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- 🍭 They Raised $20M by Bragging About Cheating 🤫
🍭 They Raised $20M by Bragging About Cheating 🤫
Meanwhile, science quietly plagiarizes itself.
Snack Prompt
July 07, 2025
Good morning. The intern crushed his interview last week.
Turns out Cluely answered half the questions through his AirPods.
We’ve promoted the AirPods.
Let’s dig in.
🍭 What’s Cookin’:
Cluely’s $120M business is built on “cheating”
AI ghostwrote 13% of science papers and no one noticed
The Designer Who Almost Quit: Part 1/5
Steal This Prompt:
Everything Else to avoid the intern's fate
🍭 Steal This Prompt
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Cluely
🔎 “Cheat on Everything”: Best Product Strategy of 2025
The Bite: Most startups pivot. Cluely doubled down on being “the villain.”
After getting suspended for building an AI interview cheat tool at Columbia, Roy Lee turned the scandal into a slogan, raised $20M, and made “cheating” a subscription service.
It’s not a bug. It’s the brand.
Snacks:
Marketing thesis: “Everyone thinks AI is cheating. So say it louder.”
$120M valuation: Built off the back of an expulsion and a tagline
No PMs, no middlemen: Just engineers and TikTok creators
Profitable already: Enterprise clients use it to sell, hire, and support faster
Full-stack controversy: Even their org chart is trolling you
Why it bites: In a world where every AI startup is “aligned” and “empowering,” Cluely said screw it — we’re complicit.
But here’s the twist:
That honesty is empowering. Because the real cheat code isn’t the tool, it’s owning the narrative before your critics do.
Controversy is a market position.
It breaks the feed. It builds recall. It creates a tribe.
Cluely isn’t hiding its edge, it’s monetizing it.
That’s not marketing. That’s allegiance-building.
For product marketers, here’s your takeaway:
Don’t just ship features. Ship friction.
A polarizing brand is algorithmic armor.
If your startup doesn’t make someone a little mad, it’s probably not worth talking about.
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Cheating Cont…
🧪 AI Wrote Your Science Paper. Probably.
The Bite: A new study analyzed 15 million biomedical abstracts and found that at least 13.5% of 2024’s peer-reviewed papers were AI-assisted, with no mention of ChatGPT, Gemini, or anything ending in “LLM.”
No footnote. No citation. Just vibes and passive voice.
Snacks:
PubMed at scale: Data spanned years of biomedical research
LLM fingerprinting: Tracked spikes in stylistic fluff words like “grappling” and “showcasing”
Pre 2024 = nouns galore: 79% of excess words were dense and technical
Post 2024 = pretty verbs: 66% verbs, 14% adjectives; classic LLM sauce
Field and region gaps: Some disciplines showed more AI-creep than others
Why it bites: While Roy Lee built a startup around “cheating,” science is doing the same.
Just quietly.
Cluely owns it. Academia hides it.
But both show the same truth:
AI is shaping how things sound, not just what they say.
And if 13.5% of “human” papers already read like GPT drafts…
does it matter who wrote them anymore?
Everything Else
🧠 You Need to Know
🧾 Brex embraces AI’s mess
→ Ditched long vendor cycles so engineers can try 1,000 tools on $50 a month.
👉 Read more
🇪🇺 EU: No delay for AI rules
→ Over 100 companies begged for a pause. The EU ghosted them.
👉 Read more
🇵🇰 Microsoft exits Pakistan
→ After 25 years, Microsoft pulls out. Google’s still buying Chromebooks.
👉 Read more
🗞️ Google AI summaries under fire
→ EU publishers say AI snippets are “theft with vibes” — and revenue loss.
👉 Read more
✉️ 46 EU execs: Pause the AI Act
→ Airbus, ASML, and Mistral call for a 2-year chill on enforcement.
👉 Read more
The Designer Who Almost Quit
🗓 DAY 1: He Almost Gave Up.
The Bite: He’d been designing for 6 years. And last Tuesday, he stared at his screen like it had betrayed him.
A desktop full of screenshots. Dropbox folders inside Dropbox folders.
19 open tabs of “inspo” — none of it ship-worthy.
Not because he lacked ideas. But because none of them felt right.
Nothing felt original. Nothing felt like him anymore.
Snacks:
6 years in, and still stuck
Moodboards for days, but no movement
Screenshots everywhere, answers nowhere
Why it bites: Sometimes it’s not burnout.
It’s digital claustrophobia.
You’re not out of ideas. You’re drowning in them.
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