Janina Mütze is 32 years old and has been in charge of Civey for eight years. The company for digital market and opinion research creates representative online surveys for politics, media and business. In the stern podcast “Die Boss”, Mütze explains the advantages of founding a young company and what other female founders should pay attention to.
Janina Mütze dared to do what many people only dare to do when they are 40 or 50 – to set up their own company. With just 24 years of age, Mütze founds Civey with her business partners. The start-up has specialized in purely representative online surveys in real time since 2015. It competes with well-known opinion research institutes, whose surveys were mainly based on telephone interviews at the time. “You don’t have much to lose. Before I founded the company, I only had three salaries in my account,” says the 32-year-old in the star podcast “Die Boss”. “I had no children, no responsibility for anyone and why not try something.”
It was founded eight years ago. Mütze runs the company together with her co-founder Gerrit Richter. According to them, Civey is a pioneer in digital market and opinion research. Her customers include various media houses, political parties, the federal government and private companies. “You don’t have to sketch out the big things right from the start when you dare to take such a step into the unknown,” says the managing director of “Die Boss” hostess Simone Menne in the podcast, “you grow with the challenges and you solve them on the Step by step, the challenges are getting bigger, but the ability to find solutions is growing with it.”
“Train your pitch continuously”
Mütze recommends future female founders to acquire enough knowledge – especially when it comes to attracting investors and having sufficient seed capital available. “This is not only important in the first step, maybe to get the first funding. But also to structure the funding in such a way that in the end there is still something left for you. So that you can go three, four, five rounds further after thinks ahead, “explains Mütze. Women’s and founders’ networks are an excellent contact point for this. Here you can also “train your pitch, continuously”. It is important to talk a lot about your own idea and not to be afraid that the idea could be stolen.
In this episode of “Die Boss” you can find out what other tips Janina Mütze has on the subject of founding a company, how she makes her company more attractive for women and what she learned about leadership at a young age.
At “The Boss – Power is Female” top women talk among themselves: hostess and multi-board member Simone Menne (including BMW, Deutsche Post DHL, Henkel) meets female bosses from all areas of society to talk to them about their lives and careers. “Die Boss” appears fortnightly on Wednesdays on and the des staras well as on RTL+ and all common podcast platforms.
Source: Stern
