[SaaS & AI Series] AI, Personalization, and the Future of Beauty With Sampo Parkkinen

Sampo Parkkinen is the Founder and CEO of Revieve, a beauty technology company focused on helping global beauty, skin, health, and wellness brands deliver personalized digital experiences through AI, AR, and computer vision. A serial technology entrepreneur and operator, he has led Revieve since its founding in 2016 and grown it into a platform supporting brands and retailers across their digital consumer journeys. Sampo previously co-founded RapidBlue Solutions, where he served as COO before its acquisition by ShopperTrak. He is also a Venture Partner at Gorilla Capital, where he supports early-stage technology companies across the Nordics.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [1:42] Sampo Parkkinen’s favorite AI tools and daily reliance on Claude
• [6:26] Revieve’s mission to help consumers buy instead of pushing them to purchase
• [10:37] How RoC Skincare uses AI to drive customer acquisition
• [15:17] Using face scans and AI across skincare, makeup, hair care, and fragrance
• [22:24] How Revieve evolved its SaaS pricing and business model
• [28:01] Why white-glove onboarding helps customers get better results
• [31:31] Reducing friction in e-commerce and improving conversion rates
• [39:38] Sampo’s role at Gorilla Capital and backing resilient founders

In this episode…

Beauty and wellness products are deeply personal, yet most e-commerce experiences still push consumers toward transactions instead of guidance. As AI changes how people discover products, how can brands create digital experiences that feel more helpful, personal, and trustworthy?

For Sampo Parkkinen, a serial entrepreneur and investor focused on AI-powered customer experience, the answer is to shift from selling products to helping consumers buy with confidence. He highlights how personalized digital tools can replicate the value of an in-store advisor by listening to customer concerns, analyzing needs, and recommending relevant products across skincare, makeup, hair care, and fragrance. This creates a more intimate brand experience while improving acquisition, conversion, and loyalty. He also explains why reducing friction, avoiding generic quizzes, and positioning AI experiences as personal analysis can dramatically improve engagement.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Sampo Parkkinen, Founder and CEO at Revieve, to discuss AI, personalization, and the future of the beauty industry. Sampo explores AI-powered product guidance, personalized beauty retail, and how brands can reduce e-commerce friction. He also shares insights on SaaS pricing, onboarding, and his work with Gorilla Capital.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Sampo Parkkinen on LinkedIn
• Revieve
• Claude
• Wispr Flow
• Claude Cowork
• Fireflies
• Pipedrive
• RoC Skincare
• Super-Pharm
• Gorilla Capital
• Serviceform

Related episodes:

• “[Top SaaS & Israel Business Series] From Handling Million Dollar Cameras to Reinventing Security With Joe Levy” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[AI Series] AI Tools That Transform Your Business With Nicole Donnelly” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[AI & Agency Series] AI-Powered Lead Generation and Automation for Agencies With Ken McLoud” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Pipedrive: Brain Surgery, Married, & Moved Company from Estonia to U.S. All at Once – with Urmas Purde [Inspiration]” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable moments:

• “I don’t think I could get through my day without Claude.”
• “Nobody wants to be sold to, like, I don’t want to be sold to.”
• “Show the customer value and show them that you care about them.”
• “We built our solution, which is really our sort of personal customer experience platform driven by AI.”
• “The earlier you are, the less you should actually care about that because you’re in the process of learning.”

Action steps:

1. Shift from selling to helping customers buy: Creating experiences that guide consumers toward the right products builds trust and makes brands more useful during the buying journey.
2. Personalize recommendations across every channel: Delivering consistent AI-powered guidance on websites, apps, stores, and platforms like ChatGPT helps brands meet customers wherever they engage.
3. Reduce friction in digital experiences: Removing unnecessary steps, forced sign-ups, and gated interactions can improve engagement, conversions, and customer satisfaction.
4. Listen to customer goals and preferences: Combining AI analysis with direct customer input creates more relevant recommendations and a more personal brand experience.
5. Treat onboarding as a strategic partnership: Supporting customers through setup, optimization, and iteration helps SaaS companies drive stronger outcomes and long-term retention.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, Founder of InspiredInsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today is no different. I have Sampo Parkkinen and you can check them out. It’s Revieve Revieve.com. We’re going to show it in a second. And Sampo, I’m going to formally introduce you in a minute. I like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out.

This is part of our SaaS and AI series. And so some of the other interesting companies and interviews in this AI world, a Joe Levy AiLert, he reinvented security. So they overlay AI with security cameras and identifies if someone’s carrying a gun. Immediately notifies the authorities and locates what kind of gun, where is the person located and everything like that so they can respond within, you know, a short period of time as opposed to hours. That was interesting. I had Nicole Donnelly sharing her favorite AI tools that transform businesses, and she has spoken all over the world on this. And also Ken McLoud, AI-powered lead generation automation for agencies. That was also an interesting episode.

Sampo, I’d like to hear, I don’t know if you have some favorite tools that you’re using in the AI world and or have heard of or tested could be apps, software. What have you been checking out?

Sampo Parkkinen: 01:42

Yeah. Well, I think lately, you know, I’m really addicted to Claude. I’m just absolutely, as are many other people, by the way. So I’m sure I’m not alone there. But I don’t think I could get through my day without Claude. And, you know, I don’t want to give Anthropic any hints, but, you know, I pay a couple hundred bucks a month. Even if they would charge me a couple thousand, I would still probably pay for it. So I mean, I don’t think I could get through my day without it. It’s such a game changer for me.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 02:14

Any other apps you’re using from like a productivity standpoint? I know Wispr Flow is on my list.

Sampo Parkkinen: 02:21

Well, I mean, I.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 02:22

Like I use Wispr Flow a lot. I try not to type anymore with Gemini in the Google suite. I don’t know if there’s any you’re addicted to.

Sampo Parkkinen: 02:31

Yeah. I mean, to be honest, like, I’m pretty much sort of centralized on Claude and Cowork and, and, and, you know, using that across the board. You know, help me create presentations, you know, dig up internal material. There’s a couple of agents that I’ve got running on top of on top of Claude. And, you know, I do use a lot of kind of AI features on kind of existing SaaS solutions that we use, like whether it’s, you know, Apollo that we’re using. They’ve got some AI features. They’re not great, but passable. You know, there’s, there’s, there’s a bunch that I use Fireflies to record meetings and stuff. So there’s a bunch of AI features the Fireflies use again, not great, but, but passable.

But, you know, in the age of kind of MCPs and stuff, like all this stuff is connected to Claude Cowork.So you know, I just tend to like centralize everything on there. And then it actually, you know, I get upset when they’re, when some like, like we use Pipedrive as a CRM, and Pipedrive doesn’t have an MCP yet. Hint to the founders of Pipedrive, you got to build one. You know, I get upset because I’m like, oh, Claude has to use Pipedrive through Chrome. And it’s so slow. And I’m like, God, why can’t you just guys have an MCP? So, yeah, it’s, I guess, you know, I’ve been using –

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:51

We want our tools that we’re usingTo integrate AI so we don’t have to try and connect it.

Sampo Parkkinen: 03:57

Exactly, exactly. And I think, you know, to be honest, like, and this is kind of on a side topic, not talking about Revieve, I do think that’s where a lot of kind of these pre AI era software companies, SaaS companies really fall apart because they just slap an assistant on top of an existing workflow. And I don’t need your software and the other software and every other software, everybody with their own AI assistant, like that’s very 2024. Like I need something better. So yeah, we’ve been down that road with our own product as well and realized that, okay, it was kind of a, yeah, it was a nice thing, but it really didn’t really move the needle for anybody.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 04:38

Yeah, actually there is. Speaking of, there is an interview I did with one of the founders of Pipedrive at the time, I think there were ten thousand customers. Now they’re over 100 000. So it’s interesting to hear their journey at that point.

I’m going to formally introduce Sampo and we’ll get into it. But first, this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise 25, we help businesses connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that in a few ways. One, we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, accountability, and the full execution production. And second, we’re an easy button for a company’s gifting. So we make gifting, it could be staying top of mind for clients, partners, prospects, even staff from a culture perspective. You just send us a list, we’ll do everything else. And Sampo, it’s not like we send tchotchkes with someone’s logo on it. I like getting food, so we send food, right?

And so for me, I found no better way over the past decade to, you know, really profile the people I admire in the podcast and send them sweet treats in the mail. So check out Rise25.com or email [email protected].

I am really, you know, really excited to introduce Sampo Parkkinen formerly who’s the CEO and Founder of Revieve and he’s a serial entrepreneur investor. And, you know, really Revieve is your expert partner for personalized digital brand experience. It’s powered by AI and AR and Revieve skin, health, beauty and wellness platform really provides brands and retailers with the essential technologies in order to personalize the brand experience, to transform the customer, to create more of an intimate, one on one relationship with every consumer, which we’ll talk about.

Sampo, thanks for joining me and just tell people about Revieve and what it does. I’m going to pull up the site.

Sampo Parkkinen: 06:26

First of all, Jeremy, thanks for having me. So it’s a pleasure to be here. Happy to be on the pod. So we really kind of started Revieve and this is ten years ago. So we started the company ten years ago, which was kind of pre-AI, but we were using, you know, what wasn’t really called AI at the time. We’re using a lot of deep learning, machine learning. But we really started with a very simple notion, which is that, you know, and this and this notion is kind of I still believe in this very much so that the world of retail and the world of commerce has historically, like everything’s been centered around the transaction, like get the customer to buy, like give them a discount, get them to buy. And consumers increasingly are tired of that. Like nobody wants to be sold to like, I don’t want to be sold to like, you don’t want to be sold to, nobody wants to be sold to.

But the reality is that everybody needs help buying like, I don’t know what I’m buying. What should I buy? Which product should I choose? How do I evaluate different options? Like I don’t know. So I need help buying. And, you know, we recognize that particularly in the personal care space, you know, so skin health, beauty and wellness, like these are some of the most personal products that you as a consumer will ever buy. Like, I mean, these are literally products that you consume. You put on your skin, you put on your face. And you know, as it happens, all the brands and retailers, even in these categories, were basically just shoving these products down the throat of consumers. Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy. Get a discount. Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy. And oh, if you are lucky, once you bought something, we’re going to ask for your email address. And we’re going to supposedly try to build a relationship with you, but only after you’ve bought something. So first buy and then we care about the relationship with you.

And you know, I’ve always thought that that was kind of completely backwards. So I said, well, if you actually show the customer, like show the consumer value and show them that you care about them, that you’re on their side, you’re actually trying to help them buy, well, a shocking thing happens and they end up buying from you. And an even more shocking thing happens. They end up coming back to you and they buy more from you. They don’t go to the competition because guess what? You’re more helpful than you know, everybody else out there. So, we built our solution, which is really our sort of personal customer experience platform driven by AI, to truly enable the brands and retailers to put forward a customer experience that tells the customer, hey, I’m on your side. I’m actually trying to help you buy. Right?

So we are selling to the brands and retailers. We work with more than 120 today across five continents. But ultimately the experiences that you can build on our platform, you can deploy on our platform, they become part of the customer experience of the retailer or brand. So, if you’re a retailer, a brand selling skin health, beauty wellness products, you can use our customer experience for your customers on your website, in your app, in a physical store, on a digital screen. But, that was really the premise that we started from ten years ago. And it’s still very valid today.

And I think we see just the acceleration of that in a lot of ways, when consumers are kind of flocking to chat GPT for advice and guidance and product discovery. And the reason that’s happening is because they feel ChatGPT is more helpful to them than their favorite retailers and brands are, because their favorite retailers and brands have a listing of products and some discounts and whatever, and try to get you to buy or try to, you know, sell stuff to you. But ChatGPT is actually trying to help you buy and figure out what you should be buying in the first place. So that’s, you know, still very much the road we’re on ten years on.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:11

Sampo, I want to talk about a few things. One, you know, I do want to get into the evolution of the product a little bit and also the evolution of just the revenue model and where it started off. But I’d love to walk, have you walked through an example so people understand how it works? And maybe we could take, because I see a lot of use cases for this talk about RoC Skincare. How do they use it?

Sampo Parkkinen: 10:37

Yeah. So I think ROC is a great example. So RoC Skincare is one of our customers has been for many, many years. We actually won an award with them. Interesting enough, we won a glossy award together. They’ve branded the solution that they use us for called the AI Skin Insight. You know, it’s available on the ROC skincare website. And they want a glossy award for the best use of emerging technology. I think it was last year for this.

But in general for RoC as well as for many of our other customers, there’s two primary use cases. You know, one is how do I differentiate in customer acquisition? Meaning if I’m trying to acquire new customers for my brand, and if I’m trying to get those customers to understand what is my brand do? What is distinctly unique to my brand? How do I do that? Well, you know, I can just pay for some ads like everybody else does, and I can advertise my products like everybody else does, or I can actually use a solution, a customer experience like ours, a linked directly to the advertising. Say, you know what, know what? We’re not just going to give you the products. We’re actually giving you an experience that helps you, like provide you with content, education advice, and helps you select the right products from within our inventory. So a lot of our customers actually use us from like a customer acquisition standpoint now. And that’s really, you know, there’s both kind of the cost of customer acquisition that it helps with. Obviously, we’ve got great case studies on where we help kind of, you know, up to four x return on ad spend, for example, on customer acquisition. When you use our platform.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 12:18

Do they use it like a lead generation tool?

Sampo Parkkinen: 12:22

It’s really yeah, it’s really it’s really lead generation, but it’s also driving direct response from a, from like a digital ad, for example. So you know, imagine advertising, you know, just your product saying, hey, here’s a discount for a particular product, you know, buy it on our website versus advertising the fact that, hey, you know, come onto our website and we’ve got this AI skin inside, which is going to help you figure out which products you should buy in the first place. Well, people are more prone to click on that. They click on that and they go through that experience. They get a bunch of recommendations and they end up buying. So it’s both kind of lead generation. You can capture email addresses, start building a loyalty from, from that perspective, but it’s also kind of direct response and leads to direct conversion from ads. So that’s one, one way customers in general use us.

And then the other one is, is really, if you have existing traffic that’s coming to your website, for example, that’s coming to your app and you’re looking for ways to kind of monetize that traffic better. So what better way to do that than to have a customer experience already on your website, which is hyper personalized up to the individual, right? So you’re not telling the customer, hey, other people bought this, that also bought that. Like nobody cares. Like nobody cares. It’s like, well, what about me?

Like, I don’t care about the other people. What about me? So having that customer experience on your website that really treats that individual as an individual and says, hey, you know what, here’s what’s going on. Like, what are you concerned about? What are your goals? Here’s what’s going on on your face through analyzing the face. Oh, by the way, here’s what you should consider these and these types of products. And hey, by the way, here’s what they’re going to do for you.

So really enabling that type of a, it’s kind of the in-store equivalent, that in-store beauty advisor who has a pivotal role in the physical world in serving the customer and providing that trusted experience between the brand and the consumer, enabling that across sort of digital channels at scale. So RoC, like many of our other customers kind of use it really for both purposes. Both to kind of acquire new customers, but also to you know, generate increasing revenue from their existing customers. And as a byproduct, of course, generate kind of zero party insights from their customer base.

So if you’re trying to figure out as a brand, what is the next big thing I should be building? Well, there’s a lot of sort of data, a lot of zero party data that the consumer would, of course, their consent gives you as a brand in this type of an experience. So it’s quite powerful from that perspective.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:56

How do people I don’t know how the interaction has changed, Sampo. Like if I’m a user, is it then will it send me you know, people are on desktop, they’re on their phone. How do the, how does the individual typically interact with. Because it’s a face scan, right?

Sampo Parkkinen: 15:17

Yeah. So for skincare, there is a, I mean, we work across kind of skincare, hair care, makeup, hair color and fragrance today.

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