Inside Topia’s Enterprise Pivot: How Customer Requests Reshaped Their Entire Business Model
Product pivots usually start with a hypothesis. But Topia’s shift to enterprise infrastructure began with an unexpected customer request. A game studio wanted more than just access to their platform – they wanted to deploy it behind their firewall.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Topia founder Daniel Liebeskind revealed how this single request led to a complete transformation of their business model.
The Initial Platform
Topia started as a virtual events platform, gaining traction through events like virtual Burning Man. “We had 20,000 people come to the event, and that was kind of how a lot of people heard about us,” Daniel recalls. But their vision was broader: “The ability to actually create these social experiences actually helps a lot of kids to figure out that they want to be builders, right? Your world building, your experience building.”
The Enterprise Catalyst
The pivot began organically. “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 explains.
But the real transformation came from a specific request. “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 notes. This request revealed a crucial insight about enterprise needs.
Rethinking the Infrastructure
Instead of just offering access to their platform, they began allowing companies to deploy their entire stack. As Daniel explains, “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.”
This approach addressed a fundamental enterprise concern. “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 notes.
Technical Evolution
The pivot leveraged their existing technical strengths. Daniel explains, “We have a bunch of patents on the way that we’re actually doing this that allow us to do this in a relatively simple way from a DevOps perspective, and to do it at a very low cost that makes it feasible for companies that are experimenting with this to actually get started.”
Market Response
The enterprise offering has found its market. “We have about half a dozen customers on that front and most of them are pretty secretive and private about it,” Daniel shares. “It’s across a broad array of markets and use cases.”
But success hasn’t come easily. 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.”
The Future Vision
Today, their approach is deliberately flexible: “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.”
This evolution 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 explains.
Key Lessons for Founders
Topia’s pivot offers several valuable insights for founders considering an enterprise shift:
- Listen to unexpected customer requests
- Look for patterns in how customers want to adapt your product
- Consider infrastructure-level solutions to enterprise concerns
- Maintain flexibility in your technical architecture
- Focus on real business value over interesting technology
The most important lesson? 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.”