# Ken Johnson

> Ken Johnson is a senior product manager who operates like a one-person product studio. He bought a $10K micro-SaaS (Mailead) that did about $650K in revenue over the next 12 months, launched a lead-data product (LazyLeadz) in two to three months, and built a production SaaS (LeadQuest) solo with AI coding agents. He is open to product management roles and select fractional and advisory work.

Revenue figures are approximate 12-month totals from Ken's historical work records, not sale prices or profit.

## Contact

- Main profile, case studies, and writing: https://kennethjohnsontech.github.io/
- LinkedIn (best way to reach Ken): https://www.linkedin.com/in/kennethdjohnson/
- X: https://x.com/Kenbuildsthings (@Kenbuildsthings)
- GitHub: https://github.com/KennethJohnsonTech
- Interactive office portfolio (this site): https://kenjohnsonproductmanager.lovable.app/

## What Ken helps with

- Build-vs-buy decisions and micro-SaaS acquisitions
- 0→1 product builds with AI coding agents
- Product strategy for founders deciding where to spend time and money

## Selected work

- [MailLead — bought the missing step in the funnel](https://kennethjohnsontech.github.io/work/maillead.html): Customers found leads with Ken's product suite, then left to send cold email elsewhere. Instead of building a sender, Ken bought Mailead — a stalled product with about 100 paying customers — for $10K upfront and kept both founders on for three months. He evaluated the founders, codebase, and scaling risks; built the integration roadmap; and launched it to the company's community first, bringing in $45K in the first week and about $650K over 12 months.
- [LazyLeadz — from one Figma file to a lead-data product](https://kennethjohnsontech.github.io/work/lazyleadz.html): Starting from a single Figma screen, Ken hired a senior Bubble engineer, sourced and licensed the data, designed the rest of the product, picked the API providers, and ran delivery. It launched in two to three months, did about $250K in its first 12 months, and users have exported more than 2.4 million rows.
- [LeadQuest — a live product built solo with AI agents](https://kennethjohnsontech.github.io/work/leadquest.html): Paste in a company URL and LeadQuest builds a living go-to-market document: ideal customer profile, competitors, outreach ideas, action items, and leads. It grew out of Ken's diagnosis of why a pay-per-lead product wasn't retaining customers. Since December 2025 Ken has taken it from spec to production with Claude Code and Codex, without hiring an engineer, including owning production quality (search evals and latency budgets after a search regression).

## Writing

- [I bought a micro-SaaS instead of building it. I'd do it again.](https://kennethjohnsontech.github.io/writing/i-bought-a-micro-saas.html): How Ken made the build-vs-buy call on Mailead, and when buying beats building now that AI makes code cheap.

## Also

- Recognition: part of the team that won Product Hunt's 2020 Golden Kitty for No-Code Product of the Year.
- Has lived in Lima (Peru), Bangkok (Thailand), Da Nang (Vietnam), and Bali (Indonesia). Learned to ride motorcycles in Bangkok.