Stuck in a creative rut? BILDA's Meltem Açık has built a deck of cards to get you going
Perfection is overrated. This UX designer turned founder says start anyway.
Meltem Acik has built global brand experiences for the likes of Under Armour and Langham Hotels. The Turkish-Australian UX designer is the co-founder of beloved party collective Ice Cream Sundays and Singapore’s first camping and arts festival, Sunda. But it’s her newest venture – BILDA, a design-led company helping people build a life and business their way – that’s perhaps her most personal project yet.
In this Q&A, the Turkish-Aussie founder walks us through her nonlinear path from accounting degree to UX strategy to building tools for creative clarity. She shares how years of research, scrappy prototyping, and conversations with “lost souls” shaped The Discover Kit – BILDA’s flagship product – and why launching imperfectly is often the best kind of start.
What’s your story? What were you doing before launching BILDA?
I’ve lived in Singapore for 10 years, and before BILDA, I worked in the UX/CX space. My background is predominantly in research and design, and I’ve had the opportunity to lead impactful projects for brands like Under Armour, Langham Hotels & Resorts, UOB and Scoot. My speciality is leveraging mixed-methods research and facilitating time-boxed processes like design sprints and workshops.
I’m also the co-founder of pop-up party collective Ice Cream Sundays and Singapore’s first camping and arts festival, Sunda. I lead content and digital across both.
Was there a lightbulb moment?
Somewhere between my late 20s and early 30s, I noticed my friends weren’t sure about what they wanted from life. It felt like a generation of people was still searching for answers. I knew if there was anything I could bring to the table, it was a problem-solving mindset (plus some good energy and Turkish food). If I could help behemoth companies fix their issues through UX/CX, I could probably help my friends and other lost souls out there, too. Through ongoing research and refinement, we slowly got to what BILDA is today: a company on a mission to help you build a life and business your way.
Who would benefit from the Discover Kit?
It’s for curious humans who want to understand themselves and the people around them better. If you’re at a crossroads in your life or career, then The Discover Kit can help you find your way. If you’re feeling stuck creatively and want to experiment again, it’s for you. If you’re tired of repeating the same cycles and want to nudge yourself onto a different path, it’s also for you.
In your mind, why does a product like BILDA need to exist?
The reasons are twofold: one is rational, and the other is personal.
The rational reason: BILDA is about helping you build a life and business your way. As a design-led company, we do this by sharing stories that inspire, knowledge that motivates, and tools that can create change. The Discover Kit, for example, is our antidote to growing loneliness, perfectionism, and the anxieties modern life creates. It’s a physical deck of cards that encourages creativity, collaboration, and play (and switching off from our devices).
The emotional reason: I don't come from privilege. My mum raised my sister and me as a single parent, and being from a working-class immigrant family, I placed a great deal of pressure on myself to succeed academically. Education was the key to opportunity, a way to help me forge a better life. All through high school, however, I was obsessed with media and photography. I’d spend hours in the dark room or glued to a chair in the editing studio.
The Discovery Kit is for curious humans who want to understand themselves and the people around them better. If you’re at a crossroads in your life or career, it can help you find your way.
This period of my life was the most rewarding creatively. But pursue a career in the arts? That seemed absurd and too risky for someone like me. Be “safe,” I told myself, find something “stable”. The plan was to get into a top university, study law, and work. Ultimately, I graduated from the University of Melbourne with two degrees: a Bachelor of Arts in Criminology and Cultural Studies and a Master of Management in Accounting from Melbourne Business School. Despite doing well in my degrees, I never pursued either professionally.
BILDA, particularly The Discover Kit, is an expression of my dreams from when I was younger: those of a girl who wanted nothing more than to experiment and explore possibilities, creatively and in life. I get to do that now and hope to help others do it.
I don't come from privilege. My mum raised my sister and me as a single parent, and being from a working-class immigrant family, I placed a great deal of pressure on myself to succeed academically. Be “safe,” I told myself, find something “stable”.
What steps did you take to go from idea to launch?
I’d been successfully freelancing and helping build up other people's brands, but I wanted to take on a new challenge at some point. Creating a tangible product with real impact was at the core of it.
I put my research hat on and started observing the difficulties people around me were going through. Inside the notes app on my phone, I jotted down any business ideas I had, some of which I laugh at now:
A hotel with a hostel vibe (how I would have funded this, I don’t know)
Healthy cup noodles (I mean, still keen for this!)
Alarm clocks for people with a phone addiction (not sure what I was thinking here)
Solo travel website (yes)
Pimp my car but for your phone (speechless, but do we love?)
Independent entrepreneurship platform for Southeast Asia, not focused on tech
I was drawn to the last idea because I loved finding new brands and supporting brilliant founders, and I wanted to highlight interesting work that wasn’t solely in tech. I began my research journey here.
🔍 Research Round 1: Find the founders
My exploratory research started with talking to seven founders (all women) to understand the ups and downs of building, launching, and sustaining a business. I learned a lot from these discussions, mainly that everyone has unique reasons for starting a business and that there are a lot of challenges at every point of the journey. Whether it’s emotional baggage, a skills gap, or a systemic issue, this made me want to create a brand that’s with you at the beginning of your entrepreneurship journey and provides tools to support you along the way.
Around the same time, I heard friends talk about how stuck they felt, not knowing how to chart a path forward. I wanted to bring research and design methods to the people! Proven tools that could enable clarity and use them to design your life in an accessible, fun, yet effective way.
⚒️ Research Round 2: Test the methods and tools
I’d spent months perfecting the methods and tools, making sure there were peer-reviewed studies to back up the principles of each. During a coffee catch-up with a close friend, she encouraged me to send it to people to test. The researcher and designer in me knew that’s what I ought to do, but the perfectionist inside was squealing, regurgitating the classic line, “It’s not ready yet.” But I did send it out because I knew this was the only way forward.
I emailed as many people as I knew who I thought would benefit from it and got a ton of feedback. Momentum was starting. I was refining and adapting, but it felt like I was missing a piece of the puzzle.
🌎 Research Round 3: Locate lost souls, interview them
If this product was intended to help people find a path forward, I must speak to those who feel they have no path. The mission? Find lost souls. These interviews were helpful because they gave me a deep understanding of what it feels like to have no direction and why it happens. Analysis paralysis, time slipping away, never feeling “ready enough” or “good enough,” lacking consistency, an incessant need to learn more, and the findings continued.
I had plenty of fodder to move on to the next stage.
🗣️ Research Round 4: Workshop it
After the design was ready, I gathered about 10 people in my apartment and divided them into small groups to finalise the activities and observe how the tools were used. What were they confused about? What words didn’t make sense? What activities were enjoyable? This was when I had a lightbulb moment. The collaborative nature of doing the activities together was enriching. One person said they learned more about the strangers in their group than they ever had about their friends. I was shocked, and I knew that this was something I had to integrate into the final design and into our messaging, too.
🕊 Research Round 5: Sample + launch
If going from idea to launch seems like a long process, it is! Launching a business is hard, and this is a very condensed version. After some final refinements, I was happy to proceed with the final print. I launched in mid-April, so it’s been about two and a half months (from this date of writing), and the feedback has been incredible.
You need a balanced proportion of delusion, grit, and persistence to run a business alone. Being a (solo) entrepreneur is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
Was there a time you felt completely out of your depth as a founder? How did you get over it?
My cheeky side wanted to satirically answer this question with, “I never feel out of my depth, I always know what I’m doing!”. The truth is, I consistently feel out of my depth, but I’m also used to getting dropped in the deep end with my work. So, I’ll usually reframe the situation and remind myself that I’ve done difficult things before and can do this, too. For example, as a freelancer, I usually work on projects in completely new industries that are often complex - I have to hit the ground running by learning fast and adapting.
Since starting my freelance career, I’ve also given myself a yearly learning and development budget to upskill. So far, I’ve completed diplomas and short courses in graphic design, marketing, copywriting, content strategy, and AI. This has been immensely helpful as a solo founder.
Practically speaking, though, I also:
Ask for help and advice, I’ve built a community of people who inspire me
Observe how others have dealt with a similar situation
Let myself feel my feelings, sometimes, you just need to let them out
Create deadlines for problems to be solved instead of letting them fester
It’s also important to note that I’m at the very start of my entrepreneurship journey as a solo founder. You need a balanced proportion of delusion, grit, and persistence to run a business alone. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Comparing it to my experience as a co-founder, it just doesn’t stack up in terms of difficulty.
Solo founders out there, I see you and feel you!
If you could write a letter to your past self at the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey, it would say…
Launch
Don’t leave your product sitting in the warehouse for 6 months, just launch
Stop waiting for everything to be perfect, just launch
Launching will help you learn more than all of your research combined
Did I mention you should launch?
Did you launch???
You always deliver high-quality products, so just launch
Lastly, how are you defining success now?
Right now, success for BILDA is about resonance. For example, getting a review like this: “Honestly, life changing. I really needed this and am so glad it exists!! As a creative who has too many project/business ideas, I'm prone to getting stuck in the dreaming phase and never getting to the doing. The exercises in this kit are helping me rediscover my creativity and get unstuck, all while making me laugh and looking so cute on my desk <3”
RAPID FIRE with MELTEM
If you could have dinner with any three people, dead or alive, who would they be? 🍝 Anthony Bourdain, Socrates, Nina Simone
You can’t start your day until 🌤️ … Coffee!
Your dream brand collaboration for BILDA is 🎨 … I’d love to take BILDA worldwide and start hosting Discover Workshops in inspiring spaces like Casa Lawa, Kalm Village, Metropolis or NGV Melbourne, Merci Paris, and The Store X Berlin. A short selection of dream clients includes Pinterest, Shopify, Aesop, Mob, Figma, and independent design-led brands!
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Follow Meltem on Instagram (@meltem.acik) to learn more about what she’s building at BILDA (@bilda.community).
This interview was originally published in July 2024, and has been edited for clarity and brevity. Subscribe to Hatched Asia to stay up to date with must-know women founders, creators and creatives in Asia.
