Cluely’s Roy Lee hints that viral hype is not enough

Cluely’s Roy Lee hints that viral hype is not enough

While Roy Lee, the founding father of Cluely, argues that startups must be pondering more durable about social media virality, he also admits that model consciousness alone received’t result in sustained progress.

“I can’t say if it’s a mistake, but maybe we launched too early,” Lee said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 last week. “The whole idea [was] let’s launch something that barely works, and if we can get enough initial users, they will find out the use cases for us.”

Cluely burst onto the tech scene in April with rage bait advertising and marketing for a product it claimed would assist customers “cheat on everything.” Lee first made headlines when he was suspended from Columbia University for constructing a tool used for dishonest on coding job interviews. He channeled that notoriety into Cluely, a startup that claimed to assist customers “cheat on everything” by delivering undetectable info during on-line conversations.

In late June, Cluely launched its enterprise product, which claimed to serve a number of use instances, including serving to with sales calls, buyer help, and distant tutoring.

But earlier this week, the startup shifted and narrowed its scope when it launched a new web site that calls its product an AI assistant for conferences. The company’s plan now is to “become the best AI note taker, starting with the consumer,” Lee said on stage. As an AI notetaker, Cluely is clearly getting into a crowded market however Roy touted performance such as “sending follow-up emails.”

But he deflected questions on how properly sales and retention have been going, besides to say: “I’ll say we’re doing better than I expected, but it’s not the fastest growing company of all time,” Lee said.

The startup’s ability to seize consideration helped it safe a $15 million Series A from Andreessen Horowitz in June. That month, a16z associate Bryan Kim said on the agency’s podcast that he backed Cluely because Lee had figured out find out how to convert the consideration into paying prospects.

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When the company launched its product this summer time, Lee boasted that the startup’s ARR skyrocketed from $3 million to $7 million within just one week. “Every single person who has a meeting or an interview is testing this out,” Lee told TechCrunch then.

But 4 months later, Lee is now not desperate to flaunt his company’s monetary metrics. “What I’ve learned is you should never share revenue numbers.”

Lee claimed that there’s no upside to revealing his company’s performance: “If you’re doing well, nobody is going to talk about how well you’re doing, but if you’re doing poorly, then everybody will only talk about how poorly you’re doing.”  

However, dozens of founders at fast-growing AI startups haven’t any qualms about publicly revealing their ARR numbers, making the sharing of explosive progress an ordinary apply amid the AI growth.

Cluely’s experience so far suggests that in terms of software, social media consideration only goes to date if the company doesn’t have a strong product to maintain prospects as soon as it intrigues them.

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