Cluely Thesis on Virality and Hype

The Guarantee of X Virality

In the world of tech twitter, a post that deserves to go viral will go viral, without exception, IF seen by at least a few thousand people.

This is perhaps the single most important truth I have learned during my entire time on this platform.

People here are very curious and eager to discover and share new things.

Once you can cross a few thousand views, the reposts and engagement will take you to exactly where you deserve.

On X, follower count largely doesn’t matter past 10k. Someone with 200k followers might average 2k views. This algo is very content-dependent.

FACT: With enough of an organic base (~10k followers), viral content will go viral.

So what’s the point of “viral sense?”

The sole function of “viral sense” as I describe it is to make a deserving tweet go even more viral, to take it from 200k - 2 mil views. I am very good at this.

You cannot, however, make an inherently undeserving tweet viral.

Viral sense gets you from 1→100, not 0 → 1

TBPN posts dozens of clips a day from their podcast, with views ranging from as low as 5k to as high as 500k. There is a single reason for this: some of the content does not deserve to go viral.

3 TBPN tweets on the same day, ranging from 5-500k views

What is the benefit of going viral?

There are only two:

• Top of funnel for users

• To get your mission seen by potential hires

Importantly, virality =/= top of funnel.

Only converting content will get you downloads, and you must make sure your viral bets are converting, or at least have a chance to be in the future.

In fact, some of our meme viral videos with the most views (~50M+) generate almost zero downloads, despite being viral.

49M views on a UGC video, <100 downloads

They were early experiments on the content format that could potentially turn converting later.

The case for capturing early mindshare for conversions later exists, but it is only as strong as the product. If your product is not comparable to the leaders of what is out there, mindshare will not help you.

Virality can give people a reason to try your product, but it will not give them a reason to stay.

The only reason to stay is if your product is reasonably close to the best solution out there for the problem you are solving.

So, the benefit of going viral is if your product is reasonably close to the best solution out there for the problem you are advertising that it solves.

When is top-of-funnel useful?

In the following scenarios:

• You’re post-PMF and need users to grow

• You’re pre-PMF and need feedback to build

There comes a point where the priority switches from building to growing. Coca-Cola doesn’t need a new formula and Docusign doesn’t need a new signing method.

Post-PMF, companies are correctly less focused on building core product and much more on top of funnel.

And of course, a pre-PMF company with no users absolutely needs users for feedback. This is the classic startup advice: launch, get users, get feedback, and iterate.

Just launch bro

When is top-of-funnel not useful?

When you have enough feedback to know how to iterate, but are still in the middle of iterating.

At a certain point, the answer is to build, not to acquire more users. All truly scalable growth must be product led, without exception.

While virality can do many things, it cannot serve as the sole growth engine of a company without a product.

If you want to grow a company, your product must be good enough to grow itself eventually.

Where does Cluely stand?

Cluely has more than enough consistent usage that we can reliably test every single one of our new features against a pool of users and know where the product is retentive and where it is not.

Cluely is post-PMF in a few areas. Interviews, certain quizzes and homework that require an undetectable AI. Enterprise clients who we’ve spent time building out custom workflows for.

But conquering any of these will not end in the grander vision we have our eyes set on: the ultimate computer interface for multi-modal AI.

We need faster magic moments in larger, tangential, consumer markets.

To that end, we’ve spent the last few months working on making sure the product works for our more general users. There is a magic moment that exists with Cluely, but it does not exist for all the markets that interest us, yet.

The truth is, it is actually quite hard to build software that feels truly magical to everyone. It takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of engineering talent.

But we are very close.

How long?

I would say two weeks before a resurgence.

We are still iron-ing out some things, but the new Cluely experience will be incomparably better than what it used to be.

In markets we are already dominant in, it will be the best software available.

In markets we’re interested in, we will have parity with industry leaders.

The version of Cluely I envision is live very, very soon.

Join us at cluely.com/careers

Edit: In hindsight I realize I shared nothing about how to go viral on X. Stay tuned I guess.

Best,

Roy