Windwalk has raised $4.5m in funding from notable investors for Harbor, including a16z SPEEDRUN, Tirta Ventures, and YCombinator.
Similar to Slack and Discord, Windwalk started as a video game studio in a San Francisco living room. With a shoestring budget and a small team for their first game, Windwalk realized they were at a massive disadvantage in getting the attention they needed to scale and launch.
Traditional spend-heavy marketing and acquisition strategies like ads and influencers weren’t an option. Inspired by scrappy streetwear companies, the team leaned into growing and nurturing their games‘ most passionate superfans and arming these users with the tools to drive massive word of mouth.
Windwalk created an interconnected web of tools and social bots to enable this gamification, gamifying the entire pre-registration process, playtesting, referrals, and feedback processes for their fans. Ultimately these tools ended up being the foundation of Windwalk’s killer app: Harbor.
“Consumer companies these days view driving new user growth as a crisis. Their tried and true levers: ads, influencers, even cross-promo, have become zero-sum.
How does a company excel when everyone is renting the same eyeballs at roughly the same price?
The only way to win is on the shoulders of your most passionate users: your superfans.”
Colin Feo, CEO of Windwalk
Before today’s (October 10th, 2024) platform launch, Harbor was in design partner stage development (closed beta) and saw significant growth and demand fueled by strong reviews and word of mouth.
Last month alone, Harbor generated over 5,000,000 MAU for its partners.
In its first six months of the design partner stage, Harbor’s revenue catapulted past seven figures, attracting the attention of several blue-chip design partners in games, including Scopely, EVE Frontier (CCP Games), NZXT, Immutable, and more.
Harbor’s homebases
Harbor has built fully responsive web hubs for initial design partners, creating “homebases” for superfans seamlessly integrating into a brand’s existing website and mobile apps.
Partners use Harbor to combine their various communities into a single hub/homebase, launch community events, set up referral campaigns, offer in-app rewards, and initiate creator programs and UGC initiatives directly to their most passionate fans daily.
Every Hub or homebase is unique and managed via Harbor’s visual no-code dashboards. Partners can, for the first time, unify their disparate social audiences and gain a 360-degree view of their entire fandoms.
Harbor Data Tools enable teams to have a more holistic picture of their audiences’ social activity and drive actionable insights – identifying creators for influencer campaigns, creating cross-promotion opportunities, and retargeting users in large-scale paid UA campaigns to drive decreased CPIs.
“Harbor has been instrumental in the growth of EVE Frontier as we continue development and engage our audiences across multiple channels. Its allowed us to reward and delight our player base through an end-to-end platform that holds real value.
We look forward to continuing our partnership with Windwalk and connecting with our fans in new ways.”
Eyrún Jónsdóttir, VP of Publishing at CCP Games
Explosive demand beyond just games
Harbor’s superfan and community tooling has received tremendous interest across several other verticals, including politics, music, sports, and direct-to-consumer e-commerce. “Progressive Victory,” a political organization promoting the Harris presidential campaign, recently launched their first Hub to empower grass-roots, local activations, and social amplification.
“The future of political organizing is online. By combining gamification and grassroots energy, Harbor and Progressive Victory are revolutionizing political activism. In an epidemic of loneliness for young men, reaching young hearts and minds is more important than ever.
We’re meeting young people where they are and speaking their language.”
Sam Drzymala, Executive Director, Progressive Victory
Whether it’s e-commerce companies looking for better ways to monetize their growing communities or political groups turning curious bystanders into passionate advocates, Colin Feo notes:
“Everyone needs to own their audience and be able to capture attention. Verticals have different needs, and their superfans hang out in different places. Anyone who has superfans needs Harbor.”
Colin Feo, CEO of Windwalk
Harbor will host an exclusive event at LA Tech Week titled “Community is Dead. Long Live Superfans” on October 15th at 4:30 PT.
For more information about Harbor, visit harbor.gg and join the waitlist to be the first to access the platform.
