Success Stories: Sampsa Loukkola & WP SEO AI

Welcome to the highlights of our Growth Hacking Internship program! ✨

We interviewed Sampsa Loukkola, a student at Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences and a current Growth Hacking Intern at Herizon.

Sampsa collaborated with WP SEO AI, a company that specializes in providing AI-powered tools for search engine optimization (SEO), and here are Sampsa’s thoughts on his collaboration with his company and Herizon over the past two and half months.

Here’s a highlight that Sampsa shared with us:

At Herizon I felt encouraged to seek advice and ask questions without fear of being judged. The time it took to receive help was always low which I appreciated a lot.

How has the collaboration been with your case company? Share your growth hacking progress, examples, learnings and observations.

After the initial weeks of getting orientated and building up a rough outline of what the company was looking for from us, I was allowed a lot of freedom. That freedom came with an equal amount of responsibility to manage my own time and goals of course as management was very hands-off.

My role revolved around programming but every task was viewed through a growth hacking lens by all those involved. New tasks that were proposed were pitched with growth related benefits in mind.

On a personal level growth hacking became more and more a mindset promoting experimentation and curiosity that could be applied to anything.

How has the collaboration been with Herizon? Share examples, learnings and observations.

I felt encouraged to seek advice and ask questions without fear of being judged. The time it took to receive help was always low which I appreciated a lot.

Information fragmentation was a bit confusing at times. For one I don't find Slack the most intuitive way to share materials. Second, having multiple different services for different purposes calls for a "file map" in my opinion.

Have you had any success cases at work that you'd want to share?

If we're speaking of growth hacking metrics the projects I worked on didn't have enough time to show their effects before the end of my internship.

One application I worked on early on, specifically a pdf -> text extraction tool with a quick copy functionality, did have an immediate positive impact on workflow, cutting time spent on a manual task of extracting data from files. The problem earlier was that the content of the pdf had to be manually extracted/copied to be inserted to another application, which was frustrating and time-consuming. The feedback I received was that it made that process a lot easier/faster. Though the impact wasn't measured by pirate metrics I find it to be an example of affecting growth via optimizing workflows allowing employees to focus on more impactful tasks. 

Also the URL and PDF summarizing tools are worth mentioning. Basically what started as an idea one of the employees had about a tool that he wished existed turned into the URL summarizer. I had a lot of freedom to design and build the backend functionality based on the requirements. I also built the frontend and the UI visually in collaboration with Max from the company according to his vision.

How could Herizon have made your experience as an intern even 1% better/easier/etc?

Adjust the timing of the start of the internship so there is a two week window to learn a bit more about growth hacking and how to go about probing for bottlenecks so that we can carry ourselves with more confidence during the starting weeks. Lean into emphasizing how our existing skill sets could be used to help the companies grow with concrete examples. Alternatively provide some ideas about how growth hacking utilizes similar concepts to those we are already familiar with from our studies.

If you would join the program again, what would you do differently as an intern? All thoughts help us to give better support to other interns.

Be more aggressive in questioning practices, spend more time early on mapping out the company's bottlenecks, practices etc. and be more structured in software development.

Would you recommend other students to join this program as well? If yes, why?

Yes, for the unique work opportunity and possibly having an impactful role in a company.

Sampsa, thank you for participating in our Growth Hacking Internship Program and we wish you progress and success in your current and upcoming projects! 💜