While Roy Lee, the founder of Cluely, argues that startups should think more about social media virality, he also admits that brand awareness alone won’t lead to sustained growth.
“I can’t say if it’s a mistake, but maybe we started 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 early adopters, they’ll discover the use cases for us.”
Cluely burst onto the tech scene in April with a marketing frenzy for a product it claimed would help users “cheat everything.” Lee made headlines when he was expelled from Columbia University for creating a tool used to cheat when coding job interviews. He channeled that reputation into Cluely, a startup that claimed to help users “cheat everything” by providing untraceable information during online chats.
In late June, Cluely presented its corporate productwhich claimed to serve multiple use cases, including helping with sales calls, customer support, and remote teaching.
But earlier this week, the startup changed and narrowed its scope when it launched a new website calling its product an artificial intelligence assistant for meetings. The company’s plan now is to “become the best AI note taker, starting with the consumer,” Lee said on stage. As an AI scorer, Cluely is clearly entering a crowded market, but Roy touts features like “send follow-up emails.”
But he deflected questions about how well sales and retention fared, other than to say, “I will say we’re doing better than I expected, but it’s not the fastest-growing company ever,” Lee said.
The startup’s ability to garner attention helped it secure a $15 million Series A from Andreessen Horowitz in June. That month, a16z partner Bryan Kim said on the company’s podcast that he backed Cluely because Lee had figured out how to turn attention into paying customers.
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When the company introduced its product this summer, Lee boasted that the startup’s ARR shot from $3 million to $7 million in just one week. “Every person who has a meeting or an interview is testing it,” Lee told TechCrunch at the time.
But four months later, Lee is no longer willing to show off his company’s financial metrics. “What I learned is that you should never share revenue numbers.”
Lee claimed that there is no advantage to disclosing his company’s performance: “If you’re doing well, nobody’s going to talk about how well you’re doing, but if you’re doing badly, then everyone’s only going to talk about how badly you’re doing.”
However, dozens of founders at fast-growing AI startups don’t hesitate to publicly disclose their ARR numbers, making sharing explosive growth a standard practice amid the AI boom.
Cluely’s experience so far suggests that when it comes to software, social media attention only goes so far if the company doesn’t have a strong product to hold onto customers once it intrigues them.
