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ManusAI Joins Meta

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Re: ManusAI Joins Meta

#211

Post by 9cb14c1ec0 »

bko wrote: post #198
9cb14c1ec0 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are having problems attracting users, even when free, consider that maybe your product doesn't offer much value to them. I say this as someone who has bootstrapped a 7 figure software business.

Correct, it's very hard to provide value, which is my point. As someone who bootstrapped a 7 figure business, would you say getting to 9 figures ARR is easy as long as you don't care about margins?

Well, it helps I don't care about getting to 9 figures. As long as I make enough to live a comfortable lifestyle, I'm not going to sacrifice my family or my sanity to become some kind of unstable unicorn.

Re: ManusAI Joins Meta

#213

Post by judahmeek »

bko wrote: post #157
dinniwang wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a saying "follow the money". In this case you just need to follow the people involved in this company and the ones who negotiated this deal from Meta side and you will get the answer why it was acquired and why its valued so high. Financial engineering and social networking at its best.

Their wiki says they have ARR over 100m. Pretty impressive for a product that's 9 months old. 20x multiple is high sure, but hardly seems like friends giving friends money for ... reasons

The first R in ARR stands for "Recurring".

A 9 month old company has no evidence to support a claim of any ARR.

Re: ManusAI Joins Meta

#214

Post by oefrha »

bigcat12345678 wrote: post #174
oefrha wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manus attempted to ride the wave of DeepSeek and hired an army of influencers inside and outside of China, especially inside, to hype it up as the second coming of DeepSeek, even though they didn’t target the Chinese domestic market (as you correctly pointed out). IIRC it quickly became a joke in about two weeks after it became obvious that they were a thin layer on top of Claude and all marketing. I don’t know how t…

I don't get it Riding a wave of industry is literally the foundation of startups paradiam itself. Why it suddenly became a sin for a Chinese founded startup? This is exactly the disgusting bias (even to the point of racism) I mostly pointed out. It's like everyone automatically applied double standards to Chinese founded startup and not even admit that under such influence.

Riding a wave is fine. Stealing someone else’s clout and falsely advertising your product is not. This applies to every other shitty AI company with little to offer on top of someone else’s foundational model, regardless of origin country. It’s just that Manus is particularly egregious in their false advertising, and their bullshit is an insult to people doing actual heavy lifting, like DeepSeek or Alibaba Qwen team.

Are they the only grifters? No, not by a long shot. Are they the only ones ridiculed? No.

Re: ManusAI Joins Meta

#215

Post by Aqua0 »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #130
fhe wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but then again in this day and age maybe marketing skills are more important than anything else...

I have never heard about Manus before that post about them reaching 100M ARR or something. Where did they advertise?

They're promoting it on Chinese social media. Although those media outlets are some AI-related self-publishers

Re: ManusAI Joins Meta

#217

Post by bigcat12345678 »

oefrha wrote: post #214
bigcat12345678 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it Riding a wave of industry is literally the foundation of startups paradiam itself. Why it suddenly became a sin for a Chinese founded startup? This is exactly the disgusting bias (even to the point of racism) I mostly pointed out. It's like everyone automatically applied double standards to Chinese founded startup and not even admit that under such influence.

Riding a wave is fine. Stealing someone else’s clout and falsely advertising your product is not. This applies to every other shitty AI company with little to offer on top of someone else’s foundational model, regardless of origin country. It’s just that Manus is particularly egregious in their false advertising, and their bullshit is an insult to people doing actual heavy lifting, like DeepSeek or Alibaba Qwen team.…

> It’s just that Manus is particularly egregious in their false advertising, and their bullshit is an insult to people doing actual heavy lifting, like DeepSeek or Alibaba Qwen team.

I still felt this baseless.

Manus at the time is break through result. Are they egregious in advertising they being deepseek moment? I don't know think so. Is it a marketing ploy? Yes, but it's far less egregious than any normal AI startup, like cluely.

Comparing to deepseek or qwen, heavy lifting what? Manus is built on Claude at the time it's doing egregious marketing, how can it be considered heavy lifted by unrelated products. What's the point you want to make?

Re: ManusAI Joins Meta

#218

Post by oefrha »

bigcat12345678 wrote: post #217
oefrha wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Riding a wave is fine. Stealing someone else’s clout and falsely advertising your product is not. This applies to every other shitty AI company with little to offer on top of someone else’s foundational model, regardless of origin country. It’s just that Manus is particularly egregious in their false advertising, and their bullshit is an insult to people doing actual heavy lifting, like DeepSeek or Alibaba Qwen team.…

> It’s just that Manus is particularly egregious in their false advertising, and their bullshit is an insult to people doing actual heavy lifting, like DeepSeek or Alibaba Qwen team. I still felt this baseless. Manus at the time is break through result. Are they egregious in advertising they being deepseek moment? I don't know think so. Is it a marketing ploy? Yes, but it's far less egregious than any normal AI start…

It was never a breakthrough of any kind, especially not the "half of all office work are now obsolete" kind they tried to claim.

> Comparing to deepseek or qwen, heavy lifting what?

DeepSeek and Qwen were/are building reputation. Manus was stealing and tanking it. That's what it was.

Re: ManusAI Joins Meta

#219

Post by amunozo »

judahmeek wrote: post #213
bko wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their wiki says they have ARR over 100m. Pretty impressive for a product that's 9 months old. 20x multiple is high sure, but hardly seems like friends giving friends money for ... reasons

The first R in ARR stands for "Recurring". A 9 month old company has no evidence to support a claim of any ARR.

This is so obvious yet it totally got over me (and not only me, it seems).

Re: ManusAI Joins Meta

#220

Post by amunozo »

bostik wrote: post #170
neilv wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet the new AI startups I'm seeing are only offering terrible deals to early hires who could improve their chances of a nice exit. In this crazy environment -- in which money is flying around over AI much like the dotcom boom, but startup founders are using the last-decade playbook of not sharing the wealth with early hires -- I'm starting to think that smart AI job-seekers need to either: * get hired by a company th…

You've stumbled upon the same trade Matt Levine has been pointing out for a few months now. If you're good at AI, you could get hired at a top-tier company for 1-2M annual comp, and expect to stay there for at most five (5) years. That's a maximum of 10M pre-tax, and you'd be still on the receiving end of employment gauntlet. Alternatively you could spin up an AI startup, and get acquired for 75M+ in less than 2 year…

Isn't it much more secure to get hired than to spin-out a company that sells for 10M?
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