Colin Zima
Co-Founder & CEO, Omni. On 3 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveoperator@drinkzima ↗LinkedIn ↗omni.co ↗
Colin Zima is the co-founder and CEO of Omni, a business intelligence platform. He previously served as Chief Analytics Officer and VP of Product at Looker through its acquisition by Google.
3shows
3appearances
81statements
5resolved
4supported
1contradicted
80%fully supported
4said about them ↓ Everything Colin Zima said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Zima: Product management is not a craft, but domain expertise and caring
“I don't think PM is a craft at all, which is probably evident from my previous answers about, you know, the process. Like, I think a PM is literally the intersection of caring a lot and then having some domain expertise.”
Zima: Failing to get outbound response rates indicates a product-market fit issue
“If you're not getting response rates, I think it's probably a good indication that like there's a product market fit
Issue at some level, but like, you gotta be able to describe what you're doing also.”
Zima: Rigorous feature prioritization frameworks are a waste of time
“I just, I really think it's hard to come up with a great, like scoring framework for how to pick out the next 10 features, because I found that every single time that we tried to apply some sort of rigorous, like scoring framework to difficulty and reach and Y…”
Zima: Looker deprioritized app crashes for two years to build features
“Whereas like I had to go to the support team over and over again for probably a period of two years and say the app crashing is not a priority right now because I want to do more feature work and we can suffer through this and I know it's bad, but I don't thin…”
Zima: Looker Failed to Adapt to Modern Data Ecosystem Shifts
“Looker was not able to adapt to the changes that its sort of founding and popularization had resulted in.”
Zima: After Google acquisition, Looker's product and customers were neglected
“I had to stick around for two years as part of that, and I could just feel the company, like, and the product was not getting cared for, the customer base was not getting cared for”
Zima: AI BI tools require unconstrained exploration followed by solid foundations
“AI needs to do new things when it answers questions, so you can't constrain it. But as it does those new things, you want to be able to make sense of them, and you want to put foundation underneath it that's solid so that metrics are consistent, so that permis…”
Zima: SaaS buyers purchase development slope and long-term trust, not current features
“People want to both buy you for what the product's doing today, but they're buying you for the slope too. Like they can see your progress and they want to buy that progress also because like the beautiful thing about SAS is we want them to be a customer for th…”
Scaling B2B SaaS Requires Execution Across All Channels Simultaneously
“Everyone hopes that there's just some magical channel that they haven't thought of that when they turn it on, like will inflect the business. What we found that is like the least satisfying, but sort of most obvious conclusion that you could possibly imagine i…”
Zima: Omni Paid Boutique Partners $5,000 Per Customer Implementation
“So we push out all of our services externally. Like we would go pay a partner five K to implement one of our customers. And in turn, they learned about our product and would recommend it.”
Zima: Asking outbound prospects for feedback attracts tire kickers
“Like if you ask for feedback, you will get closer to a tire kicker than anything else, which can be good depending on the stage that you're at.”
Zima: Omni BDRs got 3% response rates while founder outreach reached 90%
“So like when our BDR team was doing this, they were getting like a three percent response rate. So they'd get three responses out of a hundred LinkedIn connects. I might get a 50% connect rate. And on a message, depending on the group, like to the ex looker gr…”
Zima: Looker's 6% spend on support drove 15-20% lift across metrics
“Even post Google, I wrote up a case study that said Google should retain Looker support because this six percent that we spend on support as a percentage of revenue is worth 15 or 20% in terms of, you know, like growth, retention, every kind of metric that we …”
Zima: Side-by-side support training cannot be replicated any other way
“And so it was this like active learning by doing next to each other that I don't think could be replicated in any other way.”
Zima: Looker and Tableau Acquisitions Left a Strategic Void in BI
“Looker and Tableau got acquired within a week of each other. And so again, now this gigantic market that is BI that has existed for the last 40 years has a pretty large sort of strategic hole in terms of there's not a new generational company that exists in BI…”
Zima: Omni refuses to let customer feedback redesign its core product
“We're a sort of pivot list 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, b…”
Zima: Omni lost all five early verbally-committed deals
“And we had five unaffiliated customers that were talking to us that we really thought were going to buy the product. They'd all like verbally committed to us. So for people that are doing sort of like normal outbound sales cycle, we had the tech win. And we th…”
Zima: Omni Was Pitched From Day One to Replace All Other BI Tools
“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 like, get rid of all of…”
Colin Zima: Refusal to pay reveals a product lacks compelling differentiation
“Customers will lie to you and they'll say like, 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 gonna kind of pay you money, they're sort of…”
Zima: Demo validation requires workflow breakthroughs, not cosmetic praise
“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 …”
Zima: Looker's Inflexibility Left Market Room for Next-Gen BI Competitors
“Like we were really good at enterprise BI. We were really inflexible. And it's really hard to take like your core foundational thesis. We are great enterprise BI and data modeling and compromise it at the margin to do these other things well. And so it leaves …”
Zima: WebEx Probably Needed to Delete Entire Tech Stack to Beat Zoom
“Like Zoom WebEx is a great example. They probably needed to delete their whole tech stack. And start over again because the platforms had changed because the market had changed in a significant enough way.”
Zima: Enterprise Incumbents Cannot Rebuild Tech Stacks Due to Customer Edge Features
“It's really hard to do that because you can't just wipe your customer base out. They all have these little features at the edge that they're using. And it's really hard to be like, no, give it a little time. And this whole thing will be better.”
The other half of the tape: Colin Zima's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 2 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Sam Blond 3
Statements about Colin Zima, by other people (1)
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the Official SaaStr Podcast 3
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Colin's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Omni | 1 | 41 | 50% 1/2 | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |
 IN DEPTHLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Omni | 1 | 24 | 100% 1/1 | full record on In Depth → |
| SAASTRLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Omni | 1 | 16 | 100% 2/2 | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |