The essence of Cluely is crypto token issuance.

"The Attention Monetization Engine"

A lot of people don't get Cluely. They can't understand how a bunch of Gen-Z hype merchants managed to scam $15 million out of a16z.

Not getting it is exactly the point.

The Cluely team is deliberately making sure you don't get it.

Today you think it's an interview cheating tool; tomorrow they drop a music video. They stir up chaos with no rhyme or reason, and their sole purpose is to create a fog thick enough to stop you from reaching the obvious conclusion: this team is pure hype, zero (substantive) value.

The moment I saw Cluely's promotional style, one old acquaintance came to mind — Justin Sun.

Cluely is in the exact same phase Sun was in at the start of his career: still running hype products to scam VC money.

When nobody can figure out what you're hyping, you've captured their attention. And with attention, monetization always follows. Cluely's current monetization model is funneling that attention to VCs. a16z's investment is essentially an ad buy.

This is only step one.

The ultimate form of the hype-merchant model is inevitably issuing tokens. Cluely is still in the pre-ICO stage.

History has already proven that token issuance is the most efficient path to monetizing attention.

To understand this, we have to let go of our fixation on the real economy.

The first time I learned as a child that RMB and USD are fiat currencies, backed by nothing physical like gold or silver, my worldview collapsed. A 100-yuan bill can buy a meal not because the paper itself has value, but because we believe in government credit.

Classical product entrepreneurship is like the gold standard. A company's valuation is strictly anchored to its product — DAU, ARR, user metrics. Investors give you money because these numbers provide solid value backing.

Today's AI entrepreneurship has evolved to stage two: fiat currency.

Hype merchants like Cluely and Justin Sun are the issuers of this fiat. Their value is no longer anchored to any actual product, but to one thing alone: consensus.

So Cluely packaging itself into something where you can't tell what it actually does — that's exactly right. That's the intended effect. When everyone believes it's mysterious, it actually becomes valuable.

The greatest thing about this model is that it strips away all concrete product vulnerabilities that could be attacked.

"I'm purely a hype product." Well, you can't seriously analyze the product design flaws of an interview cheating tool.

Just like you can't flame an air coin for bad product design. A coin is a coin — a standardized symbol whose value depends entirely on how many people believe in it. When the value carrier becomes a symbol immune to criticism, attention becomes everything.

So Cluely is, in essence, a token issuance.

"Confidence is more precious than gold." This isn't empty motivational speak — confidence is literally more valuable than gold.

When attention itself can become the core asset, issuing a corresponding token to price and circulate that asset becomes a logically coherent business loop.

The funniest part is that hype products, compared to real products, are unassailable.

Build any actual product, and immediately someone like me will jump out pointing out conceptual flaws here, bad user experience there, suspected fabricated user data.

But build a hype product, and everyone goes silent.

You pull some random thing (a.k.a. a cheating tool) out for hype — what can people even evaluate about a cheating tool product?

Anyway, I'm still genuinely happy to see Cluely. I've always believed that the last mobile internet boom officially began when Justin Sun scammed his way into funding to launch Ripple Labs.

Now, with Cluely's big scam of a16z money, and accounting for the roughly six-month hype lag between Silicon Valley and China, by the end of this year at the latest, China's AI entrepreneurship scene will also peak in hype.

The feeling of prosperity is back 😭

AI entrepreneurship is shifting from the real economy to the virtual economy, from product-driven to hype-driven. Understanding Cluely is understanding the future of AI entrepreneurship.

I recommend reading more about the hype immortal Justin Sun.

(Images in this article generated by ChatGPT o3, with writing assistance from Gemini 2.5 Pro.)