How Topia Pivoted from VR to Enterprise Infrastructure: A Product Evolution Case Study

How Topia Pivoted from VR to Enterprise Infrastructure: A Product Evolution Case Study

Product pivots rarely follow a straight line. Three years ago, Topia was building the “WordPress of VR.” Today, they’re providing metaverse infrastructure for enterprises. But this transformation wasn’t just about changing technology – it was about discovering what customers truly valued about their core vision.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Topia founder Daniel Liebeskind shared how a series of strategic pivots ultimately led to their current position in the enterprise market.

The Original Vision

Before Topia, Daniel spotted a pattern in gaming that would shape his company’s future direction. “In a game called EverQuest, which was one of the early big MMORPGs, what people actually found is that there’s a whole game component, but then there was a social component where people could just hang out and chat with each other,” he explains. “And that actually became a sub game of EverQuest.”

This insight led to a bigger vision: bringing game-like social interactions to business. As Daniel puts it, “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 First Pivot: From VR to Browser-Based

The pandemic forced their first major pivot. “When the pandemic hit, I basically threw that out because VR adoption was just very low restarted with what is now Topia, which was a browser based, very accessible, 2.5 dimensional landscape,” Daniel recalls.

This wasn’t just about accessibility – it was about timing. Rather than waiting for VR adoption to catch up, they adapted their core vision to meet immediate market needs.

Finding Product-Market Fit Through Events

The pivot paid off when Burning Man needed a virtual venue. But instead of just hosting events, they used them as real-world laboratories. “We basically would have these micro events every weekend and then hack and fix things on the weekdays,” Daniel shares. “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.”

The Enterprise Evolution

The most significant pivot came from an unexpected source – customer demand. “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 revealed a crucial insight about enterprise needs.

Instead of pushing enterprises to join a shared platform, they realized companies wanted control over their virtual environments. As Daniel notes, “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.”

Maintaining Vision Through Change

Throughout these pivots, Topia maintained its core vision of democratizing social experiences while adapting its implementation. Today, they’re “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 key to managing these transitions? 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.”

For B2B founders navigating their own pivots, Topia’s journey offers a crucial lesson: successful pivots often come from discovering better ways to deliver on your core vision, rather than abandoning it entirely. Sometimes the most valuable pivot isn’t about changing what you believe – it’s about finding a better way to make that belief valuable to customers.