Freelancer → agency owner → SaaS founder.

Now running Botster.io → an all-in-one tool that helps digital businesses extract, monitor, and weaponize web data.

Posting SaaS learnings, automation tricks, technical deep dives.

If you’re building anything online - you’ll probably find something useful here.

If you're looking to automate your business - text me, DMs are open.

Denis Grammakov

Get an OFFICE. Pay for it.
Go into debt if you have to.

I visited a guy recently who “works from home.”

His office was:

- a wobble-ball "chair"
- two monitors jammed into the corner of the living room
- kids running around
- wife cooking two meters away
- toys, noise, chaos, distractions
- honey, can you take out the trash please

And he wonders why he can’t focus or scale.
Why nothing gets finished.

HERE is the TRUTH:

You are NOT building anything meaningful if your work environment is set up like that.

An office isn’t a luxury.

For $200/month you can rent:

- a quiet room
- a coworking space
- a spare office in someone else’s building
- anywhere with a DOOR that closes

And suddenly your productivity triples. WOW didn't see that coming! 

Your standards rise.
Your thinking sharpens.
Your business becomes real.
You're happy to get home once your day is finished. 

People say:

“I’ll get an office when I’m successful.”

No. It works the opposite way:

You get an office TO BECOME successful.

Environment is everything. Respect your work. Buy silence.

Denis Gramm

Solofounder @ Botster & StayAPI // B2B Web Scraping & Workflow Automation // I blog about my journey and findings

Product managers are the new rockstars.

I hit up a PM I used to work with. Asked how the AI era is treating him.

Pretty darn good, it turns out

He’s working at a company that manages big brand sites (200+).

You know what he told me?

“I don’t need devs anymore. I build everything myself with ChatGPT and Cursor.”

Visual regression systems? Done.
Monitoring plugins? Done.
Internal dashboards and message automation? Done.

All by himself. No meetings. No JIRA tickets. No begging engineers.

Why?

Because he understands products. Understands what a good product should look like and how it should behave.

Those who know what to build don’t have to wait for anyone anymore.

They open Cursor.
Prompt AI.
Ship.

If nobody emails me that it’s broken — it’s NOT broken.

I spent SIX MONTHS building features nobody asked for
for users who didn’t even EXIST
for revenue that wasn’t coming

This was when I was building my first startup:

Pixel-perfect design.
Every page “needed” to exist. Cookie policy? VERY important.
Company address with a map widget? A MUST-HAVE
Perfect UI and UX (so I thought)
Perfect everything (so I thought)

Now?

If Sentry doesn’t light up - it’s not a bug.
If customers don’t ask - it’s not a feature.
If nobody misses it - it doesn’t exist.

Real example from a few weeks ago:

A user emailed:

“Hey, your payment gateway isn’t working.”

Of course it wasn’t working.
There was no payment gateway.

I processed his payment manually, wrote back:

“Payment processor was acting up on my side — fixed now.”

30 minutes later I added the integration.

The next customer paid successfully.

Done. Shipped. Nobody died.

Don’t build what nobody asked for.
Don’t polish what nobody will use.
Don’t delay your launch for imaginary problems.

If the pain is real, people will ASK.

Ship now.
Fix later.

li_at

JSESSIONID

100+ hospitality developers signed up for StayAPI since launch 🎉

All organic. Many from LinkedIn.

Now I’ve got a few dozen of DMs, requests, feature suggestions, use cases I didn’t even think about.

I’m going to be busy the next few weeks.

(Not complaining)

Ship → get feedback → iterate → grow.

More tools, more endpoints, more speed — coming fast.

If you're in hotel-tech, give https://stayapi.com a try!

Google had ONE JOB — beat Claude at coding.

Instead, they gave us Gemini 3.0 Pro Preview which is indistinguishable from Gemini 2.5 Pro.

In the coming days you’re going to read a lot of praise towards Gemini on LinkedIn from people who never wrote a “hello world” program.

So I’m going to save you some time.

“You are absolutely right” — still here.

No interactive debugging — still here.

Hallucinated “robust” fixes — still here.

Copy-paste the same code while pretending it was updated — still here.

So what do we get?

A model that sounds smart, but can’t work.

Not a match to my Codex + Claude combo.

Google had all the money. All the data. All the time.

And still fumbled the bag.

Sad.

Startups don’t get copied in weeks anymore. They get cloned in hours.

Someone posts on X that they got into Y Combinator.

The next day three different people ship the EXACT SAME product. Oh and it’s free. 

Good luck competing. 

Some dude launched an AI-powered MVP and showcased it.

And it had a couple of cool ideas to it.

Two days later, I copy those ideas and roll them out to prod.

The speed is insane.

I used to scroll Twitter to find one good product per week. Test it, form an opinion. 

Now? It’s an endless flood of apps. AI tools spitting out products every damn day.

New directories. New apps. New agents.

Most of them half-baked. Most of them pointless.

But it’s still impossible to keep up.

And this is before agents start building agents.

Where this is all heading? I have no idea. No one does.

Hold on tight.

Yeah… freelancers are cooked.

I barely hire anyone anymore.

And I’m saying this as someone who spent over $300,000 on Upwork over the years.

In the last 2 months I only hired one developer only to write a Python boilerplate so I could hand it off to AI and never need him again.

Closed the contract 
Fed the code to Opus 4.5 (which feels like alien tech).

That’s it.

Yesterday I asked Nano Banana to draw a simple “whiteboard style explanation” for one of my blog posts.

See attached. I was shocked it even worked.

It took 10 seconds to understand the request and output the image.

No revisions.
No back-and-forth.
No invoice.

Just done.

Who’s going to hire illustrators for blog content now?
Or $400/month diagram designers?
Or “brand visuals specialists”?

The market isn’t shrinking, it’s evaporating.

AI replacement is real. Anyone with working eyesight can see what’s happening.

If you’re a one-type-of-gig freelancer… I honestly don’t know what to tell you.

Get a job, maybe.
And after you get one — hold onto it with both hands.

Big tech AI is coming for your web scraping business.

I tried one of those Y Combinator-funded AI scraping startups the other day.

The promise was to turn any website into an API feed. 

I fed it three live websites.

A tough one
an average one
and an easy one.

It failed on all three.

I was not impressed. 

So no — client-centric custom scraping isn’t dead (yet).

But the “copy-paste BeautifulSoup from StackOverflow” era is.

What’s left?

Enterprise scraping.
Anti-bot engineering.
Monitoring + maintenance.
Pipelines that don’t fall apart when the button ID changes.

That’s exactly where you should be building.

THIS is how you make yourself UNFIREABLE in 2026

Not “more valuable.”
Not “harder to replace.”
UNFIREABLE.

FIRST Make a list of every SaaS your company pays for.
All of it.
CRM, dashboards, reporting tools, chat tools, automations - everything.

THEN Write down how much each one costs.
Most employees have no idea their company is casually bleeding $300… $500… $1200/month per tool.

AFTER THAT Pick the easiest one.

The one that:

- costs the most
- does the least
- has ONE feature you FULLY understand

NEXT - VIBE-CODE that feature.
Not perfectly.
Not enterprise-ready.
Not “rewrite the whole product.”

Just recreate the ONE feature your team actually uses — even if the code is dumb, ugly, stitched together with safety pins. 

Use whatever - Replit, LOVEABLE or n8n - AI will hold your hand.

Build it in a week after work.

SHOWTIME: Show it to your boss.
“Hey, we’re paying $500/month for this.
I built the part we actually use.
Costs $20/month to run.
I can add unlimited features and fixes.”

Watch what happens next:

Your boss goes BALLISTIC
That $500/mo subscription gets CANCELLED immediately.
Your app becomes “mission CRITICAL”
YOU become "the automation guy"
Every workflow now routes through you.
You get trust, leverage, and JOB SECURITY.

Congratulations.

You just became the person who SAVES the company money instead of the person who COSTS the company money.

And companies don’t fire the people who SAVE them MONEY.

They fire the people who can’t do what you just did.

That’s how you stay employed FOREVER.

That’s how you survive the AI wave.

Finance Design

Design agency specializing in financial firms, collaborating with them on marketing, branding, and UX design.

Design Director

Very Memorable, Inc.

Design agency with a focus on product design, branding, and content marketing. Client experience includes Children’s Health Fund, Imperial Dade, and the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise.

Earned Wealth

Solo designer at a wealth management startup that successfully secured series A financing after a seed round.
• Product and growth design on a zero-to-one product creation and launch sprint for a flat fee short term engagement service. 
• Led UX strategy and research efforts, including conducting competitive analyses, creating proto-personas, crafting customer journey maps, and prototyping apps.
• Design of an AI-powered personalized content portal for our client app. And also upgraded task list functionality but allowing a user to rank and customize their to do list, and to communicate and share files with our advisors. 
• Cross-functional collaboration with executive leadership, including the CEO, Chief Product Officer, Director of Engineering, Director of Marketing, and Chief Wealth Officer.
• Contributed to growth initiatives by designing a comprehensive branding kit and social media templates in Canva for our marketing team. Additionally, developed landing page templates in HubSpot, and provided design updates to our pre-gate website using Webflow.

Lead Product Designer

IPX Retirement

Sole team member providing UX, UI, visual design, and research for the engineering department of a fintech startup focused on the 403b/457 market for educators. 
• Led a full-scale redesign of participant platform, optimizing for mobile usability while enhancing key features such as portfolio management, stock trading, and product research.
• UX and UI design of dashboard-driven investment advisor and plan sponsor portals featuring analytics tools: Resulting in increased platform growth and usage rates.
• Introduced custom-branded storefront toolkits, empowering over 30 investment companies to create branded user experiences on our platform.
• Collaborated closely with the product owner, CTO, and business analysts to drive agile product design. Mentored team members in user-centric design methodologies. 
• UX and UI design of added IRA functionality to increase employee plan participation. 
• Prototype and interaction design of an upgraded login process leading to plan participant signup rate improvement.

Founder and principal of an agency with a focus on creating educational games and microsites.
• Brand experience for iconic properties such as Thomas & Friends, Clifford: The Big Red Dog, Angelina Ballerina, Goosebumps, I Spy, and Cyberchase.
• Client roster includes HIT Entertainment/Mattel, PBS Kids, Sesame Workshop, Scholastic, Thirteen, TIME for Kids/Time, Inc., and Asia Society.

Product Designer, Producer, and Game Designer

Anime.com, Inc.

• Spearheaded product pivot from a content driven site to a social media visual discovery tool, similar to Pinterest.
• Led content strategy and management of staff writers.
• Management of social media promotion and sponsored advertising.

Publisher and Co-Founder

Fanboy.com

• Editorial management of staff writers for a daily updated website which grew to over 7,000 posts.
• Authored 3,500 posts, many of which went viral on social media.
• Management of social media promotion and community engagement.
• Coordination of sponsored advertising.

Publisher and Founder

Design is a revenue generator. I work with high-level stakeholders to create product design, branding, and content marketing. This empowers my clients to beat their competition.

taplio

The Battle

Denis Grammakov

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