Cluely & the Virality Era → Distribution First, Product Later

What if “cheating” wasn’t a scandal, but a strategy? For Cluely, that’s the whole thesis. Founded by 21-year-old Roy Lee, expelled from Columbia for building an AI tool that aced job interviews, Cluely has grown from expulsion story to hyper-viral startup in just 10 weeks.

The core product: an undetectable AI assistant that watches your screen, listens in real time, and whispers contextual help in high-pressure moments.

It’s not just audacious tech. It’s brand as provocation, distribution as design.‍

Virality as Strategy

Cluely didn’t launch with a productivity tool. It launched with a dare: cheat your next coding interview. The premise was polarizing—and instantly shareable.

What made it work wasn’t just audacity. It was narrative clarity. The story didn’t hinge on features like “context-aware prompting.” It said one thing, loud and clear: no one will know you’re using this. That wasn’t a tagline. It was product-as-story. Outrage wasn’t a side effect, they were looking for it.

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Platform-Native Distribution

Lee skipped X and LinkedIn. Instead, Cluely focused where cultural velocity actually lives: TikTok and Instagram. Friction is low. Loops are fast. In a recent interview, he described X and LinkedIn as “two years behind” on virality—a take that, frankly, holds up. LinkedIn is just now warming up to video content. Wild.

We’ve seen it firsthand. With 2fifty, Instagram has been a breakout channel—nearly 50k followers, multiple Reels crossing the million-view mark. Not because we chased trends, but because we met the format on its own terms. And, not surprisingly, one of the reels with over 70M views, is one that showcases the way sausages are made, which it's pretty much a perfect fit for the internet.

Intern-Powered Media Engine

Fifty interns. Daily content. Sounds like a stunt. Works like a system.

Now zoom out: 50 interns posting daily on TikTok and Instagram. Even if each clip only nets 1,000 views, that’s 50,000 a day—1.5 million a month. Volume becomes inevitability. Something’s going viral.

Cluely turns that volume into a game. Bounties for virality. Rewards for traction. Gamified distribution as strategy. It’s not just smart—it’s generational. Gen-Z founders aren’t adapting to platforms. They’re native to the logic of the feed. The internet’s about to get weirder—and a whole lot more viral.

I should be asking my team to post something every week at least hahah

Momentum > Product-Market Fit

No fixed roadmap. Just rapid sensing of cultural feedback. Cluely didn’t wait to prove utility, it just weaponized use-cases and turned them into a 'impossible-to-ignore' content engine.

What We Learned

Distribution can come before stability. This is one of our biggest lessons of the year. Get the audience and clients first, then you make the product.

Virality is not luck, it’s pretty much logistics and numbers.

Cultural relevance is eclipsing polish in early-stages.

Provocation accelerates learning, and my god the algo loves provocation.

Attention isn’t just the means, it’s the material.

How We’re Exploring This

We’re not here to provoke, although we should (Maybe?). But we are certainly paying attention.

At EL FIN, we’re treating this cycle as a systems test: prototyping brand fragments built to move, experimenting with short-form presence with our client's communication, and watching what happens when you distribute before you stabilize with our services and products. Not really looking to chase clout, but mainly to find out insights we can push further.

If attention is the new infrastructure, and it's here to stay, how might we strategize and make its load-bearing points?

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