This Simple Playbook Built a $120M AI Business (in 3 Months) w/ Sam ⏐ Ep. #200

You heard about cluli? It was just this AI tool that could help walk you through job interviews. AI is feeding you answers so then you can regurgitate them. The caption is genius. Cheat on everything. It goes massively viral. They hit 7 million ARR in two months. They're worth 120 mil today. This whole experiment is three months old. Cluly has hired over 700 clippers. Every single Cluly related piece of content gets cross posted across thousands of accounts, generating tens of millions of extra views. Here's everything you need to know about starting a massively viral clipping farm. If anyone listening wants to run my clipping campaign, email me because I want to start doing this. Welcome back to the Kerner office. I had Sam on again and this was just so good, guys. We talked about viral clip farms on TikTok, scraping cities, websites for new businesses that have been listed and building agents around them. You're going to love it. All right, dude, please tell me you've heard about these Cluly guys. Have you heard about Cluly?

I have.

Okay, dude, so let me fill in. Everyone, correct me where I'm wrong because I don't know this exactly, but these two guys, Columbia University students, very smart. They had this business called Interview Coder. And it was just this AI tool that could help walk you through job interviews for coders, right? Through the technical aspects of it, right? So they're asking you all these complicated questions. AI is feeding you answers, so then you can regurgitate them and hopefully get the job. Then they use this on themselves to try to get a job at Amazon. They film themselves, they post it. The caption is genius. It's not ethical, but it's genius. Which is cheat on everything. It goes massively viral. It gets back to Columbia. Columbia says you can't do this. They kick him out of school. They say, peace out. We're going to San Francisco to make a billion dollars in AI anyway. Do I have that right?

Yeah, yeah, that's the short version for sure.

What did I miss? What else is cool about these guys? Because there's a lot we can learn from it.

Yeah, yeah. It's an interesting one. I similarly, like, have seen kind of the snippets of it on Twitter. It goes back to one of the things that ChatGPT said about your. Who you are as a human being, which is like controversy is marketing. Right? Or whatever. Whatever that line was. And I think that they just did a phenomenal job of leaning into that. I haven't tried their tool So I can't speak to that piece. But it's one of those where it's like, yo, if you have something go viral or whatever it is, like sometimes you just gotta lean into it, you know. And I think that they're doing a good job of that. Didn't they raise like so much money also?

Yeah, they raised 5.3 million in April. That was a seed round. Then they raised a Series A of 15 million by led by Andreessen Horowitz last month. And they're worth 120mil today. Like this whole experiment is three months old and they probably gave away 10 to 20% of their company. So these guys are worth 50 million each after three months.

As long as they can actually liquidate that and do the whole thing like on paper.

But if they do a Series B, they'll have a secondary round and pull out.

They'll for sure get the secondary for sure, for sure.

And unless AI is becoming unpopular in three months, that will happen. Maybe dumb not.

I don't think they have much of a problem there. Yeah, I mean the. The demos of the product and all those videos like one entertaining. Like they do a great job of leaning in, but it also looks sweet. I have not concerns but like I think at a macro outside of Clulee like curiosities around how this AI stuff will play long term. Like almost like a dependency from people on it. Right. Where it's like it is how AI takes over. It's like AI gets you the job interview. Then you use Cluly on all of your job tasks and the AI is doing all of your job for you. Like at some point the next big disruptor will just say. Or Cluly could. When they have enough data, they could be like, you could just fire that guy. We've been doing their job this whole time anyways. Right, Right. Like, and so it just starts to. It gets interesting on like I think about like, where does AI struggle the most? And like thinking about that as the spot to like focus more energy on getting good at. You know, there's like AI voices, right? Like there's like bland AI. There's a handful. I think you interviewed a couple of those guys, right, that like run the AI receptionists or whatever.

Yep.

One thing that I've seen AI really struggle with is salesmanship. Right. They can be an order taker. Hey, you want an appointment for this thing? But like convincing somebody that's unsure of.

Something like going full used car salesman on them, like pulling out all the stops, right.

Like actual salesmanship of like that side I've seen struggle with a lot. It's getting obviously better visually, but like true creativity is going to be something that I think it struggles with. Like, because it's, it's a model built off of inputs. And so like you have to be able to create something that's more than an input. And so it's just interesting to watch that of like, you watch a lot of these people jump in and they're like writing their landing pages with ChatGPT, which is cool. But like, at some point most landing pages will be written with ChatGPT, which then what makes you stand out from.

From that?

Probably the fact that yours isn't. Yeah, right. Like, yeah, I'm curious.

I'm starting to notice things in the real world that like, very clearly aren't Chat GPT. Like I was on the subreddit for my favorite band, Brand New, and this guy was sharing his story about how his wife had a miscarriage and he went to this concert and it was beautifully written. I literally had the thought, like, chatgpt can't write this. It's like, I just know this is a real story. It just feels raw and I feel like it's going to take a lot longer for Chat GBT to close that gap. Just like it took Elon Musk 12 years after the time he said that full self driving would be like fully autonomous. Like, we're still waiting for it, you know?

Yeah.

It's going to take such a long time for that gap to be closed to where it's truly indistinguishable. Because I'm getting emails every day. Like, not like cold emails, but like I'm emailing with people and it's like, oh, it's just chatgpt. It's just chatgpt. It'S just so obvious.

You can just tell.

Yeah. So I feel like good writers, they're still gonna, like, they're just gonna stand out even more today, you know, but you have to tell like real stories.

Yeah. And you see it, you see it on the, on the, like the video content that we've talked about on multiple episodes. It's like you can just tell like you're AI is not going to replace you sitting here with me talking about this stuff and the dynamicness of it and the random, you know, like you and I will talk like Chat GPT is not going to go. It's not going to context switch. Funny.

Right?

Like we're talking about at the beginning. It's not going to context switch. Quickly based on all these other different pieces where it's like, dude, yeah. I don't think it will pull, you know, some niche learning from running direct to consumer ads into a conversation around PPC for home service the way that we, we do. Because that's just how the brain works. Or at least ours do. I think it would keep talking about direct consumer or whatever the actual topic at hand is. And so I wonder about that sometimes of like, I think you lose some of the other inputs that impact the output.

Yeah.

I think that they don't have the breadth of it. The same way that like a human with real experiences would of like. Yeah. One time my mom said something and I'll that made me think about this ad creative differently. Like ChatGPT doesn't have that.

Yeah.

Or at least not yet. And I think that that part is. It's actual. What I would define it as is true originality.

And on the opposite end of that spectrum, I tweeted about this, but I. I found this YouTube video about Penn State wrestling and it was like a 20 minute documentary and I click on it and I start watching it and I. The voice sounds very realistic, but I know it's AI. I can hear it's AI and the way it's talking, it was scripted with AI. Okay. And the only thing that's not AI is the video. This guy took B roll footage of people wrestling as he was talking. But it was so well assembled that I watched all 20 minutes of it and I loved it and I shared it and it was just kind of an unlock to me. That's like we still need questions answered and there are still a lot of pockets of information out there on the Internet. Like when I run a deep research prompt in chat GPT about something, I'm genuinely interested. I read it verbatim. Like, of course that's AI. I'm reading it in ChatGPT. But that's a question I need answered. And so a lot. I completely agree with everything you said. But on the other end of that spectrum, it's like we're not going to care if it's AI in a lot of cases, a lot of situations, because we're getting our question answered.

You're getting the value that you want out of it.

Yeah.

So interesting, dude.

So back to Cluley. So did you see the founder's post, by the way? They hit 7 million ARR in two months. I neglected to mention that. Yep.

Yep.

So it's, it's not just an idea. One of the founders of Clulee tweeted this and I know you're probably in this boat where when I hear stories about people like creating dozens of TikTok accounts and clipping all these things and like I have so much FOMO because that is such an opportunity right now and I'm not doing any of it. Yep, so he says. So Cluly has hired over 700 clippers. And for those listening, a clipper is someone that takes long form content and they edit it down. You can use automation tools like Opus to do this or you can do it manually and then they just post a short form video and on their own accounts. On their own accounts or like multiple burner accounts and nine out of 10 times, maybe 49 out of 50 times, they do nothing. They do 300 views and then sometimes they do hundreds of thousands or millions of views. So Cluly has hired over 700 clippers. Every single Cluly related piece of content gets cross posted across thousands of accounts, generating tens of millions of extra views. Here's everything you need to know about starting a massively viral clipping farm. Number one, finding clippers. I'm going to share my screen real quick, but this is like gold, gold info. As always, the answer is to scroll more scrolling on Instagram and TikTok every single time you find a clip of anything DM the account, which is like such a good framework because a lot of times it's like, where do I find good clippers? WAP has like a clipper marketplace and you go to all these marketplaces and it's, it's not good. Why not just go to the people that are doing it directly, you know, so he says DM the account paid clipping opportunity in quotations gets responded to nine out of 10 times. The people running these accounts are hungry Slovakian teenagers. 2. Pay per view, not video. We pay Clippers $0 per video. We only pay view bonuses X dollars for every thousand views. This makes sure we lose nothing from bad clippers and we only pay what we want. We when you find someone good, pay them more. Same with employees. If you have a good employee, proactively pay them more. Power law exists in everything, including clippers. 1% of your clippers will generate 99% of your views. Make sure the top 1% are rewarded well and stick with you. 4. Make sure you have enough content to clip. I go on at least two podcasts weekly now. It's interesting. He's not spreading his gospel with the podcast. He, he's just doing it as a, as A way, a convenient way to record video for all these clippers.

It's input every.

Everyone at Cluli creates content. Our clippers clip everything. The biggest reason not to have 400 clippers is because you don't have 400 clips a day to post. Make more content. 5. Tracking ROI. Don't do it. Clipping is cheap and its value isn't indirect product roi. It's in squeezing all virality out of potentially viral moments. Everyone has made a single post that flopped. Posting it 699 more times will make sure you get the virality it deserves. Clipping is only relevant for YouTube shorts, TikTok, Instagram, where we will start focusing our efforts. We've done 100 million views in a matter of weeks and scaling. I believe you can speedrun your way to Mr. Beast with enough money and clearly we can't stop making money.

It's so good.

Dude, what are your thoughts on this?

Oh, it's huge. Content creators are obviously the easiest to do that for. Right? Because you're just, it's an impression game, right? You're just trying to get top of funnel awareness across the board. I'm in a couple communities for clippers to see the types of deals that come through those and it's like more people are doing it than you would think. Like because I get the emails every time there's a new. I signed up as a clipper to see who was paying what to like have this done.

You're a Los Angeles Clipper. What are you going to say?

That's it, dude, you know, go Lakers though. But yes. And so I've been like, a lot of it has been podcasters, right, that are like going and trying to just go. It's impression farming across the board. The other piece that I've been seeing people do it in is direct consumer brands, right? Because your, your CPM on those is drastically lower than what you can achieve through paid channels. The biggest hurdle that those brands run into is amount of input content, right? Because like easy for a podcast to have enough content to clip branded content. There's not a lot of long form, you know, style stuff, talking about independent products and all of those. And so like that's where I've seen more of the lift being required on the brand side. But yeah, I mean the clipper game is. There's a bunch of people very focused on it because it is, it's organic, on steroids. It's just like, oh, you can actually have 400 accounts that are all like your account but not Actually, you know.

So you've probably heard me talk about Beehive before. And if you've ever received a newsletter from me, it was powered by Beehive. I've been using Beehive for the last year and a half. Their three founders left Morning Brew and built the platform so the rest of us could use the same tools that turned Morning Brew into a multi million dollar operation. That's why Beehive doesn't feel like every other newsletter platform, because it's not. It was built by people who scaled a newsletter empire. Now you know that I only recommend stuff that actually moves the needle. For me, this moves the needle. So go to beehive.com Chris. Use the code Chris30 to get 30% off your first three months. Why aren't I clipping for my podcast? Like, what am I doing?

You actually need to.

Stephen Bartlett credits like most of his podcast growth to that. And he's gotten so analytical with it that he has a button underneath his desk, like while he's interviewing someone about whatever, and he presses a button during an interesting moment and he's basically telling the clippers, this is a good one. This is a banger. At least he thinks it is. In addition, in his interview prep, he. He will prep questions like, solely designed to engineer a response that's viral, a bull and clippable. And he's one of the top podcasts in the world.

And it's not even for a good reason. I mean, there's a little, there's a little mark button on the bottom of this Riverside thing for.

I know, I use it. I do use it.

Yeah.

But it's like, it's not super. Like, I don't engineer any questions that would elicit a viral response. We just bro down. And maybe this podcast would be less good if I did that. Maybe it would be more good. I don't know.

Yeah, I think keep it what it is. I think there's good moments that come out of it. I think it's worth going and trying to get them to do it. Yeah, like, again, it's a cost arbitrage experiment through and through. Like, it's not going to cost you any money unless you get views. So, like, why not?

I think it's. It's also very interesting because when I read those bullet points about Cluly and their success. 7 million ARR, 3 months old, 9 figure valuation. You just think, oh, they got lucky. It's AI. Oh, it's just AI. Oh, just picking. You know, it's like blockchain Just put the word blockchain in your name and raise $100 million. And there's a lot of that going on. But then I read, oh, these guys have hired 700. Yeah, they're not, you know, you use the word hired loosely. Right. They've DM'd hundreds and thousands of people. But that's a strategy and it takes a lot of discipline to pay these randos in Slovakia thousands of dollars. When you don't, there's no link to click. You don't know what it's doing for you. You just have to kind of feel it. Like the age old quote is 50% of marketing works. You just don't know which 50% it is. Right?

Yeah, 100%.

The good thing with podcast is like, this thing is so predictable. Like, I can guess when I wake up and I look at my downloads, I can guess within 5% how many downloads I'll get that day. Because they don't. Podcasts don't go viral.

Right.

So if I were to start clipping, I start to see this unexpected growth. It can't be coming from anywhere else.

We talk a lot about like just lift. Right? Like, versus like, if you're doing a channel on some of like our Amazon brands. Right. Like, we don't change a single thing on Amazon, but we spend more money direct to consumer. And we see Lyft.

Yeah.

On Amazon. And like, we just call it like broadly, we call it the halo effect. Right. Of like, similarly you go and you go and just put yourself out there on 100 million views across 600 clippers over the course of six to 12 months. And like you are now growing at, you know, 18% month over month instead of 12%. It's like you can't directly attribute that. Sure. But like there's lift. And so you know what you changed, like you didn't increase ad spend by 50%. Like something has to be doing that. And so a lot of it is like, yeah, incremental lift is how we would measure, like your billboard. The billboard is a great, a great example of that. It's like you don't have a tangible QR code on that billboard, but you can see lift in a specific demo.

And I got so much crap for it on Twitter, they're like, dude, you're an idiot. What? First of all, Clear Channel does not allow QR codes on billboards because they don't want people doing this as they drive. Second of all, that's not like I saw Houston, the city where the billboard was, go from my Sixth biggest market to my first biggest market. Whereas those top five cities never change. Right? So it's like pretty sure. It's funny how oftentimes like opposite advice is both is always correct, right? I don't like spending marketing where I that I can't track. That's what makes a billboard hard for me to swallow. That's probably the reason why I haven't paid people to do clipping yet, because I can't track it as cleanly as I can on a Facebook ad. So it's like, and I've heard gurus and I've said this myself, like, only spend on marketing that you can track, right? And you drive around the country and you're like, why does Coca Cola pay for 10,000 billboards? Does that do anything for them? You know, it's like, well, Coca Cola is probably smarter than I am. But you know, in a lot of cases, in certain industries, certain campaigns, it doesn't make sense to do marketing that you can't track. But then in other cases, you've got to like take the situation not at face value and look into it a little deeper and say, you know what? I'm going to take 10 grand and I'm going to send it to a bunch of Slovakian teenagers and I'm just going to hope and pray that my SaaS subscriptions go up or my downloads go up. And if it doesn't, then it's a ten thousand dollar tuition that I just paid to Slovakia. Right?

Yep. I'm a fan. I'm always like, I like movement. Even if we don't know what the answer is. It's like, I don't know. I always push for that. It's, it's the classic, like, action, just take action. We've had this conversation every single time that I'm on the pod. Like, you're not going to know until you do something. We can sit here and hypothesize about it all day, but like, and then we do it and then it's like, oh, we actually saw no lift from this, or we saw a little bit of lift. Oh, how can we do this better? It was enough. That's interesting. Like, instead of, should we do clipping as the thought that's on our brain or the question that we're thinking about all day, it's, oh, how do I get Clipper A to do better because he's the one, right? Like, you just change the question that you're asking yourself. And I see people get caught in that with the business ideas they Spend all their time being like, I could do this, I could do that. What about this idea? What about. And they're all, they're having the same thought process over and over and over again versus, you know, like, people in the Grow Faster community jump in. I'm like, go run ads right now. Like, I don't care. Whatever is on your mind, whatever you're thinking about today, it doesn't have to be a good idea, bad idea, we don't know. Just go run some ads. Because you're going to come back to me next week on the live office hours and you're going to say, I ran ads. This is my cost per click. Nobody booked a call. Why did nobody book a call? Oh, yep, got it. Look at, you're thinking about something else now. You're not thinking about what idea I should do. You're thinking about how do I get somebody of these 150 people that clicked on my ad to schedule a call. You're like, you're not thinking about the same thing. It's like just making the movement happen. And so it's the same with the clippers. It's like, yeah, go. You can think about launching a podcast, but like, just go launch one. Yeah, like, go hire five clippers, bro. Because then you'll have a different. We won't have this conversation of, should I be doing clipping? It's like, you'll know. You'll be like, yeah, I should or shouldn't be doing this, or I should be doing it a different way. Or they need this type of content so I can create. Right. Like, I wonder what happens if those guys, you, you just give them all your short form content. Like, why do you have to give them the long form? Give them the short form and let them clip all that. Those are more viral vibes anyways. Like, yeah, actually you, you have that guy in whatever country he's in that just reposts your videos in a different language and you've seen how well he's done. Yeah, clipping. He's a clip.

Hindi. Yeah, right.

Like, he's a clipper.

Yeah.

And instead of being mad about it, maybe you're sitting there like, wait a sec, dude, maybe I am getting some.

Well, I post my videos in Hindi now.

Yeah, because we talked about it.

Yeah, I know we did. And I'm doing it every single day, but I'm not getting any views on these things. I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

Dude, he's got that Hindi IP address.

I know, I know.

You should hit them up. You should hit them up and say, probably should. I will pay you X number of dollars per thousand views. But I just need you to put the link to my podcast in your link in bio. Yeah, and I wonder if he would make more money by being your first clipper than he's making doing whatever he's doing posting your content.

Anyways, I've thought about doing something similar. I've thought of going to the guys that copy me in English and saying, I'll give you 10 cents for every newsletter subscriber that you get, and I'll use UTM parameters. So I know. Just put my link in your bio.

Yeah, like, they're already doing it. You might as well incentivize it. Like, yeah, yeah, go post my stuff. Like, I hope there's a thousand accounts that post my stuff. As long as I'm seeing lift on what I'm doing in a way that, from a cost perspective makes sense. Who's mad?

One of the guys that copies me has 500,000 followers, and he stopped posting entirely. And I kind of want to, like, buy his account or something.

You should. Yeah. And hire a Slovakian teenager to run it.

If anyone listening wants to run my clipping campaign, email me chrisofounders.com because I want to start doing this.

Yeah, there you go. I'll send you an email right now.

I'm going to just pose an opportunity to you, and I want you to come up with a business idea for it on the fly, no prep. All right, so I'm going to share my screen guy in my community. So tkowners.com his name's Al. He sent me this email, and he says, hey, in my city, which I think is Baton Rouge, Louisiana, they publicly post all of the new business listings on the website. And he basically said, like, what would you do with this? What business could you start around this? So I'm sharing my screen of the April 2025 new business listings. Pristine, clean. Ava Cafe Specialty, Hospital Bay's Oyster Bar. These are local businesses. What kind of agent or SaaS product or vibe coding product could we build that leverages these? Because surely there's a lot more cities than just Baton Rouge, Louisiana, doing this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

These are business owners that either have money or are expecting to spend money.

Right.

On stuff.

Yeah. I mean, it comes. The first question I always ask when. When people bring stuff like this to me is like, what do you want out of it? Right. And so, like, do you want to go launch a software business on the back of this, do you want to just maximize this for income? Do you want to create enterprise value? Right? Like you got to build a little bit of a box for yourself, right? If your goal is make as much money as possible in the shortest amount of time as possible off of something like this, you're talking about a service business. If it's for a business that just started, you're like, it's marketing. Like, yeah, lead gen forever will be a service that you can sell is like we help you get more customers in whatever vehicle you want. You just use that list as a unique angle to get in the door, right? Or you go, you go one layer deeper, right? And instead of starting the service agency yourself, you take those and you sell them as leads to other service businesses.

We're thinking the exact same thing.

Yeah, you go take every new business and you can do that. I mean most secretary of state's like Texas is notorious for it. Like you see all those guys, like the moment that you file for an entity in Texas, there's companies that will send out automatic like mailer direct mail campaigns to the address Saying hey, for $99 we'll claim your ein for you or your right, whatever that is. And it's like, dude, you can get your ein for free. But like most people don't know what to do with that.

Yeah, I had an employee pay $80 once because she got a letter that said, hey, you're registered in the state of Alabama, but you don't have your workforce posters up on the wall showing like what your employees rights are. You need to buy those for $80. So she just wrote them a check and they arrived. I'm like, what are you doing? We get those for free. That's a scammer. But it's smart. I respect that scammer.

But like they're playing the game, but.

What they're doing wrong is they're doing, they need to go one step further. They're doing the lazy route because if you remember when I shared my screen, all they provide are the name of the business and the address. They're just scraping the address and they're sending the generic mailer to it. What you need to do this is what I think someone should do is go to replit or whatever and vibe code an agent that scrapes this every morning and it just plugs in like, hey, John's Restaurant LLC just opened in plugin city name Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I really need John's email. I need you to find his email, whatever you can go to LinkedIn go to Manta, find his email, send him this cold email. Hey, John, I do marketing for insert industry name here. Can we hop on a quick call to where I can help you get more customers? And then so you send out a hundred emails every morning. I do marketing for salons, I do marketing for coffee shops. I do marketing for whatever. And so it feels real to them. It's relevant to them. It has their first name, it's going to their email. You're not competing in a C in the direct mail. Yeah, exactly. Because these guys go check the mail for the next month and they see 10 things that are all the same, so they all go in the trash. But if you show up in their email or in their text, then you'll stand out. And then you can either start a $2,000 a month marketing agency or you could sell Those leads for 50 bucks per call to local $2,000 a month marketing agencies.

Yep. The difference between the 2000 or the selling it of $50 is a matter of scale and speed to significant income. That's always what I tell people is like making $10,000 a month on your own is a lot easier if you're selling a higher ticket product. Software generally is not that. And so like, you might want to jump into software because it's sexy, fun, cool, whatever. But if your true goal, like at your core, is to not work a 9 to 5 or replace your income or hit a specific income target services, the easiest way to make that happen. And again, it like gets the ball rolling. It's like every service, not every single one, but most of the service businesses that I've been involved with have stepped into software after because like, that's just the natural progression. And so like I would go be the $2,000 a month agency. If you're just starting from scratch and you have that data, I would just be the agency and then start just making money. Like, prove to yourself you can do that.

All right, what'd you think? Please share it with a friend and we'll see you next time on the Kerner office.