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Roy Lee's product before Cluely: screenshot the question, AI solves it instantly, invisible on a screen share. He blew it up with a controversy script — filming himself cheating his way to an Amazon offer, getting expelled from Columbia, and live-tweeting every step — which converted straight into a $5M round on 200-300M views.
Roy: “I'm probably the first person in history to deliberately get himself expelled from an Ivy to hype a funding round.” The tech is trivial — LeetCode solvers already existed — and the real moat was the nerve to market it: film yourself cheating → an Amazon exec reports you → Columbia expels you → tweet the whole thing → virality converts into $5M.
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Interview Coder was Roy Lee's product before Cluely (with co-founder Neil, two guys in a dorm): screenshot a technical interview question → AI solves it → the code is fed to you, wrapped in a desktop shell that's invisible on a screen share, purpose-built to help software engineers cheat on LeetCode-style interviews. The paid version launched February 1 and “blew up,” with 200-300M views across the internet (no MRR disclosed); roughly 99% of it was written with AI. Roy freely admits similar LeetCode solvers already existed with rougher UX — “you don't need a genius, you need someone willing to market it.”
The first signal arrived in October, before there was a business. Roy and Neil had spent a whole semester at Columbia shipping side projects that went nowhere, and one throwaway demo of a tool for cheating on technical interviews did roughly 500,000 impressions on LinkedIn.
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Data credibility: Founder Roy Lee's own account: the paid version launched February 1 and “blew up” after 200-300M views across the internet, but he never gave a concrete revenue number; the heat converted directly into a $5M round. Both revenue and view counts are self-reported and unverified ⚠️. All revenue figures are founder-reported or estimated by the video creator — unaudited.
The paid version went live on February 1 and, by Roy's account, blew up. It is worth being precise about what was sold.
What turned was a conflict loop, and each turn of it was involuntary. The Amazon video reached an Amazon executive, who told Columbia to expel him or the company would stop recruiting from the school.
There were two silences. The first was a full semester at Columbia with Neil where, in Roy's words, nothing worked, a run of side projects that all went nowhere.
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