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 776 is alex ohanian who's the founder of reddit uh just as an aside um so you know in some ways the evolution of how we socialize evolution of reddit community building those kinds of things uh would you consider is it five million the all you brave so it's like your pre-seed round basically yeah it's it's it's five point eight in total that we've raised mm-hmm so what talk take me earlier so before the five million when did you raise the 800 grand uh we did that so we hosted burning man uh in 2020 uh basically you know burning man uh was trying to figure out how to deal with kovid and they're shutting down they were trying to throw their own event we were kind of advising them on how to build a virtual world essentially i had to build a you know metaverse experience for burning man uh they wound up deciding that they were gonna uh outsource this so we were one of the co-hosts of it in 2020. we had over 25 000 people come to the event uh and this was like five months after we actually uh wrote the first line of code so you know the whole platform is pretty new uh but we had over 20 000 people come to uh two burning to what we call build a burn which is the virtual burning man uh and then right after that you know we had a lot of people interested trying to invest in topia and so we did uh friends and family round essentially then got it so that was eight hundred thousand sort of pre-seed round and did you do that like on a priced a priced round or a normal note would you say uh so it was actually six hundred thousand and it was uh using daniel come on man the story keeps changing okay so six hundred thousand raised we then raised 5.2 so we've raised 5.8 all together fair fair fair okay cool cool i'm the reason i'm trying to get to this is because every founder like when they have their big first moment for you this burning man moment there's always a ton of inbound interest and so i'm curious how you sort of like moved quick you know reduced the amount of time you were on investor calls did you use a note to do that or did you go ahead and do the full price round on the 600 yeah we just we just did a note um and you know we actually did the whole thing in like two weeks yeah it was really fast for for that uh for the note round for the friends and family and then the uh the price round you know we were really we i talked to a lot of different vcs we were really trying to find somebody that was uh spiritually and energetically aligned with what we were trying to do and understood what we were trying to achieve um and we're going to try to like you know push us down some path that didn't make sense for uh you know for our values for our culture so when i met alex ohanian and his team caitlin holloway as well i was another partner at 776. yeah i was just like okay these are these are the perfect investors for us they totally get what we're trying to do they have deep experience building reddit you know which is a platform that i have a lot of deep respect for uh and you know investing and just a lot of experience and connections and so uh when when you know when we actually made that uh happen you know it's kind of like sparks flu and let's make this happen that that makes sense to me why you two aligned in terms of like an energy level um most people are most founders are selling some around 20 of the business in their seed were you around that same amount yeah around there okay dan do you ever do you ever did you ever consider man this is going to be big i want full flexibility i'd prefer to bootstrap yeah you know bootstrapping is is definitely a path to go um you know i think if you're gonna do that either you need to have a founder that's already had a big exit and has the capital to bootstrap or you need to uh really focus on how to make how to maximize revenue and build a sustainable business right off the bat um and while we are you know we we had revenue within our first six months um that hasn't been our core focus you know really for us it's building a product that people love and that is building a network allows them to come together um revenue has been honestly you know one of the reasons that we focus on revenue at all now is that we can pay out our creator ecosystem yeah and provide that kind of financial independence what was like to boost that ecosystem obviously then you bring in network effects right so how low was revenue in 2020 i mean most of it was probably from the burning man event right but are we talking like 100 revenue or something like that yeah it was it was even less than that um i think in 2020 we didn't actually turn on revenue generation capabilities until something like um you know august or september is right before burning man we even let people subscribe at all uh and so it was when you say when you say let people subscribe like does that mean they're they're trying to buy worlds at nine bucks a month they're world builder builders taking 30 percent like what are the models where you did you open up yeah so the first one was uh was world ownership essentially so that these are these are unique urls it's kind of like real estate so if you want topia dot io slash nathan then you pay nine bucks a month to have that and you have unlimited people that you can bring in there we have huge amount of scalability um so we don't like cap the number of people at a time we've had people bring thousands of people at once into one of these worlds uh and that's just nine bucks and so that that's what we opened up first uh and you know we have thousands of people paying to have worlds that they own and all of these things would you say this year this is gonna be your main revenue stream then it's gonna be this nine dollar per month world ownership concept no we make we make way more from uh our business side uh what is more like the confluencer side the world ownership side okay okay interesting i mean if you have thousands though at nine bucks a month i mean let's say two thousand and nine bucks a month that's more than you know 20 grand a month in revenue so if you're doing way more on the b2b side i mean what you are you guys passed a million run rate yet we're not no can you break it next year you think a million next year yeah definitely our goal yeah and the reason i bring that up is because it sounds like if that goes up confluencers can make more money so you get more creatives cartoonists illustrators building for the platform and you get network effects so like don't don't kill me for pushing on revenue but i'm also trying to help that's exactly right that's exactly right and and that's that's really the the focal point here is how do we uh you know how do we create financial independence for creators make so that you can just you know you can have a full-time career be just creating things that bring people together right creating experiences creating social experiences online um that's that's actually sort of the uh the goal and the mission here you know that makes a lot of sense okay so um so uh how i guess the main thing you're tracking then are what is it how many confluencers contribute at one at least one illustration or at least one template per month like what's that metric for you that you really care i know you're not a metrics you're like an energy guy but you have to have some metrics right what's the metric yeah we definitely we have metrics so you know we are looking at how many people are having conversations a week um okay you know importantly we're not saying how how you know um what is like session duration how long are people having conversations because we're not trying to build an attention economy we're not an ad based model right we're never going to be so uh the length of time isn't at nearly as important as actually coming on frequently and having at least you know one human connection with people so we track uh we track that we uh look at how many events are happening on platform each week and then we look at how much we are paying out to our creator ecosystem interesting okay so how many conversations per week happen last week uh last week i think it was four thousand people had at least conversation that's amazing okay and so how many events was that across uh it fluctuates i think last last week was 180 different events wow okay and then it sounds like again a really good day for you in terms of paid out to creators would be like 3k so maybe i mean it sounds like you're around like two or three k per week on a good week on a good week yeah yeah yeah super interesting okay very cool you know i think that the most i would argue the hardest thing about this really is finding like a mousetrap to get like the common person understanding this right like i get it but i would say i'm even early right like what do you think a mousetrap is going to be where you get millions of people having a conversation each week yeah well one of the funny things that's happening is we've been a metaverse company for years now without actually using the word metaverse right and so uh it's really hard to describe topia without bringing people into it i think that's actually getting a lot easier because now people are exploring what is this idea of real-time social interaction online what is the synchronous internet what is the metaverse uh and so that's actually making things much much easier for us um but you know i think that the the ultimate um explosion in people actually having conversations is likely going to come from people just being more comfortable with uh with these kinds of platforms actually using them having it integrated into their daily way of uh of life and and part of how they actually interact and have community with people all over the world right in many ways we're actually bringing uh the accessibility to communities we're tearing down location-based physical constraints uh economic constraints to to be a member of different groups and so uh you know it's my belief and i think what we're seeing actually happen around us real time is that people are are getting more and more excited about uh the ability to actually interact online and not just in a meeting right but in sort of a social free to move you have your own agency safe consensual way well i just signed up and i'm very happy to say i got forward slash nathan username which i'm shocked that i got so i'm very excited this is great you know this reminds me of this is crazy this looks almost exactly like the uh whatever the the boring apes ecosystem they built to give value to the nfts they're building do you have anyone combining and illustrating virtual worlds and you can only access them and with nft access it's funny you should ask that we uh we have not this is this is an exclusive on this podcast um you know just teasing that we are uh one of the one of our core beliefs is in the interoperable metaverse the idea of you know if you're going to be creator-centric we need to make it possible for creators instead of having to uh in like women this is so creepy i just joined this world there are other people here i've never met before but i see their faces and i see their little illustrators walking around this is very interesting [Laughter] you're probably in welcome which is kind of like our welcome lobby is the url welcome yeah i just muted myself i'm going to i'm i'm walking through explore the topia sign i'm going to the private zone i'm discovering public world art island look in looks interesting this is very interesting yep wow this is like so like how much of your time is spent towards like building the next disney right don't you need like amazing illustrators and cartoonists like create these virtual worlds isn't that the key here like activision x world of warcraft builder people yeah i mean we so one of the crazy things is that we have a huge marketplace full of assets uh we have we have both topia assets we also have uh community built assets and then scenes which are collections of objects or cloud collections of assets um so there's a ton of stuff that you can actually just pull in and then if you want to upload your own content you can you also very soon will be able to import uh your nft's verified nfts uh and you know use those kinds of things so you know just tying into this sort of interoperable public database of content makes it so you don't really have to generate your own from scratch anymore as part of this whole creator ecosystem that is emerging around us you know people have been talking about creator economies for a long time but now it's actually coming to fruition and you don't need to be an artist yourself in order to have access to really high quality art that creators have made sorry if i look distracted it's because i am i'm walking through all these worlds can i like have an can i hire an illustrator and like illustrate my own little podcast booth kind of like this person right now is owning the little graphic stage and when i walk into it he's i'm listening to his music absolutely yep and people are doing that all the time so i was talking about service partners there's also just tons of artists on platform uh where you can you know they'll make you custom art and you can just make your world whatever you want to be i just jumped in the pool which is that splashing you hear in the background so funny i love this okay this makes perfect sense to me like i get it you just have to do it i love how easy you've made the onboarding i feel like that's the key to getting this to work i feel like once people are in they're going to get hooked this is great all right let's wrap up actually are you raising more capital right now uh we we likely are we haven't um you know we haven't really kicked that off um we are getting a lot of interest in raising another round you know we just raised so we don't really need capital but uh you know having more will help us to really accelerate we are scaling the team our product is evolving pretty rapidly and so you know if people are interested to reach out to me very cool all right let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite book favorite book um well the book that i just read is snow crash because that's the the word of you know metaverse uh came from i would say maybe shantaram though is uh is probably my favorite book at the moment number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh that's a good question um you know i i think mack redden at comsore he's kind of an ally of mine um but also just an amazing community builder and has a has a beautiful energy recommend checking them out number three what's your favorite online tool for building uh topia uh i mean procreate is is probably the number one in terms of uh illustration capabilities uh we also have an api uh coming very soon where people will be able to build their own tools on top of topia uh and and so hopefully one of those will be my favorite soon number four how many hours i sleep to get every night [Laughter] i think the healthy thing to say would be eight to nine but you know it's often it's five or six all right in situation married single kids uh married no kids no kids all right how old are you 34. uh 35. i just had a birthday happy birthday happy birthday to you i was october 3rd when's your birthday october 14th oh nice man very cool all right last question something you wish you when you were 20 uh hmm wish i knew when i was 20. i guess you know that you don't need to go the traditional path one of the things when when we're young at least when i was growing up you know you're told that you should be a doctor or a banker a lawyer one of the things i've realized now is that there's so many different things you can be and part of that is just the evolution of the job market and there are gig economy things you can be an artist you can be a creator you can be a manager um but you know i wish i knew when i was younger that like the world was way more open to possibilities guys topia.io hosted burning man in 2020 when everyone was shut down had 25 000 people on their virtual world they did under 100 000 bucks in revenue at that point because they weren't focused on revenue now really trying to figure out how to drive revenue so they can pay more out to co creators to get better artistic talent on the platform to create better virtual worlds thousands of people are paying over nine bucks a month for world ownership and b2b brands are hosting events on here as well along with some of these folks like burning man they're paying thousands out to creators every single month we'll see what happens next 5.2 million raise sold about 20 as he looks to scale daniel thanks for taking us to the top nathan thanks for having me on here this is really fun one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central 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