Cluely went viral in two steps. First, co-founder and CEO Roy Lee used his own X account as the launch channel. His March 2025 thread about being suspended from Columbia has 3.4 million views, and the April 20 "cheat on everything" launch video has 13.2 million. Then Cluely built a content operation around him: 50 interns advertised at $50 an hour, more than 60 creators housed in San Francisco, and over 700 "clippers" who reposted Cluely clips from their own accounts and were paid per view, never per video.
The funding followed the attention: a $5.3 million seed round in April 2025 and a $15 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in June 2025, at a valuation near $120 million according to two investors who spoke to TechCrunch. Users did not follow at the same rate. Lee wrote that one UGC video got 49 million views and fewer than 100 downloads, and in March 2026 he retracted the $7 million ARR figure he gave in 2025: the June 2025 number was $5.2 million.
Every Cluely figure below comes from a public source: Lee's posts, Cluely's own site, a16z's investment note, TechCrunch and the San Francisco Standard. View and follower counts were read from public profiles on October 1, 2026.
Most of Cluely's 2025 milestones were announced in Lee's posts on X. The oldest TikTok post still visible logged out is from July 22, 2025; seven older ones are hidden. Post dates are in UTC; view counts are as of October 1, 2026.
Lee posts on X that Columbia kicked him out over his stand against LeetCode interviews. He had built Interview Coder, a tool for cheating on them; TechCrunch reports it as a suspension. The thread has 3.4M views.
Cluely launches with a film of Lee using it to lie on a date, captioned "Cluely is out. cheat on everything." It has 13.2M views on X.
Co-led by Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures. Lee tells TechCrunch that ARR passed $3M earlier that month.
Lee posts that he is hiring 50 interns in San Francisco at $50 an hour. The post has 5.0M views.
Two investors tell TechCrunch the post-money valuation is about $120M. Neither a16z nor Cluely confirmed it.
Lee's enterprise thread gets 3.9M views. A week later he tells TechCrunch ARR doubled to about $7M.
Lee's clipping thread says Cluely hired over 700 clippers. The San Francisco Standard counts 16 employees and more than 60 creators living in San Francisco.
The official TikTok opens with intern-life skits and a fox mascot called Clue. Its biggest summer post, on August 5, has 1.4M views.
Cluely starts a numbered office sitcom. Episode 1 has 2.7M TikTok views, and episode 9, posted November 6, has 4.3M: the account's most viewed visible video.
In The Cluely Thesis on Virality and Hype, Lee says he gained 150K X followers in six months and that one UGC video got 49M views and fewer than 100 downloads.
TechCrunch reports the move from "cheat on everything" to an AI note-taker. Lee said Cluely is "not the fastest growing company of all time."
Lee posts Cluely's June 2025 Stripe figures: $5.2M ARR and a $6.3M run rate. He adds that Cluely is profitable.
The series is still running. Episode 35 has 2.2M views on Instagram and 107.7K on TikTok.
We found no announced funding round after the June 2025 Series A as of October 1, 2026.
Cluely's content came from four groups: the founder, a growth team and interns, in-house creators and paid clippers. The founder made the moments, the team and creators made the videos, and clippers multiplied every clip across their own accounts. a16z's investment note (June 20, 2025) credits Cluely's early traction to viral campaigns and "systematic user-generated content", and says its growth team was 7 people who each had grown audiences of over 100,000 followers.
The founder's role is the one most brands can't copy. Lee said on a16z's podcast, as TechCrunch reported in June 2025, that "algorithms promote the most controversial things," and that he applies the same principles on X and LinkedIn. The launch film below, posted by Lee on April 20, 2025, has 13.2 million views on X.
Cluely paid clippers only for views. In his July 17, 2025 thread, Lee said Cluely had hired over 700 clippers and paid them "$0 per video", only a bonus per 1,000 views. He did not publish the rate; our guide to clipping campaigns lists the rates other programs publish. The rest of the thread is the playbook:
Sources disagree on what Cluely's creators were paid. A widely shared breakdown from Startup Spells (June 1, 2025) says Cluely paid $20 to $40 per video plus $1,000 for a million views, and that 50 interns each posted 4 videos a day. It cites no source for these figures, and we found no primary source for a per-video rate or a daily posting volume. Lee's own thread says clippers got nothing per video, and the only published wage is the $50 an hour in his intern post.
Can you still join Cluely's UGC or clipper program? Not through any public listing we found as of October 1, 2026. Cluely's careers page says it has no open roles, and its Ashby job board still lists four jobs, none for creators or clippers: a founding engineer, an engineering intern, a videographer and a customer support specialist. We found no public sign-up page for the clipping program. To clip for other brands, see how to become a clipper.
Cluely's own accounts post comedy skits, not product demos. On Cluely's TikTok, 61 of the account's 68 videos were visible to a logged-out visitor on October 1, 2026, with 27.7 million views between them. Only 3 of those 61 captions mention a product feature, such as meeting notes or follow-up emails.
| Views | Videos posted | |
|---|---|---|
| Jul 2025 | 1,544,800 | 7 |
| Aug 2025 | 4,106,300 | 17 |
| Sep 2025 | 6,292,900 | 6 |
| Oct 2025 | 2,080,300 | 5 |
| Nov 2025 | 6,396,000 | 6 |
| Dec 2025 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2026 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2026 | 1,000,000 | 1 |
| Mar 2026 | 1,608,000 | 2 |
| Apr 2026 | 1,100,000 | 1 |
| May 2026 | 325,300 | 3 |
| Jun 2026 | 238,300 | 2 |
| Jul 2026 | 741,300 | 3 |
| Aug 2026 | 1,430,000 | 4 |
| Sep 2026 | 642,100 | 3 |
Summer 2025: interns and a mascot. The first visible posts are intern-life skits, then a storyline about Clue, a fox mascot with its own tagged account, going through a breakup. Of 26 videos posted before September 8, 2025, the median got 111,000 views.
From September 8, 2025: a numbered office sitcom. Recurring characters, an office setting and episode numbers. The 21 numbered episodes on TikTok got 18.9 million views, 68% of the account's visible total, with a median of 552,000 views. The other 40 posts had a median of 133,000. The episode numbers run to 35, so some episodes never appeared on the TikTok grid.
Episode 9, posted on November 6, 2025, is the account's most viewed visible TikTok, at 4.3 million views:
Cluely posts the same episodes on both platforms, and Instagram wins by a wide margin. Its Instagram account had 509,000 followers on October 1, 2026, against 123,800 on TikTok and 54,359 on X. Its 12 latest reels, posted between August 25 and October 1, 2026, had 14.1 million views, with a median of 848,000. In the same weeks, the TikTok account posted 6 videos with 1.5 million views in total.
The Instagram versions got 2.5 to 20 times the TikTok views. Instagram's larger following explains part of that, but not a 20x gap.
The views produced funding and attention faster than they produced users. Lee's own figures show the gap: in his September 2025 essay he says Cluely had amassed hundreds of millions of views, and gives the example of a UGC video with 49 million views and fewer than 100 downloads. His conclusion there is that virality gives people a reason to try a product, not a reason to stay, and that scalable growth has to be product-led.
About $5.2 million ARR in June 2025, by Lee's own later account. The figures he gave at the time were higher, and he corrected them in public:
TechCrunch reported the retraction the same day. At TechCrunch Disrupt in October 2025, Lee had already said that founders should never share revenue numbers.
The only public figure is about $120 million post-money after the June 2025 Series A. It comes from two investors who were not part of the deal, as reported by TechCrunch; a16z and Cluely did not confirm it. Total funding is $20.3 million across the seed and Series A.
Chungin "Roy" Lee (CEO), Neel Shanmugam (COO) and Alex Chen (CTO) co-founded Cluely in early 2025. Lee and Shanmugam had built Interview Coder and were suspended from Columbia; the SF Standard describes Chen as the only co-founder who graduated from Columbia. On marketing, a16z describes a growth team of 7 people, each with over 100,000 followers of their own. The SF Standard also reported a $100,000 camera in the office. Besides creator housing and the $50 intern rate, it is the only spending detail we found.
Most of Cluely's machine works without a provocative founder. These are the parts that transfer, with our guides on each:
Lee's power law holds well beyond Cluely, if less extreme. Across 1.7 million TikTok posts and 1.2 million Instagram videos posted from October 2025 to August 2026 by accounts tracked in viral.app, the top 1% of videos got 77% of all TikTok views and 72% of Instagram views. Among accounts with at least 10 videos in that period (about 24,000 on TikTok and 16,000 on Instagram), the top 1% of accounts got 57 to 59% of the views and the bottom half got less than 0.4%. German politicians in 2025 showed a milder version: their top 1% of videos took 49% of the views. For a creator program, the point is the same as Lee's: find the few creators who carry the views and pay them well.
"Cheat on everything" made Cluely famous, and by November 2025 the product was a meeting note-taker. Lee said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt that Cluely may have launched too early. A provocative hook brings in an audience the product then has to keep, and the people a provocation attracts may not be your customers.
Lee told other founders not to track clipping ROI. The 49-million-view UGC video Lee cites, with fewer than 100 downloads, is the case for tracking results. Measure views per creator, then installs or sign-ups per campaign, before you scale the budget.
A revenue figure given to a reporter became the story eight months later, when Lee retracted it. If you publish campaign results, publish ones you can show.
The FTC's Endorsement Guides FAQ says a connection between an endorser and the marketer that viewers wouldn't expect, such as payment, should be disclosed. It also says employees who promote their employer's product should disclose the relationship, that a disclosure should be made the same way as the endorsement (on screen or out loud in a video), and that advertisers need programs to train and monitor the people posting for them. With 700 reposting accounts, that monitoring is the hard part. Put the disclosure rule in the brief and check it before you pay.
Cluely's views and downloads drifted far apart, and only tracking shows that early. viral.app tracks every creator's public videos on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat in one UGC analytics dashboard, and calculates payouts from the rules you set: a base fee per video, a CPM rate, bonuses by view tier and a cap.
Create a viral.app account to see which of your creators carry the views.
What about 390,000 tracked TikToks, Reels, Shorts and Facebook videos show about picking UGC ad winners early, and how to boost them as Spark Ads and partnership ads without paying creators for paid views.
Daniel Shtabinsky
Growth Analyst
How TikTok keyword controls turn high-volume UGC from FYP-only reach into searchable, intent-led discovery.
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Co-Founder
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