This episode covers the story of Ieva Vaitkevičiūtė, the founder and CEO of Mindletic, a mental gym for emotional balance with the purpose to promote emotional hygiene and motivate ongoing self-care. Mindletic is a 2nd place winner of The Global Hack which gathered over 15 000 participants from 100+ countries, winner at Futurepreneurs 2020 pre-accelerator and has been recognised by global media including Forbes, NHK WORLD-JAPAN, World Economic Forum, Delfi to name a few.

We had a wonderful conversation, covering starting a business in pandemic times, mental health, working with purpose, impact investing, and more. Check out a few highlights from the episode:

1. What it means to be a social business. As a social business, Mindletic aims to be financially sustainable just like any other startup. However, instead of KPIs like revenue growth being the main focus, the team tracks the impact on emotional balance - hours spent tackling emotional health, satisfaction rates using the app, decrease in employee turnover and sick leave. Financial sustainability and social impact together to make a business that can thrive and really have a positive social benefit at the same time.

2. Startups should solve real pains. Mindletic was created to solve a real-life problem that was accelerated by COVID-19 - growing distance between leaders and employees working remotely, patterns in decreased productivity, burnout, and increased employee turnover, which led to increased costs for hiring and onboarding. Identifying a real pain and the audiences affected by it is the key step when starting a company.

3. Take one step at a time. For Ieva, getting started on the entrepreneur’s journey was as simple as connecting with people who are interested in solving the same pain - emotional disbalance. Mindletic was a collaborative effort between entrepreneurs, psychologists, designers, HR people, and leaders. Another important aspect was approaching investors after already securing revenue streams to show the potential for financial sustainability. The main advice for entrepreneurs is not to think too far away and be overwhelmed by the size of the problem at hand, but to take it one step at a time.

4. Impact investors are your partners. Impact investors usually have specific interests, like climate change or mental health and would work together with the founders towards a solution, supporting with connections and experience. While ROI and other standard metrics are important, they also look at impact metrics and help you stay focused on the bigger vision.

5. Happiness is not a goal. We have so many emotions that chasing happiness is impossible and a sure way to set ourselves up for disappointment. Instead, Mindletic invites people to identify their emotional balance zone, and seek to stay within that zone while consistently expanding it.

6. Emotional balance is crucial for the climate too. When we are emotionally balanced, we make more mindful decisions, we are more aware of our feelings, and we don’t seek short-term comfort in buying things, or eating excessively, which have a direct impact on the environment through consumerism, and food waste.

Episode references:

Mindletic - a mental gym for emotional balance with the purpose to promote emotional hygiene and motivate ongoing self-care.

Book recommendation: "Nonviolent Communication" by Marshall B. Rosenberg

Credits:

Intro-outro song "Sparks" by Ian Preece