Beyond Growth Hacking: How Yang Ying Activates AI Communities with "Human Touch"
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Beyond Growth Hacking: How Yang Ying Activates AI Communities with "Human Touch"
In Yang Ying's past experiences and ingrained way of thinking, community is not an optional extra but a necessity for product growth and the source of a product's vitality.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Chen Chang
Manus AI was undoubtedly one of the most talked-about AI Agent products in the first half of this year. From its rapid surge in popularity in March, sweeping across the internet and receiving enthusiastic responses from global communities, the brand achieved viral growth within a short time, becoming a focal point for core AI users worldwide. It has also served as a key reference case for community-driven growth among many subsequent AI products. During the initial phase of building its brand community, Yang Ying, based in San Francisco, became the first member to join the Manus AI Fellow Program in the city. As a volunteer, she hosted the earliest three foundational events for Manus AI—the world's first general-purpose AI agent—in the Bay Area, laying a solid community foundation that enabled the brand’s swift launch and deep integration into the local market.
At the time, Yang Ying was working at Niantic, leading global product growth strategy for Pokémon GO, where she deeply understood how critical communities are to product growth. She enjoyed spending weekends with local players in San Francisco, experiencing time-limited Pokémon events firsthand to closely understand user journeys. She even traveled specifically to Columbus, Ohio, to conduct in-depth user research at GO Fest, the largest annual global community event. On her second day there, she enthusiastically and proactively organized an all-day player gathering, attracting over a hundred loyal participants. In Yang Ying’s experience and mindset, community is never an optional add-on but a necessity for product growth—an essential source of vitality. Before being invited to join Manus AI, she had already accumulated rich hands-on experience and unique insights in this field.
Yang Ying officially joined the Manus AI Fellow program at the end of April and, just half a month later on May 14, quickly organized Manus AI’s first “Vibe Coding” event in San Francisco. Thanks to its precise positioning, the event attracted nearly a thousand registrations, with exceptionally high participant quality—many founders, senior product managers, designers, and development engineers, representing core user groups. Centered around “deep market research,” the event required attendees to form teams and produce a detailed market research report and presentation within just one to two hours. Ultimately, over a hundred participants attended, creating an extremely lively atmosphere filled with sparks of inspiration from constant intellectual exchange. By the end, about 15 teams presented substantial results, with one AI-powered wedding planning project taking first place. A product designer from the second-place team even posted on LinkedIn praising the event, highly commending its creative concept and interactive design. Not only did Yang Ying rapidly attract top-tier audiences from the AI community and ensure an outstanding experience for everyone, but she also began pondering: what long-term approach could sustain ongoing engagement and stickiness with Manus?
In the following Manus AI Vibe Coding events led by her, Yang Ying敏锐ly identified the key to retaining these deep AI users and keeping them engaged with Manus: continuously conveying to the audience the possibilities enabled by Manus AI. This required community events to frequently generate high-quality, high-value application cases. The bar for these outputs was extremely high—they either needed to have strong potential to become widely adopted and reusable templates, or possess compelling talking points capable of sparking discussion and virality. Through each successive event, Yang Ying continuously learned, iterated, and implemented these ideas. Judging from attendance rates and feedback data, this series of practices proved highly effective.
In early June, Liblib—one of the most representative Chinese AI startups in the text-to-image space—launched the beta version of Lovart AI, its overseas expansion product, in North America. Lovart AI’s co-founder and head of international operations met Yang Ying through offline events and immediately invited her to lead the organization of Lovart’s debut flagship offline event in San Francisco. Yang Ying quickly realized that given Lovart’s lack of recognition in the local market, its first appearance must adopt a “leverage existing momentum” strategy. She swiftly concluded that the inaugural event urgently needed to partner with a brand already possessing market credibility to rapidly build visibility and draw traffic. Leveraging her extensive industry network and precise understanding of brand identity and target audiences, the first event successfully secured a major collaboration with Freepik, then the red-hot global image giant. Upon announcement, it drew nearly a thousand eager registrants, effectively firing the starting shot for the brand’s overseas expansion.
Shortly after, Yang Ying refused to stick to convention. Considering Lovart’s current growth pain points and its need to accumulate use cases at this stage, she decisively abandoned the “Vibe Coding/Designing” format that had succeeded during her time with Manus AI. Instead, she strategically designed a small-scale, highly curated, and exclusive workshop. Its objective was clear: efficiently “incubate” and archive high-value application cases with strong viral potential, creating solid strategic reserves for future product-market fit validation and scalable marketing campaigns. Aura Nuccio, Design Lead at Silicon Valley startup Coderblock, shared her experience on LinkedIn and in her weekly newsletter, calling the event “a unique gathering of designers, technologists, and creatives exploring how AI can be a true collaborator in the design process,” significantly boosting the event’s industry influence. This example fully reflects Yang Ying’s adaptive wisdom and pragmatic strategic thinking—she does not cling to past successes, but instead chooses the most suitable growth path for each product at every critical juncture.
Later, at Lovart’s official product launch party, Yang Ying was once again entrusted with a central role—as the main host of the evening. The party operated under a strict invitation-only model, carefully curating a hundred high-quality industry elites and early adopters. The atmosphere was vibrant, with representatives from industry giants like OpenAI and Anthropic personally attending to show support. Cleverly designed interactive experiences kept energy levels rising throughout, culminating in multiple highlights. The event earned an outstanding reputation within Silicon Valley’s core AI circles as “top-tier in quality.” Many professionals in the region were deeply impressed by the event’s professionalism and impact, repeatedly asking the founders about the mysterious mastermind behind it—testament to the extraordinary influence and pulling power Yang Ying built in such a short time.
Whenever asked about her unique secrets to orchestrating offline community events, Yang Ying’s eyes always light up with curiosity and conviction about users and business: “For any product to succeed, you must first clearly understand and articulate the irreplaceable value it delivers to users. Second, at different stages of development, you must bring users together in the right way for specific scenarios, building powerful community momentum.” Her journey in community-building began during her undergraduate years at the Communication University of China, and over more than a decade, extending into today’s AI era, she has evolved into a rare talent who drives progress in the AI industry. She currently leads growth for Wanderboat AI, a consumer-facing AI application closer to everyday life. In the coming months, she will continue using her signature community-driven approach to introduce this positively-toned lifestyle product to everyone who loves life and wants AI to make their local dining, travel, and entertainment experiences easier and richer. Her story and practice repeatedly prove that she is precisely the rare individual capable of humanizing cold technology—perfectly embodying the depth and power of “activating AI communities with humanity.”
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