Cluely's Roy Lee rolls up with 50 interns and 10M views in 8 days — a viral growth machine built on Instagram reels

There they are. I think we're overpowering you. Can uh can can you hear us? Yeah. Yeah, we can hear you. Yeah. Make sure we're zoomed out all the way so we can see everybody. We got a small army here. This is incredible. Uh, how big is the team? Kick us off. How many you got at this point?

The team is 11 full-time plus the interns. How many interns you got so far? Interns, bro. We're closing in on 50, brother. Let's go. 10 there. That's amazing. Congratulations. What are they all doing? How do you manage everything? Uh, is it just is it is it purely social media? Is that what you want them to focus on?

growth. Yeah. Yeah. Growth marketing. Like the only goal of the company is get 1 billion eyeballs onto Culie. So, we have unrestricted creative freedom and permission to do anything and everything. Uh just just make the company go viral.

Every single person you see behind you has over a 100,000 followers on some social media platform. Wow. 200,000 plus. Wow. That's remarkable. Me too now. Me too. Now, yeah, you're up there. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you probably popped. Uh uh what's working? What platforms have actually been uh been driving the most growth?

I mean, I'm sure you've run a lot of tests. What have you learned that's uh that you can share, bro? Ben, take it away, bro. Let's hear it. UC has been really good. We just hit 10 million views today. Um 10 million views on eight days. Wow. There we go. Hoping to get 100 million views in the next month.

What what what platforms specifically are the most fertile ground for uh targeting your specific customer? because you can imagine that uh there's a lot of folks who are AI curious on X but then there's a much broader more viral audience more general audience on platforms like Tik Tok, YouTube, Instagram.

What's working and what is uh is the next next platform that you're going to be focused on? Yeah. Well, we're trying to go viral on every platform regardless. Um but the main thing right now is Instagram reels. Oh, Instagram reels in interesting. And what is the main value prop that you're hitting people with?

Is it still the cheat on test thing or have you evolved at all? What? Still actually interviews? Yeah, interviews. Okay. And uh has there been I This was controversial when you launched it. Is it still controversial in the comments? Are you getting flamed? Has anyone big dunked on you? And has that driven virality?

Is that actually a net positive? Instagram is not like Twitter. Like you could post the craziest on Instagram and they will still will not think it's controversial. So to make it controversial, like we have to engage in bait some other way.

Like it's cheating tool is controversial on Twitter, but on Instagram, you could you could have like a white guy say the N word 10 times and it's still not controversial enough. Like like you need crazy on Instagram. That's what we crack. Every single person here has like very great viral sense. Yeah.

And you watch the reals that do go viral. You see there's like ways that we've engagement beta the videos and this is what we'll keep doing to uh probably a billion views a month is probably how how long does it take to figure out if an intern is cracked? Is it like an hour, two hours? Just how much time do you need?

For me personally, me personally, probably like 10 minutes, but for anybody watching, probably would take like one one or two weeks. There we go. There we go. Uh, how do you guys think about how do you guys think about product marketing? Obviously, you're just going viral everywhere, getting all this attention.

How do you make sure that it that it uh I love that he's shaking his head on doesn't think about it's not about the product, it's about the attention. Attention make anything go viral. Yeah. Um, yeah.

But but but how do you the side of the street, you know, you uh make some UGC videos, make some Twitter posts, you know, you could sell anything. You know, in 2025, product doesn't matter. You know, I could jack off off the side of a building, sell some videos of it for 20 bucks each, make $2 trillion. It's crazy.

Two trillion. That That's intense. Um how do you guys think about burn? Uh is it on your mind? Is it on your mind at all? I don't know if you saw the last tweet, but as of literally like two days ago, we're still we're still cast positive. We're still profitable. We're still profitable. Let's give it up for the profit.

Let's hear it. Let's hear it. Uh it sounds uh so you're charging for the product and people are paying. Are they at all satisfied or do they feel uh like they got satisfied, bro? Like the product works.

You're either using this as a consumer and it's working cuz like like you're passing your interviews and or if it doesn't work, you're not going to complain to me because I'm going to go right to your employer and tell them, "Yo, guess who's complaining about using the product?

" Like I will get you blacklisted if you complain really. Um, where how are you thinking about how do you how are you guys thinking about product evolutions? What do you want to add to the product? Obviously, uh, you want to help people cheat on everything. Where where are you going to help people cheat next?

We don't care about like the product is going to be led by the virality of the content. We have video ideas right now that we're going to try to push for different use cases. We're going to see which ones go consistently the most viral.

If you can make something go more viral, then like you can just build the technology after you have all the attention. So, we'll figure out the exact use cases and exact niches we're going to quintuple down on once once these guys get to work.

What what uh what formats on Instagram reels are like the most modern in terms of uh consistently viral? Like you mentioned like man on the street interviews. What do you do for a living? That's always been a fertile ground.

What about uh I see a lot of those like mobile game ads that look like you know you're fighting down some sort of bridge and then you go into the game it's actually just uh match three. Um what what what are the different formats that you like to pull from?

Every week there's two new ones and at any point there's probably 10 to 20 viral trends that is happening and these cycle so quick you need to keep your finger on the pulse these things will like expire immediately.

You need to be on the ball and like like if I if I told you right now by the time people watch this on YouTube like it would have all been expired. Well, we're live so so give us give us the latest and greatest like what's going viral today.

Well, right now we got 10 million 10 million views using a Snapchat format which viral for like the last three years to be honest. Okay. And and I I I think that like we just have to get people who continuously scroll TikTok like six hours a day. Yeah. But what's the what's the actual format that you use?

Like describe the video. What is the hook? Like break it down for me like you're explaining the like the art behind the viral format. There's a caption. It starts with a face. Usually a handsome dude or a pretty girl.

They're saying, "Damn, this interview is starting with the interviewer starting with the hard questions. I should have been a CS major, not a business major. " That's engagement because people are saying like, "Bro, like CS is way harder than business.

" Then it turns around the interviewer asked like like, "Hey, how are you doing? Why should we hire you? " And then this guy uses Cluey to generate a response, but he can't read the response. So he reads it hella autistically like, "Oh, I re revel in detail.

" And and then that's that is like another conversation point like people are cooking on the guy because he uh he can't read properly. The guy is like a doing a really dumb interview using That's great. That's great. How are you guys using uh AI generated content internally?

I know a lot of these the videos that you guys are creating are just typical social media vertical video. Do you have an intern that's just generating uh basically copy and pasting making a bunch of other V3 or any of these tools rev anything clicking? Not not yet.

I think there's still like a 10% left before they cross the uncanny valley. And the biggest thing is that people need to think your video is real. That like like that is the difference between 100k views and 10 million views if people think that's real. Totally AI CEO is bearish on AI.

What about uh what Google needs like 10 more Chinese researchers to like figure it out and once once they push out the latest update then then then BO3 will be there. But right now we need real people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, well, I I mean, what about just using AI as like stock footage replacement?

Not not as the leadin for the video, not the entire video, but just like sprinkled in to illustrate a point, you know, an establishing shot of like a building, a helicopter pulling into a building. Like that that historically has been kind of something that you would reach to uh, you know, Adobe Stock video for.

V3 feels like it's there, but are you not drawing on that at all yet? If there's a viral format when we need it, maybe we'll use it. But right now, like it's it's really brain dead to go viral on Instagram. Yeah. Formats are not hard. You don't need a helicopter.

You need a guy, a camera, a really shitty camera, and you need a computer. That's it.

I mean, what about like those those kind of like AI mashups like Harry Potter Balenciaga or the uh the kangaroo with the plane ticket getting on the plane like like AI content can go viral when it's really uh when it's like inspired almost by a human.

It's not it's not entirely AI generated, but it's using the tools effectively to create something that's like still catchy. Uh do you think you'll be using any of that anytime soon? Probably very soon. We're scaling up.

Like what you see right now is probably about less than 1% of what the size we will be by the end of this summer. Like we are profitable. We're not trying to be profitable. We just keep making so much money. We can't help it. So we're really scaling this up to I'm not even trolling you.

1,000 creators are going to be shipping out content. We're doing a complete internet takeover. Okay. So, so, so, so, so why in house? Why? Like, like like what? Why do they even have to be employees? What? Couldn't you turn this into like a multi-level marketing scheme or something?

A pyramid scheme where we're going to do this again. Oh, that's what you're going to do. Okay. MLM MLM. Are you guys worried that you could be infiltrated by journalists? I'm sure they're circling the house right now. The hit pieces are going to come. You know, we're we're doing a softball interview right now.

I mean, the person who's brave enough to try to do a hit piece on the Culie Army is It's going to be scary. I bet they're dying, too. Look, more more eyeballs is better. There's no companies that ever died from a founder being too controversial.

You got deal infiltrating with genuine spies and they're still doing fine, bro. You got worker 17, guys. They're they're they're still kicking. Like, no company ever dies from being too controversial. You die because you don't make enough money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Uh speaking of making money, uh what's the pricing model right now? Are you doing anything on price discrimination? And is there a super high tier? If you get a whale, what does a cluey whale look like? Can I spend $2,000 a month on this service? Yeah, you should add a tipping feature, too.

People should be able to tip you guys if if they have a good experience and they get the job. Like really financialization, pay as you go, high interest rate loans. Just really push it. Make it sports gambling in there. Maybe just throw it all in. Yeah. I mean, it's $20 a month for consumer, $100 a year.

And and our our topline revenue is really being driven up by enterprise. enter. You're gonna have to talk to your sales team to get a custom pull. But you know, like there's a lot. Wait, are you are you serious? What what what are the is that more on the sales side? What who are the enterprise? So you sell the SDRs.

You guys laugh cuz you think I can't sell enterprise cuz I'm No, I I don't believe it. I trust like these 20 these Fortune 500 CEOs. Like these are like 35 year old dudes who sit there scrolling through Twitter laughing at my post. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it seems seems legit. It makes sense. No, I I I believe it.

But but I mean you're not going even higher tier. Like what's the $2,000 a month clearly vision for for consumer? There's a lot more we can do with more compute, but right now we're like to be honest, I didn't expect to grow this fast. The team is quite small.

I'm like spent a lot of time trying to hire more more competent engineers. We have a lot of backlog tasks that we need to fill out, especially for this last contract that we signed. So we're full-time focusing on the one big guy that we got right now. And after that um the then we'll we'll try and scale this up.

But right now, we're focused on the one one big client that we signed. Yeah. Uh talk about your compensation strategy. The people want to know. Uh you you said uh you can raise infinite capital and you're so confident. I believe you. Uh but but I'm curious to to get some more insight there.

Bro, I feel like it's so to be a company. Sorry, am I allowed to say that? No, you're not allowed. No, this is a family-friendly show. It's very stupid to be a company like trying to race to the bottom to see how little you can pay your employees. Bro, if I'm making hella money, we're all making hella money.

Like, like it's I'm trying to pay them more to see if man, like maybe tomorrow we'll start being like cash flow negative, but make money, bro. Like, I I would like to pay these guys what they're worth and the output is insane. We did 10 million UGC views in what, like eight days?

Like, like you don't see this sort of traction in any company and you don't see killers like this in any company unless you paying these like what they're worth, bro. Like, I don't know what happened to like 13 maxed out contracts. Maxed out contracts. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Uh what about devices?

I mean it seemed like this would be a natural fit for some sort of AI wearable or other platform. Um is there an app coming or are you interested in what's happening with Johnny IV and OpenAI? What's what's your take on the device world? We're very interested in the hardware space.

We've got like a million things cooking on hardware. We got people in the garage right now working on you don't you don't even know about, bro. like like like we're we're bringing manufacturing back to America and it all starts at the Kulie garage. Let's go. I love to see it.

Nobody, you know, they doubted, but you guys are re-industrializing America. You guys really are the brain down there. They're working on brain chips down there. Brain chips. That's the future. There we go. There we go. The new Neuralink. Yeah.

I mean, I I you know, there's a world in the future where you guys actually just roll up Neurolink and OpenAI. Bring them under the fluy umbrella. Definitely. It's possible. I'm excited to offer acquisitions for for both of those companies. It's in the road map. It's on the road. All right. This has been a lot of fun.

I'm excited for you guys. Uh it is uh and uh I have no doubt that you'll go from, you know, 10 million views a week, 10 million views a week to 100. Uh and I'm excited to see you guys hit that billion uh view mark very soon. So, keep it up. We are all very entertained and uh rooting for you. Sh. I love the energy.

Thanks, man. We appreciate you joining. Later, guys. Keep having fun. Bye. You know what he needs? He needs linear. He needs linear to manage all his interns. Sounds chaotic in there. Needs to use the platform purpose built to design and build the best products on earth.

I bet they already I bet they already use linear to uh meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product road maps. Go to linear and get started today.

Um, I wanted to go through the uh the Sarah Guo piece because we are having uh Sean on because he is throwing the AI engineer world's fair and he's going to be joining with some some other folks uh breaking down what's going there. Um we can we can kind of revisit this Sarah post which we talked about later.

Uh possible topics for her keynote. Apparently she completely revised everything but I really liked it. She wanted to talk about AI native UX, not just chat skins, vertical AI surge, that was something we were discussing earlier.

Um, multimodal frontier video 3D audio uh retrieval plus long-term memory, synthetic data flywheels, obviously super important.

The sim tore real robotics push uh closing the autonomy gap robust agentic workflows cell scale digital twins and programmable biology compute geopolitics world models for zero shot planning and RL environments that actually generalize generalize she has mapped out the like the the true surface area but more recently she uh authored a post an article on X uh directly on X you can read the full thing at her uh at her X page senormis on taste and I Thought this was an interesting post.

Lulu uh quote tweeted and she says, "Stripe returns errors in plain English. " Quote, "That card number doesn't look right, not error_invalid parameter because developers debug at 2 a. m. Spotify's shuffle isn't random. It avoids playing the same artist twice in five songs. True random feels feels broken.

Engineered random feels right. Notion's drag handle appears only on hover. Six dots arranged in two columns. Not three lines not always visible because permanence is clutter and six dots whisper, "Grab me. " While three lines shout, "I'm a menu. " I love it. This is taste.

The relentless, almost painful ability to know what should exist, what shouldn't, and where quality matters. It's the difference between shipping a product and shipping a point of view. The best founders understand that taste is a competitive advantage that compounds. It runs deeper than pixels.

It's in your codebase, your culture, your cap table. And I'm just thinking about the clue lead taste, which is just like the most maximal possible. Just maxing everything. He's he's maxing. He's maxing. It's true. He's such a character.

I love that we can have him on and then have someone, you know, like, you know, public company CEO on the same. We got range. Yeah, we got range. It's fun. Um, that was absolutely wild. He um uh we should probably text the families and say, you know, don't play this in front of the kids.

But um but uh he knows, you know, the level, you know, he he even in every word, he's thinking of how do I get the max amount of attention out of each incremental word. It's not just each incremental post. He knows what he's doing. Even I am like s systemically offending people in multiple ways in a single sentence.

Yeah. But at the same time, like he's entitled to be his own personality. Yeah. And and I do think, you know, not to get completely sidetracked now that we're on to the next topic, but uh I do think, you know, an enterprising young journalist might want to take a crack at Roy just because it will turn into a feud.

Y it will probably be good for both of them. It will be very It's WWE. It's WWE paywall the article. He's become a little bit of a heel of tech. Like he's somebody that people like love to hate. No, it it's like how do you take the YC playbook and just run the opposite of it?

Like it is it is the inverse of the YC playbook which is you know be loud before you're confident in your business model and confident in your product. Um the question is just like it's getting yeah it can't all be style. There needs to be some substance.

You have to actually build a product that people will be that people will love. you have to make something people want. And so, uh, we're not seeing that side right now, obviously, at least not in in public interviews.

Um, but I hope that he can turn it off incrementally and and eventually you probably need to turn it off 90% of the time because yes, attention is really really important right now, but at a certain point, you have to just deliver on the on the core metrics and the value prop or else someone else will come along and and and offer something with with Yeah.

They won't have all the all the style, but they will have the and I I I I think there's a venture capital firm out there that even now would give him an increment just seeing that interview see that and be like, I'll give this I'll give this team another 10 mil. Yeah. To go keep figuring it out, right?

I mean, attention is incredibly valuable and but he's also but he's also being smart and that he's figured he basically has the world almost convinced that he's going to burn through every dollar he has in the next two months. Oh, totally.

Which is pretty but behind the scenes he's like, "Well, I'm actually making money. " Yeah. I mean, obvious Shipman at Friend was going through a similar thing where there was that big story about, oh, he raised like a $2 million seed round and he bought a $1 million domain and everyone was like, "Oh, he's so wasteful.

" But then, of course, he would like finance the domain. And so it was really just adding like an incremental like 30k of burn per month and it wasn't really like he didn't take that whole hit upfront and then he was able to kind of build the business.

Yeah, he's making a category bet on AI companionship and having friend. com is a great is will lead to increased marketing efficiency over time as he starts to scale. So well anyways we should go back to this completely. You know what he should do? He should get a he should get a watch on bezel. Go to getbessel. com.

Really flex. Your bezel concier is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. So go to getbzel. com. Um, so Sarah goes on to say, "Think of it like running a restaurant. " It's so funny comparing the taste thing to this. It's like the most serious post.

There's the most silly uh just silly hype train over there. Uh, think of it like running a restaurant. Anyone can follow recipes, source ingredients, and serve food. But the difference between a forgettable meal and a Michelin star isn't just technique. It's the chef's pallet.

Their ability to know when something needs more acid, when a dish has one element too many, when to stop plating. Software is the same. But products aren't just feature complete. They're composed. And we see this with like uh a lot of the best software products.

The software is more like art than than science in terms of like the design the design and how you're how you're um interacting with the user. Um, so Sarah says, "It's easy to say, hard to do. Everyone claims to have taste now it becomes the new uh product market fit. A term so overused it's lost meeting. Founders drop.

We're taste driven in pitch meetings. VCs nod knowingly. Nobody defines it. Most companies confuse taste with aesthetics. They hire a design agency, pick a nice font, and call it done.

" But real taste runs deeper in the error message, the loading sites, the the loading states, the features you killed because they were merely good, not essential. Real taste hurts. It's saying no to features that would triple your TAM.

It's spending a week per of It's spending a week perfecting an interaction that users will barely notice consciously. It's choosing the harder technical path because the UX is 10 10 time 10% better. If your taste doesn't cost you something, it's not taste, it's preference. The pain compounds daily.

A Fortune 500 prospect wants a demo tomorrow. Do you ship a halfbaked feature or the half-ass collateral or lose the deal? The entire AI landscape reshuffles every 3 weeks. Do you chase every new model or trust your vision? Your competitor just shipped something flashy. Do you match it or hold your ground?

Anyway, we'll have to have Sarah on the uh on the show to recap her talk. But right now, I believe we have Shawn coming in to the studio to tell us about the AI engineering worlds fair. We're very excited to have him join the show. Thanks so much for hopping on. I wish I