Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks
Beyond the Hype: Cluely's CEO on Authenticity, Virality, and the Future of AI Distribution
Summary
The conversation is a dynamic discussion between Roy Lee, co-founder and CEO of Cluely, and a16z General Partners Erik Torenberg and Bryan Kim. They explore Roy's unconventional journey from a college student to a tech CEO, emphasizing his "distribution-first" approach to building Cluely. Key themes include the evolving landscape of digital marketing, the power of viral content, the concept of "momentum as a moat" in the AI space, and Roy's unique, often controversial, marketing tactics that prioritize authenticity and rapid iteration over traditional professionalism. The overall sentiment is one of excitement and belief in Roy's innovative strategy and its potential to disrupt the tech industry.
Unconventional Path to Tech CEO: Roy's journey involved being rescinded from Harvard, taking a year off, attending community college, and eventually dropping out of Columbia to build Cluely, driven by a desire to live an "interesting life."
Distribution-First Strategy: Cluely prioritizes viral content and aggressive distribution, particularly on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, which Roy believes are two years ahead of X and LinkedIn in understanding virality.
"Rizz Marketing" and Authenticity: Roy's marketing is characterized by provocative, authentic, and often controversial content, directly contrasting traditional corporate professionalism. He believes this resonates deeply with Gen Z and the current digital landscape.
Momentum as a Moat in AI: Bryan Kim introduces the concept that in the rapidly changing AI landscape, the ability to move extremely quickly (momentum) in product development and distribution is a crucial differentiator and defensibility, rather than traditional moats like network effects or handcrafted products.
Creator-Led Business Model: Cluely's team structure emphasizes "world-class engineers" and "world-class influencers" (creators with over 100,000 followers), highlighting a shift towards creators directly building software companies.
Product Development Guided by Usage Data: Cluely's product development is heavily informed by analyzing user behavior and usage data from their viral distribution, allowing them to rapidly iterate and find product-market fit.
The Translucent AI Overlay: The core product concept for Cluely is an "invisible AI overlay" that seamlessly integrates AI into the user's screen, a novel UX that Roy believes will be the future form factor for AI.
Challenging Professionalism Norms: Roy anticipates a future where radical transparency and interesting, authentic content define corporate culture, pushing against outdated notions of brand image and formality.
Intro
Erik Torenberg: Six months ago, I was some random college kid in a dorm, and now I feel like I'm at the center of the tech universe. There's something really strange and special happening here.
Roy Lee: I heard someone call it "rizz marketing," which is a compliment, but they're like, "I hate this rizz marketing!" We wrote our first lines of code ten weeks ago. All of a sudden, we have over a million dollars of enterprise revenue coming in.
Bryan Kim: Roy is probably the top 0.001% in the world in terms of knowing how to distribute. Is this viral? Does this have viral fit? If any company in the world has a marketing team and the head of marketing does not have at least 100,000 followers, you need to replace them. The game has changed. You're converting this awareness and eyeballs into money dollars.
Roy Lee: I might as well just quintuple down on every single crazy belief and thought I have and just live the most interesting life ever. I'm all in on building companies. There's no way I can do anything else.
The Cluely Phenomenon
Erik Torenberg: Roy, the man, the myth, the legend, the man of the moment, clearly, is the current thing. How does it feel? The announcement the other day generated a lot of love, a little bit of hate, and maybe more in the middle. Any reactions? How do you react to this?
Roy Lee: I mean, it's pretty crazy. I think, literally, six months ago, I was some random college kid in a dorm, and now I feel like I'm at the center of the tech universe. The more astonishing thing is how correct my assumptions on virality have been.
I think it's growing increasingly clear that people on X and LinkedIn are behind. There's an extremely small intersection of people who understand how developed the algorithm is on Instagram and TikTok, compared to people on tech platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn. It's such a small intersection that it's inevitable my predictions will be right, and it's been crazy to see that play out in real time.
Bryan Kim: Yeah, Elon's reaching out to me and offering a billion-dollar acquisition offer. Roy, we said not to do it, of course. To the moon, right? What is your reaction, seeing this play out?
Bryan Kim: Look, Roy, this is fantastic. It was so interesting. I remember right before the announcement, you had already sent me the video 24 hours ago, like, "Bro, this is what we're going to show," and I was like, "Okay, this is great, and I think it's going to do well."
I didn't think it would do that well, and I didn't think it would create that much controversy. But I also think I underestimated how positively people would view this. There's a lot of meta-analysis on you out there, which is really, really cool, and there are people who are going like two to three layers deep. I've actually read something that linked a meta-analysis of a16z with how "Waslulu" exists and how there's this sort of fungibility of thoughts and things like that. I have no idea what they're talking about. So it's just been incredible, people doing literary criticism.
Roy Lee: No, I'm not kidding, there's literally a guy who wrote about "fungibility of thoughts" with a16z, and clearly people always overrated the stuff. They're like, "Oh, this is a master plan, a16z is trying to do this whole, whole space."
Erik Torenberg: Yeah, no, don't, don't, don't tell them, Eric. We are playing four-dimensional chess here.
Bryan Kim: Ten threads analyzing the left-hand handshake. It's like, guys, come on. I wanted to dissent from the haters. I tweeted something to Brian: "How you feel about Lulu is how you feel about yourself." But I deleted it because I didn't want to trigger people on Twitter. I'll talk shit on a podcast. Maybe I'll get clipped to Twitter, but I don't want to. It was fascinating to see.
From College Dorm to Tech Center
Erik Torenberg: So maybe I want to go back to the beginning because this isn't a story that has been told a lot. We will be talking about the Amazon interview, but maybe let's go back even further. When we think about where you are now, talk about the threads and the through lines from your childhood that can help make sense of who you are and this moment.
Roy Lee: I think from birth, the most character-defining feature of me has been being attention-grabbing and provocative. This played out in elementary, middle, and high school. I always had a camp of people that loved me and a camp of people that hated me. I was always the boldest. I would say the craziest shit and everything that was on my mind, just no filter.
This ended up with a lot of people liking me and a lot of people really disliking me. Things culminated senior year of high school. I did well in school; I got accepted to Harvard early. Then later that year, I was just always doing crazy shit. I snuck out of a school field trip past curfew. The police had to come and escort me back because we were out at like 2:00 AM; we were all like 16, 17, 18.
Then I got a suspension for that, and that was when the camp of "Roy haters" took over and reported everything everywhere, and it ended up getting me rescinded from Harvard. That kind of started my journey of, I think, wanting to actually swing big at building companies. At that point, I felt like my life took such a crazy turn.
For context, my parents literally run a college admissions consulting company. So we literally teach kids how to get into Harvard, and the youngest son of the company gets rescinded from Harvard. It's like the worst thing ever. So we decided, "Let's keep this quiet. You still have the same test scores and application, everything. Maybe next year you get into a different school."
I spent an entire year at home, and I underestimated how mentally tormenting that would be. I'm probably the most extroverted person you might have ever met in your life. I cannot stay maybe like eight hours without talking to someone. To spend a year alone made me think, "Man, my life is so crazy. I might as well just quintuple down on every single crazy belief and thought I have and just live the most interesting life ever." So that was like the moment where I decided, "I'm all in on building companies. There's no way I can do anything else."
Erik Torenberg: I was wondering if you were going to have a moment of like, "Oh, you know, this has set me back in some ways, maybe I should reform or tame it down," but you took the opposite, like, "No, this is who I am, and it's gonna work out."
Roy Lee: Yeah, you just sit in a room by yourself for like 12 months, and all of a sudden, your craziest thoughts become logical, and there's no one else. The echo chamber is you and your brain, and it amplifies everything. I think that's the reason why I am the person that I am today and willing to make the bets that I am today.
Later, I go to community college in California at the behest of my parents. I think California was a middle ground. In California, I have the chance to build a company, and at a community college, I have the chance to get the education that my Asian parents always dreamed of. So I do that. And then later, I get into Columbia, and I have to go to Columbia for at least a semester to appease my parents.
I go to Columbia, and the first thing I'm thinking is, "Can I find a co-founder and a wife?" Those are the only two things that I am looking for in college, and still looking for the wife. But on pretty much the first day, that's when I met Neil, my co-founder. We started hacking on a bunch of things, and the one thing that worked was the earliest version of Cluely.
Parental Perspectives and Platform Differences
Bryan Kim: And were your parents ever trying to reform you or moderate you, or really kind of like, "Roy's gonna be Roy," and almost so—
Roy Lee: Probably like every single day of my life until I got into Harvard. Then they calmed down, and they're like, "Wow, this kid really made it." And then when I got kicked from Harvard again, they were on my ass a lot until I got into Columbia again, and they're like, "Wow, after all this, he gets back into the Ivies. I guess I really can trust him, and his unorthodox swings will hit home runs."
Bryan Kim: So you mentioned before that your parents, they will love you no matter what. I am curious what they think now.
Roy Lee: Man, it's crazy how lax they've gotten since I got back into Columbia. Now they're okay with anything. When I told them, "Hey, Mom, I'm dropping out to do this," she's like, "Oh, okay, you know, I expected it. Why didn't you drop out sooner? Why did it take a semester and a half?" Because at this point, I was like convincing my co-founder to drop out with me, and she's like, "Man, took you long enough." So they're totally on board with all the crazy shit that I do.
The Evolution of Digital Strategy
Erik Torenberg: One of the things we were talking about in the context of going viral, I heard you say, is that Twitter is two years behind Instagram, behind the other platforms. Talk a little bit about, well, first, just like when your sort of provocativeness translated over to Twitter or just like the digital mediums, how did that strategy evolve? And let's talk about the difference in the platform.
Roy Lee: I think, and this goes way back, but many years ago, when YouTube first came out as a platform, this was like the turning point of everything. This democratized content. You weren't paying for commercials, and visibility, publicity, and content were not gated by the amount of money you were willing to spend on ads or TV space. It was just gated by the quality of content.
And five years ago, when TikTok came out and short-form algorithms really started taking over, that shifted the frame once again. So now it's not about how much good content you make, it's literally just about how much content can you make. There is simply not enough good content out there for the average person to consume, which is why you see the same brain rot reels over and over and over again. You see the same Minecraft parkour video over and over, just because there's literally not enough content for the average consumer to consume, and people have not caught on to a few things.
First, you just need to make more content that a consumer will like. Most people don't know how to make viral content—content that any person can watch, consume, and it is digestible. Everyone on X and LinkedIn is trying to go for like, be the most intellectual, thoughtful person, and they'll generate some "slop" that maybe like 200 people in the world can actually understand and make sense of. But of course, they want to seem like the most interesting, thoughtful, intelligent person, but this just doesn't, it lacks viral sense.
There's not enough viral content to go out, and the second thing is that the algorithms really promote the most controversial things, and people on X and LinkedIn seem to have, there's not enough controversial things to be rewarded for. So when I come out swinging out of the gate, I've been on Instagram and TikTok for the past ten years of my life, and I understand what sort of, what level of controversialness you need. I take the slightest foot into controversialness, and all of a sudden, X and LinkedIn explode because the algorithm inherently highly, highly rewards this stuff, and as a result, it's just getting shoved into everyone's feed, and they don't understand. But I'm just literally applying the same principles of controversialness from Instagram and TikTok onto X and LinkedIn, and they're just so not ready for it. That feels like the craziest thing ever.
And this is something that I've said before, but I guarantee my videos do not go as viral on Instagram and TikTok, and the sole reason is because on those platforms, they are not controversial enough.
The Future of Content
Bryan Kim: Yeah, and on those platforms, there are literally people committing felonies in public or at least insinuating they're committing felonies, and even then, it'll be like, "Oh, good try, bro," it's not interesting enough. And X and Twitter just haven't caught on. There aren't enough creators out there who are willing to press the controversial button.
There was a Mark, Mark says this sometimes, right? Like, the "supply chain of the meme." It's like the strangest concept. The meme actually travels from like Reddit, and then it goes to X, and then it goes to Instagram, then LinkedIn, then CNBC, and there's like a train that it goes, and certain people are just early, late. But when you actually flip it with virality and controversialness, maybe that flips a little bit.
Roy Lee: Yeah, well, and sometimes it starts like 4chan or something.
Bryan Kim: That's what I mean, like I didn't want to say it. It's like 4chan, Reddit, then Twitter, then Instagram and LinkedIn. But for you, it's actually Instagram, and Twitter comes before Twitter in terms of the raunchiness or craziness of it.
Roy Lee: Yeah, I mean, I just feel like the average person who's in X comments hating about how controversial this is, if they spent one hour looking through the timeline that is my Instagram feed, their brains would melt and explode. They would not be able to comprehend how people are digesting this at scale.
Bryan Kim: Well, it's funny because ever since Elon took over X, some people started complaining like, "Oh, this stuff has gotten too controversial, or too much dark stuff, or too much negative content," and yeah, it turns out they're, you know, it's just the just the beginning.
Roy Lee: Yeah, yeah, I mean, literally, this is what the future of content is going to be. You're not going to get more millennial founders; you're only going to get more Gen Z founders, and I guarantee you their backgrounds and content are the exact same as mine. And they know exactly what I'm doing, and I'm sort of like the canary that's leading the way for this. But I guarantee you there's more of this coming, and it's inevitable, and you just embrace it.
Distribution as Design
Erik Torenberg: When did you realize that this was the way you were going to build a company? How did you intuit, like, "Hey, distribution is a scarcity, distribution is what matters," and that because there are a lot of creators out there, but they're not combining it with a tech company? How and when did you put this together?
Roy Lee: I guess there was a certain point where I kept going viral that I sort of realized that I know something that X and LinkedIn people don't know yet, and it is sort of like mastery of the algorithm. I think everything started with the "interview coder" situation. Interview coder was the earliest prototype of Cluely, and it was a tool to let you cheat on technical interviews.
And I used it to cheat my way through an Amazon interview. I made it super public, I posted it everywhere, and it ended up getting me blacklisted from big tech and kicked out of school. That situation was inherently viral. When's the last time someone got kicked out of an Ivy League and raised $5 million? This has probably never happened in the history of humanity. So that situation was inherently viral, and at that time, I had no idea that this was like a repeatable thing that I could do.
But then the launch video happened, and I had my intuitions about the virality of the launch video, and I just kept scrolling on Twitter, and I was wondering, "Man, why is nobody doing what Avi Schiffman with Friend.com showed the world you could do a year ago? Why has nobody done this yet?" And it worked. And then I did the "50 interns" thing, and it worked. Like, I kept doing viral video after viral video, and at a certain point, I just realized, "Holy shit, people on X and LinkedIn, they have not caught on yet."
And this is the massive alpha that I'm trying to capture here, is that they have not caught on to what it means to master the short-form algorithm, or the algorithm that is short-form. And as a result, they're literally like, I am able to dominate the timeline for not the past week, but like probably the past few months, just because people on X and LinkedIn have not caught on, and for some reason, they still refuse to catch on.
Erik Torenberg: Right. And so, just to put a finer point on it, the 50 interns, maybe explain this idea of basically at your company, you either have engineers and you have creators.
Roy Lee: Yeah. Right, there are only two roles. You are either a world-class engineer who's building the product, or you're a world-class influencer. And for full-time, every single person has over 100,000 followers on some social media platform. It is the only way to prove that you actually have mastery over virality and you understand what it takes. I think if any company in the world has a marketing team and the head of marketing does not have at least 100,000 followers, you need to replace them. The game has changed.
Erik Torenberg: And so, do you think this is a strategy that other companies should also be employing, of basically having whether it's intern-based or just like having an army of creators and sort of deploying them towards their end?
Roy Lee: I'll go a bit deeper into the interns. So, we made a pretty viral video announcing that we were hiring 50 interns, and you'd be in here making content all day. Essentially, that's almost what we do. We have over 60 contractors. These contractors get paid per video, and they just are forced to sit in front of a camera and make TikTok and Instagram videos about Cluely. This is what marketing looks like. This job did not exist five years ago.
How do you explain the job where you sit in front of a camera and you make five, ten-second videos that seemingly make no sense to anybody, but just consistently generate millions of views? That's not a job that makes sense to people, but that is our internship. That's what a modern-day marketing internship looks like. We pay very little money for the amount of views that we get, and different companies, you know, they're paying literally millions of dollars for Super Bowl ads when you can get the same quality and quantity of views for $20,000, and you see it converting. Yes, our only converting videos are the ones that we have on Instagram and TikTok.
The Genesis of a Partnership
Bryan Kim: Brian, why don't you share your story of how you got excited about Cluely, of how you and Roy met and built this relationship, and how this partnership formed.
Bryan Kim: Sounds great. I had a good contact in New York who travels in the young, cracked-folks area, and her name is Alli DeVoe. She sent one of the lists that she sent had Roy in it, and I read what they're working on, and it sort of reminded me of like, "Oh, like a scout thing," or "It's, you know, it's on the edge of virality." I'm like, "Oh, this is interesting, I want to talk to him." So I reached out, Roy, if you remember, I just reached out, "Hey, heard your name, blah, blah, we should talk." You're like, "Oh bro, let's talk." And then like a day later, you wrote back, and actually, you're multi-stage. "I don't want to talk to you," yeah, "My advisor says don't want to talk to you. Go away."
And what did I do? I could have just stood down, but I said, "Okay fine, I promise you will not talk about fundraising. Let's just talk. Like, I want to meet you, I want to talk to you, I want to build a relationship, blah, blah, blah." Thankfully, you agreed. We got on a quick call. We chatted a little bit where you had your origin story. I'm like, "Oh my god, this is amazing, it's so cool. I'm glad he's doing this. Sadly, he's not accepting money, but that's okay."
Yeah, and then I tracked you. I tracked your Twitter, I tracked what you're doing, the 50 interns. You moved to San Francisco, and I had it in my mind, "Okay, next time opportunity strikes, I'm just gonna show up." So I think I somehow got your phone number or some such thing and texted you, "Yo, like, I'm at your office, can I hang?" So I come, and you say, "Yeah, that's great, come up."
What I actually think was really, really cool, there are a couple of steps, but step one was there was an engineer who randomly found you on Twitter or Instagram and had just come up. You did not know him, he did not know you. He just came to your office, came in to say hi, wanted to say hello. And one of your friends, I think Nicholas, was just there hanging out, and the quality of the people, the fact that random engineers were knocking on the door to come talk to you randomly, which was just like, "Oh, like, there's something really strange and special happening here." And all of your team members sitting on the thing and doing things and creating content, and you and Neil working on the product. I was like, "Oh, like, there's something very special."
And I sort of was thinking, "Oh, like, is this something that we should sort of back?" And then I think one more video was made or something. And next time I visited, I think I came with some stuff where, you know, you're eating steak, and then you flash some metric or something where I realized that you're converting this awareness and eyeballs into money dollars. You drop some numbers. You're like, "Oh yeah, we're doing this much revenue, and that's what we're doing, and guess what? Some enterprise customer wants to talk to us, I don't know why, blah, blah, blah."
And that's when I sort of realized, "Oh, he is actually able to convert this awareness and distribution that you're getting into real dollars," and I don't know many people who know how to do that. And during that time, I was already writing this thing called "momentum as a moat" because it's been so hard to pierce through the noise of everything in AI, especially in the sort of consumer-facing, pursuers-facing. To do that consistently is actually way, way, way harder, near impossible.
And so I had the theory that, "Oh, like companies who know how to do that, companies who know how to build at that speed are going to be the winners," and I felt like I had found a person who was doing that. So I think we moved very quickly, right? Like, Roy, I think I told you, "Look, just hit download, hit download on the Stripe data, hit download, send it to us, I won't ask any more questions."
Roy Lee: Yeah.
Bryan Kim: And then we'll have a chat, and that hopefully is what we delivered. We quickly scrambled to do a very fun, for small-person, interview where a small-person chat with you and some of the partnership partners, and where you called some of them old, bald, and boring. And we were excited to, you know, do the deal. I think I was at an LP summit running around in Las Vegas trying to call you to get to terms, et cetera, and that's how it all worked out. And after a while, I brought you five, six pounds of steak as an excitement and a deal.
Momentum as a Moat in AI
Erik Torenberg: I want to double down and double-click on the "momentum as a moat" piece, Brian, because you have an interesting background in that you've been doing consumer for a while. You worked at Snap beforehand among other places, and I remember Ben Thompson had this post about Snap where he said that Snap has a gingerbread strategy where basically, you know, if they invent stuff, Meta is going to copy it, so they just have to keep inventing stuff. And I guess it's like all the breadcrumbs or something. And you also have backed a number of these consumer companies. You've had a front-row view to, "Hey, these network effects aren't as necessarily defensible as they once were, and so companies need to keep innovating, keep pushing."
Share more about how this kind of momentum, especially as it moves to AI companies, how this theory was born, and what it really means for defensibility.
Bryan Kim: I did not have that view before. I did not think a gingerbread strategy necessarily worked, nor did I think momentum was a moat. I actually truly believed in these handcrafted, artisan products that really get to the core of why people want to use them. I still somewhat believe the core of it, but like, you know, these artisan products where, it just takes a while to build it, and it's very, very nuanced, and I have believed that led to high retention. So the thing that I looked at the most always was, "Is this product highly retained? Does this product have network effect on the traditional sort of theories of moat?"
What I realized, and this was true to some extent in the era of mobile. Mobile is like a two-decade-old platform, so a lot of things have been tried, and a lot of people tried different things, and therefore finding something people came back to again and again was the most important thing in my mind. And then AI hit, and I still had that framework where, "Oh, like I'm going to look for things that are highly retentive and repeated again and again," and guess what? Things change too fast. The underlying model changes every day or every week. If you craft this thing, and OpenAI or someone builds their new model to include that part in their new product, you're done, you're gone.
So then it couldn't become about this highly thoughtful, slow-build product. It needed to be something where founders knew how to move extremely quickly. And that included product, that included distribution. Because these things are so magical—AI is so magical, we built the digital god and locked it in a chatbot—it's so magical right now, kind of anything goes. People give it a chance. Therefore, what's really important is to try to build the plane as it's falling down the cliff. And people who enjoy the thrill of the plane going down and are actually as excited about building as it goes down, I think those are the winners of the next day.
When I think about folks like Roy, it's the type of founder archetype who gets value and who is excited and leading the charge in terms of that speed, whether it's marketing, distribution, or product build. Usually all of that needs to come together to build an extremely durable, long-data product. That to me eventually will turn into a product that needs to be retained, that needs to be used every day, but we're still in this early stage of AI where I think momentum is the moat.
And, going back to Roy, I'd love to hear how you think about it because we talked about it a little bit over chat where you think like stage one, stage two, stage three of building Cluely and sort of the distribution advantage that you have, and you keep talking about this, "Oh, maybe X and LinkedIn people don't get it right now, but that gap may narrow over time." So how do you think about the next stage and et cetera, but that's how it links to sort of my theory of momentum of the moat.
Product Strategy and the Translucent Overlay
Erik Torenberg: I want to get to Roy's product strategy, but first I want to outline some points, which is, you know, it was interesting, Paul Graham, when he started Y Combinator, identified that technical founders were undervalued. That they were being underappreciated, and people thought, "Oh, you know, you need to have an MBA," and you realize, "Hey, it's easier to teach technical founders business than it is to teach business people how to build great products or how to code." And then what happens over the next 15 years, it becomes way easier to build these things. AWS, low-code AI, et cetera, and distribution becomes the scarcity. There's so much software, this, you know, it's such a flooded ecosystem, as you quoted in your piece, Andrew Chen's piece about how all the marketing channels suck. They've all been sort of wrung out dry.
And so distribution is now the scarcity. In the same way, the technical co-founder, now there's almost like an audience co-founder, or almost like a, "Hey, how do you, how do you really break out?" And we've seen creators start to build businesses, like Mr. Beast with his chocolate Feastables. Kylie Jenner with her makeup line. Whatever these creators create, these lip commerce products. But no one's really done it with software. No one has put the two together. Justin Bieber tried to do a social network called Shots, or he tried, you know, John Shahidi via using Bieber. But no big creators really built whether a consumer or enterprise, huge software company. They've built commerce or physical goods. And I always thought, "Hey, why doesn't Mr. Beast launch like a Square competitor? Like, he's got all these eyeballs. I'm sure he's got to get something better margins than Feastables." And he has games, and he's a friend and a friend of the firm, and he's done phenomenally well. But what I like is that Roy is putting both of those together.
So maybe you can walk through a little bit. You talked about your distribution strategy. Why don't you talk about how the product strategy has evolved from the beginning on, and then we get to the sequencing.
Roy Lee: Yeah, I think something that a lot of people miss is that the first line of Cluely code was written like ten weeks ago. This is really new. This started with Interview Coder, which is just like a product that I coded up over a weekend in my dorm, and it was a tool to let you cheat on interviews.
What we realized after we got about 250 million impressions on the whole scenario is like, "Wow, we just got so many eyeballs on this thing. Maybe if we can do this again, but we have a more general use product with a similar UX, because we think we're really onto something with the UX here, then maybe we can make a lot more money." And that's what we did with Cluely. We just launched it as like "Interview Coder for everything," "no cheat on everything." We just wanted to see what happens, and the usage data would tell us what people are using it for.
That's exactly what's happening now. We have this general purpose cheating tool, which in reality is just like an invisible AI overlay. We thought, "Here's a new user experience for AI, let's push it out to a bunch of people and see what happens." As a result, now we're past like a billion views overall on Cluely, and we're probably the most viral startup in the world. And we have all this usage data that literally tells us, "Hey, here's where this is most sticky, and here's where the product direction needs to go." I think that's the core advantage of distribution: you do not have to worry about market fit or anything because your users will tell you where the direction of market fit is headed, and their usage data will literally give you the information that you need to know. If you don't have usage data, then you're literally shooting blind. Every person who has built a company before knows that you can't really know what direction you're going. You have to talk to your users, but I feel like if your distribution is strong enough, you don't need to talk to your users.
You just need to look at their data, like you just need to look at the aggregate number.
Erik Torenberg: When you're also redefining kind of what a minimal viable product is to some degree. People, other companies, will spend many months building this thing and then seeing how people use it. But for you, if you can create, you know, sort of draft the right content, you can test out the idea in a much quicker way to see, hey, is this really resonating?
Roy Lee: Exactly. I mean, we didn't even have, when we launched the video, we barely had a functioning product. The day before is when we finished our final tests, and we're like, "Okay, we think this works now. Let's just launch the video as soon as possible." And we launched the video, and all of a sudden, tens of thousands, we just said, "Hey, let's just throw sales calls in the videos to see if people use it for sales calls," because that seems like a pretty lucrative space.
All of a sudden, we have over a million dollars of enterprise revenue coming in, people using it for sales calls, and it's just a, like, you can shoot-in-the-dark distribution a lot quicker and a lot more accurately than you can shoot-in-the-dark product. And you don't need like a million product integrations. It's just so much quicker. And what's even better about it is that the iteration loop is much faster too because the algorithm will literally tell you via a number, which is the number of views, shares, whatever, how well your strategy is going to work. So it's much, much easier to test, "Is this viral? Does this have viral fit?" rather than "Does this have market fit?"
Audience-Guided Product Development
Bryan Kim: Maybe Roy, does that mean you sort of let the audience guide where the product goes? Is that how you sort of think?
Roy Lee: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Bryan Kim: And maybe tell, let's talk a little bit about like the form factor because one of the things that internally we discussed is, look, Roy's probably top one percent, now I revise it, top 0.001% in the world in terms of knowing how to distribute that married the Venn diagram of that and people who know and had the instinct to build a semi-translucent overlay. It sounds so simple. Yeah, so does this, this disappearing picture, sounds so simple, it's easy.
It's not technically hard, like a half-translucent overlay. That sounds simple. It's not technically hard. But that overlap to me was what gave me so much excitement around what you're building. I actually have it right now on my screen. Eric, did you go to University of Michigan?
Erik Torenberg: Yeah, I did.
Bryan Kim: I see. I didn't know that. But I have Cluely open. I'm like, "You went to U of M." Oh, you did philosophy, policy, and economics, I think, yeah, great. We can sort of bond over that, you know, like this all of a sudden is an incredible tool. That's amazing.
Why don't you talk more about where you see the product going, or particularly like how you think about it? Anyone who's building AI tools is asking themselves the question of how does one of the incumbents not, how's this defensible from one of the major players? You know, will OpenAI, et cetera, just build this feature? How do you think about making your product truly defensible, especially from the people that have, because of their reach, their size? You know, OpenAI has distribution too, right? So yeah, how do you think about this?
Roy Lee: Yeah, I mean, I guess we're first to move in a pretty novel UX, and I think we did get the translucent, like, I think everyone's going to inevitably get the translucent overlay. This is how an integrated AI should feel. And like Apple shows everyone that liquid glass is the translucent overlay that will be the form factor of AI in the future.
Right now, I feel like it's just a land grab, and if the question is about distribution, then I think there's actually a pretty strong case for us to make that we will actually end up distributing better than OpenAI, and it's enough that you could probably bet on us at a 30,000x discount. I'm actually not worried about distribution. And I think the quality of the product, I mean, it's quite simple. I really feel like this is just a land grab right now to see who can convince as many consumers and enterprise first that they are the guy who deserves to win the translucent overlay. Right now, we're making so much noise. I mean, with the translucent overlay, why would it not be us?
Erik Torenberg: And when did you figure out the translucent overlay was the right approach?
Roy Lee: Yeah, I mean, I was just in my dorm with Neil, and we were just like, we literally spent every day thinking about how can we make Interview Coder more invisible to interviews, and we played around. There were probably 20 to 30 versions of Interview Coder in the past that we thought didn't work. But, you know, it essentially feeds you a code answer, like an answer to a coding problem, and you need to overlay that on top of your code, and we're just like, "Man, I really need this integrated into my code. I need to see what I'm doing as well as see the answer that AI is giving me." Eventually, we just landed on translucency, and this was like, "Wow, this is a magical moment. This is what the product needed." And very soon, we realized, "Why are we only thinking about coding interviews and software engineering coding interviews? This is such a small market." This is true for everything. AI should not feel like a separate window. It should be integrated seamlessly, and that looks like translucency.
The Staged Approach to Building Cluely
Bryan Kim: I would love, Roy, to chat about the staged approach of how you're thinking about it. I think like right now, we're distribution first, and then we'll sort of build the product as we go. Stage two, here's how we do it with a bunch of engineering prowess and product development, et cetera. I think we sort of chatted a little bit about that on text, and to me that was like, "Oh, okay, like he's, he's got, like you'll figure out a product as you go."
Roy Lee: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bryan Kim: I'd love to love to talk a little bit about that.
Roy Lee: I mean, right now, the internet is up in storms saying, "Hey, where's the product? Where's the product?" And the two things that we are literally working day and night to build out are the product that we have in our head and what the users are telling us that they want. But also, every video I make that's not directly about the product drums up so much more hype for the eventual product launch video. I will guarantee that this will be viral, and I guarantee that it will be more viral than if we just launched earlier.
I think there's truth in the statement of like, "Launch early, ship fast, launch before you're ready," but for some reason, when we're doing that at scale, it feels like everyone is like, "Oh no, you launched too early." Like, "Not now, where's the problem?" Like, what are you talking about? This is the playbook. We wrote our first lines of code ten weeks ago. We're earlier than the latest YC batch of companies, yet we're generating probably more revenue than every single one of them. And the product is like, it's literally two and a half months since being built. In my perspective, we are pre-launch.
And the huge benefit of being massively distributing pre-launch is that you will know what product to build with as much certainty as you could possibly get. And if you can distribute and hype it up to an audience of literally millions of people, like, "Hey, this product's coming out, this product's coming out," and we're screaming to the world, "AI overlay," like, "AI that sees your screen, here's your audio." The second we make that, why would you pick anyone else's product to use? We've been screaming from the top of our lungs since day one, like before day one even. And right now, the stage is distribution. Get it into everyone's mind what Cluely is. Cluely is the AI, the invisible AI that sees your screen. Here's your audio. Everyone knows this, and as soon as we launch it, who else will they download?
Authenticity and the Anti-Fragile Approach
Erik Torenberg: Yeah, and one thing I think that's fascinating about what you're doing, and I'll compare it to our friends at TBPn who are kind of rebranding or reclaiming. They call themselves "corporate-driven media," and because everyone was like, "We're independent media," and they're like, "No, no, we're corporate-backed, we're more honest that way." And they're just leaning into, you know, all the bits about Ramp, and you know, you say 5%, and there's this kind of humor to it. I think similarly, you're kind of leaning into the controversy or being controversial as a strategy where some people think, "Oh, that's like fake or forced or whatever." But you're at the same time, you're super authentic in the way that you're doing it, and people feel like they know you. Sometimes even if there's a character and exaggeration, that also feels authentic in some way. It's just kind of a unique style.
Roy Lee: Yeah, I mean, I think this just reflects a growing shift in society. Literally, for the past few decades now, there's just been such a sharp drop-off in professionalism, and I really think it's because content creation has been democratized. The first ever YouTube creators were just people making funny videos in their dorms, and this was the most authentic. People crave this. Nobody wants to see another ad or another corporate newspaper bullshit. They want to see some real person doing real things, and the democratization of content creation has allowed authentic people who make content to be seen by millions. Now authentic people who create content will be seen by millions, and for some reason, no company gets this. You'll have like a 100x followers, and your post will be about introducing blah, blah, blah, and it's like the most corporate bullshit ever. You're not going to get any views, and nobody wants to see this.
Would you rather have a world where everyone was extremely transparent, and even the founders were honest, and everything you see is just someone's authentic life? Or would you rather see a bunch of corporate bullshit everywhere? What we envision for the end stage distribution of Cluely is that it does not feel like an ad at all. This is just the story of someone's life that you want to see, and it is true and authentic, and I try to be like, I'm probably more transparent about everything than I'd say probably 99% of companies in the Valley are, which is because of what you're saying.
Controversial Marketing and Future Impact
Erik Torenberg: Some people get so mad at the some. I heard someone call it "rizz marketing," which is a compliment, but they're like, "I hate this rizz marketing!" Like, it's got to be, you know, product first, get back to fundamentals. But first, this is its own fundamentals too of how the world works today. But two, it's like, you know, so of course they can't destroy you, but even the people who want to destroy you, the joke in my head is they could try to kill you, but they can't kill the idea.
Roy Lee: Yeah.
Erik Torenberg: Like, the way that you're building companies, there's something about it that is going to have an impact on the next generation, and you're just starting the company journey, but even still, just causing that shift or inspiring that shift is remarkable. What I would say the viral marketing, when you say viral marketing, is interesting, right? One leads to another. I actually think what you're doing is like anti-fragile marketing.
Roy Lee: Yeah, like you're so controversial, I'm gonna cut off your head and three will spring up because one is mad at you, one is really happy about you, one is neutral. You get all these, every time someone comes at you and comes at the idea of Cluely, the more aura points it gets, like aura farming.
Erik Torenberg: Any lessons from the most controversial stuff that you've done, or is it always triple down? Is there a line to cross? How do you think about that?
Roy Lee: I think the few lessons have been never punch down. Like, never, ever even remotely close to punch down. And I think people reward, and the algorithm does reward authenticity more than anything. It rewards many things, but one of the things that it rewards most is authenticity. I think you'll see me on Twitter every once in a while I'll make a genuine comment, "Hey, thank you, I really respect you," or something.
Erik Torenberg: I saw your response to Gary Tan.
Roy Lee: Yeah, I mean, it's true. I respect the guy, and I hope that one day when the company gets to where I imagine it will be, then he will come around. I don't think the lesson is to triple down on everything, but I think the lesson is that if you're honest, then the algorithm will reward you because there's literally zero other company out there that is being fully honest about everything, and there's zero founder out there that behaves authentically. The only other person I might think is like Elon Musk.
Erik Torenberg: And I think that's a really good role model to have in business. Speaking as you build Cluely into the first destination for consumers and enterprise alike, how do the type of stunts, if you will, and skits actually fit into the type of customer that you want to serve?
Roy Lee: Forty years ago, we were way more professional than we are now. If you were even an engineer, you'd come into work with a suit and tie, and if you didn't, it was distasteful, it was disgusting, I cannot believe it. You should never, ever show up in a hoodie and sweatpants. Now you're weird if you come up with a suit and you're not in a hoodie and sweatpants, and everyone wants more authentic things.
Right now, for some reason, in society, we're still lingering onto this image that companies need to be brand-friendly and boring and never say anything controversial or whatever. I don't understand how this became the societal norm, but in reality, people want to see interesting things. That's the point of life, you see interesting things, and there's just this lack of professionalism. And again, with the distribution of short-form content, everyone sees the craziest things, and you just get desensitized to these things, and that's why sports like sperm racing are able to be so hyper-viral. Nobody would have aired this on CNN ten years ago, but you don't need CNN anymore.
You have Instagram and TikTok, and Instagram and TikTok, they love sperm racing. As a result, they're able to raise at a mass evaluation, genuinely have a shot at being like the next legit sport. And it's not just sperm racing. I mean, it's every company in the world. There's Sam Altman talking about how hot the guys are that GPT generates in the timeline. There's Elon Musk doing ravings about his political takes. Every company is getting less and less professional. This trend is not dying anytime soon. I'm just the person that is pushing the envelope perhaps a little further than the world is ready for at the moment.
I think that the question that everyone should linger on a little bit is like what happens. Can you imagine a world where we do win? Can you imagine what the state of the world will look like if Cluely does win, and we prove to everyone the bar for professionalism is here where we've determined it? The entire state of corporate culture of America as a whole is going to shift, and perhaps the entire world. Everyone will realize like, "Oh, we've been, we've had our panties up in a bunch worrying about brand image and professionalism when in reality the world craves something different." I have very strong conviction that I'm right in this because I was right about X, and I just, I did not understand for the life of me why nobody is producing the viral videos that were so obviously designed to go viral for the algorithm. It's just because nobody has caught on, and nobody's willing to press that button. Now that I've pressed the button once, I just imagine what the world looks like if Cluely makes it, and I think you're probably more interested in that. That would be a much more interesting world if every company was being 100% radically transparent and doing exactly what the most interesting thing was, as Elon says.
Bryan Kim: The most entertaining outcome is the most likely. It's true. On that note, this has been a fantastic episode with Roy and Bryan. Guys, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
Roy Lee: Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you, thank you.