How Heicoders Academy Built a 12,000-Student Operation with Fewer Than 20 People
When Beh Min Yan and Kong Yu Ning started Heicoders Academy, an online academy for AI courses, they were working full-time jobs at Gojek and OKX. They bootstrapped the business on weekends, teaching machine learning to small cohorts of working professionals in Singapore. Today, they are on track to train 12,000 students this year.
Their client list includes Standard Chartered, the National University Polyclinics, Temasek Trust, and DBS Bank. They hold one of the highest ratings among AI course providers on Singapore's national SkillsFuture platform.
They run this entire operation with fewer than twenty people.
The difference comes down to two things: an obsession with quality, and a deliberate decision to build every operational system in the company on top of Manus.
Practitioners, Not Career Trainers
Heicoders Academy was officially founded in 2020. Singapore's training market was crowded with career educators who had never shipped a product, and Yu Ning and Min Yan wanted to build something that actually worked. Their curriculum focuses exclusively on frontier technologies with commercial relevance, updated regularly in partnership with companies like Manus and eToro to make sure the material reflects what people use on the job.
On the people side, “industry practitioners” is not a marketing tagline at Heicoders. It’s the baseline. The company does not hire career trainers at all. Every instructor goes through a technical assessment and a live teaching demo, and fewer than 10% of applicants pass. Those who do still spend one to two months in training before they lead their first cohort. The team cared enough about this standard to publish a full handbook on it: handbook.heicodersacademy.com.
They described their positioning bluntly: "Serious AI practitioner-led training for normies."
By 2023, the company had crossed seven figures in revenue. By 2025, corporate clients were sending entire departments. Standard Chartered's marketing team enrolled executives in AI courses. The National University Hospital sent two cohorts of fifty people from its data analytics division. Growth was accelerating, and so was the operational complexity.
The Weight of Growth
Every month, Heicoders Academy receives hundreds of support requests. Instructor scheduling required manual outreach and availability checks. Applicant tracking lived in email inboxes. Compliance documentation was scattered across multiple tools, from digital signatures to code-of-conduct acknowledgments to CPD hour tracking. The administrative weight was threatening to crush the lean team that made Heicoders competitive in the first place.
"This Is Going to Change the World"
Then Yu Ning saw a CNBC report about Manus. He went straight to the website, watched the demo, and signed up immediately.
"Oh my god," he told his team. "This is going to change the world."
He had been using other AI tools for months. They were useful for generating ideas and drafting content, but they all shared the same limitation: the human still had to do the final work. The AI could suggest a system architecture, but someone still had to build it. It could draft a support response, but someone still had to send it.
Manus completed the work. It built functional applications and deployed them. It handled workflows end to end rather than handing off a half-finished draft.
Rebuilding Operations from Scratch
Within months of adopting Manus, Heicoders rebuilt their entire operational infrastructure. They now run a public careers portal with a full applicant-tracking backend. A student support system routes and resolves over hundreds of tickets each month with SLA tracking and advisor performance metrics. An HR portal handles onboarding, compliance quizzes, digital signatures, and instructor records. A course-feedback dashboard ingests raw CSV exports from the government's training platform and generates visual performance reports for every instructor, every quarter.
None of these systems existed before Manus. All of them were built by a team with no dedicated software engineers on staff.
"It is not possible without AI agents," Yu Ning said. "The reason why we can do it is because we automate everything like crazy."
The automation gave the core team back their time. Instead of drowning in administrative tasks, the founders could focus on curriculum quality, strategic partnerships, and the kind of thinking that actually moves a business forward.
"We noticed that since our team started using Manus, we started growing very quickly," Yu Ning said. "Everyone has more time to think about things like, how do we deliver more value to clients? How do we partner with other companies?"
From Tool to Curriculum
Heicoders also brought Manus into the classroom. The team recognized early that prompt engineering alone would not prepare students for what was coming. The real shift would come from agents that could complete entire workflows autonomously. So they revamped their curriculum to make every course AI-native. Students build functional tools in class, not just study theory.
During a three-day training for Temasek Trust, , students used prompt-engineering practice boards created using Manus by the Heicoders team to practice their prompt engineering.
The students from Temasek Trust got to create their very own web applications without any coding - just purely through providing instructions to Manus. Here are some examples of applications built by the students from Temasek Trust using Manus:
"Every time we show a student a demonstration of Manus, their eyes open," Yu Ning said. "They finally understand why people say AI is going to disrupt jobs and industries. This is because of AI agents."
Corporate clients who initially dismissed AI agents as too complex for their teams change their minds within minutes of a live demo. Yu Ning recalled one session where a skeptical executive watched Manus build a functional tool in real time and said: "Even our admin staff can build applications now!"
Manus works as a teaching tool because it makes agent activity visible through its side panel. Students with no prior AI-agent experience can watch the agent reason, browse, write code, and deploy. The learning curve flattens because the process is transparent.
The Second Bet
Today, every new hire at Heicoders is trained on Manus from day one. Some become more proficient than the founders within weeks. The company operates with fewer than twenty people, no dedicated engineering staff, and a full suite of custom-built operational systems while training thousands of professionals per month.
When Min Yan and Yu Ning started teaching machine learning classes on weekends, they bet that practitioners could out-teach career trainers. They were right. Now they are making a second bet: that a small team with the right tools can out-operate companies ten times their size.
So far, the numbers agree.
What They Built
Heicoders uses Manus to run its entire hiring operation through a custom career platform. The portal acts as a centralized hub for publishing job openings and tracking candidates through every stage of the application pipeline. Before this, the team handled recruitment manually, reviewing applications one by one as they came in through email. The new platform replaced that ad hoc process with a single system that keeps every posting and applicant organized in one place.
The team built a support portal to give learners a single point of contact for course changes, feedback, appeals, and other requests. The system consolidates these into one unified ticketing workflow, which helps Heicoders meet the government's SLA requirements for delivering timely pre-course and post-course advisory services and for tracking customer satisfaction. On the back end, an internal kanban board lets the team work through incoming tickets in an organized way, so nothing slips through the cracks and every request is accounted for.
Course feedback portal
Heicoders built a course feedback portal that turns raw CSV datasets into visualized dashboards, giving the team a clear view of individual instructor performance. The dashboards let them analyze trends by quarter and by course, making it easy to spot patterns over time. On top of the data, the AI summarizes each instructor's strengths and areas for improvement and automatically suggests coaching tips, so feedback translates directly into actionable next steps.
Internal HR portal & scheduling system
The team also built an internal HR portal that manages instructor onboarding and tracks code of conduct acknowledgements. It includes a built-in digital signature system that replaced the traditional e-signature SaaS the team previously relied on. The portal comes with an automated instructor scheduling system that checks availability and assigns instructors based on filtered requirements, removing the manual back-and-forth that scheduling usually involves.
Prompt Engineering Board
For its corporate AI training workshops, Heicoders built a community board where employees can share their best practices for prompt engineering and learn from one another. It doubles as a hackathon platform for submitting internal use cases, giving teams a structured way to surface and showcase the ways they are putting AI to work.
Ready to build something amazing?
