Page 14 - MidWeek - Oct 5, 2022

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Meli James and Mana Up are growing the entrepreneurial landscape in Hawai‘i — and having a blast doing it.
There’s a price (literally) to living in paradise. But according to Mana Up co-founder Meli James, it doesn’t have to be this way.
ter-life crisis made her shift gears from the hospitality industry to starting her own venture — a wine app called Nirvino — at the age of 27. Nirvino started in 2007 as a mobile website that helped people find good wines at the grocery store or restau- rants, and then capitalized on Apple’s app store launch a year later by converting to a cell phone application that allowed online purchases.
the web at our fingertips.” Through that experience, she fell in love with entre- preneurship and startups, and went on to launch other successful companies. That formula of having an idea and making a business out of it spoke to James, who wish- es there were opportunities to learn the ins and outs of entrepreneurship back when she was in high school in the
about her island home that many others have experi- enced.
launched the small-business accelerator in 2017, 63 com- panies have gone through Mana Up’s accelerator pro- gram and grown their busi- nesses by leaps and bounds. And, come Nov. 3, 11 more will join the ranks during a virtual graduation showcase.
narrative and building leader- ship, as well as hyperfocused one-on-one weekly sessions individually tailored to the specific business.
“We can create this place where ideas can come to fru- ition in an innovative ecosys- tem,” she states. “Any idea that you have, you can build here in Hawai‘i — how amaz- ing would that be? Now that I’ve been an entrepreneur and seen success with my busi- nesses, (I wanted to) bring what I learned to Hawai‘i so more people can come home or stay home.”
“It was kind of this unspo- ken thing that if you really wanted to do something dif- ferent, Hawai‘i wasn’t the place for that,” she says. “I felt like Hawai‘i wasn’t an option for me, and I felt like I had to stay on the mainland, so I did.”
“We had over 150,000 peo- ple watch our show last year,” James says. “It’s Shark Tank meets Oprah meets American Idol.”
“We teach them the skills and how to look at the world as their customers,” explains Heyd, a California native who met and married a Maui boy and moved to the islands in 2016. “Instead of it tak- ing them three years to learn something, how do we make it take six months? We vet resources and consultants to shorten the learning cycle, re- duce mistakes and allow them to grow quicker.
James’ introduction to en- trepreneurship was all boots on the ground after a quar-
Born and raised on O‘ahu, James went to the mainland for college and upon gradu- ating faced the same doubts
Since James and company co-founder Brittany Heyd
“We pour fuel on the fire.”
“Back then, we had clunky smartphones that were expen- sive, and this was game-chang- ing,” recalls James, who was living in tech-forward Silicon Valley at the time. “It was the first time in our lives we had
’90s.
“It wasn’t even a word peo-
But now, James has the ability to share that knowl- edge with forward-thinking islanders through Mana Up, giving them the opportunity and help she never had as a young adult.
It’ ll be a time of celebra- tion on a job well done and a chance to look back on six months of hard work that in- cluded intensive workshops on digital marketing, e-com- merce, packaging, creating a
ple knew how to spell yet,” she adds with a laugh.
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