Colin Zima, co-founder and CEO of Omni, discusses why relying on massive technology platform partnerships rarely generates distribution for early-stage B2B software companies.
“There are gigantic tech partners like Snowflake and Databricks and Google and Amazon. They don't care about you when you're two people or 10 people or whatever.”
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More from Colin Zima
Insight
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.”
Colin ZimaAug 10, 2026▶ 45:35He lost his first 5 deals—built the next Looker, raised $250M | Omni
Opinion
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”
Colin ZimaAug 10, 2026▶ 11:30He lost his first 5 deals—built the next Looker, raised $250M | Omni
Insight
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…”
Colin ZimaAug 10, 2026▶ 17:10He lost his first 5 deals—built the next Looker, raised $250M | Omni
Insight
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…”
Colin ZimaAug 10, 2026▶ 23:34He lost his first 5 deals—built the next Looker, raised $250M | Omni
Insight
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…”
Colin ZimaAug 10, 2026▶ 32:19He lost his first 5 deals—built the next Looker, raised $250M | Omni
Disclosure
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.”
Colin ZimaAug 10, 2026▶ 34:31He lost his first 5 deals—built the next Looker, raised $250M | Omni
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