What if you could make everything within your business searchable? In this episode with Marin Smiljanic founder of Omnisearch we learn how he took the lessons learned from working at Amazon, a previous attempt at creating a startup to build a new category of search company.
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Episode Transcript
Matthew Todd
Hi. My name is Matthew Todd and welcome to Inside the ScaleUp. This is the podcast for founders executives in tech, looking to make an impact and learn from their peers within the tech business, we lift the lid on tech businesses, interview leaders and following their journey from startup to scale up and beyond covering everything from developing product market fit, funding and fundraising models to value proposition structure and growth marketing. We learn from their journey so that you can understand how they really work, the failures, the successes, the lessons along the way, so that you can take their learnings and apply them within your own startup or scale up and join the ever growing list of high growth UK SaaS businesses.
Hey, and welcome back to the podcast really pleased today to be joined by Marin Smiljanic, and founder and CEO of Omnisearch. Morin, good to have you here.
Marin Smiljanic
Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Matthew, for having me. Great to be here.
Matthew Todd
No, no worries at all. Looking forward to the conversation today. Obviously, we’ve talked a little bit about your background before we started recording. And yeah, I’ve got lots of questions I know, I want to ask and find out more about and I’m sure our audience will like to hear more about your story as well. So let’s kick things off if we can, while you’re giving a little bit of an intro about yourself and your your backgrounds.
Marin Smiljanic
Yeah, totally. So my name is Marin. I’m a software engineer, originally from Croatia. And now that I think about it, actually, it seems like I’ve been in software engineering or some form of programming since my early days of high school, which would make it about 15 years now. More or less, give or take. And I first got into it, through, you know, my math skills, I suppose, were I in back in Croatia, I went to a very, a really, really great high school that was focused on programming and mathematics. And so that is actually how I first got into programming. I started doing programming competitions, doing hard algorithmic problems. And that is how I how I got into the whole thing. I really, really loved it.
And so after, after high school, the coolest thing that I did was sort of started moving a little bit more towards industry and doing what you would call a real life software engineering. What really helped here also was that my dad had his own software company. So actually, you know, most of the nuts and bolts I could gather from from just listening to him and watching him work.
Matthew Todd
Yeah.
Marin Smiljanic
I also very, for a brief amount of time, even even worked at his company for a couple of months during my very, very early college days. So I would say, you know, my first serious foray into what you would call, really, the big tech companies came during my, I believe, third year of college, when I interned for the company that is nowadays known as meta. And this was in Menlo Park in Silicon Valley.
So the thing there was that, given given the configuration of people around that time in Croatia, people who were very, very successful in algorithms and math in competitions, there were a lot of us that just sort of wanted to go there and get some experience in the valley. And the skill set that we had. And the knowledge that we had was, among other things, very good for passing interviews. So a whole lot of us just applied there and got got accepted.
So that was really a huge boost, I would say to my confidence of being able to really participate in the biggest companies in the world. So there I worked on site integrity, spam filters and stuff of that sort. But then I decided that I preferred that I would prefer trying to start up after after that internship was done. And so I landed at a company that’s called mem SQL. And they were at the forefront of developing new database technology. In particular, what they were doing is doing SQL databases in memory. So that they were really, really cutting edge at that point. So I did an internship there. And that was also my first job straight out of college, where I worked for about a year.
So after that, I again, moved, moved to big tech. I moved to Amazon, and there I stayed for about three years. Okay. Yeah. Two main two main teams that I covered were s3, which was a part of AWS and which was actually like one of the big the biggest distributed systems in the world, because that even publicly it said that it stores trillions and trillions of objects. And if it goes down, then you know, roughly speaking, you can see images on the internet.
Matthew Todd
Yeah.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, pretty much.
Marin Smiljanic
Pretty much. So, so that was a huge, huge, huge deal. And, you know, my team there worked on actual scalability issues. So that was a huge, huge school when it comes to distributed systems and systems programming in particular. Yeah, after that, I was on the Alexa team where we shipped the email integration so that you could say, Alexa, check My emails, you know, privacy privacy things notwithstanding, this was actually a pretty, pretty cool feature. And it gave me a more product centric view of what happens in companies. That’s, that’s the gist of my pre startup career.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. So it was that Amazon experience then being involved on Alexa, which obviously, you know, relatively new technology then, was that kind of startup esque in nature, what was that like?
Marin Smiljanic
That was fairly startup esque in nature, because as compared to most of the other teams at Amazon, and also what other other big tech companies, this one was actually shipping something new. So that means there was less maintenance work, less operational load, less, you know, customer tickets, but there was more actual crunching and making sure that you that you need to, you know, hit the deadlines that, you know, the senior executives have committed to, you know, if you’ve got a senior vice president who’s talking to the press at date XYZ, then you got to make sure you ship by data XYZ. So in that sense, it was really great. It was a very different view from from the SRE team.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, yeah. So in that experience, that what was it that led you to wanting to start your own thing?
Marin Smiljanic
I think that I felt that, that my trajectory of learning was kind of flattening out somewhat. And so it was, it was either, you know, I’d start looking for other challenges within Amazon, or I would go go on and start a startup.
I think more broadly speaking, I’ve I’ve been wanting to start a startup for a long time. That’s always been my end game. And so now the question was what I give it a couple more years and Amazon, or would I would I take the leap then in there, and I thought that I had a great idea. And so I had also, you know, been fairly frugal and put a lot of money on the side. So I was okay, you know, not not having a job for a while I got things off the ground.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. And so what was the startup idea that you then tried to get off the ground at that point?
Marin Smiljanic
Yeah. So the first my first startup idea was actually a machine learning powered news aggregator app. And this is actually, if you if you follow it, all the the tech scene in China. So they actually have a very dominant one called Toutiao. And so that one is actually made by the same company that later on, went on to build tic toc build or buy what however you take it.
Matthew Todd
Yeah.
Marin Smiljanic
So that’s a huge one. And I got inspired and said, okay, this could be really big. Problem is, of course, you know, this was this was a bit too late to the market. And so the market was already flooded by, you know, a whole lot of other news aggregators, you had Google News. And then also, if you think about it, people in in the West, as opposed to China do consume a lot of their news from Facebook and Twitter, so that that didn’t really fly as well as I had intended it to.
That being said, from an engineering standpoint, it was a truly amazing thing to build. You know, I had really good crawlers. We had really good mobile apps, I was working with an amazing mobile developer. And the product itself was sleek, it was beautiful. It was fast to market, it’s just that it was in a crowded market.
Matthew Todd
I see. And how long did it take you to realize that?
Marin Smiljanic
To realize that it was in a crowded market?
Matthew Todd
Yeah.
Marin Smiljanic
I think it took me about probably a bit more than a year, year in 10 months, maybe.
Matthew Todd
So you gave it a decent amount of time to try it, but just weren’t seeing seeing it take off?
Marin Smiljanic
Yeah, exactly. I was, like I said, I wasn’t, I’m not inclined to pivot too fast. I’m not inclined to launch something, give it three months and then pivot it. Because, you know, after you invest something and build some IP, there’s always options to reuse that and to build something else on top of that. So you know, doing a hard pivot is an expensive thing. So I always prefer to give it more time before before, you know, going into something completely different.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I see. So what remains of that IP now then has that something you’ve been able to leverage going forward? Or or not?
Marin Smiljanic
I’ve been having, I’ve been getting inquiries, because a lot of people are interested in using the API. So for the for the product itself, meaning the mobile app not so much, although I every now and then discuss it with people to you know, customize it a little bit for traders or for something like that. But by and large, I would say that most people are interested in the API.
Matthew Todd
Okay, so what what was the decision to start your cryptocurrency startup on the search light then did you say okay, this isn’t working and go straight to that, or was there a bit more of a process a bit more going on behind the scenes than that?
Marin Smiljanic
There, well, there’s always a bit more behind the scenes. It’s never quite so impulsive, especially like after you, you know, get burned once and then you got to make sure that the next thing is thought through a little bit. better.
Matthew Todd
Yeah.
Marin Smiljanic
So but it did become evident at some point that this thing wouldn’t fly as a full time standalone business. It was cool as a product. But at a certain point, I decided, okay, now I gotta pivot. Now I got to actually start something else.
Matthew Todd
Yeah.
Marin Smiljanic
And so what what I had been, what actually prompted me one of the things that prompted me to consider the Omnisearch kind of idea. And we’ll go into, of course, what what Omnisearch is in a bit, but what really did frustrate me was back when I was an Amazon, as you can imagine, you know, both of my teams were highly, highly, technically complex.
And with that, there was just a lot of, say, onboarding, and training and educational materials that you had to go through to even be able to, you know, do your job properly. Yeah. And so, in particular, we had a ton of video training materials.
And the problem there was okay, you know, you might consume some of those. But as soon as you had to refer back to something that was mentioned in any of those, there was no way to do it. So you could search the videos by title or a description or any other textual metadata of that sort.
There was no way to say, Okay, where is this mentioned in this video, whereas, you know, I don’t know, Paxos or you know, any other algorithm mentioned in this video. And I want to jump straight to the description rather than going through the whole hour long thing.
Matthew Todd
Yeah.
Marin Smiljanic
And so that was really the spark that that got me thinking about this, this particular idea. There are a couple of other ideas on the table, and I put them all on paper, I still have the paper. So there’s about five of them. But then this one really did seem the most promising the end.
Matthew Todd
So taking the lessons, then from the previous, the news aggregator that you saw wasn’t really kind of fit for the market, it was already too crowded. What was the criteria then that you’re evaluating this idea against all the other ideas to kind of come up with Omnisearch as the winner.
Marin Smiljanic
So first, first thing, team, team wise, I decided that that I would want to get a co founder to do it with me. And so luckily, I was able to find my friend Monty who actually was one of my students very early on when he was in high school, and I just started started college. And that whole group of people was, so I taught them some algorithmic stuff.
Matthew Todd
Okay.
Marin Smiljanic
And that was, that was an amazing group of people, I still think that there’s like five or six of those, those guys that are absolute top notch. And so mighty in particular, before going before going into Omnisearch was one of the earliest people at a TechStars alum company called Memgraph that was similar to my old company, back in the day, was was working on in memory databases.
And so he was one of the key people there built a lot of really, really highly performant code. And that was, that made him a really great fit for for this kind of thing. So he I got him interested in this. He was all like, okay, yeah, time for a change. Let’s do it. So we dove into this.
Matthew Todd
So you kind of have an initial team structure in mind that was suited to the problem.
Marin Smiljanic
Yes, yes.
Matthew Todd
Solution side of things.
Marin Smiljanic
To the solution. Yes. And then in terms of evaluating the idea what we did, what we did believe is probably worth going more b2b rather than b2c. Okay, because b2c is, at least it seemed to me very, very hit or miss. Whereas with b2b, you can actually, you know, iterate towards something that’s, that’s acceptable to the market. There’s, I feel like in b2b, there’s less of, you know, dictating jobs like to the market. And rather, rather, it’s more more adapting to customer requirements into what people actually tell you their needs are.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, it can certainly be easier to validate the the idea and get some initial traction, I think.
Marin Smiljanic
Absolutely. Absolutely. And then obviously, we felt that our technical knowledge would give us the edge here. So it checked all the boxes.
Matthew Todd
I see. That makes a lot of sense. So how would you describe Omnisearch then just to give people some context?
Marin Smiljanic
So Ominsearch, I would, I would describe it as the search service, the search product that can search anything, any type of content, any type of data. So what started off as an audio search product, which you’d have is literally where the inspiration came from, from educational videos, podcasts and stuff of that sort.
It really expanded into being able to search anything, so audio, documents, text, presentations, videos, and when I say videos, then started starting, you know, only a couple of weeks ago, I don’t actually mean just the audio parts of video. I mean, we’re now able to actually search the visual parts of video too. So you can type in some sort of an object description will be able to find exact scenes and exact moments where this is where this has mentioned.
Matthew Todd
I see.
Marin Smiljanic
Or where, where this appears similarly for images. So that I would really say it’s the most versatile search solution in the market today. Because all of this stuff we can do completely out of the box, all of the processing is done on our end, no particular metadata needs to be provided by the customer. And so all this magic can just be leveraged as is. What I would then also say is that rather than being I would say, use more for people’s internal data, more and more of the use cases that we’re seeing up until now, were people integrating this into their own sites.
Matthew Todd
Okay.
Marin Smiljanic
Which which was fairly fairly counterintuitive not not exactly the way I would have imagined it.
Matthew Todd
Yeah.
Marin Smiljanic
But mostly, the way that people are using it right now is to power all the search functionality on their site.
Matthew Todd
So this would be kind of content creators of of some form that have some kind of user base.
Marin Smiljanic
Exactly like the major ones that we have right now are educational content creators.
Matthew Todd
I see.
Marin Smiljanic
Yep. So this was a this was one thing that I wasn’t sure how it would pan out, or whether we would go one way or the other. But we’ve been seeing like some some really, really good traction, and some really happy customers and good testimonials on that.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I see. So it’s kind of coming back to where you first saw that problem at Amazon then of education not being able to find the content that you were looking for to do your job. Are you finding that other content creators are the kind of course providers have similar problems and can help their students using your your platform?
Marin Smiljanic
Exactly.
Matthew Todd
And what did the initial kind of validation look like then? What were the early customers like? How are they using it?
Marin Smiljanic
So we actually had a fairly a fairly good hypothesis after after the product was built, the initial product version of the product was built. We had a fairly a fairly good idea about to two verticals that those were our initial guesses. Yeah. So either media industry, which, you know, you can think of either either streaming services, or any legacy media, like the CBS is or the BBC or stuff like that.
Matthew Todd
Yeah.
Marin Smiljanic
Or on the other hand, the education industry, so our wild guesses, okay, you know, we’ve got a ton of audio and video, which verticals need this the most? And so we basically started doing calls with these with customers, or prospects in these two industries. And we got a bit more, I would say, interest on the education side, but that may just be a function of the companies in the media space being bigger.
And I would say, you know, more serious or bureaucratic or whatever you want to call it.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, slow moving.
Marin Smiljanic
Exactly. And for education, that was not really the case, because you had a lot of independent creators, smaller companies, startups, and so on, and so forth. So we were, we were pretty confident that education was going to be our better bet, at least as a first vertical.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, no, I can see if that makes sense. Definitely being quicker to adults, technology than those other bigger media companies certainly would be.
So when it came to, to looking at those early customers, then, you know, how did you, what was that kind of process like of, of serving those initial customers, making sure that they got value out of that, that early version?
Marin Smiljanic
So actually, we had a fairly unorthodox way of getting getting to our initial revenue. And this was this was a risky one, but it did, it did pay off for us.
Matthew Todd
Okay.
Marin Smiljanic
So and this is actually what you would call developing an add on for a platform. So in our particular case, we were introduced to a company called Thinkific.
And they were based in Vancouver, which is where I was also based when I was working in Amazon and doing doing the initial startups. And so they are essentially you can think of them as the Shopify for online courses. So if you’re a course creator, they’ll give you all the scaffolding, all the all the plumbing, and then you can put your branding and your domain and everything and completely design your own course site.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, think I’ve used it for some some previous courses. Very good.
Marin Smiljanic
Good. Yeah. So what the great thing was, was that we got introduced to them through an investor.
Matthew Todd
Okay.
Marin Smiljanic
And then it turned out that quite that actually, at that point, they were piloting their developer program, meaning they were making their API’s open, and in fact inviting and incentivizing developers to come develop on their platform. And so that seemed like a really good idea to us because that would allow us to reach a very solid amount of have, you know independent course creators and companies.
And so what we did is we built, you know, a plugin, an app, whatever you want to call it for that platform, leveraging all the technology that we could build beforehand, and then launched it on the on the App Store. And so this, this really got us a couple of, I would say, super important early customers, yeah. And then, in the end got us a couple of dozen really, really great ones that have been happy with us and that we’ve been happy with.
And in terms of, you know, serving them and making sure that we’re incorporating the feedback, we all first of all, we always like to make ourselves available to talk to directly. So if you go to our site, you can always book a demo that goes straight to my calendar. And that obviously, at some point will become quite unscalable, it is becoming somewhat unscalable, even at this point, but in the earlier stages, it was it was super, super important. And also, we were very responsive on emails, anything that customers ever needed, they knew they could always write us and that we would pick it up very very quickly.
Matthew Todd
Even though you’re deploying that through Thinkific, then you presumably are able to charge kind of subscription to your services and also have a direct relationship with those course creators, think if you don’t hide that from you, as I know some platforms do.
Marin Smiljanic
Exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly, yes. So that’s, I mean, the flip side of that is that you can potentially develop, develop for a platform and you know, spend a lot of time doing the development, and not really having too much of a gain from it. But if you do pull it, pull it off like this, then the amazing thing is that you actually do have a direct direct relationship to the to the end customers themselves.
Matthew Todd
And in terms of competitors to what you’re providing, presumably, there are other competitors, and definitely in that search space, obviously, but presumably, by going down that kind of partnership route, especially being an early integration partner with Thinkific, then there’s not a lot of options for other people on that course creation platform to solve those problems.
Marin Smiljanic
No, I would say that in that particular case, there’s no there’s no other really good options. But I think that even even if you look at it more broadly, while we do have competitors, like I always consider Algolia, to be a very, you know, they’re not a straight on competitor.
Matthew Todd
Yeah.
Marin Smiljanic
But they are a site search provider. So, you know, we have a couple of big ones, what I think that you know, even from a technology standpoint has differentiated us always is that most of the most of the competitors are built to text first. So that means that if you’re somebody who wants to use it, then the burden of extracting all the content, and in some sort of structured way from say, documents or audio or video, or anything of that sort to be able to then throw it into the into the textual search solution. All that burden is on you. Without if you do use Omnisearch, then you get all of that out of the box.
Matthew Todd
I see. And is that an advantage of or just a kind of side effect, if you like of starting later, than other companies in that search space have started, you know, in video and audio was not such a primary consumption mechanism?
Marin Smiljanic
I think so. I think so it’s it’s definitely it definitely benefited us, because it became way more relevant. So it just wasn’t as relevant some 10 years ago.
Matthew Todd
Yeah.
Marin Smiljanic
And the second thing is that finally now the technology and you know, the, the hardware and everything has caught up. So that now you can actually do things that you weren’t able to do say even just say five or six years ago, in terms of you know, transcription or video processing or image recognition or anything of that sort.
So the technology is just at a way, way higher level than it used to be. So I would say it’s a combination of Yeah, the content itself becoming more relevant and the technology becoming better.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. Yeah, sounds like that makes a lot of sense. And I think sounds like is the coming together of quite a lot of different factors that for you resulted in it being quite good timing, especially with that Thinkific partnership, as well.
Marin Smiljanic
Yeah. I like to think so.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. So as someone with a very technical background, you’re starting off with very algorithmic software development, you mentioned that your co founder is the CTO. How do you personally feel about kind of stepping away from a purely technical role to to leading Omnisearch as CEO? I’m always interested to hear from founders that you’ll start from that technical background.
Marin Smiljanic
It’s it’s not easy because if you’ve if you’ve done coding at some point, especially if you’ve done a lot of it, you’ll you’ll miss it. If you if you even Even so much has reduced it, let alone you know, if it dwindles, So it hasn’t always been easy, especially since you know, there’s somebody needs to do the business stuff. And I feel like even though at some point, the conventional wisdom is it’s better to have two technical founders, and for one guy to do the sales and marketing, I feel like that conventional wisdom has, the pendulum has almost moved moved the other way, as the almost like, it’s a handicap now to have two technical founders.
Matthew Todd
Yeah.
Marin Smiljanic
But in my view, I feel like the complexity of the product and the complexity of the space is such that the CEO, can’t be a business guy who’s going to bluff it out. The I feel like you need to have a pretty deep understanding of what’s going on, you know, if something happens in machine learning, you know, some new development that can be used, you need to be on top of that, and you need to be able to comprehend it in a deeper way.
And so I feel that, you know, in in the search space, it definitely pays to have as much of the team technical as as possible. But I did, I do miss it a lot. I do miss, you know, full time coding a lot.
Matthew Todd
Yeah.
Marin Smiljanic
But now with with, say, the visual search features that we’re shipping, I did did a fair bit there. So okay, every every now and then I’ll jump in and do something really nice.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, no, that makes makes a lot of sense. I can see that with your type of products. There are a lot of it is very technical, and is relying on a lot of innovations in technology, as you say. So it’s important to have the right level of technical knowledge there.
But also, you do have to balance that with the business side of things, as you say, as long I think that’s where many technical founders can go wrong, because they’re not able to put themselves in the customers shoes and see things from their perspective from the problem perspective so well, but it sounds like you’ve got a good handle on being able to see it both from the problem perspective, as well as from the solution side as well.
Marin Smiljanic
Yeah, I think so. And the other important thing is really, that you trust the rest of the tech team. Yeah. And that, for me is absolutely the case. I think that, you know, we have such great young talent now around around the two of us that have you know, one programming competitions, one metals, coached teams, and so on and so forth. And that’s just been phenomenal. It’s a real joy to work with those guys.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I think that’s a big part of it. Actually, I think where it, it doesn’t work so well is for what reason when those technical founders don’t have a technical team that they genuinely do trust and don’t have that feeling of, well, I could do it quicker myself. I could do it better myself. And that’s when perhaps they might feel always drawn to more of the technical side and neglecting some of those business things that need to be done as well.
Marin Smiljanic
Yeah, I agree.
Matthew Todd
Yeah.
Marin Smiljanic
Tricky. Balance.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. No, definitely, definitely is. And one other thing I wanted to talk to I already mentioned, investors beforehand, when you’re saying about the introduction to think if it goes, well, how have you approached funding Omnisearch?
Marin Smiljanic
Too aggressive, even though we were unprepared. But I would say that, that for us, we had started fundraising, we’re either talking to investors relatively early on, okay, and the first 2025 investor calls didn’t really result in anything. I think that the main problem was that all we had was a really cool demo, like Omni even at its very, that’s the only thing that’s missing from from the podcasts, the most impressive part is not there. I can’t do a demo.
But basically, the the Omni demo has, since its absolute, like v zero, been fairly well. And so what we would do is we’d show the demo the the investors or customers or whatnot, would get fairly interested. But then it when they started poking deeper into, you know, either traction of which, at that point, we had none, or even just ideas about the business plan, we showed that we didn’t really have enough clarity on that.
So this, this is probably why we burned burned a bunch of those introductions, I wouldn’t say burn, but they didn’t materialize.
Matthew Todd
Pushing too hard too early before you were really prepared?
Marin Smiljanic
I think so. I think so. And still, I would advise people, you know, younger or earlier stage startup founders to do that, because you’ll get the feedback. It’ll suck, but you’ll get you’ll get the feedback and you’ll know what you need to work on is definitely better than you know, starting out too late and then running out of money and having to abandon it.
But I will say that one really, really great thing was that I felt way better do During this after we had something customers, because even even just talking about your customers in the present tense gives you a different kind of confidence. And the investor, the investors that have been around for a while will will see this. So it’s not like, oh, we could you know, Castle in the Sky, we think this might be the ideal customer persona. It’s like, hey, we’ve got these three, four or five, whatever that are that are actually buying get in like it and use it this way. And here are the testimonials.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, no, I think that’s really good feedback, good learnings and good perspective. I think founders, whether they choose to bootstrap or seek fundraising can sometimes lose sight of the importance of that initial traction.
And it’s not so much just to say, Oh, look, we are capable of getting customers. It’s, as you say, it’s knowing that, yeah, we have people that we know, we help we add value to we solve problems for and that gives you confidence yourself in the products when when talking about it to any any interested stakeholder.
Marin Smiljanic
Absolutely. And like I said, the ones that have been around for a while they’ll they’ll, they’ll see it.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. And why did you decide to go down the investment route rather than bootstrapping it?
Marin Smiljanic
That’s actually a good question. Because I do feel like SaaS is a good route, a good field when it comes to bootstrapping. It’s got fairly low costs. And you know, you can just either take it as a side hustle, and then grow it from there.
But I think that in our particular case, it was fairly clear that we would need to make significant technology investments. And that that is not a good fit for for, you know, just bootstrapping. So if we had just said, okay, well, we’re hacking this product together, and then we’re launching it to the market and then just growing revenue, that would have been a good fit, I think, for bootstrapping.
But for us, a we needed to make sure that we could that at least the two of us could stay, stay on full time working on this. And then also that we could hire some extra people to help with the tech development.
Matthew Todd
I see. So it was driven by what you saw as necessary. technical development costs in order to meet the needs of the customers you had and presumably prospects as well.
Marin Smiljanic
Exactly, exactly. And obviously, you know, we do have a preference for making it big with with Omnisearch. And for that Vc, Vc money definitely helps because it is yet another form of validation. If you’ve raised money, then you know when, say bigger customers are doing due diligence, they can take a look at that and see oh, okay, cool. This is not that.
Matthew Todd
I see. And what is the vision then for Omnisearch? Obviously, you you talked about finding that niche in education, especially because of Thinkific partnership. Where do you see on the search going?
Marin Smiljanic
So I think that, you know, I always think about it first at a at a tactical level in terms of the other verticals that I want to conquer. So the next one being media, which, which was our second one, from the very beginning.
We have conferences, we have, you know, scientific databases, we have a whole host of of different verticals, where we can apply the same cookbook that we used for further education. One more broadly speaking, I sort of 10 years down the down the road, I would want every major site in the world to be using Omnisearch as their as as to power the search on their site. And this is this is definitely going to be a tough mission but that’s the dream. That’s the dream, really.
Matthew Todd
I see. That’s the definitely a big a big mission, a big vision. But I think something definitely aspirational to, to work towards. Yeah. And then from a tactical perspective, taking that as the goal. How do you, how do you develop a strategy that allows you to move towards that?
Marin Smiljanic
I would still say that you do it, at least for the first couple of ones, you do it vertical by vertical, and you establish you establish social proof in each of the individual categories, and grow it from there, we still have plenty of work to do even just to cover education and media properly. But once that’s done, then we then we use the learnings from that to develop a more general solution that works with everyone anywhere in the world.
Matthew Todd
I see. And with education and just sticking with that and looking to scale within that initial vertical. Are you looking, how are you looking to do that? Are you looking for other partnerships? Similar to Thinkific? Are you looking mainly to integrations into existing platforms as what I mean? Are you kind of going independent as well?
Marin Smiljanic
I’m I’m liking the idea of integrating into existing platforms, but then there’s being more and more of like proper enterprise deals. Selling directly to them and then exposing that to all their end users rather than developing for a platform and then owning the user relationships.
Matthew Todd
I see. So almost b2b2b if you like selling, selling to these other companies that already provides education at scale?
Marin Smiljanic
Yeah, I would say. So I think that’s the most efficient way to do this. And also wanted to bring you good, you know, bring in customers that that will help you establish more credibility in the industry.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I see. And one thing when it comes to taking on those bigger customers, then obviously, you’re going to be dealing with larger amounts of data that you’re going to have to enable searching over. How do you manage the balance of kind of operational costs and performance and everything else that goes along. I forget what the numbers are for something like YouTube. But there’s an insane amount of content being put on there every day, I can imagine that for, even within the education sector, there must be similar cases where there was a massive amount of pre existing content, but then more continually being created as well.
Marin Smiljanic
Kind of but not entirely, because there there is, I would say a major, major difference, between the sort of b2c user generated content sites, and even the biggest platforms, there are many orders of magnitude less, I can’t exactly tell you how much.
But there are intuitively, you know, between a Coursera and a YouTube, there are many, many, many orders of magnitude of difference. And so what has so far been lucky for us in that regard is that since we you know, focus more on powering search on the sites, it means that generally we have smaller, smaller quantities of data to deal with. Yeah, so this has so far worked worked really nicely for us.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So yeah, what are the next steps then for property search? Is it is it more of the same over the next few months?
Marin Smiljanic
So we are publicly launching our visual search capabilities. So being able to find objects inside images and videos, that is happening this Monday, Monday, the 10th. So we’re launching on Product Hunt, anyone listening, feel free to to help us out and support us, that would be much appreciated.
So that’s, that’s the near term stuff, then we’ve got some very, very good algorithmic improvements and performance improvements that are happening with the new version of our search engine. So our tech team has been working on this for the past couple of months, they so far, you know, so far, the benchmarks are looking amazing.
I can’t really share any of it publicly yet. But in the in the next couple of weeks, we’ll definitely be pushing this out on social so that it’s visible to anyone. And then I would say from a customer standpoint, probably more and more of the same in the next couple of months, just growing, growing the revenue growing the customer base and getting some big names out there.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I see sounds, sounds like you’ve got a lot of good good development in the pipeline, and, you know, good opportunities, that that you can kind of look forward to as well with with a lot of these deals.
Marin Smiljanic
Yeah, I think so.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, they’re fantastic. And in terms of, you know, anyone else, listening to this podcast, I think there’s a few really good learnings here. And I think is interesting that you’re coming from a technical background, which I think you know, will be interesting to many founders coming from a similar position.
But I also think is interesting to hear that you’ve got a relatively technical product and innovative products on the technical perspective, which you are able to successfully balance with the perspective of the customer as well to make sure that you’re adding value that I think that was definitely something interesting that our audience can take away.
Is there anything else that stands out to you in the kind of Omni search journey so far that you, you think other founders listening to this could take away?
Marin Smiljanic
Practice the good old zen mind, beginner’s mind. Realize that even though you are as great as you potentially are on the technical side, you’re still kind of a newbie on the business side. And so make sure you ask ask people for advice. Surround yourself with people who have been there, done that. And just keep on learning.
Marin Smiljanic
I still think that, you know, it’s, it’s very, it’s very important for at least someone, someone on the team to dive deep into into the business side, to do sales to do marketing. Learn to love it. I mean, there is no way to pull anything off with without it.
And also do practice the good old zen mind, beginner’s mind, realize that even though you are as great as you potentially are, on the technical side, you’re still kind of a newbie on the business side. And so make sure you ask ask people for advice. Surround yourself with people who have been there, done that. And just keep on learning, keep on learning and keep on you know, doing doing I would say acting and learning from experience.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I think that’s really good advice. Don’t be afraid to recognize that you don’t know that much. Yes. And just keep on doing and doing and learning and don’t be inclined to feel too comfortable on the technical side, because you can build the best technical product in the world. But if no one ever hears about it, no one gets to use it, then you don’t get to build that thing anymore, right?
Marin Smiljanic
And then, yes, then you join you join the graveyard?
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. Well, no, thank you for for taking the time today. It’s definitely been really interesting to hear about the developments of Omnisearch so far. I’d love to catch up a little bit further down, you know, a few months or a year down the line and seeing how you’ve managed to progress with that, that education sector that vertical and also see if you’ve managed to start looking at the media or other verticals as well.
Marin Smiljanic
Yeah, thank you know that thanks so much for for doing this. This was awesome. And thanks.
Matthew Todd
No worries. And I’ll make sure that we put links to Omnisearch in the the notes for the podcast as well. So anyone that’s interested in, in seeing it for themselves, you know, moving beyond the audio to see it. I’ll encourage them to take a look at the site and see what it’s about as well. So I made sure we include these. But yeah, thank you again for taking the time.
Marin Smiljanic
Awesome. Thanks. Yeah, thanks again. And I hope everyone enjoyed it.
Matthew Todd
Thank you for joining me on this episode of Inside the ScaleUp. Remember for the show notes and in depth resources from today’s guest. You can find these on the website insidethescaleup.com. You can also leave feedback on today’s episode, as well as suggest guests and companies you’d like to hear from. Thank you for listening.