The B2B growth playbook has been consumerized for native AI startups:
1️⃣ Influencer marketing is outperforming paid social by 10x at Lovable.
Manus leaned into the same motion, sharing raw screen recordings, such as "watch this agent do X in 30 seconds," created by builders, indie hackers, and AI educators across X, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts.
Ten seconds of "this actually works" beat any paid campaign for both companies.
2️⃣ Founder led and employee social has become a core growth engine.
Anton Osika, Co-Founder of Lovable, tweets growth updates, shipping velocity, and learnings in public.
Every engineer announces their own features.
Manus operated the same way, founders, and employees shipping in public, demoing features themselves, narrating product evolution in real time.
Like an open source project.
Corporate polished lingos no longer resonate.
3️⃣ Community as an infrastructure.
Lovable's Discord has hundreds of thousands of members actively helping each other build.
Manus went further, with massive Discord, peer-to-peer problem solving, highlighting community built workflows and agents, plus in-person meetups across the US, Europe, and Asia. Local champions running workshops.
Users are becoming co-marketers and co-educators.
Community drove onboarding, retention, feedback, and relentless word of mouth.
No forward deployed engineers (enterprise)
In a way, this is a massive shift for traditional B2B marketing.
In another, it is not.
AI or not, marketing has always been about one thing: sharing value at the human level with humans.
That is never out of fashion.
I tested 4 different LLMs (Perplexity, ChatGPT, Anthropic, and Manus AI) to write a book and here are the results.
