Yanbo Wang

building the ai native growth engine for restaurants
2x founder, prev product 40k users
ex @bytedancetalk @oliverwyman, mkt @columbia_biz vus @harvard

[Yanbo Wang @yanbowang47]

A month ago I met Renjie, and we decided to turn his 5-year-old marketing agency into an AI-native one.

The business has been doing great, almost no churn over the years, and literally all growth came from customer referrals, but the economics for Renjie haven't been so favorable, as scaling the business always meant more hiring.

Over the past month, I've shadowed the whole company, explored and built a bunch of stuff like ontology, influencer marketing automations, brought agents to Lark, etc., and it's so exciting to see more and more work is offloaded to AI while keeping up a good quality of work.

My goal is to build an AI native os for our agency and lift the profitability in the coming months. Follow along to see if I can pull this off!

(video filmed on Aug 29)

[Yanbo Wang @yanbowang47]

spent half a day & updated our landing page:

[Yanbo Wang @yanbowang47]

i hand wash my underwear every day

not because i love doing it, but because i believe discipline is built in the smallest moments

entrepreneurship is a marathon, if you can't stay consistent with the little things in life, you can't stay consistent with the big ones. so folks, start by washing your own underwear

[Yanbo Wang @yanbowang47]

Day 40 of building an AI native growth agency for restaurants:

- turned profitable (within a month)
- fully automated influencer marketing
- launched our internal dashboard
- in the process of preparing our client dashboard

Stay tuned!

[Yanbo Wang @yanbowang47]

Came across a graph shared by @Lawted2 yesterday, and I lowkey feel like this is the best visualization I’ve seen of how humans & AI collaborate in an AI-native company. (The original is in Chinese and below is my translated version)

At our AI native marketing agency, we’re building the exact same setup. Our influencer marketing automation runs 24/7 without human intervention, while routing critical info/requests to the corresponding account managers only when necessary.

[Yanbo Wang @yanbowang47]

Filming our application to one of the best accelerators out there

Wish us luck!

[Yanbo Wang @yanbowang47]

and i woke up to another one booked for next week

[Yanbo Wang @yanbowang47]

Today was genuinely an exciting day for our AI native marketing agency.

Our influencer marketing automation completed its first end to end flow from discovery all the way to scheduling a filming time with the influencer.

It ran with zero human intervention and ended with a notification routed to Lark, reaching the designated account manager.

If all goes well, we’ll soon scale this to all our current clients, which I believe will substantially improve our margins as we reduce manual work.

Stay tuned!

[Yanbo Wang @yanbowang47]

In my entire time at college, I only took a single programming class, and I even took it Pass/Fail.

Back when I did my consulting internship in 2025, I was actually intimidated by anything technical. Looking back now, in the age of AI, there really is no skill you can't learn and no industry you can't pivot into. As long as you're willing to try, you'll slowly find your footing.

I wouldn't say I'm super technical now, but at least I speak the language. Just going to keep pushing forward. Things will only keep getting better.

[Yanbo Wang @yanbowang47]

What a blessing to ship with this view

[Yanbo Wang @yanbowang47]

@gregisenberg The thing is we don’t know if keep improving the capabilities of frontier models is the “right” way to agi, given how little they can further improve + how much attention jev has drawn, mb there’s another way

[Yanbo Wang @yanbowang47]

@filipscaleson Appreciate it brother

[Yanbo Wang @yanbowang47]

Been building in public on Rednote for the past few months, and someone asked why I wasn't on X.

Well, now I'm back 😤

[Yanbo Wang @yanbowang47]

signed up for a hacker house earlier and got an invite yesterday

has anyone done this before?

and do they accept founders? or is it just for interns?

[Yanbo Wang @yanbowang47]

@metahumanmorph yeah 100%

[Yanbo Wang @yanbowang47]

@metahumanmorph Hmm perhaps world model is the next big thing? Pretty interesting idea to think about

[Yanbo Wang @yanbowang47]

@metahumanmorph What’s your take bro can you share some more

[Yanbo Wang @yanbowang47]

@hanghuang_ gstack hhh

[Yanbo Wang @yanbowang47]

coming to NYC in May, back again in August

looking to connect irl!

a quick self intro:
→ built a consumer app in china, grew it to 40k users & 8M social impressions
→ huge vibe coding lover, shipped 6 side projects in the past few months
→ incoming @ columbia business school, studied across harvard/columbia/hku
→ ex intern @ tiktok, oliver wyman, frost sullivan, ey, etc

looking to start/join something serious in the states

if you're a founder, VC, PM, GTM, engineer, or fellow vibe coder, let's grab coffee ☕

[Yanbo Wang @yanbowang47]

china is changing fast bruh

i'm back in changsha for a quick reset

at a local cafe catching up on work and just overheard a vc group talking loud about ai and nearby incubators. felt like i was back in sf for a second

i’ve clearly been away too long...