A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:00:00 · Colin Zima, S1
[00:00:00] S0: I'd probably done a hundred demos and we had five unaffiliated customers that were talking to us that we really thought were going to buy the product. They all verbally committed to us and we thought we were in paperwork. We were going to sign all of them and we end up losing all five deals. I think it's hard to reinvent yourself. The innovator's dilemma is a real problem. Take Looker for example, we did a lot of things really well. We did a lot of things not well, like we were really good at enterprise BI. We were really inflexible. It's really hard to take your core foundational thesis and compromise it at the margin to do these other things well. And so, it leaves space for other people on the other side. If I'm saying, I bet that I can either reduce your cost or make you guys smarter and give you a better product, and make it really easy for you. That's a pretty easy message. People like free money and they like having their job done for them. Be thoughtful about where you're spending your time and what you're doing. The company only gets more valuable every day based on what you do and so if you reflect on a day. Think about whether you made the company more valuable or not, and if you didn't. Think about what you should have done to make the company more valuable. [00:01:06] S1: That's Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. I called it the Product Market Fit question. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. I mean, the name of the show is Product Market Fit.
00:01:06 · S1, Pablo Srugo, Colin Zima
[00:01:06] S1: That's Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. I called it the Product Market Fit question. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. I mean, the name of the show is Product Market Fit. [00:01:19] S2: Do you think the Product Market Fit Show, has product market fit? Because if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take out your phone. You have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders and it lets us get better guests, thank you. Colin, welcome to the show, man. [00:01:36] S0: Yeah, thanks for having me. [00:01:37] S2: Excited to have you here, man. I mean, you've built a pretty solid business, raised over $250 million. Last round was just a few months ago, and we're going to hear all about what Omni actually is, what it does, how you made it all happen. But we start not where it all begins, but where this show begins. Which is with the product market fit moment. So when did you feel like you'd found true product market fit?
00:01:58 · Colin Zima, Pablo Srugo
[00:01:58] S0: The quick backstory on the company is we're about four and a half years old, and I've spent a lot of my life in BI. I had spent eight years at a company called Looker that got acquired by Google and so when we launched the company, we actually had a bunch of really talented people that had spent a long time at Looker. And I honestly thought that we would have traction in like a month. We'd tool around a little bit, we'd get people on the product, they'd be like, this is amazing. It probably took us like nine months until we had our first user in the product and it was actually a product manager that I had worked with at Looker, and she had started a company. And I just convinced her to start using the product every day. But it was one and two daily active users for three or four months at that point, and us internally using the product. And about the one year anniversary, we finally. I'd probably done, I don't know, a hundred demos and we had five unaffiliated customers that were talking to us that we really thought were going to buy the product. They'd all verbally committed to us. So for people that are doing sort of normal outbound sales cycle, we had the tech win and we thought we were in paperwork. We were going to sign all of them and we ended up losing all five deals. And the feedback we got was like, company's too young, product's not quite there but it's close, stuff like that. I showed it to my end user, they didn't love it. [00:03:09] S2: What kind of ACVs were these, by the way? Just to know the stakes?
00:03:09 · Pablo Srugo, Colin Zima
[00:03:09] S2: What kind of ACVs were these, by the way? Just to know the stakes? [00:03:12] S0: So now we're maybe 45k, at that point. We were just trying to get 15k, and the idea was as low as possible where we could still justify a sales driven motion. But we needed to convince you that it was worth some money or it wouldn't be worth anything and so we went back, and we actually just worked on the product for two months. And we said, let's get rid of every bug that we could possibly find. So rather than an error every two minutes, you'd have an error once a day or something like that and then I actually went on another podcast with Sam Blond talking about the business, things like that. We ended up with like three or four trials out of that podcast and all completely unaffiliated. And we won all four of those trials. And that was the moment that we realized that we had something interesting. There were people that we didn't know, they paid, you know, full-ish price, 15k, 20k, whatever it was, and they actually liked the product. And it was at that moment we sort of realized that finally we've built enough. And we can sort of create some repeatability, and then you get your first good customer. The first person that's using the product and finding things that you hadn't thought about, and just sort of discovering new ways of using it. That was when the flywheel really started happening and that was all over the span of maybe four weeks.
00:03:12 · Colin Zima, Pablo Srugo
[00:03:12] S0: So now we're maybe 45k, at that point. We were just trying to get 15k, and the idea was as low as possible where we could still justify a sales driven motion. But we needed to convince you that it was worth some money or it wouldn't be worth anything and so we went back, and we actually just worked on the product for two months. And we said, let's get rid of every bug that we could possibly find. So rather than an error every two minutes, you'd have an error once a day or something like that and then I actually went on another podcast with Sam Blond talking about the business, things like that. We ended up with like three or four trials out of that podcast and all completely unaffiliated. And we won all four of those trials. And that was the moment that we realized that we had something interesting. There were people that we didn't know, they paid, you know, full-ish price, 15k, 20k, whatever it was, and they actually liked the product. And it was at that moment we sort of realized that finally we've built enough. And we can sort of create some repeatability, and then you get your first good customer. The first person that's using the product and finding things that you hadn't thought about, and just sort of discovering new ways of using it. That was when the flywheel really started happening and that was all over the span of maybe four weeks. [00:04:25] S2: So I have some questions, some follow-ups but maybe this is a good moment for you to tell us a little bit. What does Omni do? Because that's going to help set the context for this.
00:04:25 · Pablo Srugo, Colin Zima
[00:04:25] S2: So I have some questions, some follow-ups but maybe this is a good moment for you to tell us a little bit. What does Omni do? Because that's going to help set the context for this. [00:04:32] S0: So, I mean, we were founded February 22. So a little bit before ChatGPT, but the product's vision was always pretty straightforward. It was, let's build a BI platform that can do everything. Write SQL, use Excel, do pivot tables, and also enterprise BI, and embedded all in one platform. And in 2026, it's become, you know, ninety percent AI. But the idea was always a product that could compete with Tableau and Power BI, and Looker, and your SQL runner. And sort of do everything all in one place. And that was the product that we sort of pitched, and were selling from day one. It was, get rid of all of your other BI, we can do it all and it came from this place where I had worked with these very decentralized tools like Excel. And these really heavy enterprise tools like Looker. And it was always like, why isn't this one tool? Why can't this actually just work together? And that was the original vision for the product, and kind of what we slowly built over that year.