How Topia Interactive CEO Daniel Liebeskind grew Topia Interactive to $962.1K revenue and 3K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is daniel liebskin he's the co-founder and ceo of topia a platform for creative social experiences that inspire authentic human connection he's a product developer and engineer having built nearly 30 applications over the past six years and believes that creativity is humanity's greatest gift is on a quest to empower creators daniel are you ready to take us to the top i am thanks for having me nathan such an honor to be here you bet so so talk to me a little bit there's companies like envoy mit octopus and octa using topia how are they using you yeah so companies that are using topia really are using it as a community platform so when you think about your employees your co-workers uh you know you if you're just showing up to meetings you don't actually really know anybody you're kind of just a mercenary working for a company um and so being able to actually turn your co-workers into people that you know that are part of your community that you can have social experiences with um that's really core and critical to retention uh to you know having a good uh working environment and so people are using topia to have holiday parties to celebrate their ipos to have all hands happy hours and and sort of the the social fabric that makes up a co-working community when you're in person really hard to do with just zoom and so uh things like topia are able to step in and provide that medium for the social fabric facebook's now meta they're betting on the metaverse you're like the b2b version of meta huh well you know we're we've actually we've been doing metaverse stuff for the for a couple years now um and i wouldn't even say that we are entirely uh or even focused on b2b uh for example burning man which is a big festival that happens annually actually happened on topia um happened last year on topia this year on topia um and so we're very much a community platform businesses are communities you know in a community of employees so they're using topia but we also have thousands of uh different people that are not business oriented using topia really just as a way to evolve how they socialize online to come together for real-time experiences um and to make friends and and daniel how are people paying you what's your revenue model yeah we have a few different revenue models um and you know we really have two different types of users we have uh first of all we sort of have a whole creator ecosystem uh and so creators are creating assets they're creating art they're creating programmable experiences putting those in the marketplace curators are creating templates which people can then use to really easily customize their worlds uh and then we have confluencers which are actually bringing people together uh inside of worlds and earning money by doing that and so people are paying us both for world ownership um and that's nine dollars a month uh and we have a couple thousand people that are doing that and then we have uh also on the b2b side like you mentioned uh people are throwing one-off events and uh and they're also subscribing to have uh persistent monthly spaces where they can have all hands and and happy hours and um and uh check-ins and those sorts of things so there's a few different things we also have uh uh community subscriptions and ticketing coming very soon so we're adding new revenue models as we go on the b2b side what's the average b2b company paying you per month or per year to use the tech you know it ranges uh the largest one-off event we've uh we've charged is forty thousand dollars uh small ones can be a hundred dollars uh and then on the recurring side you know that also ranges we basically charge based on venue size so if you want to have a venue size a capacity of 100 people we charge four dollars per person of capacity so that's 400 a month um i would say that's probably you know for a small company smallish company that's what people are paying uh and then you can have unlimited number of people on unlimited number of events but never more than a hundred people at a time but we have you know we have people that are uh have a 25 person capacity 100 percent capacity a thousand person capacity so it kind of ranges got it how many people are paying something on the b2b side uh on the b2b side on a given month you know again we sometimes have we have a lot of one-off events as well we have um dozens at this point that are paying us but you know kind of fluctuates god i got it yeah ignore the one-off stuff but it sounds like maybe if you have dozens called maybe 24 paying at least 400 bucks a month on the b2b side something like that yeah interesting do you see that being the feature obviously everyone wants recurring revenue because then you can you know determine who to hire and rely on future revenue to cover their salaries and stuff but not everything is meant to be a b2b sas recurring model i mean you're having success with one-off events you know are you comfortable with that how do you plan yeah you know we we very much actually want to be the evolution of how people socialize we're not really focused on the b2b side per se um i think a lot of businesses have found topia to be really engaging in a great way to bring people together we also we're very focused on our creators right on the people that are actually creating these experiences that are curating experiences that are bringing people together in worlds which we call confluencers um and so we're actually paying 30 of our revenue out from the b2b side to our creator ecosystem and that's one of the reasons that we're really stoked about all the different businesses that are paying but i think as we think about the long term of topia you know we're very much a creator ecosystem and very focused on how can people uh have communities in these really unique social experiences and these curated and customized social experiences and so that's that's kind of like our focal point things like burning man you know are very much in our wheelhouse uh festivals gatherings those kinds of things and so daniel how much in september or october did you pay out to confluencers uh we actually just had our biggest day uh i think a few days ago we paid out um three thousand dollars in a single day uh to our confluencers uh so you know it's still kind of early innings on some of this stuff but um you know it's it's scaling pretty quickly what give me just obviously i want to try and avoid extremes congrats on a hugely successful day though but if you look at us all of october how much total one hour are we talking like five ten grand to confluencers yeah something like that okay interesting so got it so so i can then multiply times i mean three there right you're doing something like 30 grand a month on the on the world ownership side is that right uh you really like getting into the revenue numbers yeah so we're yeah we're somewhere between there you know fluctuates again uh based on the one-offs and one-offs actually generate a lot of the confluence or commissions at this point yeah i see i see so on that largest event where we had like 40 000 that was that the b2b says played how would a confluence or make money on that yeah so 30 so we would basically say okay here's a 40 000 invoice that's paid and we're carving out 30 of that uh and uh so you know 12 grand then gets slated to get paid out to our creators and our confluencers basically to our creator ecosystem bring people into the event who are creating content creating templates creating assets and bringing people into events so you could have a big brand like dell who's very unset many people say is unsexy and slow say i want a cool factor i'm going to pay daniel and topia 40 grand to then incentivize all these cool metaverse builders templates to go like build this cool online ecosystem that's right we also have service partners so uh this 40 000 event actually they paid forty thousand dollars to us but one of our service partners uh provided a world building services event production uh we have about a dozen different service partners are those the world ownership people that you said there's thousands of paying nine bucks a month no they're in some cases they are but uh often they're actually like event production companies they are uh a team of illustrators um and and uh you know they have a lot of different uh capabilities sometimes they can hire paid actors you know so you can have these live interactive events so think of like sleep no more in new york if you're familiar with that um you can you can have a corporate event that's kind of like your own customized sleep no more which is like interactive theater and these service partners will build the world they'll customize it you know put in your uh your company product videos or inside jokes scavenger hunts you can you know where you can win things and then during the event they'll actually run the event they'll have the paid actors those kinds of things and daniel when did you start building the business what year uh so this topia uh formerly started in 2020 but i've been building platforms like this since 2015 and so it's been it's been a long journey i've been actually the same technology that we're using utopia which is web real-time communication we basically have peer-to-peer encrypted tunnels for our audio and video so there's like an encrypted tunnel between two browsers i was building stuff uh using that technology back in 2015 uh and so you know it's been it's been kind of a journey but this particular iteration started in 2020 we raised a little bit over five million uh in may of this year from uh 776 and bonfire ventures uh and a few others um and uh...