A Waterloo-based tech company has passed a major milestone, and plans to mark it with a hiring spree.
Kik, which was founded by two University of Waterloo students and continues to operate out of the city, recently passed 200 million registered users.
Users signed up with Kik are able to communicate with each other via the Kik app – not only sending each other text messages, but also sharing photos, links and other items.
Heather Galt, the company’s vice-president of marketing, says half of the app’s regular users send content on a daily basis – and that the average user stays active in Kik for 35 minutes per session.
“That’s higher than Facebook Messenger, it’s higher than Snapchat, it’s higher than Twitter – we are almost at the top,” she says.
Ending up in the company of those tech giants never entered the minds of co-founders Ted Livingston and Chris Best when they launched their company in 2009 – not least because two of them didn’t exist, but because the first incarnation of Kik was a music player for BlackBerry phones.
Pretty quickly, Best says, they began to see opportunity for an app that could do many things at once.
Before long, they had a hit – an overnight success they weren’t expecting and their servers weren’t prepared for.
“We all spent two weeks not sleeping, or going home,” he says.
Kik currently employs 65 people in Waterloo.
Its rapid growth means the company is looking to double that figure before long.
“We need tons of people – especially developers, designers, creators,” Best says.
Despite the growth already seen and the hopes for increased success in the future, Kik executives say they have no plans to leave Waterloo Region.
“This is our home,” Galt says.
“We were made here, we are based here, and we want to hire and grow here.”
