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?
I run Deimann Com, a small company in Hamburg that builds and operates six digital products. The biggest one is Leadscraper, a B2B lead generation tool. There are no employees. Recurring work like monitoring, support triage, bookkeeping and reporting runs on AI systems I’ve built, and for Leadscraper I work with a few freelance developers.
That means almost everything that reaches me is either a decision or an exception the systems couldn’t handle. So no two days look alike. One day it’s a pricing question, the next it’s a bug in the signup flow or a call with an estate agent in Norway.
I stopped counting hours a long time ago. What I look at is the bottleneck: what’s the one thing holding everything else up right now? If I get that out of the way, or automate something that used to eat a few hours every week, or ship something customers can use, it was a good day, even a short one.
I also keep meetings to a minimum. I need long uninterrupted stretches to build or think, and one call in the middle of the afternoon tends to kill the whole block.
How do you bring ideas to life?
Fast, and without a business plan. I can’t remember the last time I wrote one.
I build the smallest thing that can tell me whether the idea is any good: a landing page, a rough AI prototype, a script, sometimes just me doing the process by hand. AI has shortened this a lot. An idea I have on Monday can be a live product with a payment page by Thursday, because there’s nobody to convince and nobody to wait for.
I try to get there early because I’ve learned that I’m bad at predicting what works. Whatever I figure out at my desk is usually less useful than what the first few people who touch the thing tell me. And because nothing depends on a team, I can switch a product off again just as quickly when the numbers say so.
What’s one trend that excites you?
Solo founders who build around AI from day one. I’m biased, because that’s how I run my own company.
My last company needed about fifteen people. This one runs six products with none. I use AI for coding, research, a good part of marketing and support, and to pressure-test decisions. A few years ago each of those would have been a hire, or a department. Now it’s one founder, a handful of specialists and AI. I think we’ll see companies with real revenue and almost no staff, and starting one has become a lot cheaper and less risky than it used to be.
What is one habit that helps you be productive?
I ask myself whether something really has to be done by me. Most of the time the honest answer is no, and then I automate it, hand it off, or drop it.
I have very little patience for repeating manual work. Bookkeeping is a good example. I used to sit down with it every month. Now an AI agent goes through it once a week and I only deal with the exceptions. I’ll happily spend five hours building a system to get rid of a one-hour weekly task. The math doesn’t always work out in the short term, but I do it anyway, because afterwards the task is off my mind for good.
What advice would you give your younger self?
Learn distribution earlier. Most founders I know, me included, fall in love with the product or the tech. Getting attention and selling is the harder skill, and it’s the one that’s hardest to replace.
The other thing: don’t confuse size with success. My last company, Leantree, was a recruiting agency with about fifteen people and clients like Vodafone and TUI. I sold it in early 2026. It was a good business, but with fifteen people more decisions landed on my desk every day than do now with six products. More people, more office space and more complexity didn’t make it a better business. These days I care more about freedom and having options.
Tell us something you believe almost nobody agrees with you.
That most founders look for a co-founder far too early, and for the wrong reasons.
For my first company the standard advice was right. At Leantree, on most days someone in the building knew something I didn’t. But when I’m honest about what a co-founder usually solves, it’s a missing skill or too much load for one head. Both of those I now cover with AI and with specialists I hire for one problem at a time. I run six products without a CTO.
What I haven’t been able to replace is someone with the same stake telling me no. Earlier this year I started an AI batch job, went to lunch, and came back to an €800 bill for data nobody was ever going to read. A partner would have asked what it costs before I pressed enter.
So I’d still stay solo until there’s a very clear reason to give away a big piece of the company. But you have to be honest that the disagreement doesn’t come built in anymore, and you need to organize it yourself.
What is the one thing you repeatedly do and recommend everyone else do?
I write decisions down before I make them and read them again a week later. About a third of the time I disagree with what I wrote. When you work alone that matters, because nobody else is going to stop you.
I do something similar with anything that goes out under the company’s name. Before it’s sent, several AI agents read it, and each one has been given a different reason to dislike it. One reads it as the recipient’s lawyer. Another looks for the sentence that would embarrass me in six months. Last month they killed a sales letter I’d been proud of for a week. I was annoyed, and they were right.
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do?
I cut down what I’m looking at. When I feel overwhelmed it’s almost never one hard problem. It’s twenty open loops at once. So I write everything down, pick the one or two things that matter, and let the rest sit for a while. Most of it is still fine a week later.
There’s a version of this that comes from how I work. The routine doesn’t need me anymore, so my days consist almost entirely of hard calls, and I underestimated how tiring that is. The only fix I’ve found is to schedule days with none.
Getting away from the desk helps too. I spend a good part of the year in southern Norway, and a few hours of fishing sort out more problems than another evening at the screen.
What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business or advance in your career?
I learned marketing and distribution before I got deep into software. I spent years in performance marketing, first in-house and then at Leantree, where we ran recruiting campaigns for large companies. That taught me how companies actually buy, how customer acquisition works and how much depends on positioning.
So when I build software now, marketing isn’t the step after launch. While a product is still being built, I’m already thinking about who’s going to find it and how. Every product gets its own channel, whether that’s SEO, paid ads or outbound. Great distribution won’t save a mediocre product. But I’ve seen plenty of good products that nobody ever found, and those aren’t businesses either.
What is one failure in your career, how did you overcome it, and what lessons did you take away from it?
I keep overestimating how much customers care about what happens under the hood, and I’ve made that mistake more than once.
With Leadscraper, most of my attention went into the lead research that happens in the background. Then I went through the session recordings and found hundreds of clicks on things that weren’t clickable. People were trying to use the product and the interface wasn’t answering. None of the backend work mattered to them at that moment.
They don’t care how sophisticated it is. They want their problem solved quickly.
So now I spend a lot more time on onboarding and on the first few minutes someone has with the product. The complexity can be there. The customer just shouldn’t have to see it.
What is one business idea you’re willing to give away to our readers?
A small dashboard or desktop widget that tracks your usage limits across AI tools.
Heavy users now pay for ChatGPT, Claude, a coding agent and a few other things at once, and every one of them has different limits, reset times and pricing. I notice it myself. One place that tells me what I have left, when it resets and which model to use right now would be enough.
It sounds tiny, but I suspect managing your AI tools is going to become its own software category.
What is one piece of software that helps you be productive? How do you use it?
Claude Code. I’m not an engineer by training, I come from marketing. The system that runs my products today, the part that watches every service, restarts what falls over and drafts customer replies, was written in conversations with a coding agent over a few months. A few years ago I would have needed a CTO for that.
The code generation is useful, but what I value most is being able to ask an entire codebase questions in plain language. On Leadscraper, where I work with developers, it helps me understand parts of the system I didn’t write and test an idea before I brief anyone.
What is the best $100 you recently spent?
Honestly, the monthly subscription for a coding agent. It’s around $100 a month, and nothing else in the company comes close in what I get back for the money. Most of my internal systems were built with it.
It also powers my side projects. Right now that’s a small robot that uses a camera to teach itself how to load my handwriting machine. Nobody needs that, strictly speaking, but I learn a lot from it.
Do you have a favorite book or podcast from which you’ve received much value?
Not really. I don’t have a business bible.
I get more out of long conversations with founders and operators who get specific: numbers, what broke, what they’d do differently. Small founder communities are good for the same reason, because people tell you what’s actually going on in their company and not the LinkedIn version. Someone’s specific experience helps me more than another framework.
What’s a movie or series you recently enjoyed and why?
I’m the wrong person to ask, I don’t watch much.
When I do, I like realistic stories with some mystery or tension, or an odd idea at the core. I like it when a film doesn’t explain everything and I’m still thinking about it the next day. The main requirement is that it pulls me away from work for a couple of hours. If I’m on my phone while it’s running, it wasn’t worth watching.
Key learnings:
- Headcount is a poor measure of a company. Janik’s last business needed fifteen people, his current one runs six products with AI and a few specialists.
- Get an idea in front of real people quickly, and be just as quick to switch it off when the numbers say so.
- Learn distribution early, and develop it alongside the product instead of after launch.
- Working alone removes the people who tell you no. Write decisions down, reread them a week later, and build the disagreement in on purpose.
- Customers care about the first few minutes and whether their problem gets solved. Keep the complicated parts out of their sight.