AI “cheating” app Cluely’s CEO and cofounder, Chungin “Roy” Lee, said most startups flop because their products don’t get seen.
“Engineers just cannot make good content,” Lee said during a Wednesday interview at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025
“There’s a bunch of shallow replicas, but I challenge you to find one video you think is like, ‘Yo, this is as tough as Cluely,'” he told TechCrunch.
Every startup needs to focus more on distribution. And most startups flop because they fail to get seen, even if they have product-market fit, Lee said.
Cluely launched earlier this year as a tool to help software engineers cheat on their job interviews, among other use cases.
The startup earlier this year posted a tongue-in-cheek video of Lee trying to use Cluely to impress a woman on a date, which went viral.
Cluely has since removed references to cheating on job interviews from its website. It positions itself as an “undetectable” AI that views users’ screens and feeds them answers in real time.
The San Francisco startup, which announced a $15 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz in June, has made it clear it’s betting big on distribution to drive growth.
Cluely needs to be “the biggest thing” on Instagram and TikTok, Lee said in an episode of the “Sourcery” podcast published in June. “Every single big company is known by regular people,” he added.
Lee told TechCrunch on Wednesday that the internet rewards the bold, not the polished. “Reputation is sort of a thing of the past,” Lee said. Founders need to be extreme, authentic, and personal, which is “extremely at odds with being super corporate.”
Lee also said he rejected the idea that Cluely’s content strategy is “rage-bait.”
“I don’t even think I rage-bait,” he said, adding that he’s “honest” and “authentic.”
“It’s probably just my personality,” Lee added.
Lee did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Betting big on distribution
Lee told Business Insider earlier this year that his main goal for Cluely is to reach 1 billion views across all platforms.
In June, he said there are only two job titles at Cluely: engineer or influencer.
“There are only two roles here. You’re either building the product or you’re making the product go viral,” Lee said on the “Sourcery” podcast. “There’s nobody who’s not a great engineer who has less than 100,000 followers.”
He also said that traditional marketers can’t drive the same growth as influencers because they don’t actually know how to go viral.
“You can have a 35-year-old marketer who scrolls as much as they want. For some reason, they just won’t have the viral sense to come up with hooks that are capable of generating 10 million views,” he said.
“The reason all these big consumer app guys are so young is because you need to be tapped in with young culture to understand what’s funny,” he added.
In July, Lee wrote on LinkedIn that Cluely is offering huge pay packets to recruit top-tier talent.
Engineers were offered up to $1 million in base salary, and $250,000 to $350,000 for designers. Both job descriptions also list equity.
“I only care about how good your work is,” Lee wrote in the post.
“I do not care about school, experience, age, citizenship status, etc. Please be world-class,” he added.
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