Pageloot’s practical AI test: automate replies, keep outreach human
Siim Kostabi is co-founder of Pageloot, a QR code platform for marketing agencies and brand teams. Kostabi explains how the company uses AI to handle repetitive outreach replies, measures whether AI assistants recommend Pageloot, and keeps human judgment in customer communication.
Use AI for repetitive tasks with clear rules for when a person takes over, then measure the results. Keep customer-facing writing human when AI produces generic copy, and answer buyer questions in the places people and AI assistants already look.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
We started Pageloot in 2018 and have been bootstrapped ever since, so we have always had to win on product rather than ad budget. Today more than 20,000 businesses in 110 countries use it, including De’Longhi and Starbucks, along with 870+ agencies. What makes us different is that we built for agencies: their own domain and logo across the dashboard, and a branded live stats link their clients open without logging in. The agency stops screenshotting QR results into monthly reports, and the client checks the results whenever they like.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Most of it comes from organic search. People looking for a QR code generator find our free one, which needs no signup, and some of them upgrade once they need codes they can edit after printing or want to see their scan analytics. Where I wish more came from is agencies. One agency brings the QR codes of many clients at once, so this autumn we started reaching out to agencies directly in the Netherlands, the Nordics, France, the UK and the US.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
Handed over: the first reply to people who answer our outreach emails. An AI model sorts every reply, drafts a short answer from a fixed list of facts and sends it within minutes instead of the next day. Anything about money, a complaint or someone ready to buy stops and goes to a person. Went back: writing the outreach emails themselves. The AI drafts sounded like every other cold email and people could tell, so I write that copy myself again. Same with translations: machine translation is only a first draft now, and every language gets a pass for how people in that country actually search before it goes live.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Yes. People arrive knowing more, and many have already compared three or four tools before they talk to us. So we started measuring it: every week we ask four AI assistants about 70 questions a buyer would ask about QR code tools and log who gets recommended. At the end of September Pageloot was named in 1 of those answers. By mid-October it was 9. The biggest lever so far has been getting listed in the comparison articles those assistants cite. We don’t yet see many signups we can tie directly to an assistant, but the trend is clear enough that we now treat it as its own channel.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Do: answer the questions your buyers actually ask, in plain words, and get your product named on the comparison lists that already rank, because that is what both people and AI assistants read. Put AI on the repetitive work, give it a clear rule for when a human takes over, and measure what it does every week. Ignore: tools that promise to write all your content or outreach for you, and anyone selling guaranteed AI rankings. Buyers spot generic AI copy straight away, and the trust you lose costs more than the time you saved.
Thank you to Siim Kostabi and the team at Pageloot for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
Want to share your playbook?
Leaders Perception publishes founder and operator interviews every week. A few questions, about five minutes, no calls. It is free and everyone we accept gets published.