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- Cluely AI: UGC Strategy for Viral AI Marketing Domination (10M+ Views a Day)
Cluely AI: UGC Strategy for Viral AI Marketing Domination (10M+ Views a Day)
PLUS: I Make $3M ARR From 20 Apps
Roy Lee is not your average startup founder. He built a product that helped people cheat technical interviews, got expelled from Columbia University for it, and then raised a $5.3 million seed round from Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures to build something even bigger.
That product is Cluelyâa tool designed to let users "cheat on everything."
But Cluely isn't just a tool. It's the centerpiece of a bold, calculated, high-volume viral marketing strategy.
Roy and his team have managed to rack up millions of views with brand-new social media accounts, turn disciplinary hearings into press, and build a creator farm that churns out hundreds of videos per day.
This is a teardown of exactly how they did it.
He Got Rescinded From Harvard, Expelled From Columbia, and Still Closed $5M
Roy's story begins with rejection. After being accepted to Harvard in high school, he was caught sneaking out past curfew on a school field trip. The incident led to a suspension, which Harvard found out aboutâand promptly rescinded his offer. The news was kept secret by his family, and Roy spent a year isolated at home, which is when he learned to code.
Later, Roy applied to dozens of colleges again and got rejected everywhere except Columbia. His suspicion? Columbia uses the Coalition Application instead of the Common App, which may have helped him slip through. There, he met Neil, who would become his co-founder. The two connected after Roy spent weeks asking smart students if they wanted to build a startup.
Their first big move was a software product called Interview Coder, which used LLMs to help users cheat on technical interviews.
Roy used it himself to land internship offers at Amazon, Meta, TikTok, and Capital One. These werenât real applicationsâthey were part of a deliberate campaign. The goal was to record, post, and prove the tool worked.
After getting the Amazon offer, Roy turned it down preemptively to avoid legal exposure. Meta and Capital One rescinded offers when the videos gained traction. Columbia opened a disciplinary hearing and eventually expelled him after he posted internal documents online.
How Roy Turned Getting Blacklisted Into a Startup Superpower
Roy didnât just accept the risksâhe amplified them.
His belief: once something goes viral, institutional backlash is neutered. That bet paid off.
"Virality protected me from further punishment."
He knew that once the video crossed a certain attention threshold, there would be more leverage than liability.
Before the video blew up, it sat at 15,000 views for weeks.
During that period, Roy posted anxious brain dumps, wondering if he had thrown away his career for nothing.
Even his co-founders told him to stop.
But once it took off, everything changed. The controversy became insulation, not exposure.
Interview Coder was built in one week and debugged in another. It was simpleâshockingly so.
It was a few lines of code on top of existing frameworks. The tool displayed answers during interviews in a translucent overlay that was undetectable to screen sharing, tab switching, or keyboard shortcuts.
But the product was never meant to last. It was a product designed to die. As soon as companies adapted their interview methods, the tool would lose its relevance.
The real value was the attention it captured, which Roy converted into $5.3 million in seed funding to launch Cluely.
Cluely took the core idea of overlayed AI and expanded it into a general-purpose tool that can "cheat on everything": meetings, sales calls, presentations, and more.
The phrase itself was engineered to provoke curiosity.
"What does 'cheat on everything' even mean?" Roy left it intentionally ambiguous.
Roy published over 1,000 tweets in 3 months to reverse-engineer what made a tweet go viral.
He focused on controversy and polarizing statements.
His benchmark: if half the audience doesnât hate it, itâs not viral enough.
On Twitter (now X), that strategy worked. Early on, Interview Coder was seen as a David vs. Goliath momentâa student fighting back against an outdated industry practice.
Later, as Royâs account grew, he received more hate but also more attention. He embraced it.
"All press is good press," he said. The key wasnât avoiding controversyâit was maximizing it.
He carefully separated his online persona from his real-life identity as online is not real life. Itâs theater, and he played the role to perfection.
4 Million Views in 1 Week: Inside Cluelyâs Insane UGC Machine
Cluelyâs Instagram secret: a viral content system run like a factory.
Within the first week of launch, they hit 4 million views using accounts that had zero prior traction.
Their model: if you make 100 different videos, one will go viral.
If you then repost that same video across 100 accounts, 20 to 30 of them will go viral too.
"The algorithm isnât random; itâs just not public."
The Exact Steps They Took to Build a Viral Content Farm
1. Hire a Dedicated Idea Guy
They started with someone whose sole job was to come up with 100 video ideas per batch.
This person needed high screen time (>6+ hours of scrolling) and an innate sense for what could go viral.
2. Recruit UGC Creators with Direct Outreach
Most mid-sized creators arenât paid well. Offering $20â40 per video plus $1,000 bonuses for million-view content is often more attractive than brand deals.
DMs labeled "PAID CONTENT OPPORTUNITY" get high response rates.
If accounts donât get replies, they just buy TikTok/Instagram accounts with 10K+ followers.
A dormant TikTok or Instagram with 10K+ followers has more reach than a new one. Itâs a shortcut to legitimacy and algorithmic trust.
3. Know Who to Target
Creators with 10Kâ100K followers who post often are the sweet spot.
They also target hot female creators regardless of follower countâ"a pretty face is a viral hook" in itself.
4. Streamline with a One-Page Content Brief
Each creator receives a simple one-pager:
Talk to the camera
Donât mention @cluely in the first five seconds
Make it relevant to what Cluely does
Creators are given freedom. The point isnât to micromanageâtheyâre handed seed ideas and told to remix them.
5. Scale With Capital
"Your ability to scale is strictly determined by the capital you have," Roy says.
Their internal team of 50 interns creates 4 videos per person, per day. Thatâs 200 videos daily.
6. Build a Coaching System
Every creator is assigned a content coach. Weekly meetings review performance and identify improvements.
Over time, superstar creators emerge who dominate impressions by 90/10, a modified Pareto.
7. Pay Bonuses for Performance
The $1,000-per-million-views bonus incentivizes creators to iterate and go big. This ties creator success directly to view count.
8. Set Posting Volume Targets
They aim for high-frequency posting: 200 videos/day is the internal benchmark. Roy treats video production like product iteration.
9. Use Instagram/TikTok Accounts as Distribution, Not Brands
Accounts are disposable. If one gets flagged or shadowbanned, another one takes its place. The accounts are delivery mechanisms, not long-term assets.
How to Reverse Engineer Cluelyâs Entire UGC Network
Cluely made itself hard to track, but not impossible. You can uncover their strategy with the right methods:
1. Use Captions as Breadcrumbs
Search for known captions like "how life feels...... cluely" on Google.

Cluely Caption #1 - "how life feels...... cluely"
These captions like "I shouldâve studied CS instead of finance" are found when someone from Cluely's team shares them on their socials without sharing their account names.

Cluely Caption #2 - "I shouldâve studied CS instead of finance"
Then filter by "past week" or "past month" using Tools > Time > Custom range.

Cluely Caption #1 - "how life feels cluely instagram" on Google
This shows you posts within the last 7 days or 30 days.

Cluely Caption #2 - "I should've studied CS instead of finance instagram" on Google
These let you find their UGC creators so you can copy their strategy:

Cluely UGC Intern - @lexicluely

Cluely UGC Intern - @andrewhackslife
2. Track Referral Links
Most of Cluely's creators have cluely.com/?ref=
in their bios.

Cluely UGC Intern - @cluelymaxxing
A simple Google search for that string, combined with "instagram," will surface many of the affiliated UGC pages.

Cluely Affiliate Ref
3. Filter for Reels, Not Posts
Use advanced Google search: cluely.com? AND 100 likes site:instagram.com/reel/ -site:instagram.com/p/ -site:instagram.com/tv/
to isolate Reels.

Cluely Reels - Find Instagram Reels promoting Cluely
Turns out, Cluely uses Meme Pages for short-lived virality.
Cluely rents meme page placements for 24â48 hours. Pages like @intr0vert.vikx (635K followers) post their content, then delete it to keep the feed clean since social media content is only good for 24-48 hours unless its YouTube.

Cluely Hired Meme Page @intr0vert.vikx
This creates temporary but massive visibility spikes and gets Cluely the downloads it needs. Quittr app used a similar strategy recently to turn $100 into $21,758 by paying for promotion with a meme page that posts 300x per day.
4. Exploit Google Cache
Even when meme pages remove Cluelyâs content, Google often caches the original link. If you act fast, you can find content that is no longer publicly listed.

Cluely Videos - Removed from Instagram but visible in Google Cache
5. Pattern Match Influencer Names
Once you find one Cluely affiliate, look at their followers, follows, or similar content. Chances are they were part of the same outreach campaign.
For example, @cluelymaxxing has "cluely" in the prefix. Some accounts might have "cluely" in the suffix and so on.
6. Observe Video Themes
Common content topics include AI vs. humans, tech career regret, or fantasy matchups (e.g. "1 Gorilla vs 100 men") used as bait hooks.

Cluely - 1 Gorilla vs 100 men trendjacking
These are all part of Cluelyâs creative pattern playbook.
The Ghost AI Overlay: Cluelyâs Secret UX Advantage
The core Cluely experience is a translucent AI overlay that reacts to your screen and audio in real time. This new UX is not just a technical innovation; itâs a taste innovation.
The product is undetectable by screen share, tab switches, or system shortcuts. The team is optimizing latency and response time by planning to self-host LLMs and compress input data to minimize delay.
Their long-term moat is user-specific data. Cluely is building ultra-personalized models that learn your tone, your job, your writing style, and your real-world use cases. Eventually, these will outperform generic tools like ChatGPT in every user-specific task.
"The Internet Is Fake, So I Can Be Loud": Royâs Growth Gospel
Roy Lee understands the rules of the internetâand he plays to win. His online persona is deliberately crafted: polarizing, unapologetic, and engineered for virality. Offline, heâs measured and private. Online, heâs a spectacleâand thatâs the point.
But this didnât happen overnight. Roy built his risk tolerance like a startup scales momentumâstep by step:
First, launch a tool anonymously.
Then, attach his name.
Then, film himself cheating.
Then, leak disciplinary documents from his university.
Every move invited more backlashâand more attention. But with each escalation, the downside felt smaller. The upside? Asymmetric.
Cluely isnât just another AI tool. Itâs a thesis: that hiring as we know it is broken, that prompting will die, and that AI should work passively in the backgroundâreading context, predicting needs, and acting without input. Cluely is building toward that ambient future now.
The real moat isnât the tech alone. Itâs the flywheel: original UX, proprietary user data, and an unmatched distribution engine. Fifty interns. Two hundred videos a day. Millions of views. At this scale, virality is inevitable. And when attention compounds, product quality becomes a secondary concern. Distribution is the product.
This isnât a traditional SaaS play. Itâs an AI-native, internet-native movement built with speed, taste, and audacityâand itâs designed to dismantle legacy systems in broad daylight.
Cluely doesnât aim to win quietly. Itâs built to win loud.
By watching in real time, youâre not just observing a companyâyouâre studying the blueprint for how to dominate modern consumer markets. In a world ruled by algorithms, volume and velocity beat pedigree.
Cluely figured that out early. Now theyâre sprinting to be on everyone's TikTok feed.
Top Tweets of the day
1/
Ideal date/timestamp UX:
âą <1s: Just now
âą 1-59s: âNâs ago
âą 1-59min: âNâm ago
âą 1-23h: âNâh ago
âą >24h: âMay 30â for current year dates, âDec 12, 2024â for all non current year datesBonus: Add a hover tooltip to show the exact timestamps in UTC and local timezone đ
â Steven Tey (@steventey)
4:25 PM âą May 30, 2025
Vercel has an incredible UX.
Not a lot of people get UI, Design, and UX. You can easily spot a product built by a marketer like Clickfunnels vs a product built by someone who understands UX like Linear.
Speed. UX. Design. In that order.
2/
implement difficult (but interesting) projects. stuff ~20% above your current ability
it raises your ceiling for solving hard problems, it makes you learn new stuff, and it makes you very efficient at easier problems
repeat over a long period of time
â danb (@dnbt777)
6:10 PM âą Apr 20, 2025
Good framework. Its called growing pains for a reason.
3/
Misplaced Guilt = Higher Reply Rates
The boomer prospect ignores sales reps all day.
But when she says:
âhope this isnât annoyingđâ
he feels bad ignoring her.
Guilt becomes action.
His emotional conflict becomes your pipeline.
â caiden (@zephyr946)
3:48 PM âą May 31, 2025
Caiden got his previous account banned but came back with a banger on a new account.
This woman does not exist.
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