Small Team, focused skills
Our story
We started HQ to create the company we would want to work for. Where people care deeply about what they make and who they make it with. We want to build epic products. Craftsmanship, integrity, and curiosity have guided us from day one, and still do.
Written by Zarin
How we started
Matt and I started working together while living in our parents’ basements. The card table on the back porch was our office, and team lunches featured hot dogs roasted at the firepit.
As students at Weber State University, we didn’t have plans to start an agency — we just wanted to make cool tech products. I was building websites as a freelancer (in those days, we designed in Photoshop and wrote code in Notepad++). Matt created social media ads for companies before social media marketing was a thing.
Eventually, we decided to build a product together: a wedding website creator called “Beside You Forever”. We weren't necessarily passionate about the wedding industry, but we were very excited to build a real tool. In many ways, it was our lived education about the world of tech and entrepreneurship. We loved the process.
Between our products and busy client work, we thought, "Why not join forces and focus on building one really good company?" It gave us an engine for building whatever we wanted, whether our own ideas or client projects. HQ was born.
We're often asked what HQ stands for. The original thought was that our company was a "headquarters" for our various endeavors. Also, it’s short.
13 yrs
In business
250+
Launched projects
25
Team members
5.6 yrs
Avg. team tenure
Our team
We care about working with passionate people who love building digital products with great UX.
Matt Sutherland
Zarin Ficklin
Paxton Bigler
HQ Culture
What we care about
Work hard and be nice to people.
Design and development are people jobs. We want to work with people who are good to be around (this should be a given, but it’s important).
Focus on user experience. In a world where AI and other efficiencies are making it easier than ever to build digital products, great UX is what makes things stand out.
Care about what you do. Most things in life are mediocre: It's really hard to make something truly great, and that's what we chase.
Who we want to be
Make cool stuff people will use. There's nothing like overhearing a stranger rave about a product you worked on.
Work with interesting people on interesting projects. Some industries are inherently more exciting than others, but regardless, we always get fired up about each project.
Create the kind of workplace we’d always dreamed of. Building a company is satisfying, but even more fulfilling is building a company that improves the lives of our team.
Working together
Built by collaboration
We are greedy to find talented, driven, intelligent individuals, and when we get them in the door, we do all that we can to keep them. All of us have grown stronger and more capable over the years as we have worked together and learned from each other. With the group we have assembled, we have a collective confidence that we can rise to any opportunity presented by new or existing clients. A normal week might find some working from home, others working from the office, but always constant collaboration, support, and shared drive to make HQ a positive experience for each other and for our clients.
Come work with us
Whether you’re looking to design, build, update, or refresh an existing app or website, we can help. Even if we’re not a good fit, we will help point you to somebody who might be.
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