In Yang Ying's past experiences and inherent thinking patterns, community is not an optional choice, but a necessity for product growth and the source of product vitality.

Author: Chen Chang

Manus AI is undoubtedly one of the most talked-about AI Agent products in the first half of this year. From its rapid rise to fame in March, sweeping across the entire internet, to the enthusiastic response from global communities, this brand not only achieved viral spread in a short time, becoming the focus of attention for core AI users worldwide, but also served as an important reference case for community growth for many subsequent AI products. In the initial stage of building the brand community, Yang Ying, based in San Francisco, was the first member to join the Manus AI Fellow Program in the city. As a volunteer, she organized the first three foundational events for Manus AI, regarded as the world's first general-purpose AI agent, in the Bay Area, laying a solid community foundation for the brand's rapid launch and deep integration into the local market.

At that time, Yang Ying was working at Niantic, responsible for the global product growth strategy for Pokémon GO, and she understood how crucial and important community is for product growth. She was keen on experiencing limited-time Pokémon events with local players in San Francisco on weekends, gaining insights into the user journey; she even traveled to Columbus, Ohio, specifically to conduct in-depth user research for the largest global community event, GO Fest. The day after her visit, she organized an all-day player gathering with great enthusiasm and execution, attracting over a hundred loyal players. In Yang Ying's past experiences and inherent thinking patterns, community is not an optional choice, but a necessity for product growth and the source of product vitality. Before being invited to join Manus AI, she had already accumulated rich practical experience and unique insights in this field.

Yang Ying officially joined Manus AI Fellow at the end of April and quickly organized Manus's first "Vibe Coding" event in San Francisco on May 14, just half a month later. This event attracted about a thousand registrations due to its precise positioning, with high-quality participants including many founders, senior product managers, designers, and development engineers from the core user group. The event focused on "in-depth market research," requiring all attendees to form groups and produce a specific market research report and presentation within just 1 to 2 hours. Ultimately, over a hundred participants attended, and the atmosphere was extremely lively, sparking countless ideas. At the end of the event, about 15 teams presented their solid results, with one AI project related to wedding planning taking first place. A product designer from the second-place team even posted on LinkedIn to express admiration, highly affirming the creativity and interactive design of the event. Yang Ying not only invited a high-quality audience from the AI circle in a very short time, ensuring an excellent experience for everyone, but also began to contemplate: how to maintain the activity and stickiness of the community towards Manus in the long run?

In the subsequent Manus AI Vibe Coding events she led, Yang Ying keenly captured the core key to retaining these deep AI users and ensuring they continue to support Manus: continuously conveying the value of "what Manus AI can achieve" to the audience. This process required community activities to frequently produce high-quality, high-value application cases. The requirements for the output cases were extremely high; they must either have the potential to become widely adopted and reusable templates or possess strong topicality to spark discussion and dissemination. In each event, Yang Ying continuously learned, iterated, and practiced these ideas. From the participation and feedback data of each event, this series of practices undoubtedly yielded very good results.

In early June, Liblib, a representative AI startup in the domestic text-to-image sector, released the test version of its overseas expansion product, Lovart AI, in North America. The co-founder of Lovart AI, responsible for overseas operations, met Yang Ying through offline events and immediately invited her to organize Lovart's first brand offline event in San Francisco. Yang Ying quickly realized that, given Lovart's lack of recognition in the local market, the initial appearance must adopt a "leveraging strategy." She swiftly judged that the first event needed to partner with a brand that already had market prestige to quickly raise brand awareness and gather traffic. With her deep industry connections and precise judgment of brand tone and target audience, the first event successfully collaborated with the then-popular global stock photo giant Freepik. Once the event was announced, it immediately attracted nearly a thousand enthusiastic registrations, successfully launching the brand's overseas debut.

Following that, Yang Ying did not stick to the conventional approach. She deeply considered Lovart's growth pain points and the stage-specific needs for accumulating product cases, decisively abandoning the "Vibe Coding/Designing" format that had been successful during her time at Manus AI. Instead, she strategically planned a small, high-quality workshop with a very private nature. The core goal was very clear: to efficiently "incubate" and solidify high-quality application cases with dissemination value, laying a solid strategic reserve for subsequent product-market fit (PMF) validation and scaled marketing communication. Aura Nuccio, the design director of the Silicon Valley startup Coderblock, praised the event on LinkedIn and in a weekly report, calling it "a unique gathering of designers, technologists, and creatives exploring how AI can be a true collaborator in the design process," greatly enhancing the event's industry influence. This specific case fully reflects Yang Ying's wisdom in adapting and her pragmatic strategic thinking—she is not constrained by previous successful experiences but chooses the most suitable growth path for the product at each critical juncture.

Subsequently, at the official launch party for Lovart, Yang Ying was entrusted with the important role of the core host for the evening. This party adopted a strict invitation system, carefully selecting a hundred high-quality industry elites and early users to attend. The atmosphere was lively, with representatives from industry giants like OpenAI and Anthropic personally attending, and the entire atmosphere was continuously heated and climactic due to the clever design of product interactions, earning a "top-notch quality" reputation within the core AI circle in Silicon Valley. Many industry professionals in Silicon Valley were deeply impressed by the professionalism and influence of this event, inquiring with the founders about the mysterious mastermind behind the event, highlighting Yang Ying's extraordinary influence and appeal created in a short time.

Whenever asked about her unique knack for organizing offline community events, Yang Ying's eyes always shine with her curiosity and persistence towards users and business: "For any product to be successfully launched, it must first be clear about the irreplaceable value it can bring to users and be able to articulate it clearly. Secondly, at different stages of development, it is essential to gather users for specific target scenarios in the most appropriate way to form a powerful community force." She began to delve into the community field during her undergraduate studies at Communication University of China, and after more than a decade, she continues to thrive in today's AI era. With her keen insight, profound understanding of users, and precise judgment of commercialization paths, she has become a rare talent driving progress in the AI industry amidst the new era wave. She is currently responsible for the growth of the product Wanderboat AI, a consumer-grade AI application closer to the everyday lives of the general public. In the coming time, she will continue to bring this positively toned lifestyle product to all those who love life and wish to make their local dining, entertainment, and leisure experiences easier and more colorful through AI, using the community forms she excels in. Her story and practice repeatedly prove that she is the rare talent capable of activating cold technology with human warmth, perfectly illustrating the depth and power of "how to activate AI communities with 'human warmth'."

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