Topia’s Stealth Customer Discovery Method: How Anonymous Event Participation Shaped Their Product
Most founders test their products by watching users through one-way mirrors or analyzing usage data. Topia’s team went undercover, becoming users of their own platform without revealing their identity. This unconventional approach to customer discovery yielded insights that would have been impossible to gather any other way.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Topia founder Daniel Liebeskind revealed how their stealth observation method shaped their product development journey.
The Weekend Laboratory
Instead of relying on formal feedback sessions, Topia created a weekly rhythm of testing and iteration. “We basically would have these micro events every weekend and then hack and fix things on the weekdays,” Daniel explains. “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 had several advantages over traditional user testing:
- Users behaved naturally, unaware they were interacting with the platform’s creators
- The team could experience friction points firsthand
- Feedback was immediate and unfiltered
- They could test fixes quickly in the next event
Scaling Through Virtual Burning Man
The method proved invaluable when they hosted virtual Burning Man. Rather than just providing the platform, they created a structure that encouraged user-generated content and interaction. “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 event became a massive real-world experiment. As Daniel notes, “We had 20,000 people come to the event, and that was kind of how a lot of people heard about us.” But more importantly, it revealed how people would actually use their platform at scale.
Converting Insights into Enterprise Value
The most valuable insights often came from unexpected places. While watching people navigate between virtual spaces, they noticed something interesting: business users attending the festival saw potential applications for their companies. “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,” Daniel shares.
This observation led to their current enterprise offering. Rather than trying to guess what features businesses might need, they had witnessed firsthand how business users wanted to adapt their platform.
The Evolution to Enterprise Infrastructure
Their stealth observation method revealed a crucial insight: enterprises wanted control over their virtual environments. Instead of joining a shared platform, companies wanted to deploy the technology behind their own firewalls. 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.”
From Consumer Platform to Enterprise Infrastructure
Today, this insight has shaped their entire business model. “We have about half a dozen customers on that front and most of them are pretty secretive and private about it,” Daniel notes. “It’s across a broad array of markets and use cases.”
Key Lessons for Founders
Topia’s stealth customer discovery method offers several valuable lessons for B2B founders:
- Direct experience beats secondhand feedback
- Unfiltered user behavior reveals more than formal testing
- The most valuable insights often come from unexpected use cases
- Real-world testing at scale reveals problems that small tests miss
For technical founders especially, Daniel’s approach offers an important lesson: sometimes the best way to understand your users isn’t through data or formal feedback, but through direct, unfiltered experience of how they actually use your product.