Ana Mineva of DGLegacy: Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup

It’s also very important to take care of your physical wellness. The good news is that once it becomes a habit, it just becomes part of your daily life. The physical activities and staying in good physical shape are providing you with tremendous stamina to build your company, so don’t neglect that!

Startups have such a glamorous reputation. Companies like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Uber, and Airbnb once started as scrappy startups with huge dreams and huge obstacles.

Yet we of course know that most startups don’t end up as success stories. What does a founder or a founding team need to know to create a highly successful startup?

In this series, called “Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup” we are talking to experienced and successful founders and business leaders who can share stories from their experience about what it takes to create a highly successful startup.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Ana Mineva.

Ana Mineva is the CEO and Co-Founder at DGLegacy, a secure document and password manager for digital inheritance, based in Berlin, Germany, Ana is also an an EMBA degree from ESMT Berlin, #1 Business School in Germany.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started? What was the “Aha Moment” that led to the idea for your current company? Can you share that story with us?

Hi, I’m Ana, tech entrepreneur, married, and proud mother of two amazing kids!

The idea behind Digital Inheritance service DGLegacy came to me several years ago. I had the gradual realization that as both me and my husband were traveling a lot for business trips, we had very poor visibility over our digital and financial assets — they were dispersed in different asset management systems, online investment platforms, neobanks and digital brokers, insurance companies, and banks — to mention few.

I started to search for a solution, and I was quite surprised that there was no such — people were using various hacks such as google sheets, vaults, sheets of paper. It’s easy to imagine how difficult it would be to keep all these up-to-date, not to mention the poor visibility and transparency to our loved ones.

But the biggest shock for me came when I saw the numbers of the abandoned money staying in banks, insurance companies and financial platforms — close to $100B in the US, £77B in the UK.Globally, we are talking about a trillion dollars problem.Our money that stays in the companies, which manage them, instead of reaching our loved ones.

This was the “Aha” moment that led to DGLegacy ‘s creation. The moment in which I wished we had a tool where I could see a snapshot of my assets and could decide what parts to share, with whom, and when.

This is how DGLegacy was born. Peter and I created the solution we were craving: the ability to help global citizens connect beneficiaries with their chosen assets, at the time they chose, and provide them with support in the claiming process.

Was there somebody in your life who inspired or helped you to start your journey with your business? Can you share a story with us?

I consider myself a creative person who thinks out of the box, and often looks for non-standard solutions, creativity needs inspiration, and nurturing.

Apart from usual ways for gathering inspiration such as reading books, I have always found my biggest inspiration and support in my partner Peter and my two bright kids. These are the people who have supported and inspired me the most in this stunning adventure, called DGLegacy.

Peter and I both quit our jobs and launched DGLegacy in 2020, without a secure income, outside of our home country with no relatives around to support us, with two school age children? This was not an easy call, to say the least.

But the customer need was there and the opportunity was big. We clearly knew that we are not just launching a new service. We were creating a completely new global market — the digital inheritance market.

We already had years of managerial and entrepreneurial experience and were equipped with strong knowledge from our EMBA studies at ESMT Berlin. So facing this exciting opportunity, we knew what was the right thing to do.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

There are many companies out there who compete in existing markets. But there are very few companies that ever existed, which created complete new markets.

This is what we at DGLegacy are doing — we are creating a completely new digital inheritance market, around the global need for the people to protect their digital and financial assets, and ensure that if something happens to them, their loved ones will inherit their assets.

For sure, the risk is very high. First, we need to create the market, then the market should be big enough, and then of course DGLegacy has to position itself as the leader in this newly created big market — not an easy venture! But we are full of motivation and ready to continue working hard to build the number one global digital inheritance service!

The quest of enabling millions of people globally to protect their assets and to secure financially their loved ones, is a very inspiring and noble mission.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

This is one of the best parts of our business, that the very basic idea of DGLegacy, solving the multi-billion-dollar global problem of unclaimed and abandoned assets, is bringing tremendous value to the world.

Imagine the distress that the families are experiencing when a close family member passes away. Now imagine what additional stress is caused to them if they cannot identify and locate the financial and digital assets of their loved one. This can dramatically change the quality of life of the whole family overnight.

We are the best helping hand for the families in these difficult times. We cannot return their loved one, but at least we can make it very easy for them to identify, locate, and ultimately claim the financial and digital assets of the deceased family member. In many cases, this is the difference between preserving their quality of life or dramatically reducing it.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

The first trait that I think is the most important is perseverance. It’s never easy to build a successful company. If you have the expectation that it will be fast and easy, you’ll be majorly disappointed.

I think entrepreneurs should be prepared that they need strong perseverance, to push through for a long period of time while building their company.

Also, this should not be perceived as a punishment. Here comes the second trait — you must really love what you do and believe in it. There are entrepreneurs whose primary motivation is money. If that’s your motivation, you won’t reach far. Your primary motivation should be to create a new product or service, which creates massive value for your customers, and in which you deeply believe.

And my third trait is that I always try to balance between short-term and long-term goals. When you are busy with daily urgent tasks, it’s easy to shift your focus towards primarily short-term goals. I always make sure to also allocate time to focus on long-term goals, and to reflect on our strategic priorities, vision and mission.

This one eye on the long-term goals also helps me to keep my focus. There will always be new shiny things — features, capabilities, products. I think entrepreneurs should be really focused on their core value proposition and should say much more “no” than “yes” in their daily job.

Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey?

Oh totally. The hardest moment was when we realized that the approach towards a digital inheritance service is very different from what we have experienced in our previous tech companies, and also very different from the theory in the books that you can read.

Most books and people will tell you that you need to build an MVP fast and start testing the market. This is what we did initially too — not only the books but our previous experience told us so.

Now imagine that we are building a new neo bank. Assume that we follow this advice and we build a quick and dirty MVP. Do you think that anyone will close their existing bank account and switch to our online bank, by seeing our hacky MVP? The answer is obvious.

We quickly realized that trust is a super important factor for services like DGLegacy. There are no shortcuts and crappy MVPs for fintech services which are in the trust business. We learned that the hard way. About six months after we launched the service, we had to almost completely rewrite it. Our initial approach was MVP based, and the numerous user reviews that we conducted showed clearly that this approach simply doesn’t work.

This was very disappointing for us. Can you imagine a startup which is still pre-revenue, that launched its service just 6 months ago, to have to spend money and time (a lot from both of these!) to rewrite its product? Very disappointing. But we learned a lot during that period and I think we drew the right lessons.

Now I can say that we have completely outstanding customer acquisition metrics and CAC (customer acquisition cost). To a very large extent we have achieved this because of the hard lessons that we learnt during that setback at the beginning of our journey.

Many startups are not successful, and some are very successful. From your experience or perspective, what are the main factors that distinguish successful startups from unsuccessful ones?

First of all, we probably need to align on the term successful. For some people a successful startup is a “big” one.

I have a different opinion. I’ve seen too many big startups who are still highly unprofitable. Many of them are already 10 years old, some of them are even public companies, and they have no clue how to turn the ship into profitability. I call this startup circus.

My view of a successful startup is different. I think every startup company must prove that it can be profitable no later than 5 years after its inception. After that, it’s the company’s decision if it wants to overspend in growth and trade off profitability. It’s absolutely OK to do this, but you must have clearly proven that you can be profitable.

So, here comes my first factor that differentiates successful companies from those who are not. Successful companies grow very fast, but at the same time, they can clearly prove that they can become profitable, if they decrease their growth investments. Or, they have already become both big and highly profitable.

The second factor that I’ve seen that clearly differentiates successful startups is their relentless focus on their core value proposition. They have a very simple, concrete and clear value proposition, and they can easily link the daily activities within the company with this value proposition.

Unsuccessful companies often struggle with very fundamental questions, such as who are our target customers, what is the primary value proposition for them, what are the strategic advantages of our company, etc. The successful companies have very clear answers to these questions.

The third factor is a strong founding team. How many successful companies do we know with poor leadership, or founders that cannot work together?

You need a visionary founding team, that can execute fast and that has a super strong synergy among the co-founders.

What are your “Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup”? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.

The first is a very clear idea about the value that your startup will bring. This should be very concrete and simple.

If you need several minutes to explain the value of your startup, then chances are high that it won’t fly.

The second thing is to do user reviews even before you launch your startup. If you hear answers such as “yeah, nice idea”, then don’t start it.

“Yeah, nice idea” quite often means that people don’t want to offend you because they simply don’t understand or don’t like your idea. Iterate on your value proposition until you hear “Wow, that’s great! I would love to pay and use such a service!”

And there is an interesting story behind this one. When we were launching DGLegacy, we had two other ideas for startups. We were clear with ourselves that we want to focus on only one of them, so we did user reviews. The idea was the feedback from the reviews to determine which of the three ideas to pursue.

The feedback for the other two ideas was exactly “yeah, nice idea” and we saw zero excitement in our potential customers that we interviewed. On the contrary, when we were telling them about DGLegacy, there was immediate excitement in their eyes and almost 100% affirmation that people would strongly consider using and most importantly — paying for such service!

The third thing is perseverance. This is really important. It doesn’t matter how much you believe in your idea and in yourself, it will be a very difficult journey. There will be endless difficult moments where quitting will not seem like a bad idea. You must persevere to prevail in these difficult moments. Your employees and your customers will rely on you. You must be a role model for both of them. In every moment when other people will say “That’s it, I can’t anymore”, you should take a deep breath and make your next step, and continue the journey. That will make the difference between success and failure.

The fourth thing is to leave your ego aside. Building a company is in the area of unknown unknowns. If your attitude is “I know it all”, chances are high that you’ll fail. There will be a lot to learn along the way, from the business, the customers, the colleagues, the competition — you must open your mind that you’ll learn a lot.

The biggest example for me in that relation is my partner. He is an incredibly successful executive and entrepreneur. He has built and managed highly successful tech organizations from zero to thousands of people. He has numerous degrees and certifications, always achieving the impossible, and always with the greatest possible impact. If he studies something — better bet that he will graduate with honors. If you have an impossible situation, sit back and relax — he can achieve the impossible. And I don’t know from where he finds time to be an author of amazing books, speaker at conferences, mentor and advisor of other startups and VCs, and most importantly — a very caring husband and a father, and an awesome human being that is ready to help anyone.

Seeing this, it’s hard to believe how humble he is when he is building a new company. Despite his massive experience, knowledge, and expertise, he is always listening carefully, reflecting on every step of our journey, adapting and challenging the status quo, and at the same time moving with a lightning speed.

The last and fifth thing in my list is to know that every startup is either going up or down; there is no such thing as staying flat. Moreover, if you think that you are staying flat, it means that you are going down.

At every step of your journey think about what’s next. What are the new goals and milestones that you want to achieve, what are the new risks that you need to tackle, how you should grow your company, your team and yourself to meet the demands for the next level of growth of your company?

What would you recommend to founders about how to best take care of their physical and mental wellness when starting a company?

I think there are two primary factors that determine the wellbeing of a founder:

To truly believe in the value your company is creating

To have a very good collaboration and synergy with the other co-founders and to share the same values

If any of these is not true, then it usually results in dissatisfaction, mental fatigue and often a burn out for the founders.

It’s also very important to take care of your physical wellness. The good news is that once it becomes a habit, it just becomes part of your daily life. The physical activities and staying in good physical shape are providing you with tremendous stamina to build your company, so don’t neglect that!

How can our readers further follow your work online?

You can follow the news on our site www.DGLegacy.com

You can also follow us on the latest news and updates related to protecting your digital and financial assets at our Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook pages.

This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!