Michelle is a UX/UI designer, ex-digital nomad, and the co-founder of NARU — a community platform born in a Melbourne lockdown and built to tackle loneliness. What started as a one-month hackathon project with friends has grown into a space where people come together to stay accountable, connect meaningfully, and support each other through life’s chaos. In this chat, Michelle shares her unconventional path into design, how travel shaped her startup thinking, and why rest isn’t something you earn — it’s something you schedule.
Michelle, I love that you have such a passion for social impact. What sparked your interest in combining design with doing good for the world, and how has that shaped your journey as a co-founder at NARU?
The story of how NARU started explains everything about why we do what we do. It was after the 6th pandemic lockdown in Melbourne, when 21-year-old me was still living with my parents, stuck in a room that didn’t allow me to experiment and explore the world in the way I wished I could. A couple of my friends felt the same way, so we decided to tackle our loneliness by creating a product that solved it.
In hackathon style, we ideated, designed and built an app from scratch in 1 month, launched it to a group of people in AISEC (a student club in the University of Melbourne), and got our first feedback: People found closeness in using NARU with their friends during times of isolation. They felt more connected, motivated and supported than before. In a subtle way, NARU helped me during my hardest times of need – by showing me that I could give others a purpose to live and move forwards, even when it’s hard.
You’ve had an incredible career as a UX/UI designer. How do you balance the creative demands of design with the more practical aspects of running a business like NARU?
My career into UX/UI was very unconventional. I studied a Bachelor of Science majoring in Cellular and Developmental Biology, with a concurrent diploma in Computing. During my final year of studies, while I was working on NARU, I asked myself where my passions really lay – and UX Design was the answer.
I loved how it gives me the superpowers to find out what people really need from a product, and how they are impacted by the work that we do. But as a founder, it isn’t easy to trust every feedback that comes our way and spend 100% of our resources on it. I learnt it the hard way when I led a roughly 2-year initiative working with a partner that gave us too much feedback and didn’t trust our intuition in launching and really seeing how it would go. Now, I take a much more practical approach in understanding that for anything in life (not just in business) – you can have everything, but just not all at once.
As an ex-digital nomad, I’m sure you’ve experienced some amazing places and cultures. How did your time as a nomad influence your approach to both design and social impact work?
The joy of creating your own product from scratch is that it gets easily moulded by the experiences that you, as a designer and founder, face in your own life while building the product. During our travels to Taiwan, Japan and Bali, my co-founder and I explored finding a place for NARU in many different cultures and communities.
The most significant would be in the digital nomad community, especially in Bali – because people go there just to network and collide with people from other parts of the world (as founders, freelancers, remote workers, investors, etc.) This shaped our idea of NARU to become a platform not just for individuals to connect 1-1 with friends, but for people to collaborate and grow together under a “community” umbrella of trust, like-mindedness and authenticity.
When it comes to balancing work and life, what does a typical day look like? Do you have any daily habits or routines that help keep you grounded while managing everything on your plate?
My co-founder and I are life partners. Our biggest adventure was to live in Japan for 3 months, while working our own full-time jobs and on NARU at the same time. It gave us a lot of challenges and new perspectives on how we wanted to work, where we were spending our time on that wasn’t the best return on investment, and with all things when people are on the go – “Marie-kondoing” the heck out of our lives and businesses.
We often found ourselves in cafes for 5-6 hours a day, with occasional breaks to walk around a tourist attraction, before rushing to another meeting back at our accommodation. We found it challenging to balance being a typical tourist and checking off the list of going to every recommended destination, and remaining productive as remote workers and founders.
Eventually, our routine consists mainly of using the weekends as our no-work periods to focus on traveling safely and enjoyably, while focusing on work during the week to get important priorities out of the way. Of course, at night, we had the mandatory visits to the local Combini, arcades and nightlife strolls to keep our minds happy and rested for the next day.
Being a co-founder, it’s easy for work to blend into everything else. How do you set boundaries to make sure you’re still taking care of yourself while growing NARU?
One of my biggest life-hacks has been using NARU with my own friends to keep myself accountable to having “Work life balance”. I speak to my coach and advisor Liisa Vurma regularly and we identified early on that I struggled to give myself permission to rest, especially when I feel like there is already a lot on my plate that I need to finish first before I deserve any time off.
We changed this thinking to ensure that my time-off was a mandatory part of my day, and that I would focus on hobbies that took my mind off work completely – like reading, climbing, bouldering, gardening, running and spending time with friends. I have a Journey set on NARU to remind me every 48 hours if I have had my rest, and I force myself to journal about my mental health even when I am at the busiest times of my day.
When you prioritise the person you need to become to accomplish your goals, you will start to find importance in self-sustainability to prevent burnout and depression. It isn’t easy to say the least, but your health is your biggest wealth.
I’d love to hear more about your work with NARU. What has been the most rewarding part of building a company that focuses on social impact, and what are you most excited about in the future?
NARU has grown immensely over the past year. We have partnered with many social impact communities to help them serve their members better – whether that’s high school students in Nigeria starting a design career before getting into university (NextGen Tribe), or women transitioning careers and learning about AI and data science in a judgement-free safe space (Ada’s Tribe), or most recently, working with Future Minds Network (NFP) who runs programs for students and is recently helping young artists in Australia start a creative business and sell their artwork with the help of a $500 grant funded by Hume council towards 10 artists.
We increasingly see a potential of using NARU in places of member engagement and growth, as we stand differently to other community platforms out there in our focus on developing safe digital spaces for members to achieve their personal goals through the help of their community. In a world where it is increasingly easy to feel isolated and lonely (through feed-centred social media, the rise of AI-generated content and cyber-bullying/content moderation being harder to manage in major platforms), NARU creates an alternative way for humans to connect. We believe in redefining the digital footprint of humans and amongst a loneliness epidemic, to build a movement of impactful connections, one community at a time.
With so much going on, how do you stay creative and inspired? Do you have any go-to practices or activities that help you keep the ideas flowing, especially in a field as innovative as UX/UI design?
As a founder who actively wears many hats of product designer, sales rep, content marketer, community builder, QA tester, and many more — the most important decision I made was to consult an advisor/coach. I turned to Liisa Vurma for advice about our product. Our conversations went so well that we have been talking monthly over 2 years. She has constantly helped to unblock me when I needed a new perspective in both my founder and personal issues.
She suggested I use NARU to keep myself accountable for having a “Work Life Balance” and I have found my life completely changed over time to prioritise this balance over everything else. In true NARU fashion, I have about 10 friends following my Journey on NARU and supporting me with my progress, which sometimes includes me ranting about my packed calendar, and other times showing off the veggies growing in my garden.
I have also found meeting up monthly with my most active members on NARU (called our NARU VIPs) to be hugely motivating, inspiring and also a way for me to be vulnerable about my founder journey. We celebrate each of our wins, go through feedback of the NARU platform, talk about our monthly goals and activities, and at the end of the day, remind each other that we are here to walk this journey called “life” together :- )
