Not dashboards. Not sentiment scores. Not AI that sounds confident and makes things up. Verified, traceable intelligence — with every finding traced back to a specific person on a specific piece of content.
Boutique engagements led personally by a human analyst. For studios, agencies, and brands that need intelligence they can act on — not more dashboards to interpret.
Explore EnterpriseA systematic analysis of 30K–100K comments — who your real audience is, what they actually want, and who's been quietly loyal without being noticed.
Explore Creator ProgramMost "AI-powered" analytics tools either scrape a sample and extrapolate, or feed raw text into a chatbot and call it analysis. Both approaches produce results that feel authoritative and can't be verified. We built a different architecture — because we had the same frustrations you do.
We compute everything provable from raw data before we touch AI — then use AI only for pattern recognition on structured outputs. Verification isn't a feature. It's the architecture.
Every community member classified and scored from raw engagement data. Tier assignments, advocate identification, dormant member flagging, content decay curves — all computed deterministically before AI enters the picture.
Pre-analysis outputs become a knowledge graph mapping relationships between members, content, and behavioral patterns. AI processes structured graph queries — not a wall of raw comments. The scaffold is why attribution is possible.
Every AI-generated insight is cross-referenced against the quantitative scaffold. Fabricated statistics and ungrounded claims are caught before they reach your report. Every number and quote traces to a source.
From an actual engagement: 226K-member community, 85 content pieces, 29,591 interactions from 16,913 unique individuals. Every metric below is traceable to source data.
Real data from a real engagement. Community members are represented as pseudonyms — the same format clients receive. Every figure is verifiable against source data upon request.
Your community — customers, players, followers, holders — is constantly forming and updating beliefs about your product, your brand, and your competitors. Those beliefs drive purchasing decisions, loyalty, and churn. Standard analytics tells you what they're saying out loud. Headwater reads what they actually believe: who the real advocates are, where conviction is fragmenting, what narratives are forming before they become visible problems.
This is a project-based, founder-led service. Every engagement is scoped personally. You describe the question; if the methodology can answer it, we scope it honestly — cost, timeline, and deliverable — before any commitment.
The aggregate metrics look fine. Sentiment is mostly positive. But something has shifted — and you can feel it before you can prove it. We map exactly who has disengaged, when it started, and what their last interactions suggested about why.
Sponsorship, partnership, market entry, product launch — all involve bets on how a community will respond. We tell you what that community actually believes before you commit: genuine engagement vs. manufactured consensus, real advocates vs. loud noise.
Competitive landscape, category dynamics, unmet demand, sentiment that precedes behavior. What are the people you're trying to reach actually asking for? What concerns appear repeatedly in comments but never in reviews? Where is the real opening?
I've spent years studying how online communities form and transmit beliefs — in educational settings, in organizational transitions, and in financial markets where wrong reads on a community had immediate, measurable consequences. The analytical habits that environment demands — complete population analysis, individual-level tracking, verified attribution — are now the architecture of Headwater. The methodology works because the problem was studied in its most demanding form first.
You describe the question. We'll tell you whether the methodology can answer it, what the analysis would involve, and what it costs — before any commitment. Projects typically start at $1,500.
Who are your 50 most loyal commenters? What content has staying power vs. what dies in a week? Which fans went quiet — and why? The same pipeline that powers our enterprise analysis, automated for individual creators. From $697. Money-back guarantee.
Explore Creator ProgramThe difference isn't features. It's what the architecture makes structurally possible — and what it makes structurally impossible.
| Capability | Headwater | Brandwatch / Sprinklr | Manual Freelancer | Generic AI (ChatGPT) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Analysis depth | 100K+ complete population | Keyword monitoring | Manual sampling | 2–3K max per session |
| Individual-level tracking | Full cross-content history | No | No | No (no memory) |
| Dormant member detection | Automated, scored, named | No | No | No |
| Verified statistics (traceable) | Every number has a source | Partially (surface metrics) | Subjective estimates | None — hallucination risk |
| Attribution (who said what) | Specific handle + content + date | No | Manual, limited | Cannot attribute reliably |
| Turnaround | 3–7 days | Real-time (surface-level) | 1–4 weeks | Hours (shallow, unverified) |
| Cost | $697–$5,000 per engagement | $12K–$36K / year | $1,500–$4,000+ | Free (trust is the cost) |
Most tools give you noise. We find the signal — and show you exactly where it came from.
Scoping calls are free. Typical turnaround 3–7 days. No contracts, no lock-in.