From Virtual Burning Man to Enterprise Sales: Topia’s Journey in Building a New Market Category
Sometimes the best path to enterprise sales starts with a festival in the desert. Or in Topia’s case, a virtual version of one. In just four months, they went from writing their first line of code to hosting 20,000 people at virtual Burning Man – a pivot that would unexpectedly unlock their enterprise opportunity.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Topia founder Daniel Liebeskind shared how this consumer event became their gateway to enterprise sales.
The Unexpected Opportunity
When Burning Man needed to go virtual during the pandemic, they approached Topia. “Bernie Man sent out the link to everybody. People came in, they’re clicking, they’re moving around, they’re going into the different camps, they’re experiencing different activities,” Daniel explains. But what happened next surprised them.
“We had a lot of companies, people that were not representing their company, but coming to the festival, that realized that there was utility here for their company, allhand, for example, or for a launch event, or really for whatever,” Daniel recalls. Business leaders, attending as festival-goers, were spotting potential enterprise applications.
Building the Platform Through Real Usage
The festival’s structure became a testing ground for enterprise features. “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,” Daniel describes. This modular approach would later inform their enterprise architecture.
Instead of theoretical use cases, they could observe how people actually used virtual spaces at scale. “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 notes.
The Enterprise Evolution
The transition to enterprise wasn’t immediate. It started with a specific request that revealed a broader opportunity. “We did that because we had AA Game Studio come to us and ask if we would do that and allow them to deeply customize everything,” Daniel explains. This request highlighted a crucial market need: enterprises wanted control over their virtual environments.
This insight led to their current offering: deployable metaverse infrastructure. As Daniel puts it, “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.”
Finding the Real Value Proposition
The enterprise pivot revealed what customers truly valued about their technology. “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,” Daniel explains.
Instead of pushing enterprises to join a shared platform, they enabled them to create their own secure environments. This approach resonated with enterprise buyers concerned about data control and customization.
Lessons for B2B Founders
Topia’s journey offers several valuable insights for founders building new market categories:
- Consumer events can validate enterprise use cases
- Watch how people actually use your technology, not just how they say they’ll use it
- Look for patterns in unexpected adoption
- Let customer requests guide your enterprise features
- Focus on what enterprises actually value (like control and security) rather than just features
The key lesson? Sometimes the best way to build an enterprise product isn’t to start with enterprises. As Daniel puts it, “A key, I think, for entrepreneurs and a key to our success certainly has been finding out what is actually going to be valuable to our prospects, to our customers, and then building that.”