Cluely’s Roy Lee said, in a founder group conversation, that anger behavior carefully designed and consciously embraced is a legal development lever for startups in dire need of attention. He commented on how “irritation expertise” – content built to entice strong reactions – can compress years of brand commitment into days if a squad has the stomach and the talent to use the denial.
Inside the rage-bait playbook for attention-starved startups
Lee’s theory hinges on a startup quandary we’ve seen repeatedly. Delivery is destiny. His plan opens with a polarizing assertion that closes the scroll – something short, folksy, and hard to neglect. Then follows the conscious framing that motivates opposition, not to win any statement but to steer the sound love engines of quote-tweets, stitches, and scrapes.
The real KPI isn’t upvotes. It’s responses, duets, and reflections about pieces that sustain the loop for the initial ignition. His mix is clear on a founder basis; in his idea, several technically creative teams fight to establish conveying public narratives. Material that will transmit varying requires rhythm, style, and heat resilience – rather than excellent writing. “Attention is the solitary commodity!” is how he condenses it. A maxim that influences the acceleration and sound intensity of Cluely’s launches.
A case study in going loud with provocative AI claims
Cluely went viral on a claim that its AI’s “undetectable” windowing let you cheat anywhere. When proctoring vendors quickly challenged the claim with the counterclaim that they could detect the behavior, the dispute became the story. The company quickly went viral and somehow raised $15M from Andreessen Horowitz despite the sector’s objections to the claims.
Lee is dismissive of the deadlocked jury: the message got out there more than any ad spend could have gotten it. Yet when asked about traction, he refused to share revenue or even user numbers and just mentioned that the results were “better than aimed for”. Once more, the issue with outrage marketing is that short-term awareness is quantifiable in the data, while long-term sales are often difficult to confirm.
Research supports the mechanism behind this. Wharton’s Jonah Berger et al.’s NYU study of works regarding “moral-emotional language” found that blog posts that generate moral outrage are more prone to viral spread than those that remain neutral. An MIT study on Twitter’s dissemination trends found that “untruthful stories were about 70% more likely to be retweeted”, hence easier to propagate over the longer term, which suggests that captivating claims can and do dominate the public domain.
However, prop-stirring is not pretend. Although little by way of case study evidence on this count was offered, business case studies often suggest that audiences acquired out of sharp controversy churn more quickly than conversion benchmarks will predict. Specifically, the industry generally shows weak growth leads on measures such as session depth and return rates when one compares “blocking headlines” to immediate or product acquisition. Hence, this is the trade: cheap publicity and costly confidence.
Risks that can break a young brand using outrage tactics
Outrage marketing runs a narrow channel between audacity and deception. The Federal Trade Commission bars misleading claims and can penalize unsupported performance statements. Platforms increasingly down-rank borderline content and lock accounts during mass-report waves. Thus, the distribution becomes at risk precisely when a campaign peaks.
Security researchers and competitors also pounce on overreach, and their rebuttals can permanently define a product’s reputation in developer and enterprise circles. On the human factor side of the equation, founders become the face of the flame. It is an asset, as authenticity is hard to fake, but also introduces key-person risk. A misjudged joke during a pile-on can trigger a sponsor to sign a backing, hiring challenges or a regulatory probe. Edelman’s Trust Barometer has repeatedly shown that credibility gaps compound when leaders appear casual with the truth in technology categories.
How to use controversy without burning down customer trust
If a team attempts Lee’s method, guardrails help. For example:
- Anchor the provocation to a real product unlock. It may be a bold comparison or a category takedown, and a benchmark you can defend with reproducible tests.
- Pre-brief credible third parties, individuals, and institutions that can validate your core claim as the debate unfolds.
- Account for the backlash by designing prepared responses, a takedown policy, and an escalation map for safety and legal issues.
- Measure beyond impressions. Choose whether the outrage is compounding or merely sitting dormant by tracking activation, retained weekly active users, and support ticket volume per cohort.
Where Lee’s strategy lands in today’s media environment
Lee’s argument is not so much about trolling for fun as it is about trolling as accepting the media environment. Intensity is rewarded by algorithms; counter-speech is distribution; neutrality is irrelevant. His thesis is that a startup, by itself, can take advantage of these facts without needing fabrication – that a factor of the multiplying public company valuations includes the value of consciousness, investor appetite, and influencer megaphones, for which the brand risk will be minimal.
Whether the algorithm is correct will depend on what Cluely ends up shipping, and what sticks after the smoke clears. But for now, Lee has forced a conversation that every founder whose ad budget is shrinking due to issues other than product malfunction and market regulation for this economy: in a world where attention scarcity is bottlenecked, is it better to be loved by few people or be fruitless arguing about everyone?
