Roy@im_roy_lee
[EXPLAINING THE CLUELY PIVOT (+ A BRIEF HISTORY)]
9 months ago, i built Interview Coder, an undetectable translucent desktop overlay that lets you cheat on leetcode interviews.
i knew it had viral potential, and posted about it constantly until I did go viral.
then I did it again. and again and again.
and then it made me ~$1 million dollars in profit. holy fuck!
apparently you can build a gpt wrapper, go hella viral, and become a millionaire.
could I do it again, but bigger?
so, I started cluely with 2 big questions:
> where else could this overlay be useful outside of leetcode interviews?
> can I keep getting this much attention?
the second answer came immediately. yes, I am very good at getting attention.
and thanks to the attention, we got hundreds of thousands of users ridiculously quick, and were able to use the data to figure out that our stickiest power users were using it in meetings.
so we just built for that.
the deeper learning, though, is that we seem to have cracked the formula for organic virality.
no other tech startup has ever been able to do it this reliably or at this scale.
it’s really not luck, and most importantly, if done right, it works to grow companies.
interview coder proved it, and cluely continues to prove it, growing faster than ever in a “saturated” space.
the world is vast.
there are tens of millions of people in meetings every day, and 90% of them don't know what an ai notetaker is.
the market is big enough that you can be the most controversial person in the world and still win, as long as you can deliver the magic moment to the user.
