I'm Leonhard Solbach, founder and managing director of Solbach Datentechnologie GmbH in Bad Honnef, Germany. We built Solbach Leads: the most comprehensive index of DACH companies, and a search engine on top of it that finds the companies that need what you sell most.

I got into the University of Bonn early, through its program for gifted school students, and started studying physics courses there before software took over. I spent the years after that as a software engineer, mostly backend and infrastructure. Most of my time goes into the engine behind Solbach Leads.

After years of working as a freelance developer, I kept getting the same request from my clients' sales teams: the leadsourcing for coldcalling was a manual and painful process. So we built one-off solutions, each pulling specific data for one specific use-case.

After some time we realized that due to European regulation enormous amounts of unstructured company data is being published - yet basically never processed. Annual reports, websites, shareholder filings, financial figures tell exactly what a company builds and what it builds it with, what its worried about, what it can afford, and where its potentially about to grow.

Standard databases throw nearly all of it away and keep an industry code and a revenue figure, because reading the rest at scale was never economical.

So we stopped building one off solutions and build out company index instead: 13.9 million websites, 12TB of raw webcontent, millions of annual reports, shareholder filings - all being constantly updated and processed with our AI pipeline. A depth that is only economical because we host our own AI models in Germany.

I write about what building it teaches me about software engineering (especially in the age of AI), running open-weight models, and what changes in outbound sales once research stops being the bottleneck.