Cluely’s Roy Lee has a message for startup founders: you should be thinking harder about how to go viral.
“Generally, if you’re not in deep tech, then you need to low-key deep focus on distribution,” Lee told the crowd at Disrupt 2025.
But he also made it clear that not everyone was cut out for this kind of viral marketing.
“If you’re any good at engineering, you’re probably not funny and you’re probably not going to be a content creator because you don’t have it in your blood. Realistically, most of these people have no chance of going viral.”
Cluely’s AI assistant grew famous this April with a viral claim that its undetectable windows could “help you cheat on anything” — a claim that was quickly disproven when a string of proctoring services showed they could, in fact, detect use of the AI assistant. But in a matter of months, the company had raised $15 million from Andressen Horowitz, becoming one of the most visible products in the crowded AI assistant space.
As Lee frames it, it’s part of his talent for going viral, which often means making lots of people very angry at him. “I think I’m particularly good at framing myself in a way that’s controversial,” he said onstage. “I do a lot of things that are different. And everything I do that’s different, I frame it through the filter of my voice. And my voice is naturally just very enraging to a lot of people.”
For Lee, it’s part of a broader theory of social media, in which attention is the only currency. Techcrunch event TechCrunch Disrupt is live! Join Google Cloud, Netflix, Microsoft, Box, Phia, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, Vinod Khosla — some of the 250+ heavy hitters leading 200+ sessions designed to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. And don’t miss 300+ showcasing startups in all sectors.
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“Reputation is sort of a thing of the past,” Lee said. “You can try to be the New York Times and guard your ironclad reputation, but realistically you’ve got Sam Altman on the timeline talking about hot guys and you’ve got Elon Musk going batshit crazy.”
“You just have to realize that the world is trending to a different place,” he continued, “where you have to be extreme, you have to be authentic and you have to be personal.”
It’s hard to say how well that strategy is working, though. When asked for Cluely’s revenue numbers or user numbers, however, Lee demurred.
“What I’ve learned is that you should never share revenue numbers because if you’re doing well, nobody will talk about how well you’re doing. And if you’re doing poorly, people will only talk about how poorly you’re doing,” Lee said.“I’ll say we’re doing better than I expected, but it’s not the fastest growing company of all time.”
Topics AI, cluely, viral Russell Brandom
AI Editor Russell Brandom has been covering the tech industry since 2012, with a focus on platform policy and emerging technologies. He previously worked at The Verge and Rest of World, and has written for Wired, The Awl and MIT’s Technology Review. He can be reached at russell.brandom@techcrunch.com or on Signal at 412-401-5489. View Bio October 27-29, 2025 San Francisco
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