Cluely’s Roy Lee suggests that viral hype isn’t enough

While Roy Lee, founding father of Cluely, says startups should think harder about social media virality, he also acknowledges that brand awareness alone won’t result in sustainable growth.

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

Clue burst onto the tech scene in April with furious marketing of a product bait it claimed would help users “cheat on everything.” Lee first made headlines when he was suspended from Columbia University for building a cheating tool in coding interviews. He took that fame to Cluely, a startup that claimed to assist users “cheat on everything” by providing undetectable information during online conversations.

At the end of June Cluely introduced its product for enterpriseswhich was presupposed to be used for a variety of uses, including helping with sales calls, customer support, and distant tutoring.

But earlier this week, the startup pivoted and narrowed its focus, launching a latest website that calls its product an AI assistant for meetings. The company’s plan now is to “become the best AI-powered note writer, starting with the consumer,” Lee said on stage. As an AI notebook, Cluely is clearly entering a crowded market, but Roy touted features equivalent to “send follow-up emails.”

But he deflected questions about strong sales and worker retention, saying only: “I will 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 draw attention helped it raise a $15 million Series A from Andreessen Horowitz in June. This month, a16z partner Bryan Kim said on the company’s podcast that he supports Cluely because Lee discovered the right way to get attention from paying customers.

When the company launched its product this summer, Lee boasted that the startup’s ARR skyrocketed from $3 million to $7 million in just a week. “Every person who has a meeting or an interview tests it,” Lee told TechCrunch.

But 4 months later, Lee not seems like bragging about his company’s financial results. “I’ve learned that you should never share revenue numbers.”

Lee argued that there was no advantage to revealing your organization’s performance: “If you’re doing well, no one will talk about how well you’re doing, but if you’re doing poorly, everyone will only talk about how poorly you’re doing.”

However, several dozen founders of fast-growing AI startups have no qualms about disclosing their ARR numbers publicly, making sharing explosive growth standard practice during the AI ​​boom.

Cluely’s experience so far suggests that when it involves software, social media attention only goes so far if the company doesn’t have a strong product that will retain customers once it intrigues them.