Jānis Kauss - entrepreneur, developer and Creative Technologist

More than 20 years of building digital products

I am the founder of Smartsoft and have spent more than 20 years working with digital products, internet businesses and technology. My strength is the ability to connect areas that are usually separated: business thinking, startup experience, creative concept development and software engineering.

I can not only define what should be built and why it may work, but also turn the idea into a fully functioning internet project. Programming is more than a technical profession to me - it is a tool for testing ideas and turning them into reality.

From client websites to my own startups

I began by creating websites and custom internet solutions for clients. Later I increasingly focused on my own digital products, SaaS platforms, social games, AI tools and startups.

I have created and developed more than 100 internet projects, digital products and experiments. Not all of them became successful businesses, and that is precisely why the experience is valuable. I have seen ideas being defined, built, launched and scaled. I have also learned why products fail to find an audience, where budgets are wasted and how a good idea can fail because of weak distribution or the wrong business model.

Business, creativity and technology

I am interested in more than whether a project can technically be built. The important questions are whether people need it, which problem it solves, how it will find an audience and what is truly worth building first.

This allows me to contribute beyond conventional development - from the idea, product definition and business model to prototyping, engineering, launch and continued growth.

Startups as Art

Alongside my business work, I have run absurd.website since 2020 - an independent internet-art and experimental practice built around the idea Startups as Art. Products as Concepts.

I create functioning internet projects in which startups, digital products, services, games, platforms and business models become artistic material. This practice lets me explore unconventional ideas, learn new technologies and discover approaches that a purely commercial process would rarely reach.

Creative coding and education

I also build ArtCodingLab.com, where I teach creative coding and help young people experience technology not only as consumers, but as creators.

What I bring to a project

• startup and entrepreneurial experience;
• product and business-model thinking;
• creative concepts and idea development;
• prototype, MVP and full-scale system development;
• software engineering, AI and automation;
• marketing, audience and growth thinking;
• the ability to turn an idea into a visible and testable result quickly.