The Technical Founder’s Dilemma: What Topia Learned About Balancing Product and Go-to-Market
Technical founders often fall into a familiar trap: building the perfect product while neglecting the go-to-market motion. For Topia’s team, this realization came with a stark admission about their early priorities.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, founder Daniel Liebeskind shared his team’s journey from being “basically just a team of engineers building a technology” to developing a comprehensive go-to-market strategy.
The Engineering-First Mindset
Like many technical founders, Daniel started with deep domain expertise. “I’ve been soft for Engineer for a long time now. Before that, I guess, growing up, I built games, I built websites,” he explains. His technical background led him to spot opportunities others missed, particularly in real-time communication technology.
This technical insight was valuable. As Daniel notes, “I came across something called WebRTC, championed by Google Protocol for real time communication on the Internet. My first company was in 2014 that was focused on that technology, and it was a little bit ahead of its time.”
The Cost of Delayed Go-to-Market
However, being ahead of the technology curve didn’t translate into market success. Looking back, Daniel’s biggest regret is clear: “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.”
Their team composition reflected this technical bias: “Were basically just a team of engineers building a technology and a platform, being responsive to people that found us. But we didn’t really have any outbound, we didn’t really have a go to market motion.”
Learning Through Customer Discovery
The team found an unconventional way to balance their technical focus with market learning. “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 approach allowed them to maintain their engineering-driven development while gathering crucial market insights.
The Enterprise Evolution
The pivot to enterprise offerings revealed the importance of go-to-market strategy. As Daniel explains, “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.”
Their technology was solid – they had “a bunch of patents on the way that we’re actually doing this that allow us to do this in a relatively simple way.” But technology alone wasn’t enough. They needed to find and validate real business problems their solution could solve.
Building a Go-to-Market Motion
Today, they’re seeing success with their enterprise offering: “We have about half a dozen customers on that front and most of them are pretty secretive and private about it. Right now. It’s across a broad array of markets and use cases.”
But Daniel notes that the best opportunities often come from customers: “The best use cases come inbound to us for that product, and having high conviction or having any conviction that this might solve a real business problem for you is the path to adoption.”
Lessons for Technical Founders
Topia’s experience offers several key insights for technical founders:
- Don’t wait to build go-to-market capabilities
- Find ways to gather market insights while building
- Technical excellence alone doesn’t ensure market success
- Let customer needs guide product evolution
- Balance innovation with practical business value
The key 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.” Technical founders need to solve not just the engineering challenges, but the market challenges as well.