Cluely's Roy Lee hints that viral hype is not enough

While Roy Lee, the founder of Cluely, argues that startups should be thinking harder about social media virality, he also admits that brand awareness alone won’t lead to sustained growth.

“I can’t say if it’s a mistake, but maybe we launched too early,” Lee said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 last week. “The whole idea [was] let’s launch something that barely works, and if we can get enough initial users, they will find out the use cases for us.”

Cluely burst onto the tech scene in April with rage bait marketing for a product it claimed would help users “cheat on everything.” Lee first made headlines when he was suspended from Columbia University for building a tool used for cheating on coding job interviews. He channeled that notoriety into Cluely, a startup that claimed to h