The following interview is a conversation we had with Fabricio Miranda, CEO & Co-Founder of Flieber, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $19 Million Raised to Build the Future of Inventory Management for E-commerce
Brett
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we’re speaking with Fabricio Miranda, CEO and Co-Founder of Flieber, an inventory management platform that’s raised over 19 million in funding. Fabricio, how are you?
Fabricio Miranda
I’m doing great, Brett. Thanks for having me.
Brett
No problem. Super excited for this. So I was checking you out on LinkedIn, and I saw you do a post that talked about a big change you made in your life when you were 26 years old. So take us back to your world. Age 26, what was going on and what was happening.
Fabricio Miranda
Yeah, so age 26, I was. I was the youngest director in a multinational company called Neoris. And, you know, I had it all for my age. I had a great position, a great salary, very good exposure. So in terms of potential for the future, was amazing. But I was always like, I was never a person that likes to do the same things over and over. And I felt the need to do something different. So I jumped. Another director of Niore left to open a company. I jumped with him to open this company, and that started my entrepreneurial journey. And long story short, I’m in my 7th business. I have two exits in this period. So it’s been a crazy ride. And as I say to my wife, I think I’m going to die going straight from the office to the grave.
Fabricio Miranda
I don’t see myself retiring anytime. So I think these seven businesses are going to multiply and be maybe 20 by the end of my life.
Brett
Now, what did you learn from the selling of those two companies and going through that exit process?
Fabricio Miranda
I think that gives a lot of. I think it proves the model right, because entrepreneurs, you’re just embarking on a dream. And many times you’re like, you’re senior friends and your friends have salaries and you don’t. You have very small salaries just to cover your expenses. And then you try to invest a lot of time, ears many times to try to prove things, prove that your dream is right. And when you finally exit for the first time, it’s like a seal of approval. It’s almost like, okay, it works. It’s a good model. I’m going to keep doing that. So the way I see entrepreneurship nowadays is that I try to build things that add value as quickly as possible. So the exits have to have shorter term, shorter periods between them and adds the most value possible.
Fabricio Miranda
So the shorter the term between two exits and the higher the value, the more successful I am in this business model that I have for my life. And so the exits are kind of an affirmation of the model.
Brett
What was it like for.
Fabricio Miranda
Let’s.
Brett
You know, let’s focus on. We don’t have to go to numbers, but, like, the first or the biggest exit that you had. Talk to us about the 24 hours that followed. Did you go through just euphoria? Did you go through depression? I’ve heard mixed things from founders after they have their first big exit.
Fabricio Miranda
It’s funny, because I was never connected to money. Like, I don’t have any dreams of buying a. Buying things. For an example, in this exit, it was a nine figure exit. Of course, I didn’t have the full ownership. I had a minor ownership on the company, but it was a meaningful exit, and what I bought was just a $3,000 guitar. That was the only thing I bought after this exit. So I was never into buying stuff. So when we sold it was much more the thrill of proving that the model works and going back home to my wife and saying, you know, it works, you can trust me, and we’re gonna do that, and it’s gonna work more times. We’re gonna. We’re gonna do that over and over. And seeing that she will support me from.
Fabricio Miranda
From that moment on, and not that she didn’t support me before. She did, of course, but it was always a pressure, me trying to prove that was gonna work, and I didn’t know if it was gonna work. So, yeah, it’s. It’s. It’s. It was much more a thrill of seen the model work. I didn’t have depression. I didn’t have a lot of euphoria. Also, I had a sense of pride, but I was almost ready for the second one. So as soon as I sold the first company, I was already embarking on the second one and didn’t have any vacation in between the two. And so, yeah, I didn’t have the depression that people say they have.
Brett
Let’s talk about what you moved into with your most recent company, which you founded. It looks like in early 2019. So at a high level, talk to us about what the company does, what the platform does. Let’s go deeper there.
Fabricio Miranda
Yeah. So trying to intro why Flieber exists, I sold this company in Brazil called Ecoaqua, which was a water treatment company. And then I decided to move to the US with my family. I have three boys, and I decided to raise them here in the US. I thought it was a better place to raise them. And then I opened a hedge fund. I needed a work visa from Brazil. I opened a hedge fund in Manhattan. Called Victory Capital. And I was running the hedge fund, and I met a guy opening an Amazon store. I got really intrigued with that. I didn’t even know that was a business. But this guy was very smart, very capitalized, and I thought there was something behind it.
Fabricio Miranda
So I went out for a glass of wine, and he asked me in the very beginning of our conversation, Fabrizio, how much percent of retail do you think is online? And I thought it was already 45, 50%. And he said it was eight. That is in 2015. And at that moment, I went crazy. I was like, oh, my God, this is a much bigger revolution than I thought it was. And I decided to join him in this business called head clicks. And long story short, Flieber is the fourth company I opened in this segment since 2015. And the reason I opened Flieber is because I learned through that operating this Amazon brand, and then after starting other businesses in the same segment, I learned that as retail evolves and goes more and more online, everything becomes digital. So everything is just changing.
Fabricio Miranda
On a website, numbers and inventory is still physical. So inventory will be as a business model, the center of complexities will be the weak link of this chain. And I decided to start because of that, because Flieber is solving inventory. 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. So that’s why I found a Flieber. And 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. And, yeah, we’ve been doing that for five years, and it’s exciting and very hard at the same time.
Brett
On your LinkedIn, I see the very specific language that you help e commerce brands that are doing anywhere from two to 50 mil. Did it start off as the ICP day one? Is that where you said you were going to focus? Or what was that process like to get to the position that you could put that so boldly on your LinkedIn like that?
Fabricio Miranda
Oh, my God, it was a mess. Because there’s two things happening at the same time. The first of them is that inventory by itself is changing a lot. You see the supply chain crisis during COVID You see that supply chain has become the center of the problems in the world because there was no investment in technology over time in supply chain. As Ryan Peterson from Flexport says, supply chain is the only industry that people still operate with fax machines. That’s true. There’s still fax machines in supply chain. And so there’s the whole complexity of solving a very techless industry. And in parallel to that, there’s the whole world of retail being revolutionized. Now. You have marketplaces, you have platforms, you have like social media, e commerce, and there’s a bunch of different things happening at the same time.
Fabricio Miranda
So it was really hard to find the right strategy, the right positioning and the right ICP. So we started, 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. And as we evolved, we started seeing that 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. So 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. And then 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.
Fabricio Miranda
So it gets really hard to integrate. So 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. So that’s why we nailed that two to 50. And I think it’s a pretty accurate description today of our client base.
Brett
If we look at the go to market strategy, what is that go to market strategy that you’re deploying today?
Fabricio Miranda
Yeah. So we used to focus on a sales led growth, and the reason is because we never actually had a product. Once more, I keep saying that it’s a very complex segment. I don’t want to go through why it’s complex. But inventory, in a nutshell, inventory depends on a lot of different data that is coming from a lot of different sources. So you need sales data from channels, you need inventory data from warehouses, you need product data, you need a lot of different data to be able to do the calculations that you need for replenishing inventory, or I knowing when you need to transfer things and etcetera. So because of that, we built a platform that was highly dependent on our team operating in the back end. It was almost like a service approach.
Fabricio Miranda
So I didn’t have a product, so I couldn’t do a product led growth approach, and I had a sales led growth. And because of that, I structured a sales team and et cetera and what was happening was that the economics of the business were terrible because 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. And 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. We’ve been operating that way for about six, probably eight months now. With a self serve platform, we changed to a product led growth approach.
Fabricio Miranda
So a lot of content, a lot of trying to bring people to website and to landing pages and make them try the system and free trial. So it’s a whole different world that we’re living. But 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.
Brett
What have you learned from making that transition? I think a lot of founders out there are in the middle of making that transition, or they’re thinking about making that transition. What do you wish you had known a better way to ask that is, what do you wish you had known that you learned now from doing it?
Fabricio Miranda
I think one side effect of that, I already knew that for the economics of the business, it was an amazing decision, because when you build something that is scalable, our costs were cutting half, at least, maybe more than half, because of that change. So economics are amazing. Now 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. So it’s a great model for us. But 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 or with 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.
Fabricio Miranda
And that was used as an excuse for a bunch of things, and 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. So that forced, it was a side effect that I didn’t plan for that, but that forced us to build a much better product. It doesn’t even compare to the previous one because of that, because people are not, we don’t have now the, I think the crutch of having the team operating for customers.
Brett
Talk to us about building that team out to support that new motion. What was that like?
Fabricio Miranda
Yeah, that’s still going, right? So we’ve been operating that way for about eight months now. And as I said in the beginning, it’s my 7th company. So I learned a lot through the process. One of the things I learned is that 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. So I rip off the band aid all the time. It’s very normal for me. So the first thing I did was I let go the wholesale Steve that happened last June, which was even before finalizing the development of the new platform. But I knew that if I kept the team, I would have two cultures competing inside of the company.
Fabricio Miranda
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. So, ripped off the band aid, let the whole team sales team go and started. I hired people who were specialized in content creation. So I have people helping me with LinkedIn posts, helping me with website, helping me with content and SEO and etc. So hired all those people and created. We’re still in that phase of creating this machine, this content machine, and we’re creating a pretty interesting machine now. So it’s still ongoing, but it’s a tough change because it’s a cultural change. I have a lot of people in the company that’s been with us for four and a half, even five of those five years that we’ve been live and shifting.
Fabricio Miranda
Their mentality is not easy, but it’s happening and I’m happy with the decision we made.
Brett
What’s the key to creating content that people actually want to read and having that content move the needle? I don’t know about you, but most of the content I come across online, it’s just horrible. It comes across as very salesy, overly promotional. What are you doing to make sure that your content’s actually good, people actually want to use it and it’s helping achieve your objectives?
Fabricio Miranda
Yeah. As I said, we’re still in the early days and honestly, I still think the content sucks because it is a learning process. You are always trying to find the right tone, the right voice, what resonates with people. I think what I worry the most in my role today is a lot less about selling Flieber and a lot more about showing people what I think they should be doing. Based on my experience and what I see from our customers, what happens to our customers and Flieber is just a consequence. So I wrote a blog post today I think is going to go, you know, sometime this week it’s going to go out. And I never talk about Flibber. I talk about, hey, if you are doing this, you should try one of the inventory planning platforms in the market.
Fabricio Miranda
And it’s not, as I say to my competitors today, we fight against Excel spreadsheets. Almost all of the brands use Excel spreadsheets. So each different competitor, I’m sorry, each different brand that migrates to a inventory planning system is a win for the whole category. So everybody wins because now the paradigm is not anymore. Excel versus inventory planning is which inventory planning system is better for me. So they are already kind of converted into using a system. So yeah, I try not to be salesy, but I still am because I think some of the people that work with me are still trying to find the right tone, the right voice. In the ideal world, I don’t sell flavor, I sell the idea. And Flieber is just a consequence in that process.
Brett
What else from a marketing perspective is top of mind, what are you going to be focusing on for, say, the next six months?
Fabricio Miranda
Yeah, 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. So it’s become really expensive to get customers that way. It’s become almost impossible. 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. So it’s become really hard to operate in that segment. So that’s why I think an inbound approach where you’re the putting content out and having people reach out to you is the best approach. What I am building now is a very strong partnerships platform. So especially through agencies.
Fabricio Miranda
So in my segment, there’s a lot of agencies that help these retail companies operate online or operate even in all segments. And there’s a lot of room for those agencies to start not only using Flieber , but also introducing Flieber to those customers. And that’s something that a lot of people do in the market and I haven’t done yet. So that’s my new focus is a lot of on the partnership side, trying to ramp up that side of the business.
Brett
So how do you think long term about the market category? Is it always going to be inventory planning? Do you have ambitions to create a new category? What are your thoughts there?
Fabricio Miranda
I have a huge ambition since the beginning. I just don’t know the right name for the category. And I think there’s a, I’ll talk about the problem with it, but my dream is to create what I call the inventory and sales synchronization system. So what happens today and since forever, because if you go back to the world at retail, to the physical world at retail, you have people getting products into stores and then the stores would sell the product, right. So the marketing would be much more a branding that you were trying to strengthen the brand. And there was no direct connection between the marketing investment that you did and that specific sale because you were just saying, hey, buy Coca Cola.
Fabricio Miranda
And people would go to a store, would see Coca Cola would connect with that advertisement that they saw and they would buy the Coca Cola, but you wouldn’t know that they bought the Coca Cola because they saw that advertising. When you go online, there’s a direct relationship. You do a sponsored post or sponsored listing on Amazon, for example, the customer will click on that will buy and you have direct attribution of a sale to that specific campaign. So I think there’s a huge difference in the way that people operate nowadays with this new world of direct connection between the sales and the action that you did, marketing action that you did in the sales that you made.
Fabricio Miranda
So today what happens is that people are making those sales, those direct sales, without knowing what’s going to happen with their inventory because these are two separate areas in the company, because that’s how retail evolved. Retail was done that way. There was no need for those two areas to be connected. So nowadays I think there is a direct connection between sales and inventory. Are you going to make a promotion? Yes. How much more you want to sell or do you plan to sell with that promotion? X percent, based on the history and etcetera. So if you sell x percent, what is your inventory going to look like three months from today? Are you still going to have inventory? Are you going to run out of stock or are you going to be overstocked?
Fabricio Miranda
So all those decisions have to be made at the same place. So my dream is to create that category. We’re just a little far from that because as I said, it’s two separate areas in the company, the marketing people don’t even know who the inventory people are. Don’t even want to talk to the inventory people. The inventory people are there in the trenches trying to play the catch up game and trying to operate and desperate to, you know, to be able to bring the products in time so that they’re not, you know, screened by everybody. So once that gets more combined, I think I’m going to be able to create that category.
Brett
When it comes to evangelizing your vision for this new category and maybe just your vision in general, is there consensus like the way that you view the future of inventory planning? Does everyone agree? Yep, that’s the future that we’re headed towards. Or is your view, is your take different from how others are viewing the future?
Fabricio Miranda
I think whenever I talk about it resonates a lot. I think I have some contrarian views. For example, I really think that in the future, supply chain is going to be almost a non demand thing. Imagine that what you’re buying now, it’s going to already be close to your house because of the intelligence that we will have to spread the inventory across the supply chain. And just a parenthesis here. 25 years ago, I was in a project at New Ores and were studying the 911 service for Hillstone, which was the best performing 911 service in the US. And the way that they were performing was that they were predicting the demand for calls based on history.
Fabricio Miranda
And then based on that they would already send out the ambulances and the fire trucks and et cetera to the places that usually that are likely to have calls based on history. So that whenever they had a call, the ambulance was already a couple blocks away because statistically they needed an ambulance there. And I think supply chain is going to be the same. It’s going to evolve to being something similar. We are going to have already that product around your house knowing that you are going to buy the product based on history of purchases in your neighborhood or maybe in your street. So that is a little contrary. A lot of people are like, oh, you’re crazy, that’s never going to happen.
Fabricio Miranda
But overall, my vision of inventory being connected to sales and those two sides being separate and that not making sense, that resonates a lot. Everybody agrees with that. Everybody agrees when I talk about the inventory based advertising, for example. So advertising campaigns should be based on your inventory availability. If you have 2000 units and the next batch that you can replenish is going to be 60 days from now when you’re going to have only 1000 units, you can only sell 1000 units. If you sell more than 1000 units, you’re going to be out of stock. That’s so obvious, right? But not a lot. But almost no companies do that today.
Brett
What about fundraising? So, as I mentioned there in the intro, over 19 million raised to date. What have you learned about fundraising this time around?
Fabricio Miranda
Yeah, it was easy to raise funds because first I had a very early motion sales motion, and I was able to get very soon, I was already in the $500,000 in ARR in like three months of company. So I was able to prove the model that it works, that there’s demand and etcetera. And that was pre Covid. I raised a little bit pre Covid, but the vast majority I raised during COVID the market was crazy. So it wasn’t hard to raise funds. In hindsight, I would do differently. All of my other companies would bootstrap them. That’s the first. Flibber is the first company that I raised capital with, VC’s, and I had no experience with that. And I ended up abiding to the generous schizophrenia of the market and raising a lot more than I actually needed.
Fabricio Miranda
So, for example, I raised my last round, I raised over two and a half years ago, and I still have over 30 months of Runway. So I raised like five years of funds, which makes absolutely no sense. But anyways, it was easy to fundraise. I wouldn’t do the same way. I think if you have, I think scarcity creates creativity, generates creativity, and I think that’s one thing that we made a mistake by raising too early. We grew the company too early. We grew the team more than we should. We lost a lot of agility in the process, so there was some adjustments to do because of that. But anyways, in terms of fundraising, I was lucky to be in an easy time.
Brett
Final question for you, let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision look like? What’s your impact going to be on the industry as a whole? Your customers? What’s that big, beautiful feature look like?
Fabricio Miranda
Yeah. I still dream with the day that people understand that Excel spreadsheets are amazing. I’m the biggest Excel geek. I use Excel every single day for everything I do. But Excel spreadsheets are just not the right tool to solve the complexities of inventory planning. So my future dream is to finally have all these people who are today using Excel migrating to inventory planning platforms. Not only Flieber, we can be one of our competitors, but the market maturing enough so that people understand that Excel is great as something that you’re going to use in the end to make final analysis based on the final results, things like that. But it’s not the right tool to get all the data needed and process all that data and make all the complex calculations you have to make and considering all the variables and etcetera.
Fabricio Miranda
So I hope we get to that world where I’m going to come back here and say, hey, my competitor now is not Excel anymore, is XYZ. So that’s my dream for four to five years from now.
Brett
I love it. All right, we’re up on time, so we’ll have to wrap here before we do. For any founders that are listening in, that want to follow along with your journey to execute on this vision, where should we send them?
Fabricio Miranda
Oh, I think the best place to follow me personally is on LinkedIn. It’s Fabricio Miranda. So if you go to LinkedIn and look for Fabrica Miranda from Flieber, you’re gonna find me and our website. If you want to know more about Flieber, a website, or if you want to send me an email, I always give my email to everybody.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. Thanks so much for taking the time. It’s been a lot of fun.
Fabricio Miranda
Thanks a lot, Brett.
Brett
Keep in touch.
Fabricio Miranda
Bye. Bye.
Brett
All right, that was awesome, man. You’re a great guest.
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