Roy Lee, who started Cluely, believes startups should pay more attention to going viral on social media, but he also acknowledges that simply getting your name out there isn’t enough for lasting success.
“I’m not sure it was a mistake, but maybe we launched prematurely,” Lee remarked during his appearance at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 last week. “Our concept was to release something that barely functioned, hoping that if we attracted enough early adopters, they would discover the best ways to use it for us.”
Cluely made a splash in the tech world in April by using provocative marketing for a product it said would let users “cheat on everything.” Lee first gained attention after being suspended from Columbia University for developing a tool that helped people cheat during coding job interviews. He used that infamy to launch Cluely, a company that claimed to provide users with undetectable information during online chats, effectively letting them “cheat on everything.”
At the end of June, Cluely rolled out its enterprise solution, which was promoted as being useful for a range of scenarios, such as sales calls, customer service, and online tutoring.
Earlier this week, the company pivoted and narrowed its focus, unveiling a new website that describes its offering as an AI meeting assistant. Now, the company’s goal is to “become the leading AI note taker, starting with individual users,” Lee explained onstage. Although the AI notetaking space is already crowded, Roy highlighted features like “automatically sending follow-up emails.”
When asked about sales and customer retention, he avoided specifics, only saying: “I can say we’re performing better than I thought we would, but we’re not the fastest-growing startup ever,” according to Lee.
The buzz Cluely generated helped it land a $15 million Series A investment from Andreessen Horowitz in June. That same month, a16z partner Bryan Kim mentioned on the firm’s podcast that he invested in Cluely because Lee had figured out how to turn attention into paying users.
When Cluely launched its product this summer, Lee proudly shared that the company’s ARR jumped from $3 million to $7 million in just a week. “Anyone who has a meeting or interview is giving this a try,” Lee told TechCrunch at the time.
But four months on, Lee is much less willing to discuss his company’s financial results. “One thing I’ve realized is you should never disclose your revenue figures.”
Lee argued that there’s no benefit to making his company’s numbers public: “If things are going well, no one will talk about your success, but if things aren’t going well, that’s all anyone will discuss.”
Still, many founders at rapidly expanding AI startups have no hesitation about making their ARR public, and sharing impressive growth figures has become common in the current AI surge.
Cluely’s journey so far shows that in the software world, social media buzz can only take a company so far if there isn’t a solid product to keep customers engaged after they’re drawn in.
