cares about your change, and nobody is worried about what you’re going to do, what you’re going to say, just do it.”

Founders spend months planning the perfect transition while the business burns cash on a broken model.

The lesson: The market doesn’t care about your transformation story. Customers care whether your product solves their problem. Make the decision, execute it, move forward.

Lesson 4: Removing the Service Crutch Forces Product Excellence

The most valuable outcome of Flieber’s transformation wasn’t the improved economics—it was the unexpected effect on product quality.

“I think the side effect is that it forced us to focus a lot on the quality of the product, because before, since we had people try and operate for customers, we could just, every time we had something difficult to do, we would just say, hey, this is too hard. Our team will do that for the customer.”

Remove that safety net and everything changes.

“Now we need to implement those things. We don’t have customers calling our team, we have customers trying the platform. And if the platform doesn’t resonate, they’re just going to go away, they’re not going to subscribe with us.”

The lesson: If your customer success team is constantly firefighting, you don’t have a CSM problem—you have a product problem.

Lesson 5: Product-Led Economics Create a Virtuous Cycle

Once the platform became truly self-serve, the business model transformed.

“When you build something that is scalable, our costs were cutting half, at least, maybe more than half,” Fabricio notes. “We’re able to charge less. By charging less, we’re able to get more customers. By getting more customers, we’re able to increase the revenue.”

Lower costs enabled lower pricing. Lower pricing increased conversion. Higher volume reduced per-customer CAC.

The lesson: Product-led growth isn’t just a distribution strategy—it’s a fundamental business model that only works if your economics actually support it.

Lesson 6: Traditional SaaS Playbooks Are Saturated

Flieber’s transition wasn’t just about economics. It was about recognizing that traditional outbound motions have diminishing returns.

“It’s become really hard nowadays to operate in SaaS overall because everybody has access to the same platforms, everybody uses the same systems, everybody uses the same playbooks,” Fabricio observes. “People receive so many emails that now email marketing almost doesn’t work anymore. Advertising is too expensive, doesn’t work. Also, after changes that Apple made a few years ago and SDRs are calling people receive so many calls that they don’t take the calls anymore.”

The lesson: What worked five years ago is table stakes now. If your GTM motion looks identical to every other B2B company’s playbook, you’re fighting for scraps.

Lesson 7: Decisive Action Beats Incremental Optimization

The overarching lesson is about recognizing when incremental improvements won’t solve the fundamental problem.

“I made a hard decision a year and a half ago to rebuild the platform and make it self serve. And that was the single most important decision, critical decision for a success.”

Most founders would have tried smaller fixes: hire cheaper support staff, raise prices, target higher-ACV customers. These feel less risky. They’re also slower and less likely to work.

“It was the best, by far the best decision I made for Flieber. Now we have a product and we have a sales product led growth movement going on.”

The lesson: When your core business model is broken, optimization is procrastination. You need transformation, not iteration.

The Takeaway

Fabricio’s journey demonstrates that the hardest GTM decisions are often the most necessary ones. Firing your entire sales team while rebuilding your platform sounds insane—until you recognize that the alternative is slowly bleeding out.

Eight months after the transformation, the company has lower costs, better conversion, higher quality product, and sustainable growth. It took brutal honesty about what wasn’t working and the courage to blow it up.

That’s the real lesson: inflection points demand decisive action, not comfortable compromises.