The Story of Flieber: Building the Future Where Inventory and Sales Finally Talk to Each Other

 

The Story of Flieber: Building the Future Where Inventory and Sales Finally Talk to Each Other

A nine-figure exit buys most people a yacht or a sports car. Fabricio Miranda bought a $3,000 guitar and got back to work.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Fabricio Miranda, CEO and Co-Founder of Flieber, shared how a Manhattan hedge fund manager became obsessed with a problem most people don’t know exists: the $1.8 trillion lost annually to stockouts and overstocking in global retail.

It’s his seventh company. The pattern: find a broken model, fix it, exit, repeat.

The Conversation That Changed Everything

The origin story starts in 2015 with a glass of wine and a surprising statistic.

Fabricio had moved to the US from Brazil. He’d sold his water treatment company and opened a hedge fund in Manhattan. Then he met someone opening an Amazon store.

“He asked me in the very beginning of our conversation, Fabrizio, how much percent of retail do you think is online?” Fabricio recalls. His guess was 45-50%. “And he said it was eight. That is in 2015.”

“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.”

Fabricio launched three more companies in the e-commerce space between 2015 and 2019.

The Pattern Recognition

Running multiple e-commerce businesses simultaneously gives you pattern recognition most founders never develop.

Fabricio noticed something fundamental: “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.”

Digital marketing could be optimized in real-time. But inventory? Still governed by lead times and container ships.

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

“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.”

Building the Platform

Flieber is the fourth company Fabricio opened in the e-commerce segment since 2015. But it’s different: it’s 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.”

Most companies handle this with Excel. But Excel wasn’t built for this complexity.

“Excel spreadsheets are just not the right tool to solve the complexities of inventory planning. 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.”

Finding product-market fit took iteration. “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.”

The sweet spot emerged: $2-50 million in revenue. “They start having issues that demand to solve the complexity of inventory, and they not yet have all those legacy systems to deal with.”

The Bigger Vision

But Fabricio isn’t building just an inventory planning tool. He’s building what he calls “the inventory and sales synchronization system.”

In physical retail, marketing and inventory never needed to talk. Online changed everything.

“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.”

Yet companies still organize like physical retailers. Marketing and inventory are separate departments.

“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?”

The future: advertising campaigns based on inventory availability.

“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?”

Almost nobody does it.

The Future: When Supply Chain Disappears

Fabricio’s long-term vision borders on science fiction—until you realize similar systems already exist.

Twenty-five years ago, he worked on a project studying Hillstone’s 911 service. Their secret? Predictive positioning.

“They were predicting the demand for calls based on history. 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.”

Apply that to retail: “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.”

“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.”

What Success Looks Like

For now, the goal: convert the market away from Excel.

“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.”

When that happens, the competitive landscape shifts. “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.”

That’s the future Fabricio is building: a world where inventory and sales synchronization is standard practice, where the $1.8 trillion lost becomes a historical footnote.

For a serial entrepreneur on his seventh company with two exits behind him, this isn’t just another startup. It’s the infrastructure play that could reshape how modern commerce operates.

And when this one exits? “I think these seven businesses are going to multiply and be maybe 20 by the end of my life.”