Cluely's Outrage Marketing Ad Genius: The AI Cheating Tool That Went Viral And Triggered Millions

Cluely didn’t just launch an ad.

It made a statement—and backed it with a 6-figure video launch that felt more like a short film than a startup pitch.

That investment paid off fast: 7.8+ million views, 3.4K+ retweets, 20K+ likes, 10K+ bookmarks, and enough traffic to bring the site down.

The ad drew attention because it wasn’t safe. It was direct, aggressive, and designed to provoke.

This wasn’t an accident. It was a deliberate strategy to get people to react. And they did—loudly.

Why Cluely Framed Cheating as the Smartest Way to Beat the System

The most controversial idea Cluely pushed was simple: cheating is a tool.

Instead of treating it as something unethical, the ad and manifesto positioned cheating as a form of leverage—something that smart people do to expose broken systems.

This idea landed hard because it challenged long-held beliefs. Most people see effort as noble and cheating as failure. Cluely flipped that.

The manifesto claimed the future will reward leverage, not effort. It compared its product to tools like calculators and Google—things once feared, now embraced.

Many people found this offensive. But others saw it as honest. If most hiring processes are tests of trivia, and most meetings waste time, then maybe using AI to shortcut them isn’t cheating—it’s adapting.

This isn't Roy Lee's first rodeo with cheating. He did it before with his previous startup, Interview Coder, a cheating tool that got him jobs at FAANG companies like Amazon, Meta, and TikTok. Interview Coder went from $0 to $3 million ARR in 67 days.

The AI Product That Failed the Date but Won the Internet

The video didn’t show someone winning. It showed someone failing.

The main character, Cluely founder Roy Lee, goes on a date, lies about his age and job, and gets called out.

The waiter brings him grape juice instead of wine.

The woman leaves. He panics, flatters her, and then declines a second chance because he’s going to an anime convention.

It’s awkward, funny, and a little sad. But it works because it feels real.

The guy uses AI to boost his confidence, but it doesn’t fix his deeper flaws. That’s the genius of the script. It avoids painting the tech as magic. It shows it as a tool that doesn’t override personality.

The storytelling grounds the product. It moves the conversation away from hype and into something human. That makes it harder to dismiss—even for critics.

How Haters Accidentally Drove Thousands of Signups

Critics called the ad and product “Black Mirror-level dystopian,” “evil,” and “a manifesto for mediocrity.”

People posted long threads dissecting every line of the manifesto. The quote-tweets either love it or hate it but they brought him much needed eyeballs.

They questioned whether tools like Cluely could destroy trust, collapse standards, and create a future of hollow competence.

But here’s the catch: every complaint, every angry comment, made the ad spread faster. The outrage created loops of engagement. People watched just to see what was so bad. And in doing so, they helped it grow.

The creator knew this. One user commented that the ad seemed designed to make people angry. The reply by the creator was simple: “The fact that you’re watching it, getting annoyed, and commenting is why the video was designed this way.”

In a world where attention is scarce, outrage is a shortcut to awareness. Cluely didn’t just accept backlash—it engineered it.

Cluely’s Manifesto Didn’t Flinch—It Picked a Fight With “Hard Work”

Cluely didn’t water down its beliefs. The manifesto stated, without hesitation: “We want to cheat on everything.” It didn’t hide behind polite language or vague missions. It made a moral tradeoff and stuck to it.

The manifesto drew a line between tools that help people and tools that replace people. Cluely claimed to be the next step. It said that effort is overvalued, and knowing how to use AI is now more important than raw skill.

This wasn’t a subtle message. It was a call to action. And it’s why some people saw the product as the future, while others saw it as a threat.

Nikita Bier captured Cluely's ad genius in a one-liner: “If your product offends someone, it’s probably one version away from something special.”

Cluely didn’t chase universal approval. It knew that tension gets attention. The ad was a test—of values, expectations, and comfort zones. And it proved one thing clearly: in a world of noise, picking a side is the only way to be heard. And one way to pick a side is having a contrarian opinion and building a product around it.

Top Tweets of the day

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One of the best places to reach out to anyone who is a big influencer is on the place where they are the least active and not big of an influencer.

Bonus points if you can get their personal number or message them on a messenger app like Telegram, Whatsapp, iMessage, or Discord.

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Jeff Bezos once said, “Advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service.”

Then Amazon became the largest advertising company in the world, spending $20.3 billion on advertising in 2023.

This is a testament to the power of advertising in driving sales and revenue.

When someone says "we don't spend any money on advertising", read it as "we don't know how to convert paid traffic into customers."

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