Software entrepreneur Janik Deimann is the founder and owner of Deimann Com GmbH, the company behind Leadscraper, an AI-powered platform for real-time B2B lead generation. Deimann Com acquires, develops and operates digital software products, with a focus on SaaS and data-driven B2B applications. It runs as a bootstrapped, AI-first operating company: lean structures, no traditional team, with day-to-day operations handled by AI systems and specialised experts in each area.
What is your typical day, and how do you make it productive?
My days are rarely identical. I run a software company, work with a small development team, do marketing, talk to customers, and usually have a few automation or hardware projects running in parallel.
I try not to measure productivity by hours worked. I ask myself what the biggest bottleneck is right now and focus on removing that. If I solve one important bottleneck, automate something that used to take hours, or ship something that creates value, I consider that a productive day.
I also try to keep meetings to a minimum. I prefer long blocks where I can actually build or think.
How do you bring ideas to life?
Very quickly.
I almost never start with a detailed business plan. I try to build the smallest version that can prove or disprove the idea. That might be a landing page, an AI prototype, a small script, a 3D-printed part, or a manual version of the process.
AI has made this dramatically easier. Today I can go from an idea in my head to something I can actually test within hours or days.
My rule is: get the idea out of your head and into reality as early as possible. Reality gives much better feedback than thinking.
What’s one trend that excites you?
The rise of the AI-native solo founder.
I think we are going to see companies generating serious revenue with incredibly small teams. AI isn’t just another productivity tool. It is slowly becoming an execution layer for coding, research, marketing, support, operations and decision-making.
Things that required a department a few years ago can increasingly be done by one founder, a few specialists and AI.
That changes the economics of starting a company completely.
What is one habit that helps you be productive?
If the answer is no, I try to automate it, delegate it or remove it completely.
Especially when something happens repeatedly, I have a very low tolerance for doing it manually again and again. I would rather spend five hours building a system than spend one hour every week doing the same task forever.
What advice would you give your younger self?
A lot of entrepreneurs are obsessed with the product, technology or idea. But being able to get attention, generate demand and sell is usually much harder to replace.
I would also tell myself not to confuse company size with success. More employees, more offices and more complexity don’t necessarily mean you have built a better business.
I value freedom, leverage and optionality much more today.
Tell us something you believe almost nobody agrees with you.
I think many founders look for a co-founder far too early.
A great co-founder can obviously be extremely valuable. But sometimes a co-founder is really a workaround for missing skills, accountability or execution capacity.
With AI, specialized freelancers, developers and better software, a solo founder can now cover much more ground than was possible even a few years ago.
I would stay solo until there is a very clear reason why another person should own a significant part of the company.
What is the one thing you repeatedly do and recommend everyone else do?
Question every recurring process.
Whenever I see something being done manually for the tenth time, I ask why.
Can software do it? Can AI do it? Can an API connect the systems? Can a machine do it? Can the process simply disappear?
A surprising amount of work exists because nobody has stopped to question why it is being done that way.
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do?
I reduce the number of things I’m looking at.
Usually being overwhelmed isn’t caused by one difficult problem. It’s caused by having twenty open loops in your head at the same time.
I write them down, identify the one or two things that actually matter, and ignore the rest temporarily.
Changing my physical environment also helps me a lot. Getting away from the desk, walking, driving or working from somewhere else often makes a problem look completely different.
What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business or advance in your career?
Learning marketing and distribution before becoming deeply focused on software.
I previously built and sold an agency, and that experience taught me how companies buy, how customer acquisition works and how important positioning is.
When building software now, I don’t see marketing as something you add after the product is finished. Product and distribution need to develop together.
A mediocre product with great distribution isn’t enough, but a great product nobody discovers isn’t a business either.
What is one failure in your career, how did you overcome it, and what lessons did you take away from it?
One mistake I’ve made repeatedly is overestimating how much customers care about what happens behind the scenes.
As builders, it’s easy to become excited about sophisticated technology, automation and features. But the customer mostly cares about whether the product solves their problem quickly and whether they understand how to use it.
I’ve had to learn that technical sophistication doesn’t automatically translate into perceived value.
Today I try to pay much more attention to onboarding, simplicity and the first few minutes a customer spends with a product.
The lesson is simple: complexity should stay behind the curtain.
What is one business idea you’re willing to give away to our readers?
Build a simple dashboard or desktop widget that tracks AI subscription limits across all the major AI tools.
Power users increasingly have ChatGPT, Claude, coding agents and several other AI subscriptions running at the same time. Every service has different usage limits, reset times and pricing models.
Give users one place that says: What capacity do I have left, when does it reset, and which model should I use right now?
It sounds like a tiny product, but I think we’re going to need an entire layer of software just to manage all the AI tools we use.
What is one piece of software that helps you be productive? How do you use it?
Claude Code.
For me, the interesting part isn’t simply that AI can generate code. It’s that I can interact with an entire codebase through natural language.
I use it to prototype ideas, investigate problems, make changes and understand parts of a system much faster. Combined with a small development team, it dramatically reduces the distance between having an idea and actually shipping it.
AI has effectively become another interface to software development.
What is the best $100 you recently spent?
Probably a collection of inexpensive electronics and prototyping parts — microcontrollers, sensors and components for small automation projects.
I love being able to turn a software idea into something physical.
For less than $100, you can now build prototypes involving cameras, displays, sensors, Wi-Fi and motors that would have required serious engineering resources not that long ago.
The return isn’t necessarily the hardware itself. It’s how quickly you learn by building something real.
Do you have a favorite book or podcast from which you’ve received much value?
I actually don’t have one business book or podcast that I consider my bible.
I tend to get more value from long-form conversations with founders and operators who are very specific about what they are actually doing — numbers, problems, mistakes, systems and decisions.
I also like smaller founder communities where people are willing to discuss what is really happening inside their companies rather than only presenting the polished version publicly.
Specific experience is usually more useful to me than another universal business framework.
What’s a movie or series you recently enjoyed and why?
I’m probably the wrong person to ask for a definitive movie recommendation.
When I do watch something, I tend to prefer realistic stories with mystery, tension or an unusual idea behind them. I like movies that don’t explain absolutely everything and leave you thinking about them afterwards.
For entertainment in general, I prefer something that completely pulls me away from work for a few hours rather than something I half-watch while looking at my phone.
Key learnings:
- Optimize for leverage, not headcount. AI, software and automation increasingly allow very small teams to build substantial businesses.
- Turn ideas into experiments quickly. A simple prototype tested in reality is more valuable than weeks of theoretical planning.
- Distribution is a core entrepreneurial skill. Building something good and getting people to care about it need to happen together.
- Question repetitive work. If something keeps happening, automate it, delegate it or eliminate it.
- Keep complexity behind the curtain. Customers care about the outcome and the experience, not how sophisticated the machinery behind it is.