CLUELY IS NOW AN AI MEETING NOTETAKER

CLUELY IS NOW AN AI MEETING NOTETAKER #1 AI assistant for meetings Go to App Cluely has pivoted away from letting users "cheat on everything" and is now an AI meeting notetaker. Their old homepage positioned them as an "invisible AI that thinks for you" and lets you "cheat on everything." But now they're rebranding as the "#1 AI notetaker for meetings." And here's a few things Firstly, they're entering one of the most saturated categories in AI. Because we've seen Granola, Fathom, Otter, Fireflies — and these companies in this space for years. Cluely is starting from scratch in a space where users can easily switch to competitors. But secondly, their original positioning also creates a major perception problem for the company. Lulu Cheng Meservey, who's done comms for people like Sam Altman, Bari Weiss, and Palmer Luckey, captured it really well. Perception is harder to update than product Lulu Cheng Meservey @lulu_meservey "Rules are for breaking, cheat on everything! Also please let us record all your meetings." I actually thought this had to be performance art but it seems real?!? She points out that their original positioning was basically "cheat on everything" but now it's "please let us record all your meetings." Jordi: The problem with Cluely's move into AI notetaking is that it's a half-pivot. A half-pivot is always dangerous. They built a very controversial brand, very quickly. And now they need to leverage it for a pivot into a category that's squarely at odds with that brand. x.com/thousandfaces Meaning, why would anyone that built its brand on rule-breaking to access their most sensitive conversations? But Cluely CEO Roy Lee has offered some insight into the pivot. He says that the "cheat on everything" angle was deliberate and designed to generate attention and get users in the door fast. 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. So they acquired hundreds of thousands of users quickly, where their power users were. What they discovered was that people were using Cluely so they rebuilt that product for that specific use case. I'm also really intrigued by Roy's argument about market size. because he points out that tens of millions of people are in meetings every day, and 90% of them don't even know what an AI notetaker is. And so, in a market this big, controversy is actually an advantage. Because it cuts through the noise in a saturated space where distribution is the hard part, versus just building product. So if Cluely pulls this off, it'll be a case study in how controversial launches can accelerate distribution even in saturated markets. Clad LABS @cladlabs Clad LABS ACTIVE Company Zola BRAINROT ICE high productivity modern coding editor. Integration year. All coding workflow into your IDE. Can @icanverdar Oct 2 Is this genius or the most experimental YC? Michael Aubry @michael_aubry Karthikeya @karthikeya this has to be a troll But if the perception problem sticks, some brand choices are just harder to walk back than others. For a lot of people, I think the Cluely investment was a real moment. Like, what are we doing? I didn't come here to build cheating apps. I didn't come to build apps to help people under 21 gamble. These don't seem amoral to me, they seem actually immoral. TBPN @tbpn