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

While Roy Lee, the Founder of Cluely, argued that startups should Think Harder Regarding social media virality, he also admits that brand awareness will not lead to sustained growth.

“I can’t say it’s a mistake, but it could have been from the beginning,” Lee said On Stage at TechCrunch disrupts 2025 last week. “The whole idea (is) let’s launch something that almost doesn’t work, and if we can get the early adopters, they’ll be able to find a use case for us.”

Cluely burst onto the tech scene in April with heavy marketing for a product that could help users “trick all users.” Lee first made headlines when he Suspended from Columbia University To build a tool used to cheat on coding job interviews. He channeled that notoriety to cluely, a startup that claims to help users “fake everything” by sending indecipherable information during online chats.

At the end of June, cluely Introducing the company’s productswhich claims to serve a variety of use cases, including those that help with sales calls, customer support, and Remote Tutorio.

But earlier this week, the startup shifted and narrowed its scope when it introduced a new website that touted its AI assistant product for meetings. The company’s current plan is to “be the best AI Note taker, starting with consumers,” Lee said on stage. As an AI innovator, cluely has entered a crowded but functional market called “Send follow-up emails.”

But he brushed off questions about sales and retention practices, except to say: “I would say we’re doing better than expected, but we’re not the fastest company overall,” Lee said.

An introductory ability to gain secure attention $15 million series a From Andreessen Horowitz in June. That month, A16Z Partner Bryan Kim said in a company podcast that he supported it because it had been made so sophisticated because Lee had known about how Convert attention to paying customers.

When the company introduced the product this summer, Lee boasted that the startup Arr skyrocketed from $3 million to $7 Million in one weekSee rank-. “Everyone who has a meeting or an interview is trying to get out,” Lee told TechCrunch later.

But four months later, Lee isn’t so eager to pick the company’s financial metrics. “What I’ve learned is that you don’t have to show your award numbers.”

Lee claims that there is no value in revealing the company’s performance: “If you do well, no one can talk about what you do, but if you do well, everyone you do.”

However, dozens of founders at fast-growing AI startups are unqualified in terms of directive numbers, making explosive sharing a standard practice in the midst of the AI ​​boom.

Cluely’s experience thus shows that when it comes to software, social media attention only becomes present if the company does not have a strong product to keep its customers.