Our story

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.