Cluely\u2019s Roy Lee has a message for startup founders: You should be thinking harder about how to go viral.<\/p>\n
\u201cGenerally, if you\u2019re not in deep tech, then you need to low-key deep focus on distribution,\u201d Lee told the crowd at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025<\/a>.<\/p>\n But he also made it clear that not everyone was cut out for this kind of viral marketing. <\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019re any good at engineering, you\u2019re probably not funny and you\u2019re probably not going to be a content creator because you don\u2019t have it in your blood. Realistically, most of these people have no chance of going viral.\u201d<\/p>\n Cluely\u2019s AI assistant grew famous this April with a viral claim that its undetectable windows could \u201chelp you cheat on anything\u201d \u2014 a claim that was quickly disproven when a string of proctoring services<\/a> showed they could, in fact, detect use of the AI assistant. But in a matter of months, the company had raised $15 million from <\/a>Andreessen Horowitz<\/a>, becoming one of the most visible products in the crowded AI assistant space.<\/p>\n As Lee frames it, it\u2019s part of his talent for going viral, which often means making lots of people very angry at him. \u201cI think I\u2019m particularly good at framing myself in a way that\u2019s controversial,\u201d he said onstage. \u201cI do a lot of things that are different. And everything I do that\u2019s different, I frame it through the filter of my voice. And my voice is naturally just very enraging to a lot of people.\u201d<\/p>\n For Lee, it\u2019s part of a broader theory of social media, in which attention is the only currency. <\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco \u201cReputation is sort of a thing of the past,\u201d Lee said. \u201cYou can try to be the New York Times and guard your ironclad reputation, but realistically you\u2019ve got Sam Altman on the timeline talking about hot guys and you\u2019ve got Elon Musk going bats\u2014 crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou just have to realize that the world is trending to a different place,\u201d he continued, \u201cwhere you have to be extreme, you have to be authentic, and you have to be personal.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to say how well that strategy is working, though. When asked for Cluely\u2019s revenue numbers or user numbers, Lee demurred.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I\u2019ve learned is that you should never share revenue numbers because if you\u2019re doing well, nobody will talk about how well you\u2019re doing. And if you\u2019re doing poorly, people will only talk about how poorly you\u2019re doing,\u201d Lee said. \u201cI\u2019ll say we\u2019re doing better than I expected, but it\u2019s not the fastest growing company of all time.\u201d<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cluely\u2019s Roy Lee has a message for startup founders: You should be thinking harder about how to go…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":261232,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[64,63,99,153518,198,153519,55516],"class_list":{"0":"post-261231","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-cluely","12":"tag-entrepreneurship","13":"tag-roy-lee","14":"tag-techcrunch-disrupt-2025"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261231\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/261232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n