Why Omni called itself a BI company in a market trying to forget BI | Colin Zima

<p>Omni builds business intelligence software that puts exploratory analysis and governed dashboards in a single platform. In a recent episode of UNICORN BUILDERS, we sat down with Colin Zima, Co-Founder of Omni, to learn how the company navigated 18 months to real product-market fit, lost all five of their first trials due to bugs they had learned to work around, and built a demand generation channel where founders still run 10 demos a week at 275 employees.</p><p>Topics Discussed:</p><ul><li>How Colin went from being Looker&#39;s fourth customer to employee #40, and what watching that company scale to 1,000 people on the way to the Google acquisition taught him about company building stages</li><li>Why the original startup he started with his co-founder never had product-market fit, and what was different about Omni</li><li>How Omni found message-market fit in roughly three months but took 18 months to find real product-market fit</li><li>Why they lost all five trials at the one-year mark due to bugs they had learned to work around as daily users</li><li>How they won all five deals in the second cohort after two months of product cleanup</li><li>Why Omni hired sales reps before the founders finished proving they could sell</li><li>How the Looker network gave them the ability to skip validating sales-market fit</li><li>Why their third sales rep was in Dublin, with roughly half their early inbound coming from Europe</li><li>How founders doing LinkedIn outreach, with BDRs queuing messages, became a scaled demand channel</li><li>Why Colin still personally answers support tickets and runs 10 demos a week with 275 employees</li><li>How Omni became the pink company from a last-minute t-shirt decision at a Snowflake conference</li><li>Why Colin positions Omni as business intelligence rather than creating a new category like semantic layer</li><li>How Omni operates with only 40 to 50 engineers out of 275 employees</li><li>Why Omni has not hired an in-house lawyer for 275 employees</li></ul>