How Cluely turned an office sitcom into a growth engine
Cluely is not our client, and this is not our work. We study it because it is one of the clearest recent examples of a startup growing with characters and not with ads. It is also a controversial one, so we will cover both sides.
What Cluely did
Cluely is an AI app that drew attention, and plenty of criticism, for its pitch. According to House of Marketers, its content strategy leaned on recurring characters and storylines, which the piece compares to a TV writers’ room. The same piece describes a network of “growth interns” making content, with paid media used to boost the best-performing organic posts.
On funding, Outlook Business reported that Andreessen Horowitz put $15 million into the company. An a16z podcast episode with the founder carries the title “the viral AI startup that raised $15M in 10 weeks”. We treat the funding as reported and the timeline as the founder’s own framing.
We are not claiming a straight line from sitcom to funding. Plenty went into that story: product, timing, a provocative founder. What we can say is that characters were central to how the brand spread.
Why a sitcom format works for startups
Think about what a startup is short of: trust, budget, and a face. A character sitcom supplies the last one, and helps with the other two.
Characters are memorable. People forget a feature list. They remember the coworker who always misses the deadline.
Humour travels. Funny office scenes get shared by the people who recognise them, which is your customer.
Repetition builds recognition. A recurring cast means each new clip draws on the last. You are not starting from zero with each post.
It is cheap to iterate. Short scenes, a small cast and one set. You can test five jokes in the time it takes to produce one polished ad.
The writers’ room logic
The most useful idea in the House of Marketers breakdown is the comparison to a writers’ room. The point is not any single post. It is a system that produces many, keeps the characters consistent, and learns from what lands.
Digiday’s take is that Cluely understood attention differently from ad tech. Ad tech buys it by the impression. Cluely tried to earn it by the post.
In practice, that system looks like this:
- Fix the world. A setting your customer knows. An office, a standup, a Slack channel.
- Cast three to five characters. Each with one clear flaw and one running gag.
- Write in batches. Plan a season of scenes, not one scene at a time.
- Read the numbers weekly. Keep the jokes and characters that hold viewers. Retire the rest.
- Boost what already works. Put paid behind your best clip.
B2B can do this too
Office comedy is not just for consumer apps. Optimizely, a B2B marketing software company, released what it called its first B2B marketing comedy, in the form of a murder mystery. Different tone, same instinct: if your buyers watch stories in their feed, tell them stories about their own working lives.
What to be careful about
Cluely’s approach drew backlash, and its founder has pushed back on being labelled rage-bait. You do not need to copy the provocation. The part worth borrowing is the structure, not the shock value.
Three guardrails we use:
- Do not impersonate real people. Characters are invented. No lookalikes of real public figures.
- Be clear about what is AI-made. If AI was used for visuals, voice or script, say so where platforms require it.
- Make the joke about the problem, not the customer. The audience should laugh with you.
How to start small
You do not need a funded launch to try this. A starting plan:
- Week 1: pick the world and write a one-page character bible.
- Week 2: shoot or generate the first scenes. Keep each under 45 seconds.
- Week 3: launch three episodes and compare hook rate and completion.
That is a Pilot: three episodes, a character bible and a launch plan, in three weeks. If it works, move to a Season and keep the cast.
What we would measure
Skip vanity numbers. For a character sitcom, the useful signals are:
- Hook rate: who stops in the first seconds.
- Completion rate: who finishes the clip.
- Ep. 2 over ep. 1: how many viewers return for the next one.
- Followers gained: the audience you keep.
- Signups or demos: the business result.
The short version
Cluely shows that a startup can lean on recurring characters and storylines to spread. The reported funding is striking, but the transferable lesson is simpler: characters give content a memory, and a repeatable system beats a single hit. Borrow the structure, leave the controversy, and test it with a small pilot.
Curious which of our three formats fits your startup? Book a story call.