Text | Wang Zhiyuan
In the circle of friends, I often see manus information in the past two days.
A friend asked about status:
Is there an invitation code? Some people posted screenshots of their successful invitation code, and even showed off their user experience; to be honest, this phenomenon has actually reduced my attention to the product itself.
In contrast, I’m more interested in how it is marketed. Because there are many friends in the AI field around me who often discuss a question with me: In the era of information flooding, how can a company’s products quickly attract users’ attention as soon as they are launched?
This is a very realistic and important question. After all, no matter how good the product is, it doesn’t exist if no one sees it.; Therefore, I reviewed the Manus marketing method throughout the whole process and found some similarities and differences, and shared them with you.
01
Where is the same? First, let’s discuss a question:How did manus become popular?
Some people say that Manus adopts a very classic Internet marketing routine: by creating a sense of scarcity, users feel that they must use their personal resources to gain product experience; this sense of scarcity creates a product more valuable in the hearts of users.
Then, Manus further amplified the mystery and appeal of the product with the help of KOL and several large-scale tech-sized reviews, such as “the body is numb, bursting, and agent’s iPhone moments”.
In addition, during the whole process, Manus also took advantage of the opportunity to bind celebrity products or technical concepts (such as DeepSeek, etc.), further enhancing brand awareness.
Therefore, the marketing model can be simplified to:
Invitation code + Hunger marketing + keyword binding related products.This classic routine is progressing layer by layer, grasping the user’s psychology and achieving the maximum enhancement of brand influence and product market popularity with limited resource investment.
However, the difference is that I do not fully agree with this statement.
Some clues can also be seen from its official website: Manus obviously wants to rush abroad. Whether it is product introduction, founder speech, or function display, almost all are in English content and no Chinese information.
Even the login method only supports Google accounts and GitHub. You can’t see any common login options in China such as phone numbers and WeChat scan codes. The most important thing is to have an external network. I’ve complained about this on Xiaohongshu before.
So, this shows that Manus has locked its target users as overseas groups from the beginning;But why hasn’t it become popular abroad? I guess this might be:
Two days after Manus was released, there was no movement in the traditional English technology media and the open source community; instead, the founder visited several podcasts in China, sent invitation codes to people from some small circles in China, and promoted them on several official accounts.
As a result, bloggers were shocked by the product interface and user experience of Manus and reported it one after another. Because domestic bloggers had never experienced such products, they felt that it was very powerful after feeling it, so they benchmarked it as the next DeepSeek, and even said: the world’s first AI Agent.
Although the founder made it clear after the product became popular, I firmly believe that this wave of communication must have been carefully planned and rhythmic. After all, sending invitation codes is much better than holding press conferences and asking the media to write reports.
Therefore, the ultimate way of becoming popular in the circle has formed the invitation system and social communication that everyone sees.
02
There is an old Chinese saying: When times come, the world and the world work together, and the heroes are not free; when luck comes, all conditions will help success. So that’s it:
Manus has become popular, why not all of them have been released and continue to adopt the invitation system?
I guess the key issue here is: cost.
I believe you have also seen this news: The MetaGPT team’s open source project Open Manus was created by 4 people and released less than a day, and it has won more than 7,000 stars on GitHub. It can browse web pages independently, query and summarize information, and its function is similar to the basic functions of Manus.
There is a key message: a netizen assigned a task to Open Manus to query “Which hospitals in Hangzhou support direct settlement of medical insurance in other places”. It found the page of medical insurance in Hangzhou, downloaded the hospital list inside and saved it to the txt file.
To complete this task, it took three hours and cost US$3.6, which is equivalent to 240,000 tokens, which is about 360,000 to 480,000 Chinese characters, and the cost is about 26 yuan.
In other words, according to Manus’s functions and costs, assuming that a task needs to process 50,000 words, and each word corresponds to 1.5 tokens, the cost of a task is about 8 yuan.
If Manus issues 2,000 invitation codes per day (i.e. 2,000 users) and each user runs 20 questions per day, the cost per day is RMB 320,000.
For a technology product, you must have at least 200,000 to 300,000 users to raise funds; assuming that based on 200,000 users, the initial cost is about 32 million yuan, which is not considered other expenses.
I think that although Manus has successfully become popular, every time he releases an invitation code, it is a considerable expense. It does not have its own profit model yet, and it is not sure how to retain it every day. The big model is not from China.
Therefore, some costs are invisible, but they really affect decision-making. This is my inference.
03
Having written this, I was thinking that DeepSeek can quickly become popular abroad as an innovative product in the field of AI, but Manus has not reached a similar level. What is the reason behind this?
There are two main reasons why DeepSeek became popular:
1. Open source strategy.DeepSeek took the open source route from the start, opting for a MIT license, which means that any company can copy and use this model. This open attitude has attracted a large number of developers and enterprises, making it spread very quickly.
2. The model launched is extremely cost-effective. Its open source model performance is almost comparable to OpenAI’s large model, but the cost is only 1/20 of that of the other party.
This super high cost performance not only shocked Silicon Valley and the technology circle, but also gained wide recognition from foreign developers, because it can not only solve problems such as 24-point games that test logical reasoning, but also demonstrate strong technical strength.
In addition, before it became popular, DeepSeek’s support for the AI ecosystem was also very in place. It has been deeply rooted in the developer community and has accumulated a good reputation on GitHub.
Therefore, DeepSeek success can be summarized as:
Open source strategies and models are cost-effective, bringing the “Pinduoduo style” price advantage; through GitHub, we deepen the developer community, form an enhancement loop, and then feed back to the domestic market with the help of overseas popularity.
In contrast, Manus is different. It has no open source strategy and has not penetrated the developer community. Its predecessor was Monica, so they have embarked on completely different paths.
This path has changed in the eyes of users, becoming a representative of the three-piece set of keywords + invitation codes + hunger marketing; however, putting aside all this, we look at this marketing strategy, are there any problems?
I don’t think so, and it’s been tried and done. Among them, the one that impressed me the most was Luckin Coffee.Why Luckin Coffee?
Tell you a story:
I remember very clearly that when I was still working in Haidian in 2018, everyone was drinking coffee while reading the article “An Open Letter to Starbucks” published by Luckin, and was talking wildly.
In the letter, Luckin Coffee accused Starbucks of allegedly monopolizing the Chinese coffee market and filed the following allegations:
Starbucks signed exclusive terms with the property, prohibiting other coffee brands from entering; Starbucks requires suppliers to “choose one of two” and stop supplying goods to Luckin. Luckin called on Starbucks to stop these behaviors and create a fair competition opportunity for the industry, and said it has entrusted lawyers to file lawsuits and complaints.
This open letter was sent when opening the store, attracting a lot of attention.Some people think that this is Luckin Coffee’s bump-up public relations, while others think it is a self-rescue move in market competition; but no matter what the motivation is, after this message was sent, Luckin Coffee immediately became the focus of public opinion, laying the foundation for its subsequent development.
We can see that Luckin chose to bind Starbucks more radically, quickly seized public attention by facing competitors and launching controversial topics. By the way, it had very few stores at that time.
Manus is bound to keywords such as: “After DeepSeek, another sleepless night in the technology circle”, “explosion, wake-up, tailor-made for the Chinese people”.
Therefore, the core logic is to find a way to break through information noise and make the product strongly related to a certain company. In this way, everyone will immediately notice you, discuss you, and try to pay attention to you.
In this regard, it is worth learning from by marketing people, but don’t boast too much. After all, the ultimate goal of marketing is to make users truly recognize the product, rather than be attracted by short-term popularity.
In addition to binding peers and keywords, let’s talk about social communication. Manus social communication and Perplexity AI have similarities.
When Perplexity AI became popular, it encouraged everyone to share their experience using software on social media, and even shared operation recordings.
I know during the Super Bowl it did a Twitter campaign, which was to predict the $1 million competition for Super Bowl MVP; this event not only saved money, but also took advantage of the situation. A large number of people interacted with social media, increasing the number of brands and users.
Let’s look at word-of-mouth communication and viral marketing. It uses A/B testing to continuously change products. If you find a question different from others, this kind of personalization makes people feel fresh and interesting, and it is easy to share it with friends on their own initiative.
Moreover, it also has a very powerful advertising model – “sponsorship issues”. That is to say, brands can implant relevant content when users ask questions, so that advertising and user experience are perfectly combined.
Manus’ sharing mechanism relies on KOLs.
After KOL gets the invitation code, after the experience, he will definitely write articles and videos and post them to major self-media platforms; as a user, he must register to try it when seeing a new product, and he will naturally write an experience after the trial. This experience itself has a sense of superiority and can also increase attention, so why not do it?
04
But is invitation system really an enduring method? I think: Not necessarily.It is a double-edged sword.
Everyone must know the benefits:Create a sense of scarcity.When a product requires an invitation code to be used, users will subconsciously feel that it is special and valuable.
This psychological suggestion makes people willing to spend time and energy to fight for invitation codes, and even actively show off their “privileges” on social media, invisibly promoting the product for free.
At the same time, invitation system can help products control the speed of user growth in the early stages. Through invitations, while expanding the scale, collecting feedback and optimizing products, isn’t this a kind of “gradual diffusion”?
But the disadvantages of the invitation system are also obvious.
If a product is very popular in marketing, but the product itself cannot keep up, or cannot be completely relaxed at all, then the user’s “Pandora effect” will be activated.
You told me there was an apple over there, which was delicious, but I didn’t give it to me. This “appetizing” approach will make users feel that this is a kind of “inducible” or “manipulative” marketing, and may even make people feel that they are “malintentional”. In the end, users will curse online.
This is also an important reason why we have seen many users complain about Manus on the Xiaohongshu platform in recent days.
In other words, when users cannot get it, they will increasingly express their dissatisfaction and disappointment on the Internet, which will spread this emotion to more people, further affect the brand’s reputation and image, and eventually, the product will fall into a vicious circle.
Therefore, invitation system is an effective tool, but not the only answer.
The key is how to flexibly use this strategy based on the product and market environment; if you simply imitate the invitation system and ignore the kernel, it may be backfired.
No matter what, in the final analysis, invitation code + hunger marketing + keyword binding can create temporary popularity, but the core competitiveness of the product and the real user experience are the key to determining whether you can gain a foothold for a long time.
What do you think?
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