When Cluely, a startup claiming to be building a product that helps people “cheat” on everything, announced that it raised a $15 million Series A financing from Andreessen Horowitz, some people on X criticized the VC firm for backing the controversial company.
After all, Cluely isn’t just offering a product that may have questionable uses, but the startup has become famous for using what many people call rage-bait marketing.
But Cluely’s ability to grab attention is precisely what attracted a16z to the startup.
Even before meeting Cluely’s founder Roy Lee, Andreessen Horowitz’s partner Bryan Kim thought that startups need new marketing tactics in the AI era.
Kim, like many investors, previously thought that building a superb “artisan” product with highly desired features was the key to a startup’s lasting success, he explained on the latest a16z podcast episode.
But shortly after the emergence of GenAI, he noticed that offering an exceptional product might not be enough.
“If you craft this thing and OpenAI or someone builds a new model to include that part in their product, you’re done,” Kim said. “So, it couldn’t become this highly thoughtful, slow-build product. It needed to be something where founders moved extremely quickly.”
That realization has led Kim to believe that speed, whether in marketing or product building, is paramount to creating a successful startup.
Earlier this month, Kim published a post explaining his theory of why, for consumer-facing AI startups, “momentum is the moat.”
When Kim met Lee and saw that Cluely had been able to convert awareness into paying customers, he instantly knew that he had discovered a founder he had theorized about.
“It’s been so hard to pierce through the noise of everything AI, especially in consumer, and to do that consistently is actually near impossible,” Kim said.
How does Lee explain why his polarizing marketing approach has generated so much buzz?
“Most pe …