Hike was founded by Kieran Headley and I (I’m Andy by the way). Many people ask us why we built Hike and what’s our story. So here it is…

Kieran and I were driven to create a solution that would enable all businesses to get started in SEO. SEO is such a powerful channel for driving new business and increasing brand awareness, but there are a lot of businesses who just don’t have the chance to see this for themselves.

Why? Well, SEO can be complex. So they either have to learn it themselves (which is too time-intensive) or pay large sums of money for third party help, such as an agency or consultant.

Surely there’s another solution? Yep, and we’ve called it Hike.

The idea for Hike came during our time on a tech startup accelerator programme called Ignite. Kieran and I were lucky enough to be enrolled onto this programme and to use the resources and expertise to build a product that was going to make a difference. And it didn’t take long to think up the idea of Hike!

During the accelerator, we worked with lots of other small businesses. As we introduced ourselves there was one thing we couldn’t help but notice; they were all particularly interested when they found out we were “SEO guys”…

“I’m going to need your help when we launch!”

“Fancy taking a look over my website for me?”

“SEO rules!” (I may have made that one up)

Why was it that these small businesses kept asking us for SEO help? Couldn’t they get the help they needed elsewhere? It turns out that no, they can’t — maybe a few blog SEO posts here or there, but a practical solution? No. They had to either learn SEO or hire someone.

That’s when the idea hit us. We decided to create a SaaS product that would guide a small business through doing their own SEO. It was a challenge, but we thought it could definitely be done.

So we did some further research to validate the idea, interviewed lots of small businesses, conducted lots of questionnaires, even created a Facebook group! And once we knew there was a need we got to work creating Hike.

That was 2018, and here we are now. A little over a year later and we’re helping over 4000 small businesses across almost 70 different countries with their SEO. We’ve introduced lots of new features as we’ve refined the product, and even introduced our Software + Support service to help those small businesses who just don’t have the time to do it themselves.

There’s still so much more we can and will do to Hike to make it even more powerful and effective for small businesses. We hope you want to join us as we make these a reality!