Flieber’s ICP Discovery: Why Their Sweet Spot is $2-50M (And How They Found It)

 

Flieber’s ICP Discovery: Why Their Sweet Spot is $2-50M (And How They Found It)

Most founders claim they knew their ICP from day one. Fabricio Miranda admits he had no idea.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Fabricio Miranda, CEO and Co-Founder of Flieber, shared something refreshingly honest: the company didn’t start with a clear ideal customer profile. They found it through years of painful learning.

“In the beginning, we didn’t have a clear ICP. I just used the contacts that I had through my other companies in the same segment to get my first customers in.”

That’s how most B2B companies actually start. Not with precise market segmentation, but with whoever will pay you. The sophistication comes later.

The Bottom End: When Revenue Doesn’t Mean Business

The first boundary Flieber discovered was at the bottom: companies below $1 million in annual revenue.

“If a company is very small, like less than a million dollars, you honestly don’t even have a real business. You’re still trying to find a business.”

This sounds harsh until you understand what it means for product-market fit. Companies below $1M aren’t focused on operational efficiency. They’re focused on survival.

“They are not thinking about inventory at that time. They’re just thinking about surviving growth and et cetera. So there’s not a lot of market there.”

This is the insight many B2B founders miss. The problem you solve might be real, but if your customer is still figuring out their business model, they can’t prioritize solving it.

For inventory planning, a company doing $500K might have stockouts. But they’re also dealing with finding product-market fit, establishing supply relationships, and keeping the lights on. Inventory planning is a luxury problem.

The Top End: Legacy System Hell

The upper boundary surprised Fabricio more. Companies above $50-100 million seemed perfect—big enough to have serious complexity, rich enough to pay.

But they came with a different problem.

“When you go above $50 to $100 million, then you have a lot of complexity in the way those companies are structured. You have legacy systems from 1990s to integrate with. So it gets really hard to integrate.”

This is the enterprise trap that kills many mid-market SaaS companies. Large companies have the budget and the pain. They also have technology stacks built over decades.

Every integration becomes a project. Every data source has its own format. Sales cycles extend from weeks to quarters. Implementation timelines balloon from days to months.

More importantly, large companies have organizational complexity that matches their technical complexity. The person who feels the pain isn’t the person who signs contracts. The person who signs contracts isn’t the person who controls the integration roadmap.

For a company building a scalable, self-serve platform, enterprise customers represent the opposite of their model.

The Sweet Spot: $2-50M

Between these boundaries sits Flieber’s ideal customer profile.

“My sweet spot is that two to 50 million where they start having issues that demand to solve the complexity of inventory, and they not yet have all those legacy systems to deal with.”

This range represents a specific maturity stage. At $2M in revenue, an e-commerce company has proven product-market fit. They have reliable supply relationships. They have predictable marketing channels. They have operational processes that work.

But they don’t yet have the organizational and technical debt that comes with scale. Their tech stack is modern. Their decision-making is streamlined. They can implement new systems in weeks, not months.

Most importantly, inventory becomes a strategic problem at this scale. A stockout doesn’t just lose one sale—it loses hundreds. Overstock doesn’t just tie up a few thousand dollars—it ties up tens or hundreds of thousands.

“So that’s why we nailed that two to 50. And I think it’s a pretty accurate description today of our client base.”

The Discovery Process

The journey to this insight wasn’t analytical. It was empirical.

Fabricio had connections in e-commerce from running multiple companies. He used those relationships to get early customers. Some worked out. Many didn’t. The pattern revealed itself over time.

Small customers churned because they couldn’t sustain the investment. Large customers became resource sinks that consumed disproportionate time without delivering proportional revenue.

Mid-market customers—the $2-50M range—got value quickly, paid reliably, and didn’t require custom work. The unit economics worked. The implementations scaled.

This is how ICP discovery actually works. You don’t figure it out through market research. You figure it out by learning which customers stay, which leave, and which ones drain resources.

Why This Matters for Other Founders

Every B2B category has similar boundaries, though the specific numbers differ. The pattern is always the same:

Below a certain threshold, companies can’t prioritize your solution even if they have the problem.

Above a certain threshold, companies have the budget but also have complexity that breaks your business model.

In between sits the sweet spot where the problem is acute enough to demand a solution and the organization is simple enough to adopt yours.

The mistake most founders make is assuming bigger is always better. Enterprise logos look great. Enterprise budgets are substantial. But enterprise complexity can destroy a product that wasn’t built for it.

Fabricio’s willingness to define both boundaries—minimum and maximum—is what makes Flieber’s ICP valuable. It’s not just about who they want to serve. It’s about who they’ve learned they can’t serve profitably.

The Takeaway

Finding your ICP isn’t a one-time exercise. Markets evolve. Products mature.

But the framework remains consistent: look for the segment where the problem is acute enough to drive action but the complexity is manageable enough to deliver value profitably.

For Flieber, that’s $2-50M in revenue. For your company, the numbers will differ. But the process of discovering them—through painful iteration, honest assessment, and willingness to walk away from customers who break your model—remains the same.

“In the beginning, we didn’t have a clear ICP,” Fabricio admits. That honesty is more valuable than any framework. Because it acknowledges the truth: you don’t figure out your ICP through market analysis. You figure it out through market experience.

The question isn’t whether you’ll start without a clear ICP. It’s whether you’ll learn from the customers who don’t work and have the discipline to focus on those who do.