About Amy Hourigan
Hi Friends! I'm Amy Hourigan founder of Amy Who? Digital.
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The Amy and Digital part in our name is self explanatory but the the ‘Who’, comes from the pronunciation of my Irish surname Hourigan. Quite often when I introduce myself I get a reply of "Amy Who?"
So I decided, sure… that’ll do.
I come from two entrepreneurial parents. I grew up surrounded by sole traders my parents bought an iconic 80’s delicatessen when I was three so I grew up surrounded by the best era of streets ice creams and the days when you could buy a bag of lollies for 5 cents. I also grew up watching that customers could go anywhere to get their milk and morning paper but they will go out of their way to get it from genuinely nice people who give excellent specialised customer service.
Through my childhood I grew in the back rooms of a deli, a dress shop, a pub and a newsagency. I was fascinated by the entire process of owning a business. Especially the counting up the tills at the end off the day and working out what the profit was. My very first business I started back in early 2000’s as a side hustle from our family business Leigh Street Paper House. I was running Microsoft Access to manage a database of emails for a restaurant, where we could send menus to previous customers who had previously ordered. This was 20 years before Mailchimp or Uber.
When I received my first invite to join Facebook I really started to see the amazing opportunities available for business to really get social and grow their online visibility and started Amy Hourigan Online to help businesses manage their social media platforms and online communities.
It wasn’t long into my social media and community management foray that I realised that social media was amazing and powerful for reach and engagement but the biggest challenge was getting users from social media over to a paying customer and this is where my passion for digital strategy and search engine optimisation really grew.
Using friends and families websites as test cases I starting learning SEO from scratch and the buzz of getting sites ranking become an addiction that still has me hunched over my keyword at 3am in the morning (although my work life/balance has seriously improved from those early days as a small business owner).