Leadoo brings you the right kind of leads

Mikael da Costa is a little overwhelmed. The phone interview begins a little late, as he had to take calls from both Norway and Sweden just minutes before our chat was pencilled in on his schedule.

“If you think of a general hassle, this is it but multiplied by five,” he says laughingly. “What’s more is that we want to do everything 10/10 and never half-bake whatever it is that we do, so there’s plenty to do to say the least!”

Da Costa is the man behind Leadoo, a Helsinki-based company that promises to “turn your website visitors into proper leads”. It does so by offering companies tools that make website content personalised and interactive, thus boosting customer experience and engagement.

“If you think of website visitors, there are two kinds: active and passive ones,” da Costa explains. “The active ones have already made a purchase decision and they’re scrolling for information and comparing providers, whereas the passive ones are only just beginning to gather information and make their way to the site through content marketing.”

Leadoo, da Costa tells, aims to make passive visitors active with chatbots, live chats, videobots and other tools and modules, some of which are still in the making.

Boosting ROI for finding clients

The idea for Leadoo – which was initially called Interactive Ads – occurred to da Costa when he was working in recruitment. He noticed that a lot of companies were investing loads of money and resources in improving their employer brand, but the return on investment wasn’t particularly high.

“It’s not enough for people just to come to the site and read a long article about the company,” he says. “They actually need to apply for a job, too.”

To da Costa, the journey from popping into a site to sending an application seemed long, and there were no conversion points or calls to action involved.

“After reading the article, the person would have to go to the company’s careers page, find a suitable position and then take the time to write an application. That’s a lot of steps to be taken before the expected result is achieved.”

Leadoo’s tools help the company to figure out, with questions posed by either bots or actual customer service agents, what the website visitors are looking for. They also save the visitors the trouble of having to collect bits of information here and there on their own.

The key clients include, well, everyone.

“We have law firms, catering companies, recruiters, construction companies, builders and huge listed companies with various functions, but also SMEs, in both B2C and B2B.”

Customer happiness comes first

Leadoo started out, according to da Costa, almost by accident. He was supposed to downshift a little after many years working in the startup world, but the idea just seemed too good to be left on the shelf.

The first clients found Leadoo in August last year, and, since then, many new clients have knocked on the company’s door due to recommendations from others. This is what da Costa was referring to when he said the 22-strong Leadoo team wants to do everything “10/10”.

“Our customer satisfaction score is very high, and that’s the way we want to keep it. Our board of directors and half of our employees are shareholders in the company to ensure we’re all committed to providing quality service.”

Now, Leadoo is building offices in both Sweden and Norway, which keeps da Costa busy and on the phone. He’s keen to consider conquering the world, but not a moment before the clients in new locations are as happy as they are in Finland.

Da Costa also has enough experience with startups that he no longer aims to be the best in the world. If anything, he has got a fair pinch of realism in his plans for the future.

“If anything, I’m intrigued to see what our first major setback will be,” he notes and laughs again. “We’ve been going for over six months with no real issues, but with startups there’ll be something at some stage for sure!”