Today we have selected Ana Mineva to take her interview. She is the CPO and Co-Founder at DGLegacy.
First of all, how are you and your team doing in these COVID-19 times?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people around the globe lost their lives. While this pandemic is leaving horrible marks in the lives of many of us, it also imposes big challenges for many companies. These challenges require fast adaptation to the new business environment and working mode.
DGLegacy as a project was launched at the beginning of the unfolding crisis. This, in turn, strengthened our inner conviction that we should look for a different approach to everything we do.
The accelerated digitalization resulting from COVID-19 in all spheres of public life and remote work has allowed us to more easily validate a large part of the business decisions at DGLegacy.
Tell us about you, your career, how you founded or joined this company?
My co-founder Peter and I had successful careers in tech and marketing. We soon accumulated diverse and complex assets in multiple countries, stored in so many different systems and repositories that it was difficult to keep track of them. As for our children, parents, and siblings – they had almost no idea about any of the assets Peter and I owned.
As people with a strong sense of responsibility towards our family, Peter and I decided to build a working solution, especially having witnessed how unforeseen events had left people’s partners, orphaned children, and close family members deserted, with no clue about their assets and unable to maintain their standard of living.
I just wished we had a tool to see a snapshot of my assets and decide what parts to share, with whom, and when.
This is how DGLegacy, your secure document and password manager with digital inheritance, was born.
How does your company innovate?
We believe that innovation should not be responsible for a separate team or unit. And we believe that innovation should be part of every employee at DGLegacy’s daily job in every team.
As we foster this culture of innovation in multiple ways, we always ask critical questions, challenge assumptions and status quo, set ambitious goals for ourselves and our teams, ensure that people have a dedicated time to think long-term and encourage creativity in solving problems.
How the Coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?
Not surprisingly, the coronavirus pandemic has required us to adapt our business.
The transition to a more flexible work environment, new trends in people’s habits, remote work, the acceleration of digitalization in most business processes, and especially the changes in the financial sphere have helped a lot DGLegacy.
A particular fact that had a very accelerating effect on our business was that many people started to accumulate more digital assets during the pandemic, and even the physical assets started to be accessed predominantly in digital ways.
The user behavior has changed, and the users’ needs also. Having most of their assets digital or accessed digitally, people have become more financially mindful and mature to turn for help to professional digital inheritance solutions in times of extreme unpredictability and uncertainty.
Did you have to make difficult choices and the lessons learned?
The good news is that we started to build DGLegacy almost simultaneously with the development of the pandemic. Unlike most established incumbents, who had to make difficult decisions, we as a startup had the chance to make smart decisions instead of the company’s very start.
The most important lesson we have reconfirmed is that building an adaptive team and organization is the key to coping with uncertainties and unpredictable situations.
Тhanks to our adaptive team; we can proudly say that we did not have to make difficult choices.
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?
Startup companies, by nature, are agile.
Navigating in times of crisis and coping with it requires being agile and combining the skill sets of each person in your team. Each of DGLegacy’s team members is an intrinsic entrepreneur, helping us in any aspect of the crisis – implementing new working environments, building innovative business strategies, and thinking out of the box to be ready for the new normal reality.
Also, with the work being predominantly remote, it helped us a lot that our management style was bottom-up, decentralized, with broad decision making and empowering the people through clear ownership of their areas.
Combining all the startup’s basics with the unique skills of our team members and empowering them to be at their best is the key to success for us.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
We have many indirect competitors, and all of them are providing some value to their customers. The best known of them is the pencil and paper :), although there are other real competitors that we do not currently consider direct ones.
But they broadly fall into Password Managers, Digital Vaults, and Digital Estate Planning services. But they are not direct competitors because we provide much more value than them. For example, if you store your passwords in a password manager, it doesn’t inform your loved ones about the shared password and documents, should anything happen to you. They should wear the burden of remembering the shared information through the years.
DGLegacy offers a unique value to our members compared to the competitors. And the most important factor that makes us optimistic about the future is that our team fully believes in DGLegacy’s mission to build a world where people can protect their assets and passwords and make sure their loved ones are secure.
Your final thoughts
In human history, we’ve seen many periods of drastic change. Some of these changes were positive; others were vastly negative, as with the current Covid pandemic.
In most of these cases, people hadn’t realized the magnitude of these profound changes and their impact on how they lived and worked. They realized that only in retrospect.
At DGLegacy, try to see, recogn, size, and analyze the small incremental changes happening around to build a holistic picture and grasp these changes’ true significance and impact. Thus, we can foresee the future needs of our members and build the dream service even before they realize the need for it.
We believe that we live in times of very provide and vast changes. Creating and educating the market is not easy, especially in a global health crisis. However, we manage to move forward confidently and boldly transform challenges into stimuli to move forward with our mission. I cannot say if Covid-19 is here to stay. Still, the accelerated adoption of digital technologies will inevitably lead to completely new ways people acquire, manage, and designate assets.
DGLegacy acknowledges this and many other trends. We are not trying to fix what’s not working in the current solutions. We are building completely new asset management and digital inheritance solution for the new world.
- Spokesperson: Ana Mineva
- Company: DGLegacy
- Website link: https://www.dglegacy.com