Cluely’s Roy Lee on the ragebait strategy for startup marketing

Cluley’s Roy Lee has a message for startup founders: You should think harder about how to go viral.

“Typically, if you’re not deep in technology, you have to focus less deeply on distribution,” Lee told the crowd at Disrupt 2025.

But he also clarified that not everyone is cut out for this type of viral marketing.

“If you’re good at engineering, you’re probably not funny and you’re probably not going to be a content creator because it’s not in your blood. Realistically, most of these people have no chance of going viral.”

Cluley’s AI assistant shot to fame this April with a viral claim that its undetectable windows “can help you cheat on anything” — a claim that was quickly disproven when A string of proctoring services showed that they could actually detect the use of AI assistants. But within a few months the company was Andreessen raised $15 million from HorowitzThe crowded AI assistant is becoming one of the most visible products in the space

It’s part of Lee’s talent to go viral as soon as he frames it, which often means making a lot of people very angry with him. “I think I’m particularly good at framing myself as controversial,” he said on stage. “I do a lot of things that are different. And what I do is different, I frame it through the filter of my voice. And my voice is naturally very annoying to a lot of people.”

For Lee, this is part of a broader theory of social media, where attention is the only currency.

“Fame is a thing of the past,” Lee said. “You can try to be The New York Times and protect your ironclad reputation, but in reality you’ve got Sam Altman talking about hot guys on Timeline and you’ve driven Elon Musk crazy.”

“You just have to understand that the world is trending in a different place,” he continued, “where you have to be extreme, you have to be authentic and you have to be personal.”

It’s hard to say how well that strategy is working, though. When asked about Cluley’s revenue numbers or user numbers, Lee expressed discomfort.

“What I’ve learned is that you should never share income numbers because if you do well, no one will talk about how well you’re doing. And if you do poorly, people will only talk about how badly you’re doing,” Lee said. “I would say we’re doing better than I expected, but it’s not the fastest growing company ever.”