The Story Behind Manus
The best deep research product that took the world by storm, and is now able to build websites, images, videos and slides.
Imagine you:
create a video by yourself as a software developer
edit it and release it in 6 days
publish to Twitter on an account with 0 followers
DM people personally crafted messages for 3 days
Get no responses
Get noticed by one creator (Rowan Cheung)
Create one of the most viral products ever with people begging to join your invite only product.
Sometimes reality is crazier than anything you could have imagined.
I recently had the chance to attend a talk by the chief product officer at Manus, Tao Zhang. This article is an attempt to share my takeaways from this talk.
The simple thesis behind Manus
LLMs are smart and we have only begun to extract value from them.
This was the starting point for building Manus. Tao had this insight when chatGPT was released, when most people were questioning whether chatGPT would have any real impact on productivity.
In fact this seems to be a common theme across AI builders. They realised extremely early that AI models will improve. So they started building products on top of models despite their flaws. And when improved models were released, their products improved as well.
What is Manus?
The first time you see Manus, it seems almost like magic. The level of detail it provides in its answers is unparalleled compared to other deep research products. It is also extremely transparent in how it works, giving a step by step breakdown of how it is thinking. Furthermore, it provides results in a very polished format, such as websites, slides or even videos.
If you want to see what people are building with Manus, I recommend googling for site:manus.space. Solopreuneuers are building million dollar businesses, even without buying a domain name, and just having a landing page on the Manus space.
Recently, Manus also integrated Veo 3, enabling Manus to generate videos. An example of Manus generating videos can be found here.
If you have not already tried Manus, here is a link to try it out: Manus.
How Does Manus work?
Watching Manus work stretches the possibilities of what LLMs can accomplish. Behind the polished outputs and deep research is a small hardworking team, and good engineering.
This is an extremely simplified version of how Manus works. The LLM is focused on planning the next atomic action. The atomic action can be something like “visit URL” or “click a button”.
The LLM takes its context as the current observation and also considers all previous observations. This is a very simplified version of how Manus works.
The Launch
The manus launch video was created in one day, and launched within 6 days of shooting it. It was done by two of the founders at the company, with almost no prior marketing experience.
The reason they did the video themselves and without an agency is twofold. Firstly, every agency required more than two weeks to write a script for the video. The team at Manus wanted to move fast. Secondly, it was very hard to explain the product to an agency as it is a new space, and a very innovative product.
The video was released on a twitter account with 0 followers. For 3 days, the founders tried to DM personally crafted messages to people, but got no responses. Then, Manus was shared by Rowan Cheung in his newsletter. From there the product picked up steam and went viral.
Conclusion
Manus currently has a team of 80 people. When they launched the first version, they were only 6. A scrappy team of 6 people created one of the best AI agents ever. The AI age is crazy.