AI drafts hundreds of local pages – humans still approve what goes live
Joe Troyer is Chief Marketing Officer at Great Lakes Tiny Homes and built companies including Digital Triggers, ReviewGrower and SEOMaven. Great Lakes Tiny Homes runs an AI-driven content engine that generates county- and town-level pages to drive organic search. The interview explains how he scales content and instant AI customer responses while keeping a human in the publishing loop.
Use AI for the two places it actually pays: first-response customer answers and scaled content production, but keep humans in the editing and publishing loop. Ship a few systems that work and let them compound rather than chasing every new tool.
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?
I’m an internet entrepreneur with a background in digital marketing — I’ve built companies like Digital Triggers, ReviewGrower, and SEOMaven, and I’m the Chief Marketing Officer of Great Lakes Tiny Homes. The thread through all of it is the same problem: get a business found, and get its customers answered fast. What makes the approach different is that I don’t ship strategy decks — I put working systems into live operations. On the software and agency side that’s AI agents handling the routine customer questions around the clock; at Great Lakes Tiny Homes it’s an AI-driven content engine producing the local pages that get us found.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Across the businesses, most of it comes from search and referral — people find the content, or someone who’s worked with us sends the next person. At Great Lakes Tiny Homes specifically, the bulk comes from organic search on our local pages. Where I’d like more of it to come from is those same content systems compounding into a steady inbound pipeline — that’s the next lever we’re pushing on.
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: content production at scale. At Great Lakes Tiny Homes we use AI to draft the local pages — county and town level — that get us found in search, so a small team can cover hundreds of pages. On the software side, we’ve handed first-response customer questions to AI agents that answer instantly and route only the real ones to a person. Went back to the human way: publishing without a person in the loop — we found AI drafts still need someone to edit and approve every page before it goes live, so that review stays human.
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 — customers show up more informed than they used to, already knowing the work and half their questions answered before the first call. As for AI assistants like ChatGPT, it’s hard to measure cleanly yet, but we’re building for it: those tools pull from what you’ve published, so the local pages we create for Great Lakes Tiny Homes aren’t just for Google anymore — they’re what the AI answers get built on.
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 this: pick the two places AI actually pays off — answering customers and producing content — and put real systems there, not experiments. Get your core answers and your best content published clearly, because that’s what both customers and AI tools pull from. Ignore this: chasing every new tool that launches. Most of it is noise, and the winners will be the ones who shipped a few things that work and let them compound.
Thank you to Joe Troyer and the team at Great Lakes Tiny Homes 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.