Welcome to another edition of Growth Talks! Today, we spotlight Marin Smiljanic, Co-Founder and CEO of Omnisearch. Marin is the co-founder and CEO of Omnisearch, a startup developing the next generation of search technology. With a background as a software engineer at Amazon, Facebook, and SingleStore, Marin brings years of experience from both fast-growing startups and Big Tech.
His work at Amazon, particularly on AWS and Alexa, inspired the creation of Omnisearch. Marin’s deep technical knowledge, rooted in his early passion for algorithms and programming, now drives his vision for building a “search for everything” platform that leverages his deep experience.
We sat down with him, and asked a few questions regarding his startup journey and growth of Omnisearch.
What is the backstory of Omnisearch? How did you get from an idea to a business?
It was all fairly textbook. We built a quick prototype that was focusing on just audio and we ran with it for a while. We had the opportunity to partner with a company called Thinkific (kind of like a Shopify for online courses) and this led to our first paying customers. We then raised a bit of venture capital and started building the team.
What problem were you trying to solve when you founded Omnisearch, and how has that evolved?
As almost every startup, Omnisearch was rooted in a problem I faced myself. During my time at Amazon my colleagues and I had an annoying problem: we had to search consume lots of internal training videos. They were very technical in nature, often whiteboard sessions where the old guard would explain system architecture and algorithms. They were also pretty long, sometimes over an hour, so finding information inside them was time-consuming. We wanted to solve that problem and package it into a product. I think the main change since that time was that Omnisearch expanded from an audio-only search tool to a proper “multimodal” one, covering video, images, and documents as well.
What was the biggest challenge you faced when transitioning from a software engineer to a startup founder, and how did you overcome it?
Mostly the fact that I knew next to nothing about sales and marketing. Granted, I did have a bit of training at SingleStore, since the company was still pretty small at the time, but the fact is that those things don’t come naturally to engineers. I guess I adapted pretty well. 🙂
From your perspective, what growth strategies have proven most effective for Omnisearch in its early stages?
For the early stage, our partnership with Thinkific was really important. Just being able to offer our software as a simple plugin on their platform was great. It gave us a seal of approval we would not have had if we’d been selling solo. But we also recognized fairly early on that the money was in the enterprise, so we switched our go-to-market strategy accordingly.
Omnisearch focused on AI even when it wasn’t that popular in the tech world. How has your perspective on AI evolved since then?
I think the technology has made some truly amazing strides, especially with LLMs. Deep learning became the state-of-the-art approach to machine learning back in 2012 with AlexNet, and it’s been accelerating ever since. I was in particular impressed by the results of the new OpenAI o1 models.
Are there any emerging trends, apart from AI, of course 🙂 in technology that you believe will significantly impact Omnisearch’s growth?
A big trend we’re seeing is that customers, especially larger ones, want more control over their data. This is why we’ve architected Omnisearch in a self-contained way, so that it can be deployed both as SaaS, on-premise, or in a private cloud.
How do you envision the future of video search technology, and where does Omnisearch fit into that landscape?
I think the main focus is going to be efficiency and performance. The perception of multimodal search solutions today is that they’re very impressive in a demo setting, but not great at scale. I believe we’re in a unique position to change that narrative.
Looking back at your journey, what do you wish you had known when you started your company?
The importance of sales. There’s no “if you build it, they will come”, especially on something as cutting edge as this.
What advice would you give to fellow founders looking to grow their companies?
Iterate as fast as you can, and make sure your financial math works out. Long, enterprise sales processes should impact the pricing, otherwise you’ll never scale.
