Flieber’s $1.8 Trillion Problem: How to Know When You’ve Found a Market Worth Building For

 

Flieber’s $1.8 Trillion Problem: How to Know When You’ve Found a Market Worth Building For

Most founders see customer pain points. Few see market-defining patterns. The difference is running multiple companies at the same time.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Fabricio Miranda, CEO and Co-Founder of Flieber, explained how operating four e-commerce businesses simultaneously gave him a perspective most founders never develop: the ability to distinguish between tactical problems and structural market opportunities.

The insight he gained is worth understanding—not because you should copy his approach, but because the pattern recognition framework applies to any market.

The Advantage of Simultaneous Pattern Recognition

Between 2015 and 2019, Fabricio didn’t just pivot from one e-commerce venture to another. He ran multiple businesses concurrently. This created something rare: a controlled experiment across different brands, categories, and scale points.

When you operate one business, every problem feels unique to your circumstances. Your inventory management issues seem specific to your product mix, your warehouse setup, your supply chain relationships.

Run four businesses, and patterns emerge.

“As retail evolves and goes more and more online, everything becomes digital. So everything is just changing. On a website, numbers and inventory is still physical,” Fabricio observed.

This wasn’t a problem unique to one of his businesses. It was systemic across all of them. Digital marketing could be optimized in real-time. Customer data flowed instantly. But inventory? Inventory moved at the speed of container ships.

Recognizing Structural vs. Tactical Pain

The key insight wasn’t that inventory management was hard. Every e-commerce founder knows that. The insight was recognizing why it was hard—and that the difficulty was structural, not tactical.

Tactical pain has tactical solutions. You hire better people. You buy better tools. You optimize your processes. The problem gets smaller.

Structural pain persists regardless of how much you optimize. It’s baked into the business model. It affects everyone in the category.

“Inventory will be as a business model, the center of complexities will be the weak link of this chain,” Fabricio explains.

This is the language of structural opportunity. Not “my inventory management is hard” but “inventory is becoming the systemic bottleneck as retail transforms.”

The $1.8 Trillion Validation

Pattern recognition from multiple businesses gave Fabricio the hypothesis. But market-defining opportunities need quantification.

“I found out that $1.8 trillion are lost due to stock outs and overstocking global retail every year. And that needs to be fixed.”

That number does several things simultaneously. First, it validates that this isn’t a niche problem. Second, it quantifies the total addressable pain. Third, it frames the opportunity at a scale that justifies building infrastructure rather than point solutions.

This is how you know you’ve found something worth building a company around: the problem is so large that even capturing a fraction of a percent creates a meaningful business.

The Market Timing Signal

But there’s another element to Fabricio’s market recognition that most founders miss: the inflection point.

The story starts in 2015 with a conversation about Amazon. When asked what percentage of retail was online, Fabricio guessed 45-50%. The actual number was eight percent.

“At that moment, I went crazy. I was like, oh, my God, this is a much bigger revolution than I thought it was.”

This matters because structural opportunities exist at inflection points. If retail had already moved 50% online by 2015, the infrastructure would have been built. If it was only 1% online, it was too early. But at 8%—with obvious trajectory toward much higher penetration—the timing was right.

The inventory problem wasn’t new. It had existed in physical retail forever. But the shift to digital retail was transforming it from a manageable operational challenge into a systemic crisis.

Physical retail could absorb inventory mistakes. A stockout in one store didn’t prevent a sale elsewhere. Digital retail concentrated the pain. One SKU out of stock meant lost sales across all channels simultaneously.

What This Means for Market Selection

Most founders start with a problem they’ve personally experienced. That’s fine. But Fabricio’s approach suggests three levels of market validation worth considering:

First, is the problem tactical or structural? If better execution by existing players could solve it, you’re building a services business, not a platform business.

Second, is the problem growing or shrinking as the market evolves? The best opportunities exist where market transformation amplifies the pain rather than resolving it.

Third, can you quantify the total market pain? Not TAM based on competitor revenue—actual quantified cost of the problem remaining unsolved.

For Flieber, inventory management was structural (affects everyone), growing (accelerating with digital retail penetration), and quantifiable ($1.8 trillion annual loss).

The Fourth Company Principle

There’s a reason Flieber is Fabricio’s fourth company in the e-commerce segment. The first three taught him the market. The fourth is building the infrastructure.

“Flieber is an inventory planning platform for the modern world of commerce. We’re multi channel inventory planning. So it’s a very hard problem to solve.”

Hard problems require deep market understanding. You can’t build meaningful infrastructure without knowing where all the edge cases live, how different customer segments handle the problem differently, and what the real constraints are.

The pattern Fabricio recognized wasn’t just that inventory was hard—it was that as retail went digital, inventory became the last remaining physical constraint in an otherwise digital value chain. Everything else could scale instantly. Inventory couldn’t.

That asymmetry is what creates the structural opportunity.

The Takeaway for Founders

You don’t need to run four companies simultaneously to develop pattern recognition. But you do need to understand the difference between problems you can solve through better execution and problems that require new infrastructure.

Ask yourself: Is this pain specific to my customer, or is it systemic across the category? Does market evolution make this problem bigger or smaller? Can I quantify the total cost of this problem remaining unsolved?

If the answers are systemic, bigger, and yes—you might be looking at something worth building a company around.

That’s what Fabricio found. Not just a problem, but a $1.8 trillion market dislocation that grows larger as more retail moves online.

Most founders optimize their way into slightly better solutions for tactical pain. The founders who build category-defining companies recognize structural opportunities that expand as markets transform.

The difference isn’t just what you see. It’s knowing which patterns matter.