Christchurch founder Kate Radcliffe-Reid saw the same problem again and again before she built Backkr.

Small service businesses needed marketing help. They needed to understand their customers, improve their websites, fix their messaging and bring in more leads. But the support available often sat at two extremes.

At one end were digital agencies with retainers many small operators could not afford. At the other were overwhelmed owners trying to do everything themselves, usually without enough data, time or confidence.

Radcliffe-Reid, who had worked inside a digital agency, told Ministry of Awesome she had friends with businesses who needed help finding customers, but she could not realistically send them to an agency because the cost was out of reach.

That gap became the starting point for Backkr, a Christchurch-built marketing platform designed for small service businesses that need customer insight without hiring a full agency team.

The problem Backkr is trying to solve is bigger than one startup. It points to a structural issue in small business marketing: many SMEs know they need better marketing, but they do not know where to start, who they are really targeting, or whether the money they are spending is working.

Radcliffe-Reid also noticed another pattern in the job market: small businesses were often expecting one marketer to do everything. She described seeing job ads for "unicorn marketers" — one person expected to cover a fast-moving and increasingly technical discipline.

Backkr's answer is to turn website analytics into practical customer personas and marketing tasks. Users connect their website data, then the platform shows them customer types, motivations, pain points and actions they can take to improve messaging, SEO and website performance.

Radcliffe-Reid has described the user experience as "Tinder for marketing."

It is a simple line, but it explains the product well. Instead of handing a business owner a dense analytics report, Backkr turns the work into clear, bite-sized decisions.

The company says the product is heavily data-led, with Radcliffe-Reid describing the balance as "80% data and 20% AI."

That distinction matters. Many small businesses are being sold AI tools right now, but not all of them are grounded in reliable business data. Backkr is positioning itself as something more practical: a tool that uses data first, then applies AI to make the insight easier to act on.

Early use showed the strongest fit was with small service firms, often teams of fewer than five people. These were businesses like accountants, consultants, HR firms and tradies — operators who rely heavily on trust, reputation and clear messaging, but often cannot justify agency-level spend.

The investigative thread here is not whether Backkr can build a successful product. It is whether the current marketing industry has left a major group of small businesses underserved.

Small operators are constantly told they need better websites, SEO, social media, email funnels, brand positioning and customer data. But many do not have the budget for professional support, and they do not have the time to become marketing experts themselves.

Backkr is one Christchurch startup trying to close that gap.

For a city positioning itself as a growing hub for practical, export-ready innovation, the business is also a useful example of where Christchurch's startup scene is heading: not just building flashy tech, but solving very real problems for businesses that are usually too small to be well-served by traditional providers. ChristchurchNZ named Backkr among six Christchurch startups to watch in 2026.

The question now is whether tools like Backkr can help small service businesses make better marketing decisions before they waste money they cannot afford to lose.