A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:05:24 · Pablo Srugo
[00:05:24] S2: But yeah, it's a funny space. It gets reinvented every, well, probably every ten years. But now I feel like it's every two or three years and then I don't even know what the future's gonna be with AI. But my question, as you were telling me the story, was oftentimes when you have the experience that you had. Which was a long time of doing demos, trying to sell, nobody really buying, and then five that finally you get all the way to the end. All pulling out, they'll tell you, oh, you're missing this feature, you don't have SOC 2, or in your case, you have too many bugs, whatever. And you wonder, is it that or is it just they don't really care? And the difference between what I'm offering, and what's there today is just. It's just not worth, the juice not worth the squeeze sort of thing and then you kind of got to move on to something else. You made the decision to double down on the product, just make the product better. It worked. What can you tell us about how you thought through that and why you felt like in this case, no, it really is just make the product better and they're going to buy?
00:06:16 · Colin Zima
[00:06:16] S0: Yeah, I mean, it's going to sound a little bit silly, but we were using the product every single day and we knew it was better. We knew it was buggy, but we also knew it was better and it's sort of, you know, your mom thinks that you're beautiful type thing. We could see through hitting a full page error and hitting the refresh button because everything else underneath it was so awesome. But it was really clear that an unaffiliated user could not. But there were still the bones of really good product. It's a space that we understand well and we know what good data analytics looks like. And I at the time was sort of working as the data team for one of our angel investors. He was our first customer. He was sort of like, I don't know if I need your product but I know that you can help me with our business. We set up his ETL, we set up his BI, and I was just answering questions for him on a daily basis. They would just ping me questions and I would use the tool and answer questions for them. And in doing that, I understood that we had something special. It was unique. It was interesting. It was doing things really well. It was also admittedly like too rough and not quite good enough. I think when you build product, you need a balance of things that differentiate you and you need to avoid things that differentiate you in a negative way. And what was obviously not clear to us at the time was that we had too many of those negatives that were overwhelming slightly the positives. But there were positives, and I think to make product, you have to do enough good stuff. We had felt convicted that we were doing those things and you got to be intellectually honest. Customers will lie to you and they'll say, hey this is great, this is wonderful, and then not pay you money. But you should know whether your product is actually differentiated or not, and if a customer is not going to pay you money. They're sort of showing you that it's not differentiated in an interesting enough way.
00:08:07 · Pablo Srugo
[00:08:07] S2: This is where, you know, it really does matter where you start in the sense that you started with, like you said, industry. You knew a product that you knew and you used, you knew what best in class was, and obviously it's going to be biased, and all these things. But at the end of the day, your opinion on this is genuinely better than best in class, carries a lot of weight and can pull you through a lot of, let's say, not positive feedback from the market. But whether it's like no reaction or negative reaction after seeing it, and you know that they tell you things, and you can kind of measure what they say, and the feedback they give you against what you know reality is, and kind of make that all happen. And I always think, as a first time founder, you're often struggling to figure out what should you build, what idea, and oftentimes what you end up doing is you build for a market you know nothing about and you're trying to learn as fast as possible and it can't work. It genuinely can't work. There are examples where it works, but you do face this problem, which is if you don't hit it in the first one or two versions. Then you can end up in V10 and you just don't know why you're there, how you got there, and whether what you're hearing is genuine or kind of just people trying to be nice to you.
00:09:09 · Colin Zima
[00:09:09] S0: I think that's exactly right. I think the other thing I would add is we were doing a lot of demos the whole time. Like a lot, a lot of demos. I literally had a spreadsheet with a hundred names in it of people that I had demoed and while they weren't all buying the product. And, look, a lot of them were volunteering, like, you're too young, I'm not going to buy your product. You can still see when people light up and when they find things interesting. If you have enough of those moments and those things are unique to your product, it can't just be like that screen is beautiful. It needs to be like, wow, that's a workflow I haven't thought about. That is interesting. You can see those bits and those can be enough to go build on. You have to find those moments of differentiation because if you're in a competitive space and you're not significantly differentiated, and you're not better at selling or whatever, like differentiation into the market. You're gonna have trouble with pricing power and actually selling your product. We couldn't just build a tool that charts. Charting's not that hard. You've got to find these moments where I could do a two minute demo to a Fortune 500 CIO, and they could be like, wow, that thing is actually interesting. That doesn't mean they're going to give me money, and it doesn't mean that we've found success yet, but it does mean that they saw a grain of a problem that we have solved in a unique way that you can then wrap the rest of the company around. And I felt like, in using the product, we were starting to see that and experience that.
00:10:29 · Pablo Srugo, Colin Zima
[00:10:29] S2: So let's go back to the beginning now that we found that moment where the inflection point started. You're a VP, you're at Looker for almost eight years, you're a VP product there. You touched on it a little bit, but let's go deeper on it. How do you make the decision to leave and start Omni? [00:10:43] S0: Mine was almost forced in some sense in that, I had started a company before. Actually with one of my co founders here. I hated it the first time. I started a company, I sort of jokingly say that our product was like Jamie and Colin start a company. Which no one needs, and we flailed around for a little bit. We ended up selling the company. I told people I would never do it again for ten years. [00:10:43] S2: What did you hate so much about it? [00:10:43] S0: I just felt like we didn't have an important idea that we needed solving. We wanted to start a company, we didn't want to solve a problem. [00:11:08] S2: Sure. [00:11:09] S0: And the world doesn't need me to start a company. The world needs me to either solve their problem and give me money or they don't need me. [00:11:16] S2: Most of the stories don't end well. Fortunately, you actually end up getting acquired.
00:11:16 · Pablo Srugo, Colin Zima
[00:11:16] S2: Most of the stories don't end well. Fortunately, you actually end up getting acquired. [00:11:20] S0: I mean, acquired, yeah, we sold ourselves, essentially. But Looker got acquired by Google, and it was a great acquisition. It was like $2.7 billion or whatever it was. I had to stick around for two years as part of that and the product was not getting cared for, the customer base was not getting cared for. And kind of over those two years by sitting there. I sort of had enough time to build up the courage to say, hey, I think we have to go do this. I think there's space. We have enough ideas. It's time to go do this and I think if I wasn't sitting around there for a couple of years. I probably wouldn't have tried to go build something different. We had actually tried to build something similar to Omni inside Looker, classic kind of innovator's dilemma. It's hard to rebuild your own product type stuff, but it felt like there was enough of an idea that we could have space to go try to do it if we could find a team to do it with. [00:12:13] S2: It's funny, these spaces, I think of Zoom coming out of Webex, and I think of, in FP&A it happens all the time. Where there's the next gen, every five-ten years there's the next gen. And a lot of times it's people who came from the old thing, they're like, this is all that's wrong with it, let's build the better version. The same BI is a classic example of that. I almost wonder, from the outside, how does that work? Why does that work? So, you know, do you think these guys would figure it out and do it?