Original · Unique Research · 2025-11-15
Editorial note: This complete English edition preserves the historical article and all 12 interview questions and answers. Campaign budgets, ROI, community growth, efficiency gains, product performance and platform cooperation are claims reported by the source or Manda, not independently verified current results. “This year” refers to the source’s 2025 context. The r/rednote creation account is retained as Manda’s account and is not independently established here. Manda is a romanization of 曼达; no unverified personal name is substituted. The source image’s business-model labels—Lab, self-developed products and Ground, with reinforcing links—are also explained in the body.
Many AI founders share the same moment: the product finally works, the Demo looks great, the model is solid, and their social feeds fill with ecstatic praise for what they have shipped. But when the question becomes, “Where will the first customers willing to pay come from?” the room suddenly goes quiet.
Manda of Leapo Tech is the kind of person this era has called upon to solve that problem.
She spent 8 years on the front lines of social-media marketing, specializing in influencer marketing. During the peak traffic years of TikTok and Xiaohongshu, her job was to spend millions—even tens of millions—of US dollars on KOL campaigns, pushing product after product uphill and onto trending lists.
She jokes that she once spent more on influencer marketing than anyone else. But that period of frantic spending ultimately forced her to confront two painful questions:
What is growth, at its core?
Where does the pursuit of traffic ultimately lead?
When the AI wave arrived, she changed course: instead of using AI to hype another concept, she would use AI to redefine growth itself.
I. From Spending the Most to Spending the Smartest
Before entering AI, Manda had already worked through every stage of growth: the cold start from 0 to 1, validation from 1 to 10, and scaled growth from 10 to N.
During the golden age of TikTok and Xiaohongshu, she watched the numbers soar—and also watched more and more brands learn only how to throw money at growth, not how to spend it well.
She was uncertain herself at the time:
One path was to return to a major technology company and deploy her familiar “dragon-slaying skills” to optimize ROI down to the second decimal place;
The other was to keep building companies without knowing where the next explosion of traffic would come from.
What finally gave her a clear bearing was not a flash of inspiration one night, but a simple fact: more and more AI founders were coming to her for help with international growth.
Within a single year, she held intensive conversations with more than 170 leading AI founders. She noticed a striking contrast.
These founders could create astonishing products overnight, with impressive model benchmarks and polished user experiences;
But when the conversation turned to winning their first paying customers, they would invariably frown:
How should channels be segmented? How should content be tested? How should influencers be found? How should budgets be allocated? It seemed that few had truly considered these questions—or that few were genuinely good at answering them.
At that moment, she realized something:
The experience she had accumulated over the previous 8 years—through the trenches of traffic acquisition, content, social-media operations, and KOL ecosystems—was precisely the capability that many of the smartest people of this era lacked.
So she repositioned herself: from the person who spent the most to the person who spends the smartest on global marketing.
She markets AI products and uses AI to make marketing more efficient, with one goal: to help Chinese brands be seen and chosen on the global stage in ways that are smarter, more efficient, and more repeatable.
II. The “TikTok Refugee” Campaign: Speed Is the Moat of the AI Era
If Manda is someone selected by the times, the “TikTok refugee” episode offers a vivid example of her in action.
One day, turmoil around TikTok suddenly prompted large numbers of overseas creators to look for their next home, and the phrase “TikTok refugees” swept through industry circles.
Leapo had long worked across both outbound and inbound markets and knew Reddit’s community culture well. When the team saw the news, their first response was not to watch from the sidelines, but to ask: this is a migration of content—can we claim the town square first?
That same day, they created the r/rednote subreddit.
Within three days, the community surpassed 2000 members, bringing together an early wave of migrating creators.
At the same time, Manda drew on every part of her background at ByteDance, Xiaohongshu, and an MCN startup.
Who could understand overseas creators?
Who could receive them fastest?
Who had the patience to localize their content and adapt it to the Chinese context?
The answer was simple: she did.
The team quickly coordinated with Xiaohongshu’s official team, established an MCN agency, systematically brought these creators onto the platform, and helped them adapt and operate their content for its local style.
The industry quickly noticed the campaign, and Manda was invited to share the experience in a livestream. After that moment, the number of people who knew her rose noticeably.
Broken down, the episode came down to only two things:
They reacted fast enough;
They had enough relevant experience behind them.
Her summary of the decisive choice was a single sentence: speed is one of the few moats in the AI era that remains both scarce and difficult to copy.
While most people were still debating in WeChat groups whether the opportunity would fizzle out, someone else had already finished building the community.
That is the execution gap—and why, at a historic fork in the road, a small number of teams can suddenly find themselves propelled to the front.
III. An Experiment with a Lean Team and “AI Workhorses”: Small Companies Can Deliver Big
Compared with those who treat “super individual” as a slogan, Manda has made a more grounded choice: she neither fights alone nor tries to assemble another company of dozens of people.
Leapo is a lean team. Every core business function has a clearly accountable owner, while the remaining routine work is assigned to AI.
She jokingly calls these tools the team’s “AI workhorses”:
They do not complain, slack off, or fail to show up when called.
When used well, they make one thing palpable: without the enormous headcount of a large company, you can still outperform many traditional agencies in both delivery quality and speed.
This structure offers several highly practical advantages in the early stages of an AI startup:
Labor costs remain controllable, so fixed expenses do not crush the company at the outset;
Accountability is clear, and everyone knows which outcomes they own;
The team remains agile enough to shift gears, experiment, and change direction whenever the industry’s pace demands it.
More importantly, Leapo both serves the AI industry and builds AI products of its own.
That means the team is both a service provider and the first internal customer to eat its own dog food.
This dual identity forces the team to keep refining its tools—and gives it a clearer understanding of what AI can and cannot solve.
IV. Manda’s AI Workflow: Tools Are Not the Protagonist—Judgment Is
People often ask her: just how many AI tools do you use?
Her answer is simple: many, but I remain in charge of all of them.
Because so many of her clients are AI products themselves, using AI in her daily work has long since become instinctive:
From content ideation and topic refinement to operations, promotion, media buying, and optimization, AI participates in nearly every stage.
By her rough estimate, it improves overall efficiency by at least 50%.
But she insists on one point:
AI is always the co-pilot. Decision-making authority must remain in the human mind.
She has her own division of labor among specific tools:
When she needs expansive thinking and brainstorming, she uses Gemini to spark new ideas;
When she needs structured expression, reasoning, writing, or decision support, ChatGPT is her all-purpose Swiss Army knife;
And for genuinely specialized work—such as finding the right influencers for a brand—the team turns to Koogle, its proprietary influencer-discovery tool.
In plain language, what Koogle does is this:
It compresses an influencer-screening process that once required people to search manually, profile by profile and platform by platform, into a search that takes seconds.
Instead of opening dozens of tabs and repeatedly comparing audience profiles, content styles, and brand fit, you define the audience you want and receive a candidate list almost immediately. That lets you spend your energy on evaluation and communication rather than endless searching.
This is what she means by returning the human mind from “manual labor” to “judgment and creation.”
V. Leapo’s Flywheel: From Methodology to Execution to Tools
If you see Manda and Leapo merely as a marketing company that runs campaigns, you underestimate them.
The business is currently divided into three parts, but together they form a flywheel:
Lab: international-market consulting, strategy design, hands-on guidance, and methodological research—helping teams first work out how to approach the market;
Ground: concrete execution of international marketing, turning strategy into measurable numbers and results;
Between them sits a proprietary matrix of AI marketing tools, which turns repeatable work into infrastructure so that experience can be retained and replicated.
The three reinforce one another: strategy is codified into tools, tools improve delivery efficiency, and delivery results feed back into the methodology.
Over time, Leapo is no longer simply executing one project after another. It is beginning to lay a new foundation for the marketing industry as a whole.
Her original motivation in this industry is straightforward:
She has seen too many improvised shortcuts and too much money spent without understanding why.
She has also seen teams with genuinely strong products fail because they could not tell their story or generate growth.
What she therefore wants to do is this:
Make an industry that appears to have a low barrier to entry—but in fact depends enormously on professional expertise—more disciplined, standardized, and systematic.
She looks forward to a day when marketing departments and growth leaders are no longer pressured merely to deliver traffic, but are equipped with effective tools, sound data, and mature methodologies—so they can understand exactly how their money is being spent and confidently stand behind the results they deliver.
Under that vision, she defines Leapo not as an agency, but as something closer to infrastructure for the marketing industry.
The goal is to give more people a solid platform on which to work, rather than forcing every company to reinvent the wheel from scratch.
VI. The “Super Growth Individual”: A New Identity for the Marketer in the AI Era
When the conversation turns to buzzwords such as “super individuals” and “one-person companies,” Manda remains clear-eyed.
In her view, AI’s greatest leverage for people is not the claim of 10-fold efficiency in a social-media screenshot, but what happens in mundane daily work:
Break down the mechanical processes you repeat every day and hand the automatable parts to tools;
Free your mental capacity from drudgery and information gathering, then return it to thinking and creating.
She stresses one idea repeatedly: real human growth is not growth in data, but growth in understanding.
Many people begin by asking, “Which tool should I learn?” or “Which course will turn me into an AI expert overnight?”
She is more concerned with whether their way of thinking has kept pace with the era.
Because:
Tools will keep changing;
Models will keep growing more capable;
Today’s popular product may not even appear on the first page next year.
Without an upgrade in understanding, any number of tools remain mere toys;
Only when you know what you truly want and what value you can create can AI become a rocket you know how to pilot, rather than a storm that leaves you behind.
Her advice to individuals and small teams seeking to enter AI is equally simple:
Pull your mind away from “Will I be replaced?” and ask instead, “What can AI help me do that I could not do before?”
Spend less energy on tool anxiety and more on understanding your industry and gaining insight into people;
Treat yourself as an operating system built for continuous upgrades, not as hardware waiting for plugins to be installed.
In her eyes, the future Marketer is no longer simply someone who buys ads, but a “super growth individual” who understands products, users, and business models—and knows how to use AI well.
Stop asking only where traffic will come from. First ask: what kind of growth does my product deserve?
Manda’s biggest change in recent years can be summarized by two questions—one from before and one from now:
In the past, during the most turbulent era of traffic growth, she asked every day: where else can I get more traffic?
Now, she more often asks: what kind of growth path does this product deserve?
The first question considers quantity alone;
The second begins to consider quality.
AI gives us an amplifier unlike anything we have had before:
People who can think will see their impact amplified 10 times;
People who only follow trends will likewise see their anxiety amplified 10 times.
Manda’s chosen path is to use AI to make growth smarter and turn it into infrastructure—so more strong products can be seen globally, and more marketers can become not merely traffic workers but “super growth individuals” who genuinely control their professional destinies.
If you are building an AI product, running a small team, or hoping to create a one-person company, perhaps you should pause and ask yourself three questions:
What is the capability that is genuinely unique to me?
Who in this era needs that capability most?
Am I using AI to apply that capability with greater leverage?
Once you can answer those three questions clearly, AI will no longer be merely another name on a list of tools. It will become the reliable co-pilot in your story.
And what about that vision that sounds almost too idealistic, yet remains deeply sincere—“make marketing and growth easier for everyone”?
You will find that it is not a slogan, but a practical description of the daily work of people laying foundations, step by step, in the AI era.
Selected Interview Q&A
Q1: Briefly introduce yourself. Which labels would you use to describe who you are?
Manda: I’m Manda, a frontline operator with 8 years of experience in social-media marketing, primarily in influencer marketing. If I had to choose three labels, they would probably be: [marketing and growth operator], [seller of picks and shovels], and [pragmatic romantic].
Q2: How did you find your position in the field of “AI+ marketing”?
Manda: I did not think about it that deliberately at first. I simply stayed on the front lines of social media, helping products grow through different stages—from 0-1, 1-10, and 10-N. After I started my company, I noticed more and more AI product founders coming to me for help with global growth. After speaking with more than 100 leading AI founders, I realized that building products was the capability they were least likely to lack; what they lacked most was knowing “how to acquire the first user.” At that moment, I understood that my 8 years of experience in traffic, content, and KOL marketing happened to fill their gap. My positioning was therefore “pushed” into existence by the times, rather than conceived alone behind closed doors.
Q3: You once described yourself as “the person who spent the most money.” How did you become “the person who spends money the smartest”?
Manda: During the golden age of TikTok and Xiaohongshu, I did manage influencer campaigns worth tens of millions of US dollars, including cases with ROI exceeding 10 times. We truly were burning money at a remarkable pace. That experience was precisely what made me reflect: what is the essence of growth? Where does the pursuit of traffic ultimately lead? When the AI wave arrived, it felt natural to use AI to reconstruct both “growth” and “spending.” So today, I hope to be the person who “helps everyone spend their money in the smartest possible way.”
Q4: What brought you wider recognition in the AI creator community?
Manda: I feel that I have simply been carried forward by the times. One pivotal moment was this year’s “TikTok refugee” episode. Large numbers of overseas creators were looking for a new home. Our team immediately judged it to be a turning point in a “content migration,” so we created the r/rednote subreddit that same day. The community grew to more than 2000 people in three days. We then quickly coordinated with Xiaohongshu’s official team, established an MCN, systematically introduced overseas creators to the platform, and operated localized Chinese content for them. The execution went very smoothly and drew industry attention. Later, Mr. Pan Luan invited me to share the experience in a livestream, and many more people came to know me from that point onward.
Q5: What do you think were the key decisions you got right in that campaign?
Manda: Two words: move fast. In the AI era, speed is almost the only thing that can still create a moat. While many people were still watching and waiting, we had already built the community, aligned with the platform, and validated the creators’ migration path. The second factor was “confidence”: my experience at ByteDance, Xiaohongshu, and in building an MCN made it clear that I had an advantage in this situation. Every step you take in life eventually comes back to help you.
Q6: Do you now operate alone or as a “small, elite team”? Why?
Manda: We are a lean studio team, with an accountable lead for every core business function. We assign as much of the remaining routine work as possible to our “AI workhorses.” This structure is especially friendly to an early-stage company: labor costs are manageable, accountability is clear, and we can move flexibly. We serve the AI industry and also have our own AI products, so we naturally use AI to improve efficiency—and force ourselves to keep pace with the industry.
Q7: What role does AI play in your daily workflow? How significant are the efficiency gains?
Manda: You could say it is “everywhere.” Because so many of our clients are AI products, I frequently try these tools in my daily work and put them to real use in the business. Overall, the efficiency gain is at least 50%. But I want to emphasize that AI cannot replace my decisions. I am more like the “brain,” while AI is the co-pilot: I set the direction, and it steps on the accelerator.
Q8: What does your personal matrix of AI tools look like?
Manda: For divergent content ideation, I tend to use Gemini. When I need strong all-round capabilities, structured expression, reasoning, and writing, ChatGPT remains the universal toolbox. The tool our team relies on most heavily, however, is our proprietary “influencer-discovery tool,” Koogle. It returns influencer-search results in seconds, rapidly identifies creators who fit a brand, and eliminates the highly inefficient work of manually scrolling through lists.
Q9: How does Leapo make money today? How does a “super individual/small team” build a closed commercial loop?
Manda: We have three interlocking business units:
Lab is the laboratory, responsible for international-market consulting, strategy, hands-on guidance, and methodological research;
Ground is the execution unit, responsible for carrying global-marketing programs through to concrete results;
Between them is our proprietary matrix of AI marketing tools, which turns reusable work into products.
The three reinforce one another. We can deliver client projects while building our own infrastructure, so the commercial loop is not limited to “charging service fees”; it also generates a flywheel effect.
Q10: What original motivation and vision lie behind this work?
Manda: After so many years in marketing, I have seen far too much disorder. The industry may appear to have a low barrier to entry, but it depends enormously on professionalism, methodology, and systematic thinking. I sincerely hope it can become more disciplined, standardized, and systematic—so every marketer / GTMer can use effective tools and make intelligent decisions instead of exhausting their mental energy every day. Leapo does not aspire to be a simple marketing company, but to build “infrastructure for the marketing industry”: helping people spend with less anxiety and greater intelligence, expanding the overall market together, and making the industry healthier. Ideally, I hope every marketer can eventually become a “super growth individual” in the AI era.
Q11: Where do you see AI’s greatest “leverage effect”?
Manda: First, it takes over repetitive, tedious, and laborious process work, freeing enormous amounts of time and energy. Only then can you devote that newly available mental capacity to genuine thought and creation. Put simply, it allows people to move from “execution labor” back to the “creative mind.”
Q12: If someone wants to become an AI creator, build AI-focused media, or establish a “one-person company,” what should they prepare first?
Manda: My vote goes to “mindset.” Technology is advancing too quickly and tools appear too frequently for anyone to learn everything. More important is improving your understanding and keeping pace with the times—you need to know what you want and what you believe, and only then can you “pilot the AI rocket.” Real human growth is not the string of figures in Excel; it is whether your understanding has evolved. Only when that understanding rises to a new level can tools become accelerators rather than new burdens.