Cluely AI: UGC Strategy for Viral AI Marketing Domination (10M+ Views a Day)

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 Cluely—a 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He Got Rescinded From Harvard, Expelled From Columbia, and Still Closed $5M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 The incident led to a suspension, which Harvard found out about—and promptly rescinded his offer.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 weren’t real applications—they 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 Meta and Capital One rescinded offers when the videos gained traction.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 didn’t just accept the risks—he amplified them.

His belief: once something goes viral, institutional backlash is neutered. That bet paid off.

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.

The Viral Tool Was Built in 1 Week—And Designed to Self-Destruct

Interview Coder was built in one week and debugged in another. It was simple—shockingly 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.

How Roy Engineered Viral Tweets That Dominated Tech Twitter

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 doesn’t hate it, it’s not viral enough.

On Twitter (now X), that strategy worked. Early on, Interview Coder was seen as a David vs. Goliath moment—a student fighting back against an outdated industry practice.

Later, as Roy’s account grew, he received more hate but also more attention. He embraced it.

"All press is good press," he said. The key wasn’t avoiding controversy—it was maximizing it.

He carefully separated his online persona from his real-life identity as online is not real life. It’s theater, and he played the role to perfection.

4 Million Views in 1 Week: Inside Cluely’s Insane UGC Machine

Cluely’s 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.

The “100 to 1” Rule of Viral Content

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 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 aren’t paid well. Offering $20–40 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 don’t 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. It’s a shortcut to legitimacy and algorithmic trust.

3. Know Who to Target

Creators with 10K–100K followers who post often are the sweet spot.

They also target hot female creators regardless of follower count—"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

• Don’t mention @cluely in the first five seconds

• Make it relevant to what Cluely does

Creators are given freedom. The point isn’t to micromanage—they’re 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. That’s 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 Cluely’s 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.

These captions like "I should’ve studied CS instead of finance" are found when someone from Cluely's team shares them on their socials without sharing their account names.

Then filter by "past week" or "past month" using Tools > Time > Custom range.

This shows you posts within the last 7 days or 30 days.

These let you find their UGC creators so you can copy their strategy:

1. @lexicluely

2. @andrewhackslife

3. @cluelymaxxing

2. Track Referral Links

Most of Cluely's creators have cluely.com/?ref= in their bios.

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

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.

Turns out, Cluely uses Meme Pages for short-lived virality.

Cluely rents meme page placements for 24–48 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.

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 Cluely’s content, Google often caches the original link. If you act fast, you can find content that is no longer publicly listed.

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.

These are all part of Cluely’s creative pattern playbook.

The Ghost AI Overlay: Cluely’s 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; it’s 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": Roy’s Growth Gospel

Roy Lee understands the rules of the internet—and he plays to win. His online persona is deliberately crafted: polarizing, unapologetic, and engineered for virality. Offline, he’s measured and private. Online, he’s a spectacle—and that’s the point.

But this didn’t happen overnight. Roy built his risk tolerance like a startup scales momentum—step 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 backlash—and more attention. But with each escalation, the downside felt smaller. The upside? Asymmetric.

Cluely isn’t just another AI tool. It’s a thesis: that hiring as we know it is broken, that prompting will die, and that AI should work passively in the background—reading context, predicting needs, and acting without input. Cluely is building toward that ambient future now.

The real moat isn’t the tech alone. It’s 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 isn’t a traditional SaaS play. It’s an AI-native, internet-native movement built with speed, taste, and audacity—and it’s designed to dismantle legacy systems in broad daylight.

Cluely doesn’t aim to win quietly. It’s built to win loud.

By watching in real time, you’re not just observing a company—you’re 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 they’re sprinting to be on everyone's TikTok feed.

Hat tip to EO, Namanh, and Roy for the insights.

Top Tweets of the day

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