Leantree
Performance-marketing-native recruiting agency for enterprise hiring. Scaled and exited.
Fact sheet
Enterprise recruiting was stuck in legacy channels.
Large hiring teams relied on slow, expensive job boards and traditional sourcing — channels with weak signal, high cost-per-hire, and no real volume control. The performance-marketing toolkit that B2C companies had used for a decade hadn't reached recruiting.
Social ads as the recruiting top-of-funnel.
Leantree built performance-marketing-native recruiting funnels for enterprise clients including Vodafone, Unilever and TUI. Social ads produced the candidate volume, custom funnels qualified it, and integrations pushed the qualified candidates straight into the client's applicant tracking system. The company scaled to multi-million annual revenue and was sold in 2026.
Where it came from
Leantree started in 2020 with an observation that now sounds obvious and then wasn't: B2C companies had spent a decade learning to buy attention on Facebook and Instagram, and recruiting hadn't noticed. Large hiring teams were still paying for job boards that delivered volume without signal. We took the performance-marketing toolkit I knew from affiliate work and pointed it at hiring. Social ads brought candidates, custom funnels qualified them, and integrations pushed the qualified ones into the client's applicant tracking system. That's the whole idea. It worked well enough that Vodafone, Unilever and TUI became clients, and the company grew to about fifteen people.
How it ran
Leantree was a real company in the traditional sense, which is the part I want to be honest about, because everything I've built since is a reaction to it. We had a team, an office, retainers and success fees, and a service that scaled with headcount. Every new enterprise client meant more campaign management, more reporting, more people. The margins were good and the growth was steady, and a great deal of my week went into coordinating people rather than doing the work the clients paid for.
What I learned
Three things, and they explain most of what Deimann Com is. First, distribution is a product. The funnels were the asset, not the media budget, and clients paid us for the machine, not the ads. Second, service businesses hit a ceiling that is set by the founder's calendar, and the usual way around it, hiring a management layer, quietly converts the company into something you no longer enjoy running. Third, a company that a stranger can understand from the outside is worth more than one that only works because you're in the room. That last lesson is why Leantree could be sold.
Status
Leantree was sold in early 2026. I don't operate it any more, and I'm not going to comment on how the new owners run it. It's listed here because it's the proof behind the rest of this site: I've built and exited a company with people in it, and then chose to build the next ones without.
More projects
Deimann Com is a privately held software company from Hamburg that builds, acquires, and operates digital products on autonomous AI systems.
