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From VR Dreams to Enterprise Infrastructure: How Topia’s Go-to-Market Strategy Evolved Through Customer Discovery

Most startup pivots are born from failure. But sometimes, the most valuable pivots come from unexpected success. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Topia founder Daniel Liebeskind shared how his company’s evolution from a VR platform to enterprise metaverse infrastructure was driven by learning what customers actually valued about their technology.

Topia’s journey began with a vision of democratizing virtual experiences. As Daniel explains, “I’ve just long felt that there are a lot of business cases for the kinds of interactions, real time interactions that video games give to gamers that on the business side of things and on the more consumer side of things, even non gamers should be able to have these kinds of experiences.”

The pandemic accelerated their timeline, forcing an early pivot. Instead of waiting for VR adoption to catch up, they launched a browser-based platform. This decision was quickly validated when Burning Man approached them about hosting virtual events. “The first four months of our company was really trying to build all of the capabilities for people to be able to build their own camps, build their own experiences, and then actually facilitate this real time connection for this festival,” Daniel recalls.

But the real insight came from watching how people used their platform. During the virtual Burning Man, they noticed something fascinating: “We basically would have these micro events every weekend and then hack and fix things on the weekdays. We actually, in the early days, didn’t even necessarily tell people that were the creators of the platform. We would just go to the events and just solicit feedback from people.”

This stealth observation revealed a crucial insight: while their platform could host large-scale events, its real value lay in enabling customized social experiences. As Daniel notes, “In virtual Burning Man, we had one big space and then lots of different tents. And you could click on a tent and it would portal you to another world, which was the entire world that camp had created.”

The enterprise opportunity emerged organically when a game studio approached them about deploying the platform behind their firewall. This request highlighted a fundamental truth about enterprise metaverse adoption: companies want control over their virtual environments. As Daniel explains, “A lot of people are trying to approach the metaverse by saying, as an example, that Morgan building their client portal should build their client portal on top of a page, right, and give all of their data to Facebook. We think that would be kind of crazy.”

This insight led to their current enterprise offering: deployable metaverse infrastructure. “Rather than having them use topia IO, which is the Topia application, they can deploy their own metaverse ecosystem behind their existing firewall, their existing cloud infrastructure,” Daniel describes.

The go-to-market challenges have been significant. As Daniel admits, “It’s been challenging to actually discover the use cases where this creates real business value and it’s not just something that’s interesting.” His biggest regret? “Focus more on the go to market while were building the product… we could have gotten bigger, earlier, faster, even while were focused on building the platform, if we’d actually brought on anybody in marketing or sales or go to market.”

Despite these challenges, their approach has positioned them uniquely in the market. “There’s really nobody else out there right now, at least that allow companies to deploy the entire application stack behind their own firewalls and have this SDK and API where they can build anything they want on top,” Daniel notes.

Looking ahead, Daniel sees the democratization of social experiences as key to the internet’s future. But rather than pushing a specific vision, they’re building flexible infrastructure that can support whatever form these experiences take. As he explains, “We are building to be front end agnostic use case, agnostic, really focusing on building something that allows for even hundreds of thousands of users in a single instance.”

The lesson for founders? Sometimes your initial product is just the first step in discovering what customers truly value. Success comes not from stubbornly sticking to your original vision, but from being willing to evolve your product strategy based on real market feedback while maintaining the core technological advantages you’ve built.