Cluely founder Roy Lee argues that startups should think more seriously about social media virality, but acknowledges that brand awareness alone won’t lead to sustainable growth.
“I can’t say if it’s a failure or not, but maybe we launched too early,” Lee said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 last week. “The whole idea was to launch something that barely worked. If we could get enough early users, they would find our use case.”
Cluley burst onto the tech scene in April with furious marketing for a product he claimed would help users “cheat everything.” Lee first made headlines when he was suspended from Columbia University for creating a tool used to cheat in coding interviews. He directed his notoriety to Cluley, a startup that claims to help users “cheat everything” by providing undetectable information during online conversations.
In late June, Cluely announced its enterprise product. It claimed to address multiple use cases such as sales calls, customer support, and remote coaching.
But earlier this week, the startup pivoted and narrowed its scope with the introduction of a new website that calls its product an AI meeting assistant. The company’s current plan is to “start with the consumer and become the best AI note-taker,” Lee said on stage. As an AI note-taker, Cluely is clearly entering a crowded market, but Roy touted features such as “sending follow-up emails.”
But Lee dodged a question about how well sales and retention rates were going, saying: “I would say our performance was better than expected, but we are not the fastest growing company in history,” he said.
The startup’s ability to attract attention earned it a $15 million Series A from Andreessen Horowitz in June. That same month, a16z partner Brian Kim said on the company’s podcast that he supports Mr. Cluley because Mr. Lee has figured out how to turn attention into paying customers.
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When the company announced its product this summer, Lee boasted that the startup’s ARR jumped from $3 million to $7 million in just one week. “Everyone who goes to a meeting or an interview is trying this,” Lee told TechCrunch at the time.
But four months later, Mr. Lee is no longer keen to tout his company’s financial metrics. “What I learned is to never share revenue numbers.”
Mr Lee argued that there was no benefit in disclosing his company’s performance. “If you are doing well, no one will talk about your performance, but if you are underperforming, everyone will just talk about how poorly you are performing.”
But dozens of founders of fast-growing AI startups have no qualms about sharing their ARR numbers, making it standard practice to share their explosive growth amid the AI boom.
Cluley’s experience has been that when it comes to software, if a company doesn’t have a strong product that keeps customers interested, it won’t gain much traction on social media.
