Eric Siu breaks down how the SaaS startup Clue.ly copies Andrew Tate's playbook: hire hundreds of clippers to flood social media with short video clips, pay per view, reward top performers, and ignore ROI tracking. The strategy works for controversial B2C personal brands but raises questions about long-term sustainability in B2B.
It reminds me of the Andrew Tate model.
It is the Andrew Tate model. Dude, speaking of organic social, I was looking at the Clue.ly founder's post this morning on Twitter. So he actually shared their strategy. So what they do is Clue.ly, they hire— they hired 700 clippers. So I want us to kind of give our take on whether we think this is smart or dumb, but let me just give the strategy here, right? So clearly, just so you guys know, it's cheat on everything. Like you have this interface. Like if I'm talking to Neil on a Zoom call right now, I can see, you know, Neil is from this, this county over here. Here's where companies he worked at and all that type of stuff, right? Like a heads up display. So what they do, number one, is they find clippers. As always, the answer is to scroll more. So they scroll on Instagram, TikTok. Every single time you find a clip of anything, DM the account. What he DMs the account is paid clipping opportunity.
Okay.
Paid clipping opportunity gets responded to 9 out of 10 times. So 90% response rate. And so he says here, the people running these accounts are hungry, slow Slovakian teenagers.
Okay.
Number 2, pay per view, not video. We pay clippers $0 per video. We only pay per, uh, we pay bonuses, right? So maybe let's call it every, like a dollar for every 1,000 views or so. This makes sure we lose nothing from bad clippers and only pay what we want. Number 3, when you find someone good, pay them more. Power law exists in everything, including clippers. 1% of your clippers will generate 99% of the views. Make sure the top 1% are rewarded well and stick with you. Number 4, And then the number 5 is last one. Make sure you have enough content to clip. I go on at least 2 podcasts weekly. Everyone at Clue.ly 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. Number 5, not sure about this one. Tracking ROI. Don't do it. Clipping is cheap and its value isn't in direct product ROI. It's in squeezing all the virality out of potentially viral moments. Everyone has made a single post that flopped. Posting 699 more times will make sure you get the virality It reminds me of the Andrew Tate model. It is the Andrew Tate model.
Yeah.
Yeah. Here's the problem with most marketing agencies. They don't understand what is happening with the world of AI. With my agency, Single Grain, we think about agentic workflows. We think about creating agents for the future. When we think about SEO, we think about creating different products such as internal linking products or content consolidation products. And on the other side of things, we think about building products that just We just think about making marketing easier overall. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of marketing and at the same time leverage the power of AI, go to singlegrain.com and we'll see you on the other side. So what's interesting is—
But his was better in which he just pays per sale.
Yeah. Yeah. And then I know he probably had more clippers than 700. But I, the question is like, is this smart or dumb? I think if you're in consumer, I think this, this might work. This is interesting because I asked the, there's a MrBeast guy that we were talking to, guy used to work for MrBeast. And I showed him this post, right? I was like, this morning, I was like, what do you think about this? He's like, one, he's like, I hate the Clue.ly founder. I was like, yeah, you know, he can be a little polarizing. That's fine. You can have your opinion. 2, he's like, I think this is stupid and won't work for a long time. I actually sent him a reply saying, I'm like, hmm, like, why don't you think this will work? Because it's clearly worked for Tate. I think MrBeast has done this as well. And then now you have a SaaS, a consumer SaaS company doing it. And so I think it'll work for them. I just, you know, I think it's smart. I think it clearly works right now. So we'll see where it goes.
I think it can, it won't be as effective for B2B, but for B2C it's effective. I think this works extremely well for personal brands who create content. So if you want to become famous and you create a lot of content like Alex Hormozi and the content's good and already does well, you can pay a crap ton of people to start clipping and you can go viral and you can probably like 10x your views and get your brand way more out there.
I think, look, The Andrew Tate model is you're just very controversial.
Okay.
Whatever you say is like, it's going to get views, right? This guy tries to play a little controversial too. I think with Alex Hormozi, he's very well-spoken and he does, it takes a lot of work to actually simplify a topic. And most people don't see that, but that's why his stuff does really well too. It's like he simplified these topics and he spent a lot of time and effort on them. So yeah.
Yeah. And it's, I think it's worked out really well for all of us. And I think with Clue.ly, one of the biggest reasons why the clips work is because they are controversial, like you said, and they have been that way because it's, you know, if you look at their business from day one, it's not like, here's our software and it can help you with X, Y, and Z. It's cheat on everything. They're taking a controversial take and because they know cheating is bad, but they're just like, people still like cheating. It makes life easier. So we're going to help you cheat everywhere.
Anyway, that's what we'll say. A jack of all trades, guys, is better than a master of one. See you tomorrow.
