SaaStr CRO Confidential: Sam Blond + Omni Founder Colin Zima on the Power of Leveraging Your Network

SaaStr fans, welcome to, uh, this week's episode of the CRO Confidential Podcast. I'm your host, Sam Blonde. We have an amazing guest joining us today as we continue the Founder-Led Sales miniseries on the CRO Confidential Podcast. I, I'm ecstatic to introduce Colin Zima. Colin is the founder and CEO of Omni, uh, this incredible BI company that is about a year into its journey. We're going to talk a bunch about Colin, we're going to talk a bunch about Omni, and we're going to talk a bunch about how Omni has acquired so many, uh, customers in, in just a year's time. So, uh, Colin, welcome to the pod, uh, and excited to jump right in with you.

Thanks for having me. Excited.

So before we jump into Omni specifically, the way that I met Colin, I had joined Founders Fund. This is between 6 and 7 months ago now. And Parker, who is my CEO at Zenefits, now the CEO at Rippling, I came to him and said, I'm investing now. Do you know any early-stage companies that I should meet with the founder and take a look at? Without hesitation, he said, "I have one." Parker spends near zero time angel investing and doesn't really angel invest. He was like— He said that, and he was like, "But I did angel invest in this company, and you have to meet Colin from Omni." He introduced the two of us. Again, this was maybe 6 months ago, and I've now gotten to know Colin through several meetings, and we're becoming friends, and I'm really just enjoying getting to know him in this business. That's a little bit of the background on this relationship and the sort of like entry to this, this, this founder in this company that has just like positively reinforced Parker's enthusiasm about both you, Colin, and the business. So again, excited to have you and excited to talk about how you've been so successful at acquiring this set of customers just a year in. Before we jump into that, let's start by getting an understanding of the business. Can you just tell us a little bit about what Omni is?

Yeah, I mean, we're trying to build the next great BI platform. So the big challenge in BI is that you have a lot of different stakeholders. So everyone in the organization wants to use data. You've got very technical data people and you have everyone else in the company. And most tools focus on one group or the other. And we are trying to build a platform that satisfies both. So we're trying to build great technical tools for data teams with governance and sort of all the centralization that a data team wants. But we're also trying to give all the power to the rest of the organization. To build their own analytics, move really quickly, not wait for the data team to do things, and create a really seamless process to actually transfer business logic between those two groups. So let everyone build the things that they need, and still let the data team be happy to take it over.

That makes a lot of sense. And so you're building what Allframe is like the next generation BI company. And you have some experience in this space. So tell us a little bit about your background prior to starting Omni. And I think you started this about a year a year ago. So I did timelines as well.

Yeah. So we, we found— we started the company last March, so we're about a year old. Um, I spent the last 8 years at Looker. So this was a big BI company that got acquired by Google for, I think it was, $2.6 billion. Um, I spent 8 years there, and I was actually one of the first customers there, um, with a company called HotelTonight. So I was a customer, uh, a data person, loved the BI space, ended up at Looker. Um, over my time at Looker, I led customer support and success, product and analytics at different times. Over the life of the business. So I was sort of like the super user/product builder. And, you know, as we got acquired by Google, it sort of was evident that the product was not building in the same way and that the team was excited to go do a lot of the really ambitious things that, you know, we didn't have the opportunity to do anymore. So the founding team at Looker is— or at Omni rather, is two of us from Looker and the CTO came from a company called Stitch that got acquired by Talend, so an ETL services company. And a lot of our team, 19 out of the 20 folks, are from Looker and Stitch. So it's a group of people that have been building. I think we have something like 150 years of BI experience across the 20 people. That's it?

Yeah.

So I mean, it's, it's helped us move pretty quickly. And it's kind of nice to like look back at things that took us, you know, 9 to 12 months to build at Looker that someone goes and bangs out in 2 days. And it's, I mean, I think that was really the core connection to Parker is it's really nice to build something, take all of the learning that you have from that thing and sort of re-rev it and try to build it better. And in some ways it's hard because you have to throw away everything that you just built over the last decade. But in other ways, it sort of like re-unlocks you to do what you actually wanted to do the first time. And that's kind of what's been so exciting is that we're picking up a lot of the core things that we learned, but we're sort of extending them or tweaking them in certain ways and building the right infrastructure under them so that it can be kind of that much better the next time.

That's a great story. We talk about this concept of founder market fit and, you know, couldn't be stronger given your background and the business that you're building. And I really like the analogy that I hadn't thought of before you making it, but the The circumstances were certainly different, but Parker sort of building Zenefits 2.0, which is now Rippling, it was a prior business that he had as much context in the space he was building as anyone in the world, arguably. This is a bit of, again, different circumstances but similar situation where Looker was acquired by Google. You now have the opportunity to build sort of like either Looker 2.0 or next-gen BI, however we want to frame it, given all of the information that you know and the experience that you have. So, uh, that, that's really exciting. And again, like, super strong product-market fit. Uh, okay, so you started this business a year ago. Let's get an understanding before we go on this journey of what has transpired throughout the last now 13+ months. Um, where are you today? So how many, how many paying customers do you have? Uh, how many employees do you have? How many folks in go-to-market do you have? And then we'll sort of like, uh, talk through how you got from, uh, March of 2022 to, um, now about May 1st of 2023.

Yep. We have 20 folks on the dot. It's 16 in product and engineering, so very heavy on the build side. And that was intentional because we were fortunate to be able to raise a good amount of capital actually from two former Looker board members at a pair of VC firms, Bill at First Round and Tom at Redpoint. So we were fortunate to sort of take a big swing and get heavy in product and engineering. We hired I guess our first sales engineer in January, and we have two go-to-market people that started in April, on April 1st. So very young on the dedicated go-to-market side. But again, between those three, between those three folks, I think about 20 to 25 years of experience at Looker. So it's, we're sort of trying to take every shortcut that we can to have people bring in context, because there's this idea that we could bring in sellers And like, my dad was in sales, so I understand that is a transferable skill across industry. But at the same time, if we can take people that have been selling this sort of technical BI tool for the last 10 years and reapply them, we can get them accelerated really, really quickly. Um, so that's what the go-to-market team looks like essentially with me. Um, and so we're, we're pretty lean there. In terms of customers, we have less than 10 paying customers, but we have about 50 people using the product. So the, the balance that we're trying to strike is that in some ways it's kind of easy to give away a product, but you're not necessarily learning whether you're getting valued the right way by your customer. And so one of the things that we wanted to test almost uncomfortably early is when we can actually start charging a real price for the product. And so like, honestly, we started having conversations about pricing before we even had dashboards built in the tool. And part of this is like, we're trying to stress test what is a BI tool. And I was sort of hopeful that we could— a BI tool could be something that could let anyone query a database. And in many ways, asking for money helped us learn about what we needed to be in order to charge money and sort of what we needed to be to be a true replacement for other products that people were looking at. Um, so we, we started, uh, we started quoting people, I think, in February. Um, and so we, we have started closing business, which has been nice. But the way I would frame it is that the thing that we're trying to do now is not gather revenue as quickly as possible. We're trying to get people committed to work in the platform and live in the platform. And financial incentives are a good driver of that. Uh, like, a company that's paying us $25,000 a year is more committed to working with us than someone that, you know, downloads it on their desktop and uses it for a couple of minutes. So it's like it's kind of all woven together in terms of what we're trying to test as a company.

That's right. They have skin in the game. They're paying you $25,000, have, you know, in a weird way, an incentive to take advantage of the product that you're providing them because they're paying for it. Yeah. So many interesting insights. There were, there were two that I really latched on to as you were just sort of like describing where you are today. The first is the urgency with which your business is operating. So this is a complicated, uh, technology product. This is complicated software. It is business intelligence, and it is completing— it is competing against incumbents with many, many years of developing technology. Uh, and in 12 months you have 50 people on— 13 months, uh, everyone to frame it. Uh, you have 50 companies that are on the product. You have, um, a little less than 10 that are paying for the product. You have 3 people in go-to-market. You have 20 people, uh, that are now at the company. That is fast-paced, um, and you are really accelerating the time to, uh, uh, success in, in building this business. And, you know, I certainly applaud you and excite— and, and am excited, um, to see that type of urgency and progress. The second thing that stands out, and we may talk about this both on the employee side and on the customer acquisition side, but you've said this now 2 times, um, I think 19 of the 20 people are former Looker employees, or such.

Yeah.

And 3 out of 3 go-to-market people are former Looker employees. Um, and so you are, uh, leveraging your network Uh, maybe in a, in a, um, more sophisticated way or more effective way than I've ever heard of. That's like, that's, you know, 95% of the company. Um, and, and so like, you're probably doing that both on the, uh, hiring side and then also on the customer acquisition side. And that's something that like I can't preach enough in many different, um, framings, one of which is like the hiring side. When you're ready to hire your first AE, leverage your network, whether it's former colleagues, friends, investors. Um, like, you You know, don't gravitate towards putting a job posting on your website and seeing who sort of like comes in. And kind of the same thing is true on the customer acquisition side, which of course we are going to get to. Okay, so just a bit of a recap of the things that stood out for me. Let's now go back to sort of like when you start the business. A little over a year ago, you have almost 10 paying customers. We talked about the urgency and progress in such a short amount of time. When were the first interactions that you had with potential customers? And what were those interactions?

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of funny because I think again, because of that network, just announcing that we were building a BI company, we had people inbounding us last April, May. And this was people like we had, you know, a little bit of code written, but it was, it was more an idea than a product at that point in time. And we were talking to people that were theoretical customers. Like I remember having a conversation literally last May, and they were like, we're buying a BI tool right now. Can I, can I take a look at what you have? And we had to sort of be like, well, we don't have anything yet. So you're gonna have to hold for a second. So I mean, we got to talk to people very, very early, I'd say in earnest when we announced our A is when we had a really be kind of a much larger set of pipeline that come through. But a lot of what we've been doing is just sort of talking about what we're building on, especially LinkedIn. Um, and naturally our network connects to ex-Looker employees, ex-Looker customers, or current Looker customers. And so in many ways, we were sort of trying to inject ourselves into the conversation before we were ready. But get the sort of idea that we're building sort of the next great thing. Um, and so some combination of this sort of like, we're here and we're interesting and we know what we're doing in the space with these little sort of tidbits of product that we're building. And then honestly, a lot of it was working through our network in a one-to-one way. So, uh, ex-Looker employees that became, you know, the CEOs of companies have been really effective to, you know, pick up the phone. And this is the advantage of like the, the second-time sort of like experienced founder is that you can pick up the phone and ask your friend to use the product. And it's having a real friend be able to do that. You're going to also be able to ask them for money because they're running a business too and they want the business to be successful, but they're going to transparently tell you whether the product is ready or not. They'll say like, hey, this is, this is awesome, uh, but it's not a product yet, so I'm not going to give you money. Or they'll say like, oh my God, this is the thing. Like, how can I start paying you so that everyone can use this? And we started doing that very, very early because, you know, like if you have a warm connection, you can hand them the product and get real feedback. Like they are our ICP user. They are exactly the person that we want to use the product. But we also know that they can give us transparent feedback and We can actually learn from it. They'll work with us because we have that trust. So I mean, like, we were really out essentially as soon as we could reasonably declare that we had anything that was useful for people. And I think what we found is that it wasn't useful enough. So like, when Looker was founded, actually, we didn't have dashboards for 2 years. I wasn't there at the time, but I was a customer. And it was really just this SQL compiler. You built the model literally in the command line. And you deployed it out and it wrote SQL for you and you couldn't actually put more than one visualization on a dashboard. And so my hope was like, great, Omni will go the same route and we'll build this like really awesome SQL compiler, like very technical power user tool. And users in the market told us that's not good enough now. Like you need dashboards and I need a BI product. And so that led us to retrench and say, okay, let's set some timelines for when we think we can have a v0 of this dashboard BI product. And that was sort of January 1st, and we sort of sprinted at that, and then we got the dashboards out by December, uh, December 1st, and then we could have people that were actually living in the product kind of on a full-time basis. And so I think getting out there early helped us learn about, uh, sort of what the product needed to be, but sort of the interesting refinement that I would say is that we weren't out there asking customers to tell us what the product should be. I think this was a case where we— I kind of have said this literally since last March, but we're a sort of pivotless company. Like, we know exactly what we are building, and the execution at the edges is very open to interpretation. Like, I want to learn about my workflows and understand that people are using them the way that I really want them to, but we're not asking them to sort of redesign the product for us. So it was sort of this smash our idea into the market and figure out at the margin the things that we're getting right and the things we're getting wrong.

You've just reinforced one important takeaway that may or may not be obvious, but definitely worth reinforcing, that Howard last week on the podcast talked about. You probably haven't listened to that one, and so you— Not yet.

Fanatical rum user though, by the way.

Yeah, you introduced me. Um, so, uh, spend a lot of time with customers, uh, from almost day one. Uh, you started the company in March, customer interaction started in April. And, um, use that time to understand, uh, some customer challenges, customer problems, um, and what, what sort of good looks like, uh, potentially from a customer's perspective. But do not use that time to have the customers design the product for you, because the solutions that they will come up with are limited to the information that they have. Like, that is sort of like your job as a founder and product leader to design those solutions. Um, and then along this, this company journey, um, there was a period of time at Brex where, uh, our founders, um, spent less time customer-facing and then very quickly realized that, uh, that was a mistake. And I've talked a couple times on this podcast about, uh, Enrique having just his calendar full of customer calls as we were exploring developing this new product called Empower. And so my takeaway from, uh, many of these different conversations is spend, um, a large amount of your time as a founder customer-facing and never change that. Um, that is like high ROI, valuable time spent, and the, the company will benefit from that. Um, one thing I want to be sensitive to is is, uh, not everyone who is starting a company is going to be the former head of product at a company that was acquired for billions of dollars and have the sort of like network advantages that we've talked about on this call. That said, you should just take advantage— like, that's not the takeaway. The takeaway isn't, you know, um, hire 19 people from the former company that you led product at. The takeaway for me is really like just take stock of your personal and specific environment and leverage whatever resources you do have available to you. And that could be investors, that could be if you've done YC, leverage YC and their network, that can be your sort of like personal or social network, that can be where you went to school. Maybe you were, you know, in computer science at a really amazing university and had classmates that have gone on to— again, it's going to be different for everyone. But Colin, you very easily could have been, you know, at have 10 employees and have one of them be from Looker, but you have sort of deliberately taken advantage of the resources that are available to you. And so I think that's the primary takeaway. And again, like not everybody has the background or advantages that you may have, but everybody does have their own situation that they can leverage.

Yep.

And then one thing that I heard, the last takeaway is around, Social media, you talked about these LinkedIn posts. I, I've seen your LinkedIn posts. I engage with them regularly. It's free, um, and you, you can, um, you're building in a space that you know arguably better than anyone else, anyone else, and you are posting about it and you are becoming a thought leader in that space. And again, um, it is free outside of the time that you dedicate, uh, to doing that. And so, um, it sounds like that is paying dividends and potentially a takeaway for, uh, others.

It is. And what I would add there is I think I'm an example of one of those people that is like a very uncomfortable thought leader. Like, I even just sort of hate the idea of putting out the content. I would imagine that you experience this also.

I was just— you and me both is what's going through my mind right now.

And your stuff is great though. But I think the interesting point is that when you start doing it in sort of your own way, so like, Bringing actual authenticity. I feel like I'm a social media advisor right now, but you just have to be yourself on these things. I had a really, really hard time writing blog posts because I just can't write 10 pages of long form. And I really like conversations and I really like 3-paragraph quick thoughts because we have a lot of those and we tested a lot of different places. I'm not cool enough and quippy enough for Twitter. And our stuff hasn't done as well there. And on LinkedIn, it's done quite well with this sort of, you know, half a screen text that, you know, tells a story or a point of view and is a little bit argumentative. Um, and so like, I think just testing these things, like getting over that sort of leap, um, has been really effective. And then the other thing is it builds like crazy. Um, like doing one in isolation does a little bit, but as you write more and more, it gets— it both gets easier to write, but also you start building this audience of people. Um, and it's kind of funny because I sort of built it targeting like people, first-degree connections, and now I get approached and a lot of people are like, oh, I see your stuff, it's, it's interesting. And, and they're not my buyer necessarily, but the name is getting out there and our, our ideas are getting in front of these people. and we're sort of starting to— it's just this way to get projection into the market. So it's been really effective for us. Obviously we need to find more channels, but we've been sort of surprised at how effective it's been. And then the other kind of interesting thing is finding the other networks for your industry. So like for us, dbt is this open source project where people write SQL transformation. They have a very active Slack. Following what people are doing in there, and sort of just understanding who exists in the community and things like that has been another place that we've sort of learned a ton from just, you know, participating in it and just sort of being out there, but like, testing as much as possible.

Awesome. So you have just through sort of like trial and error on social media, you have come to a place where you have an effective social media sort of like strategy or program that is in place. You didn't know what it was going to be on day one, but you got there. And so like takeaways would be throw some stuff up against the wall, see what starts getting some traction, uh, invest more in that. You know, this is something that both you and Howard spend time on, and I do as well as you.

Yeah, you do too.

Um, and, uh, it has worked for us. And so again, it's hard to say specifically what will work for, you know, um, all of the audience. If we knew, there would be sort of like a playbook on how to do this, but use your own voice, find what works for you, and eventually you'll sort of like get to something that has an impact. Okay, so you're doing, you start the company, you start doing some social media, you have some customers that are reaching out. Did you have commitments from customers before the product was ready for them? This concept of like design customers, and if yes, how did you source and close those design customers?

Yeah, I mean, I'd say we did and still do. And I think to go back to sort of the previous conversation, it's this confluence between we're trying to be a valuable product in the market. So there's a lot of stuff out there that sells for $100 a month. There's other stuff like Looker that on the high end can go like $250,000 or $500,000 annually. And sort of we wanted to say like, we want to have a sales-driven model. So we want to be at, you know, $25,000 a year ACVs, at least for now. And so a lot of these conversations were with that sort of warm social network, which is like, hey, we want to sell for $25K, what does the product need to look like to do that? Or like, what do we need to do to replace your BI tool? And I would say to your point, like it was not spec-driven development, it wasn't like, I need these 10 features to buy the product. But it was sort of, I love what your core looks like. And again, we had this forward deploy trial where we let people touch and feel the product. But we tried to find people that, that got it and wanted to use the product and loved it. And then we really tried to sort of poke at like, what is keeping you from living on this platform? Like, what are the handful of things that are missing for you? And do those align with the things that we want to build? So one of our customers, for example, uses a fiscal calendar and we did not have fiscal calendar support. That's something that we could go bang out in a day and now they can do all their fiscal reporting through the product. And so it was sort of like that reconciliation that we were trying to figure out. And so it was like this balance of testing the product and, and, you know, finding the gaps. And then also just understanding who we needed to talk to, what the messaging needed to be. So I've probably done 150 demos at this point. And over time, we got to sort of the messaging that makes sense in different tiers of the market. So it was also like messaging market fit testing. Um, and the kind of who are these people? Uh, they kind of came in 3 buckets. So one was people that we knew very well and essentially demanded that we knew that we demanded that they use the product. So these are like friends, investors, you know, like anyone that will pick up the phone and talk to us. Ex-Looker employees have been like a super fruitful ground for this, but people that will pick up the phone and talk to us and essentially we are forcing them to use the product and reconciling that against buying it. There's like warm, uh, sort of like second degree. So sort of like this light outbound that's sort of like, hey, uh, this could be interesting, give it a look. And then a third of them, we don't really know where they're coming from, but it appears a lot of it is sort of social, um, and sort of like rumor. Um, and it actually has been an interesting to see the mix between those, because each person comes with a very different point of view on what they expect in the product. And so while I can get friends to use the product, they might understand Looker a certain way and sort of reflect that in Omni, where the sort of cold lead might understand it in a very different way. So it's been helpful to help us sort of understand where to develop and sort of how to build. But kind of like my answer is, and I don't even know if this is good, Anyone that will talk to us, I'm trying to drive into a trial to get feedback. And it's really like I'm trying to frame, this is going to cost you money. I still want you to use it. Give me as much feedback as you can and we'll make the economics work if I create enough value for you.

And how did you— you mentioned— well, I'll just finish the thought. How did you determine the right time to get people actually in and deploying the product itself. So you're developing the product, day one the product doesn't exist, so definitely can't— people can't be using it.

Yep.

There's this sort of like journey that you go on of building the product, and how do you decide, okay, now we're ready to actually get people using and testing this? And then continuing along that, um, uh, path, how then do you decide, okay, now the product is actually ready to have people pay us for it? They're like milestones, just any, any way that you approach it.

Yeah, I mean, the way I would describe it. And again, this is like my benefit from having been in this market is I am, I was and continue to be sort of our most important user. So I, it's not uncommon for me to use the product like 3 or 4 hours a day in like pockets of our usage. And a lot of it was just taste like this is good enough or it's not quite there yet. And so like, if you are using your own product a lot, and you have a vision for what it should be. I mean, this is again, like, our advantage is that we've used all the products in the space and we've been building Looker for the last 10 years. So like, I know what great BI looks and feels like, and I know what differentiation looks and feels like. And so a lot of it was just sort of like, the product wasn't quite there, really interesting pieces, really interesting pieces. And then it was like, oh, here's a couple workflows that are differentiated and unique and really good. And the stuff over there is still really rusty and like needs a lot of thought, but like there's one really interesting happy path that a user can go down and get a lot of value. And that was sort of the moment that I said, I can start giving this to people. I think there, there then reaches a point where there's a bucket of differentiation and a bucket of weakness and sort of the differentiation inflects over the weakness where like now this is sort of interesting enough that If I'm at— if I'm honestly in the market buying my own tool, this is the tool I'm going to choose. And obviously I'm biased and it's like being built for a lot of the very specific things I care about. But I think once that happened, it was sort of like, okay, we're ready to go. And again, continue to get the feedback from people and sort of feed it back in. So like we've had to retrench a couple of times where we thought it was more ready than it was. Like the dashboard is a great example. And people were just like, no, it's not ready. Like it needs that. And then you sort of unlock that next gate, which is like, now it's great if I don't have a BI tool, but if I'm coming from Looker, I need these 3 things. They're really important to me. And it's like, okay, great. Let's knock out those 3 things. So we unblock that piece. Um, it's like aligned to the vision and then like we're up to the next stage of competition, sort of.

Awesome. So You've now for the second time reinforced something that Howard said last week, which is I and we within Roam, and now for you Omni, are power users of our product. And when we were happy with the user experience that we had personally, we knew that we could put external folks on the product itself. And so, you know, we now have an N of 2 and a pretty solid 2 there. Okay. And then continuing Continuing along to charging, um, it's, it's a combination of delivering value. So once, once we were delivering value to the customer, and you know, this is a competitive space, so delivering value and in a differentiated way compared to what exists in the marketplace to sort of justify saying give us money, not them money. And as soon as you're able to do that start charging. Um, I, uh, that was like my interpretation. You didn't say it that explicitly. No, that's exactly sort of like the way that Howard thought about it as well, which was like, you know, um, the signal that you can receive by offering your product for free for too long is really, really negative. Um, and this is enterprise software. Companies can afford products, and so you should charge as soon as you possibly can.

I— yes, I think that's exactly right. And I think to your point, I think there might be a difference between entering a really competitive space and sort of building a new market. And building a new market seems very hard, but like for BI, there's just a budget. Like they're ready to spend $25,000. Every company above a certain size is spending $25,000 a year on BI. And it's sort of a question that's like, can that be our $25,000? And so our advantage is like this obvious market. Our disadvantage is it's a very competitive market. And so that is the sort of balance that, that is like the hypothesis that we're trying to test. Like Howard, his, he's kind of in this sort of half space where he's doing some net new things. He's sort of replacing tools, but sort of complementing them. So like there's a little bit of a different calculus there, but I think it always just comes back to like, is it doing something great? And do people love it? Um, and like when you combine that with a business model, like like, that is when you have greatness. So it's like, I can decide when the product is great, and we know what the business model can look like. So let's just smash those together.

Awesome. Um, the advice I always provide to folks is, assuming you're doing sales-led growth, you want to have a few paying customers before you hire dedicated salespeople. And so it sounds like I think the timing was that around February you said you started providing quotes to customers and charging for your product, and you hired your first dedicated salespeople in April. Um, and so, uh, I, I like— you, you have now paid your first set of paying customers, you decide to hire your first couple salespeople. What are the sort of like demand gen channels that you're leveraging at this point in time, which is few paying customers. You mentioned it's not the top priority in the business, but I suspect that you do want more paying customers.

Yep.

So what are the sort of like areas that you're pouring gasoline onto?

Yeah, so we're really just starting to fire up our outbound motion. Just because, like, in thinking about, you know, this first 50, and the ones that look like our ideal customer, like the ones that get it, the ones that are using the product the way that we like, I think that we're trying to see like, how do we find more of those? Because they have like this very specific look. And so that is the motion that we're firing up right now to go get in front of people whose BI stack looks a certain way. So like small Looker customers is a great example. Um, get in front of them and start talking more about what our product does and how it's better. Um, so that's, that's one. I think we're very much trying to figure out how to scale social much better, like how we write more and how we put out more content. Like, again, I started this year, I'm trying to put out a post a week. And honestly, that is producing a decent enough amount of pipeline for us for now. So it's sort of like, how do we get a little bit more scale in that? And one example is like, I find it really easy to have conversations with people, but we need to turn that into text and put it up on the internet. So it's like, can we record thoughts, bundle it up? I don't know, like pass it through ChatGPT so that it turns into better writing or something. But we're, I mean, we're playing with a bunch of different ideas on the content side. But that's an area that we're working on right now.

There's no bigger proponent of outbound than me. I'm like constantly preaching it, whether it be through posts or founders that I meet with. But one thing that does come to mind, and I'll relate it back to, back to Brex and also talk a little bit about how you're doing this at Omni. Um, before we launched at Brex, we were in, uh, sort of like closed beta, but we were outbounding to companies that we wanted to put on the product in this closed beta. And Brex didn't have a website. Um, everybody's, uh, LinkedIn said stealth. Um, and so you can imagine if you're like a, uh, startup and you receive an email from this company that people don't even have a LinkedIn, uh, that they work at the company and the company doesn't even have a website. Um, you can imagine your, like, probability of replying to this company and giving them all your sensitive financial information. And so the areas that we were outbound to were companies that knew who we were. It was mostly YC, um, because, like, Pedro Enrique were in YC, uh, we could leverage their batch and, and say, like, you know, your batchmates Pedro Enrique. We could also leverage previous batches and say like, you know, we were in this YC class. And many of those folks, you know, they go to Demo Day and those sorts of things. Um, and, uh, I'll give some other examples and then I'll get to the point. Um, when we launched, we put billboards up all over San Francisco the day that we launched. We did a big PR campaign around, uh, fundraising and launching the product. We sponsored a bunch of podcasts We did all of these things like the, the very day that we launched, actually. Um, and when we would email, uh, the, the companies that we were outbounding to, the likelihood that they would have heard of us was quite high, actually. We were deliberate about emailing folks in San Francisco that maybe had seen our billboards, maybe had read, uh, the articles about the fundraising, all the social media posts. And for you, um, you are leveraging social media, and it sounds like LinkedIn, becoming a bit of a thought leader in this BI space that presumably the buyers of your product have a bit of, um, sort of like up-to-date information on the happenings in the space. And so I imagine that your response rates to your outbound are higher in someone who knows Colin, has seen Colin's posts. And so, um, for those of you that are listening and leveraging outbound, which again I couldn't be a bigger proponent of, have in mind that some, um, like brand tailwinds around, uh, people knowing who you are and concentrating in areas that the folks that you are outbound to may have heard of your business will increase the probability of outbound being successful exponentially. And I don't know if you're doing that deliberately or coincidentally, Colin, but it's likely happening for you.

Oh, we're— I mean, we're definitely targeting second degrees as much as we possibly can. And like the Looker connection, we can kind of always talk to a former or current Looker user. As a first-degree connection, because we just have so much experience with that group of people. So, you know, like, we are definitely trying to lean into that as much as we possibly can.

Makes sense. And then you have 2 sales reps, 3 folks in go-to-market, you're doing some selling and outbound and social media posts. How are you thinking about success as it relates to go-to-market today? Do you have monthly revenue targets? Do you have lead targets? What are, what are the things that you're thinking about from a customer acquisition standpoint at this stage where customer acquisition is important but not the priority, as you framed earlier?

We don't have lead targets, we have meeting targets, and we have deal targets. Um, that said, I'm trying to be rational about the ramp time, even for really experienced, uh, kind of new reps. But, you know, like with 2 reps, we need to close a certain number of deals a month and close a certain number of deals a month. We need a certain number of meetings. And these are things that we can pressure test pretty easily. So it's like by steady state, we want to get to 5 deals a month and probably the 20 to 25 meetings it takes to get those 5 deals. And like, I hope it's fewer meetings and more, more closed deals. But like, we have a vague financial model. I actually just wrote a post about it. Bit where I sort of open sourced our kind of first planning doc. But we have a basic model for how we think it should work and can work. And now it's just sort of like, again, colliding reality with what we hope can happen. Like if we get 25 meetings, can we really confidently get 5 or ideally, you know, like 12 deals out of it? That is the sort of test that we are running right now.

Makes a lot of sense. Okay. Um, and then you've now been at this, uh, for a number of years at a number of different companies. I guess just big picture, um, it's sort of like the, the stage that you're at today, maybe a little bit beyond, what are the most effective acquisition channels you've used? Uh, it sounds like social media and outbound are two of them that are, that are being effective at Omni. Um, any sort of like stories there that the audience can learn from and try for their businesses? And then, yeah, Sort of like the inverse of that question as well. What are some things that you've tried and failed?

Yeah, I mean, I, I think that this is again going to sound obvious, but like fanatically happy customers are your best acquisition channel. Um, like the interesting thing with Looker that I remember, and I was a customer, is I was selling it to other people before I joined Looker. And it's the same with Roam now. Like every single person I talk to that says they're a remote company I say, go look at Roam. Like, you have to look at Roam. I love it. You should use it. And that is free and it's authentic. And there is no better version of an inbound lead than that. Like, I have a great example, which is we did a demo to a company in Finland. And ultimately they wanted a BI product that was $100 a month. And we said, that's not— that wouldn't make sense for us. Like, we'll come back and talk to you in a year when I think you're a little bit more mature and you'll want us. They referred us to a 7,000-person company in Finland that is having a conversation with us, and their feedback was like, the product looks amazing, it's a little too expensive for us, like we're not quite ready for it yet. There is no better version of leads than that. Um, like your customers can tell stories better than you can. Uh, like customer-driven outbound is better than your internal outbound if you can do it. So make customers like not like your product, but like obsessively love and market your product on your behalf. The difference— this is— I hate NPS, but the difference between a 7 and a 10 for what you're— the way that your customer explains the product to other people is significantly different. In terms of what doesn't—

let's pause there, because I think it's such an important point that we actually haven't touched on. That is this like additional to— we've talked about social media, we've talked about outbound, Um, we have not talked about leveraging, uh, customers or sort of like raving fans of your product. And one thing that, um, I wonder if you've been deliberate about, and, uh, I recommend to be deliberate about, is some sort of a strategy there, like something that is formalized around, um, just thinking about, okay, we know who the customers are that love us. And what is sort of like a program or incentive that we can put in place to drive the behavior that you just described, which generates additional demand for us? Like, you know, talking about our product to people that may be looking for something in the space, but it also makes winning deals easier if you develop this reputation of a product that people love and they sort of like heard about you, whether or not it's a priority today, it may be a priority a year from now, 2 years from now. And so just like getting as much sort of like buzz and excitement about the product from these raving fans, happy customers, however you want to frame it. Have you thought about formalizing something to take advantage of that? And for those listening, like it might be something interesting for you to do.

We haven't yet. It took us a very long time to do that at Looker. And I'll say, like, if you have a more PLG motion it's, it's probably much easier to create like that right type of incentive. We haven't done it yet. I would say the framing for how I think about it is what we have done is try to have obsessively amazing customer support. So like literally every ticket pushes to my phone. And when I say ticket, it's like we open up a Slack room with every customer. Every message in any customer Slack channel pushes to my phone. So I will jump on the phone at midnight and start helping someone debug and run to my computer and go fix the problem that they have or try to help them work through it. So I think we are still in the stage of create the tens, but I think it is a good thought that we should, we, we should figure out how to then turn those people into referrals. And like in some ways, that is the brand halo too, is like, I want those people liking my things on LinkedIn because that gets projection and all these things do feed each other. But it's a, it's a good thought of how you actually create like a more direct incentive to do that.

Well, maybe an interesting takeaway actually for those that are listening is less on the, on the customer generating side, but for folks that do love using a product like Omni and Colin just mentioned it, sort of like being a proponent of that product, interacting with their social media, those things are valuable to the business. And so for those listening, for the types of products that you do love and people that you have relationships with, I'm sure those, those types of interactions and conversations where you're promoting the product are much appreciated. Taking like a little bit of the opposite approach here, which is like, you know, being a consumer of the product versus a seller of the product. Okay. You were starting down the path of anything that hasn't worked.

Yeah, that hasn't worked. I mean, I'm trying to think back to our previous life. I mean, I think what hasn't worked for me, for example, is just like banging out blog posts, for example, like doing the type of marketing that I'm not great at is sort of the answer. So like being cool on the internet is, is not something that I am great at. And I think it's one of those things that's been harder for us to market. It's like, the real example is Twitter has been really, really bad for us. I don't know why. Maybe it's because I'm not paying for Blue. And I need to, you know, up my, up my game over there.

It's expensive out there.

But it's been weak for us. I mean, I think I've seen the content strategy work great and not work great. So Stitch which Chris is our third co-founder's company. They did an amazing job of just putting out a lot of microsites and really being amazing at the SEO game. I think that's an example of something that you need to invest really hard in if you want to do it well. Like, you can't take half steps into content. You're either like producing great content or you're sort of like the 50% gets you 10% of the yield, whereas like the 90% gets you the 90% of the yield. I think it's just using each of the channels right.

Yeah, you had to think about it for a moment, but I think the takeaway is actually a really important one, which is, um, uh, sort of like what hasn't worked for you is when you have tried to force something that has worked for others but is inauthentic for you or your company. Um, and so like, you know, don't be afraid to try and test things, and also don't be afraid to abandon something and if it's not you, um, and leverage the things that are working and are sort of more organic. Um, ending on anything else that you think is, uh, important to talk about? Lots of founders in the audience, lots of, uh, sales leaders in the audience, uh, that might be building companies.

Yeah, I mean, I— we sort of touched on it the whole time, but like the way I explain it to other young companies that I talk to is kind of like try to use your own cheat codes. Like everybody has a different cheat code to be successful. And lean into the ones that you have. So like mine was a lot of this Looker network and the sort of second-degree version of that. That's what we've leaned into. If you have a different thing that you're amazing at, like lean into that because that is your core differentiation. And like, don't be afraid to do a lot of one-to-one stuff. Like I've been really surprised at what sending a nice note to a person that I'm not super close with, but I think I can actually add value to, does for people. Like, I, in some ways, what I really mean is like, believe in selling as a value add as a founder, which sometimes is hard. Like, you think of selling as this sort of like, I'm trying to convince people that don't need a thing to buy it. And I think when you invert it to selling as trying to get things that solve problems for people in front of them more efficiently, then you really sort of pivot your mindset to like, I'm trying to help people. People. Like, I truly believe that I'm trying to give people better data analytics. I'm not trying to sell them my product. I'm trying to give them a better version of the future. And it's like, I think just that tweak in mentality helps a lot.

I can't think of a higher note to end on. Um, and so that's what we will do. Colin, uh, thank you so much for joining. This was a blast and so many interesting takeaways for me personally, and hopefully Hopefully for everyone that's listening out there, um, thank you all for being here. We'll be back soon with another episode. Uh, Colin, again, thank you, and take care everyone that's listening. Bye-bye.

Thanks.