The cheating brand
When your marketing betrays your product.
When Cluely's founder posted photos of himself with strippers to promote his AI cheating tool, the internet lost its collective mind. The outrage was the point. The attention was the goal. But it came at the expense of the one thing the product actually needs: trust.
For context: Cluely is an AI that helps you "cheat on everything"—it listens to your calls and feeds you real-time responses during meetings, sales calls, and personal conversations.
Clever positioning, but there's a fundamental problem: the product requires deep trust while the brand celebrates deception. Cluely is asking you to trust it with your most sensitive conversations while building their entire brand around helping people cheat.
Their viral launch videos show the founder using the app to lie on dates, and they openly embrace ragebait marketing—literally engineering controversy to drive downloads. When called out, the founder admitted: "The fact that you're watching it, getting annoyed, and commenting is why the video was designed this way." This fundamental contradiction reveals something bigger about how we think about brand building.
The Trust Paradox
Cluely's product requires deep emotional trust. When someone downloads an app to listen to their most private conversations and feed them responses in real-time, they're essentially saying, "I trust this thing with everything I say and hear." That’s sacred territory. You don’t hand over that kind of access to a brand that feels like a prank.
But their marketing tells a completely different story. The tone is playful, almost mischievous. The messaging winks at deception. The brand personality feels like it's in on some kind of joke—and you might be the punchline.
This creates cognitive dissonance. Users are supposed to open up to a brand that presents itself as clever and calculating. They're asked to be vulnerable with something that signals it knows how to manipulate situations. The product wants your trust, but the brand makes you wonder if you should give it.
Why We Confuse Attention with Trust
Cluely isn't alone here. This pattern shows up everywhere in startup land, and now more companies are trying to imitate their approach. The underlying psychology is fascinating: founders and marketers genuinely believe that if people are talking about you, they'll eventually start believing in you. But that's backwards thinking rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of how trust actually works.
We're wired to notice things that break patterns—controversy, cleverness, conflict. That's why "edgy" marketing gets attention. But we're also wired to trust things that feel consistent and predictable over time. These are opposing forces, yet too many startups try to satisfy both simultaneously.
The real trap is that attention feels like progress. When your brand goes viral, when people are sharing your content, when you're getting coverage—it creates this dopamine hit that makes you think you're building something meaningful. But attention is just borrowed time. Trust is what you do with that time that matters.
Permission vs. Performance
Too many startups think brand is about being memorable or likeable. But brand is actually about earning permission—permission to occupy mental space, permission to be considered when decisions get made, permission to stick around when the novelty wears off.
That permission comes from alignment between what you say and what you do. When those things match up consistently over time, you build the kind of trust that turns users into advocates and trials into habits.
Don't get this wrong: being provocative can be brilliant marketing. Standing out often requires doing something different, unexpected, even controversial. But the provocation has to serve your brand promise, not undermine it. When Dollar Shave Club launched with "Our Blades Are F***ing Great," it was provocative—but it perfectly aligned with their promise of no-nonsense, affordable shaving. It earned attention by delivering truth.
The best marketing captures attention and builds belief. Be provocative, be different, be memorable. Just make sure you're provoking people toward trust, not away from it.
Elan is the founder of Off-Menu, where overthinking your brand is a service, not a bug.