Roy Lee of Cluley talks about startup marketing ragebait strategies

Roy Lee of Cluely has a message for startup founders. “We should think more seriously about how to go viral.”

“In general, if you’re not in deep tech, you need to be conservative and focus on distribution,” Lee told the Disrupt 2025 audience.

But he also made it clear that not everyone is cut out for this kind of viral marketing.

“Even if you’re even remotely good at engineering, you probably won’t be interesting and you won’t be a content creator because it’s not in your blood. The reality is that most of these people have no chance of going viral.”

Cluely’s AI assistant rose to prominence in April this year when claims went viral that its undetectable windows were “useful for all kinds of fraud.” This claim was quickly disproved when a range of supervisory services showed that they could indeed detect the use of AI assistants. But within months, the company raised $15 million from Andresen Horowitz and became one of the most visible products in the crowded AI assistant space.

As Lee tells it, it’s part of his talent to spread the word, which means it makes a lot of people very angry at him. “I think I’m particularly good at framing myself in a controversial way,” he said on stage. “I do a lot of things that are different. And while everything I do is different, I express it through the filter of my voice. And my voice naturally infuriates a lot of people.”

For Lee, this is part of a broader social media theory in which attention is the only currency.

“Reputation is, in some ways, a thing of the past,” Lee said. “You can be the New York Times and try to protect your solid reputation, but realistically you’re going to have Sam Altman on your timeline talking about hot guys and Elon Musk is going to go crazy.”

“We need to recognize that the world is going in a different direction. If it needs to be extreme, it needs to be authentic, it needs to be personal,” he continued.

However, it is difficult to say how well that strategy is working. But when asked about Cluely’s revenue and user numbers, Lee quipped.

“What I learned is that you should never share revenue numbers, because if you’re doing well, no one will talk about your performance. And if you’re doing poorly, people will only talk about how bad you’re doing,” Lee said. “Although I would say our performance is better than expected, we are not the fastest growing company in history.”