We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Michelle Ikediobi a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Michelle, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?

Bare Chats was born from me trying to solve my own problem as a previously burnt-out college student (before I had the vocabulary to label it burnout!) All I knew was that I felt an overwhelming mix of stress and anxiety, as plenty of students do. Looking back, I realized it was a mix of journaling, therapy, and leaning on a supportive community that helped me pull through and that got my wheels turning.

I graduated with a mission: wanting to provide different outlets for students to lean on to reduce stress, increase their mental wellbeing, and truly enjoy their college experience.

Once I locked in on the mission statement, everything else started to flow naturally. Without a mission, a clear “Why?”,
it becomes almost impossible to navigate the ideation process, simply because the purpose isn’t clear to you. If it’s not clear to you, then it won’t be clear to others.

Then, I went through a huge research deep-dive where I wanted to truly understand and codify the college student experience from multiple perspectives. For example, I scraped together a Google survey, sent it around, and got a few hundred responses. I conducted a few ethnographic interviews with current students, read a few psychology books, and got plugged into different forums. After a few months of research, I was able to paint a mental model of our target market, the people we were truly serving.

Afterward, I took a quick class in user experience/user interface design (UX) to learn how to design apps. Using this knowledge, I created a prototype of Bare Chats v0.1 and grabbed a few friends to help me conduct user feedback sessions – these early sessions were incredibly helpful because 1) it helped me understand what people were yearning for 2) it helped me decide what parts of the app experience to prioritize for our first release (MVP – minimum viable product)

After a few cycles of test-and-learn, I landed on the initial version, partnered with a few developers, and launched it in the App store!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’ve always been interested in understanding the answer to one simple question: Why do we do the things that we do? As you can imagine, the answer isn’t as simple as the question.

I actively study the works of neuroscientists and behavioral psychologists (like Joe Dispenza, Kelly McGonigal, Andrew Huberman, etc.,) on the full range of behavior: subconscious programming <> self-awareness <> behavior change. Ultimately, this endless curiosity drew me to Product. In a lot of ways, Product Managers are action-oriented philosophers. We are very comfortable in the visionary “anything can be created” phase yet we’re disciplined enough to not get lost in that vortex. To know the right time to move everyone into the “okay, love the ideas now let’s make it happen” phase.

I am the CEO/CPO of Bare Chats, an advanced journaling app focused on improving our mental wellbeing in a digitally-charged world. This is done by remaining hyperfocused on the mission: redefining the relationship we have with ourselves.

I am also a Product Manager and Management Consultant by trade and have worked at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG)’s investment and incubation arm, Digital Ventures where I specialized in building and scaling startups (from idea to execution) that delivered value for millions of people across the world.

Prior to BCG, I was a Product Manager at Citibank where I launched and grew the proactive communication infrastructure and led marketing optimization and customer acquisition efforts.

I received my Bachelor’s degree in Quantitative Marketing with a concentration in Statistics and Media from the University of Rochester.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Just because you didn’t study it in a formal setting doesn’t mean you don’t know it.

In fact, most of the practical skills that I’ve been able to give to launching and managing Bare Chats are skills I learned through experimentation – trying my hand at it and getting better over time.

I didn’t know the first thing about machine learning, deep learning, or coding in Python so I signed up for a 6-month boot camp and spent my evenings trying my hand at it. Next thing you know, I was able to create an initial model for Bare Chats to recommend relevant prompts based on your interests.

I had an idea in my head for how the app should look and work but didn’t know how to translate that into an actual screen design. Instead of throwing my goals out the window, I signed up for an online class to learn UX/UI design and was able to whip out clickable prototypes for people to interact with themselves and get a feel for Bare Chats.

The anxiety that you probably feel when learning something new is something most people feel, embrace it and rest assured that the feeling eventually transforms into gratitude when you gradually start to piece it together!

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

In the beginning, I had a very big vision for what the initial version of Bare Chats would be. It would defy all technical and financial limitations and fast-forward us into the sci-fi world we’ve all seen in movies. Even though that vision is attainable, we have to start somewhere and see if it’s even worth the investment.

I had to break the vision into bite-size chunks that allowed the team to make progress and work toward more attainable goals versus being overwhelmed and burnt out trying to make a 10-year journey happen in 3 months. Impossible.

Additionally, it wouldn’t have left room for the abundance of new information, learnings, and knowledge we were getting along the way that made us rethink how the product needed to look, feel, operate, etc.

Ultimately, the mission is the one thing that stays relatively stable over time, everything else has a mini asterisk next to it which allows for continuous iterations and improvements to solve the problem in the most effective way!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.themimichronicles.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/barechats/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelleikediobi/