After he graduated from the high-school in Ruse, he studied natural sciences at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.
In 1897 he became a member of the so-called Geneva group – an anarchistic revolutionary circle led by Mihail Gerdzhikov and Petar Mandzhukov.
With the assistance of his close friend Gotse Delchev, in 1901 Dimitar Ganchev was successfully hired as a teacher at the Bulgarian Pedagogical School in Skopie.
Furthermore, in the beginning 1903 he was a delegate to the Solun congress, where a decision was made for an armed uprising.
With the outbreak of the first Balkan War, Dimitar Ganchev enlisted in the Bulgarian Army as a volunteer.