Cluely's Daniel Min × Bloom: Hacking Viral Growth

A fireside chat with Daniel Min, who designed Cluely's viral growth

We hosted a Claude Bloom meetup in Seoul with Daniel Min, the former CMO of Cluely, the startup going most viral in Silicon Valley right now, and the founder of his own new marketing agency, Mints Media.

How did I book Daniel? If you follow the Silicon Valley startup scene, you can't not know Cluely. It's one of the most talked-about companies right now, and it grabbed attention by raising a combined 26 billion won from a16z within two months of its founding. Honestly, their viral marketing is more striking than the funding. Their marketing voice is a little irritating, but you can't stop watching. Some people dismiss it as ragebait, but either way Cluely has become the hottest AI startup around, and everyone goes looking for what they'll do next.

I'd been following Daniel, the person who designed all that viral growth, for a long time. Last Sunday I happened to see an Instagram story where he said he was coming to Korea for a week and asked what he should do. I DMed him right away: Want to do a meetup with a Korean AI community? Last week I ran a Claude community meetup with an Anthropic ambassador and 2,000 people signed up, and we have 1,100 members in the Claude Bloom Discord right now. I can host a meetup for you right away. He wrote back immediately. Sounds good, but where?

Of course I had a place, I thought, and I checked D.Camp (a startup hub in Seoul I use a lot). It was fully booked. I'd worked hard to land Daniel, and it would have been a real shame not to hold the event, so I asked around everywhere. But with only three or four days left, finding a space to rent was really hard.

Then I remembered Jehim Choi, who leads Eungdaphara Marketing, the largest marketing community in Korea, and works as a marketing manager at t'order (a Korean tabletop ordering company). We'd made content together before, and Jehim had come to the first Claude Bloom event, where we caught up for the first time in a while. At 9 p.m. on Monday I asked, "Jehim, is there any chance t'order has a space for a talk?" Jehim simply sent a 1:1 DM to the CEO, arguing that t'order had to sponsor the space because the meetup was a great PR moment to announce t'order's AI transformation. Still, going straight to the CEO like that! But the t'order CEO coolly said yes on the spot, and with only two days to go, we had a venue.

And what do you know, t'order's office is in Parc.1 (a skyscraper in Yeouido), with a sweeping view of the Han River, a perfect space for a fireside chat. Apparently Sampro (a popular Korean finance YouTube channel) films there a lot. So finding a new place instead of the usual one was hard, but it got us a better space. It felt like a small miracle.

Last thing: Daniel is American, so he only speaks English. However much you announce that a session will be in English, Korean attendees can feel a bit awkward, and Daniel can't help being aware of that. Then a coworker at my company landed yet another free sponsorship, this time from Tiro, an AI real-time interpretation service that's taking off. The Tiro team came in person and provided AI interpretation on site, and attendees raved about how well the real-time interpretation worked.

I guess when things go your way, they really go your way. Here's how the fireside chat with Daniel went.

1. Daniel Min, from Wharton to startups

Daniel Min graduated from the Wharton School in 2025 with a concentration in marketing and operations. On paper it looks like a typical elite track, but his actual path was nothing like that. He'd been making content since high school, streaming on Twitch and posting on YouTube and TikTok. At 17, the first time he streamed on Twitch for four hours and made $500, he became convinced he could make a living from this.

But when he became a senior at Wharton, things weren't easy. He applied for internships at places like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and Bain and got rejected by all of them. In the US, those companies are symbols of the elite, the way Samsung is in Korea. After getting turned down everywhere, he said he felt like a loser. The first internship he finally landed was as a social media intern at a small startup called RecruitU. A Wharton senior working as an unpaid social media intern. He laughed that it wasn't exactly a résumé that would get you a girlfriend.

But that summer changed his life. Daniel said, "The one thing that was always clear was that I love content. Even uncertain actions, if you take them on top of a clear vision, eventually get you somewhere." His worst summer turned into his best. At RecruitU he started walking the streets of New York filming interviews with people in finance, and that content brought in 75,000 followers in four months.

2. Joining Cluely: "Could these people be my best friends?"

Joining Cluely started with a single Instagram DM from Roy (Roy Lee, Cluely's founder). Roy saw Daniel's blog and content and reached out first, and after they talked, Daniel got on a plane to meet him. He did think the "Cheat on everything" slogan was cool, but that wasn't the deciding factor.

Daniel's test for joining was surprisingly simple: "Could I become best friends with these people?" The team was all sharp, he liked the work they'd made before, and he felt that spending every day together in the office, they could become his closest friends. The key wasn't salary or title. It was whether these were people he wanted to spend every day with.

A Wharton grad jumping into an early-stage startup was an unconventional path. He said he got a fair amount of pushback and opposition from friends and family. But to Daniel, Cluely was a company that genuinely cared about content, and if he was going to give up what he'd been doing, it had to be something he'd enjoy at least as much. Cluely was exactly that.

3. The UGC machine, from 100 creators to 70

The first thing Daniel took on at Cluely was a UGC program. He watched other companies get results with creator-driven viral content and formed a hypothesis: combine capital with viral know-how, and you could do it better. He hired 100 creators, gave them viral scripts, and set up a system to turn those videos into ads.

The early results were mixed. Some videos hit millions of views. But video after video got zero conversions no matter how many views it had. They kept burning thousands of dollars and piling up nothing but views, which was a sign that something needed to change.

The fix was quality over quantity. He narrowed the 100 down to the 70 creators who could actually drive conversions. He gave those 70 more refined scripts and steered them toward formats that could convert. At its peak, the system was a steady operation producing 100 to 150 million views a month. Daniel's conclusion was that hiring influencers is far more efficient than just running paid ads.

4. The marketing funnel: top, middle, bottom

Daniel split the marketing funnel cleanly into three stages, and he expected completely different things from each.

The top of the funnel is brand awareness. That's Cluely's official Instagram, cinematic videos, and the office skits made with Remy. At this stage you don't expect conversions. Like brands such as Red Bull or Bain Capital, the goal is to stamp the name into people's heads without tying it directly to the product. It's the same logic as betting that if Mr. Beast, with his 400 million subscribers, launched Cluely today, he'd make more money than conventional marketing would.

The middle of the funnel is UGC videos: content that has viral potential and also aims for user conversions at the same time. Videos that rack up millions of views while actually getting people to try Cluely fall here. The first video in a bounty series they recently launched drove more than $10,000 in conversions.

The bottom of the funnel is paid ads. The rule here is simple. If ROAS isn't positive, stop immediately. If you put money in and no money comes out, that's just waste. At this stage you judge only by the numbers, not by feel.

5. The Times Square billboard: a $375K decision in 10 minutes

Cluely's Times Square billboard is an extreme example of top-of-funnel marketing. When a billboard company emailed a discounted offer for a four-week run, Roy and Daniel discussed it for exactly 10 minutes. Then they spent $375,000 on it right away.

The design was extremely simple too. Black text on a white background: "Hi, my name is Roy. I'm 21. Please buy my thing. Cluely.com." It wasn't a digital billboard but a physical, fixed one, so it stayed up in Times Square for the full four weeks. The fact that a 21-year-old put his name up in Times Square and asked people to buy his product became content in itself. People filmed the billboard and made TikToks about it, parodies spread on Twitter, and it turned into a cultural moment.

Daniel explained the decision like this. A lot of companies spend too much time making sure a bet is right. If you have an eye for good bets, 10 minutes is enough. They didn't measure direct conversions from the billboard. But the Cluely name spread across the entire internet, and that alone was enough of a result.

6. Views first, conversions later

The most common question from the audience was whether viral views actually turn into paying users. Many founders knew Cluely, but they wanted to know about the gap between views going up and payments actually happening.

Daniel's answer had two parts. First, not every company needs viral marketing. A company called Resume AI has no Instagram account, puts $100,000 a month into Google SEO alone, and makes $20 to $30 million in ARR. When a job seeker searches "make a résumé," it shows up at the top, and they pay $30 to generate a résumé. The first priority is figuring out where your target users search.

Second, if a company does choose organic content, there's an order to it. First you build the muscle for getting views, and only then do you design for conversions. Posting 200-view videos while worrying about conversion rates gets the order completely wrong. Only once you're confident that at least one in ten videos will hit 100,000 views can you start talking about conversion optimization. Daniel's point was that far too many companies worry about conversions without having the viral muscle in the first place.

7. "Make what doesn't exist on the internet"

Daniel's personal content philosophy fits in one line: make things that don't exist on the internet. Everything on the internet gets repeated, but personal experiences and the risks you're willing to take can't be copied.

The signature example is his Alcatraz swim. He trained in open-water swimming in San Francisco for four days, then filmed himself actually swimming from near Alcatraz Island to shore. Swimming to Alcatraz is illegal, but you can take a boat out near the island, get off, and swim back to shore. After that video went out, people recognized Daniel on the street and asked if he'd really swum it. That's mindshare.

His series reviewing 40 college dining halls follows the same logic. He traveled around Boston, Texas, Philadelphia, New York and California ranking college dining halls on a tier list. Not one or two, but 40. Nobody is going to copy that. Daniel said that when he gets a new content idea, he checks two things. One, does it not exist on the internet yet? Two, is it hard to make? If it's hard to make, other people won't do it, and that becomes your moat.

Showing vulnerability comes from the same place. A month ago he had a bad breakout and filmed the moment a pimple burst and bled. He said that when you show what most people hide, you get a huge amount of empathy. In the end he didn't post that video because of the image quality, but he said that if it had been good content, he definitely would have.

8. Ragebait: indifference is worse than hate

Is Cluely's marketing deliberate ragebait? Daniel said that's only half right. The goal isn't to make the internet as angry as possible. They choose framing that gets people talking. The principle he stressed was this: "The opposite of hate isn't support. It's indifference."

He gave a concrete example. Say "exercise is good for your health," and nobody reacts. Say "fat people need to exercise," and the comments explode. The core message is the same: exercise is good. But different framing gets a completely different reaction. "Cheat on everything" works the same way. What it really means is "use AI for everything," said provocatively. When calculators first came out, people called it cheating, and the same thing happened with the internet. The logic is that AI will end up following the same path.

Cluely's viral origin story comes from the same place. Founder Roy posted a YouTube video of himself using Interview Coder, a tool he'd built, live during an Amazon coding interview. The video spread like wildfire, and Interview Coder grew into Cluely.

9. The RecruitU three-step framework

The method Daniel used to get to 75,000 followers in four months at RecruitU is worth studying for anyone trying to grow a company account. He shared a three-step framework.

Step one is competitor analysis. He looked at every content account in finance and consulting. Channels like Litquidity and Wall Street Oasis were making news, memes, satire and guide videos. But nobody was doing IRL videos, meaning actually going out on the street and interviewing people in finance. Individual creators were making videos with advice on breaking into finance, but no company brand was doing it at scale.

Step two is defining your ideal viewer persona (IVP). Daniel made his target this specific: "An 18-year-old Asian American freshman who just started at the University of Alabama and wants to get into Goldman Sachs." He made every video for that one person.

Step three is applying a viral format. Inspired by street interview channels like School of Hard Knocks and Caleb Simpson, he created a format where he got career advice from people in finance on the streets of New York. He said 90% of the people he approached said no. Shoving a camera at a busy banker on their lunch break and asking for their time is embarrassing and hard. But that difficulty is the barrier to entry, and it's why nobody copies it. Results started coming in by the fourth video, and in four months he had 75,000 followers.

The framework worked at Cluely too. After Daniel joined, he used the same format to build a Cluely Careers account and got 6,000 followers from just a handful of interviews. Once the skit collaborations with Remy started, Cluely's main account grew from 50,000 to nearly 300,000.

10. Mints Media: creators instead of billionaires

Daniel left Cluely after about seven months. Cluely was running toward the goal of building a $10 billion company, and that goal required giving your whole life to it. That wasn't right for Daniel. He's 22. He wanted to spend his twenties traveling the world, making videos with people he likes, and making good money while doing it. More and more he wanted to pour 110% into his own creative projects, and eventually he left.

That's how he started Mints Media, an agency that works with tech startups that lack marketing muscle. It works with only two or three companies at a time. The ideal client is at Series A to B: they have money to spend but aren't bureaucratic yet, so they can make decisions fast. The goal isn't to build a giant company like Samsung. It's a life of doing creative work and living well enough.

For B2B marketing, he recommended investing heavily in LinkedIn and Twitter. In finance and enterprise, sales cycles are long and internal introductions are decisive. The quality of your network matters more than follower count, and instead of Instagram, you should go after the platforms where your potential customers are actually lurking. For a Korean company trying to enter the US market, the very first thing to do is make English content. You can't break into the US market while marketing in Korean.

11. "Film a video tonight"

The last topic was execution. Daniel was especially blunt with the college students in the audience. The phrase he used was "mental masturbation." He described watching 100 tutorials on how to grow a YouTube channel or get more TikTok views and then not making a single video for 60 days. Mistaking thinking about ideas for actual progress: that's mental masturbation.

"If I'd kept making videos since high school, I'd be retired in Cancún by now." That may be an exaggeration, but his point was clear. The most common question from content beginners is how to start, and the answer is to film one video tonight and post it. The moment you feel inspired after a talk like this is when your motivation is highest. By tomorrow you'll think, "I should prepare a bit more," and put it off forever.

I chimed in too. A blog post I wrote recording a conversation with a friend in Silicon Valley (Claude Blue) is what started this community. If I hadn't written that post, none of us would be here tonight. You should make content as early and as often as you can. Nobody knows where something will go viral.

At the end of the event we tried a session for the first time: 30-second pitches. Since Daniel was filming, we told people to step in front of the camera and introduce their company or project in 30 seconds. We added that it was a chance to get free promotion in Daniel's video.

At Korean meetups, when you say "feel free to network," what usually happens is most people hover awkwardly and then quietly go home. But when we said, "You get 30 seconds, come up and pitch, doing it in front of Daniel right now is free promotion," people came straight up to the stage. A founder from Europe building an AI marketing agent. An education startup in seven countries that helps high schoolers build AI companies. A service connecting 500 Gen Z creators at more than 50 US colleges with beauty brands. A creator who hit 10 million views on Instagram with vibe coding meme content. All kinds of people came up and told their stories.

I was pretty moved watching that session. The theme of the whole event was "execute right now," and the 30-second pitch put exactly that spirit into practice. Give people a structure and they move. I definitely want to do it again next time.

Originally written in Korean on Brunch, April 24, 2026.