As society is becoming more and more digital and cashless, and children’s wishes and expectations becoming extremely high, it is more essential than ever before to help them achieve a healthy balance in earning, spending and saving up money. With the aim of giving families a practical and fun way to work with economic education, Louise Ferslev, CEO started the company MyMonii around three and half years ago. MyMonii is a free app for the whole family that makes it fun, playful and easy for children and youngsters to learn about the value of money. More than 50.000 Danish families are already using this application.
Louise Ferslev’s journey is as below:
Delegation of Work
Louise is the mother of 2 children. She has a daughter of two and half years and a son of two months. Presently, she has combined maternity leaves with running and leading MyMonii as the CEO. She started MyMonii in 2015. She was alone in the beginning. After a while, she realized that she couldn’t do everything by herself as there are only 24 hours in a day. In due course of time she also realized that she was not the best to do every single job in the company. After that MyMonii hired some employees and Louise started playing the role of a leader.
Thinking Ahead of Users
MyMonii has been in contact with its users every single day since the very beginning in 2015. It encourages them to contact company and giving feedback on what works for them and what they wish for. It also looks into the data and sees how the users behave, and then it connects the qualitative and quantitative data and makes decisions about the product together in the team.
Louise considers it is also important to think ahead of the users and ask oneself, “In 3 years from now, what would our target group want then? And then try to deliver a product they didn’t know they needed.”
Traits of Leader
Louise considers that patience and self-confidence are the most important traits of an effective leader. Patience is especially very important if one is a leader in a startup. Things take longer times than one wants them to, and might meet challenges and bumps on the road, which makes the journey towards the goals even more far away.
Self-confidence because one needs to believe in oneself no matter how many things works against it. If one doesn’t–or at least pretend to believe in oneself- and the choices he/she makes then no one else will. Sounds like an annoying cliché, but it is important. The employees, investors, partners, and many others need to trust you.
Overcoming Challenges
In general when Louise meets up with challenges she sleeps, she talks about the challenges with her boyfriend and goes for a run to nearest 2-3 sparring partners to come up with the solution. And then she collects the inputs, lets the time work for her – and then she usually comes up with a solution for the challenge or at least she overcomes it without giving up.
Appreciation of Diversity
Louise has co-founded the organization “Women in tech Denmark” which is a big and growing community in Denmark for women working in tech. The overall purpose of the community is to inspire to have more diversity in terms of gender, background, religion, experience, age etc.
The numbers speak for themselves. The companies, teams and boards which have succeeded to have a lot of diversity perform better. They simply deliver better numbers in the end. Having diversity in the position of power improves the performance of the company.
Another pro with having more women in powerful positions is that there is a huge potential for tech innovation in businesses which provides products and services for women and children. Louise believes that more women should start businesses as they can make innovative products and services for themselves.
Setting the Standards
MyMonii keeps an eye on competitors, but doesn’t look closely to what they are doing. Louise is convinced that if one wants to lead company in his/her field then one must be first mover and not just copying the competitors. She believes that if one wants to win in the respective field, one needs to think in different way than the others. She wants to set the standards for others to follow. She says that, “Let them copy you instead. Then there is a good sign that you are moving in the right direction.”
Personal Growth
Louise uses the app Blinkist to hear short versions of books about leadership, strategy, motivation, personal growth etc. for her personal growth. She likes that the app gives her the most important points from a book in just 10-15 minutes. It gives her chance to listen to many different strategy books instead of just one. From this particular resources she ends up with a lot of different inputs which she uses to make her own decisions, instead of choosing one strategy book and then try to do everything in that way.
Future Goals
The goal for MyMonii in 2019 is to sign and deliver 9 white label solutions to 9 banks. This is the goal for the near future. The end goal for MyMonii is to sell the company in 3-5 years from now.