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- Issue #12: July 21, 2025
Issue #12: July 21, 2025
Drop the "AI"; Startup idea for domains; Domain wishes; Every letter $; You don't do this?
Michael Cyger
July 21, 2025
Hi there, The @CygerSelects newsletter highlights interesting tidbits related to domain names that I find in my daily browsing of 𝕏. I think this is a particularly interesting newsletter issue. Here are (what I think are) the most interesting 5️⃣ domain tweets from last week. Have a great week, Mike P.S. I publish my best posts and opinions in Cyger Says every Friday morning. #1️⃣ Drop the "AI"
quick tip: you don't need to put AI in the name of your product. everything has AI now
@ProductHunt boasts 552K followers on 𝕏. It's the go-to platform for launching new software. Founders turn to it for distribution, visibility, and the hope of going viral - and getting early sales. With that kind of reach, Product Hunt is a heavyweight influencer in the startup and founder ecosystem. So when they drop a meme like this, I pay attention. It might just signal a shift in how people think about buying domain names. Maybe. #2️⃣ Startup idea for domains
startup idea for you "AI agents that finds expired dotcom domains" every day 50,000 domain names expire. most are garbage lbut hidden in there are gems - domains with real traffic, clean backlinks, brandable names that someone will pay thousands for. domain investors know this. they make serious money buying expired domains for $100 and flipping them for $5k+. i did this when i was younger but finding the good ones is pure torture. right now they manually download massive lists of expiring domains, then spend hours checking each one. does it have traffic? clean backlink history? is the name brandable? by the time they finish analyzing 50 domains, the best ones are already gone. this is exactly what AI agents are built for. pattern recognition at machine speed. how it works: your ai agent watches all the domain drop lists 24/7. it checks each domain's traffic history, backlink quality, spam scores, and brandability. when it finds a winner, it texts you: "XYZ domain dropping tomorrow. 5k monthly visitors, mentioned in techcrunch, estimated auction price $300." how to build it: weekend mvp: connect to daily domain drop feeds, run everything through a scoring algorithm, send sms alerts via twilio when something hits your criteria. plug in apis like majestic seo and similarweb for traffic data. charge $99/month to beta users. how to grow it: start with 100 beta customers paying $99/month. these people currently spend 2+ hours per day doing this manually, so you're literally paying them to use your product. wont be easy to find first 100 customers. maybe you'll have to create tons of yt content, x content around what you're seeing out there, but i do think its possible. scale to 1,000 customers = $1.2m arr. your only real costs are data feeds and servers and your team. but this could be a 1 person biz with contractors. add features: auto-bidding at auctions, one-click listing to marketplace sites, private deals for agencies. each new feature makes manual competitors look like cavemen. (thanks to @ideabrowser for this idea) why i like AI agent businesses like this domain startup idea (and how to find them) look for markets where people are: → doing repetitive, boring work that requires pattern recognition → monitoring multiple data sources 24/7 (impossible for humans) → already paying significant time/money for manual solutions → making real money when they find opportunities (so they won't churn) → working in industries where speed = competitive advantage the best ai agent businesses solve problems that are too tedious for humans but too valuable to ignore. find the digital needle-in-haystack problems where people are burning hours for clear ROI. happy building. 
Greg Isenberg is the CEO and Co-Founder of Late Checkout, a holding company that manages a portfolio of internet businesses. He has deep roots in the tech world, having served as Head of Product Strategy at WeWork and as an advisor to major platforms like TikTok and Reddit. He also runs Idea Browser, a tool designed to surface emerging trends and startup ideas worth building. Greg frequently shares these ideas on his personal account. In one recent post, he proposed a startup concept that uses AI to identify profitable expired .com domains. It targets a niche market where around 50,000 domains expire every day. Some of these can be picked up for under $100 and later sold for $5,000 or more, as shown by real-world domain investor strategies. The concept centers around an AI agent called "DomainHunter" that would automate the process. It would analyze traffic history, backlink profiles, and brand potential using APIs like Majestic SEO and SimilarWeb. The goal is to streamline what is currently a time-consuming, manual task for domain investors. It all sounds pretty simple when Greg outlines it. But anyone who’s spent time in the domain space knows how competitive and difficult it is to find names with real value. Still, a few builders jumped in to bring the idea to life. The most notable example is Josh Pigford (@Shpigford), who launched @name_snag in a single day. He earned $1,200 on day one, and then made $0 the next day. Whether he’ll turn it into a consistent revenue stream remains to be seen. Plenty of startup founders follow him—and many of them are likely signing up to see where this goes. #3️⃣ Domain wishes
If you had one wish to change anything about domain investing, what would it be? ✨
People responded to Domain Smoke's post about changing domain investing with a range of interesting ideas. Here are the main suggestions, summed up in simpler words:
#4️⃣ Every letter $
Every extra letter makes a difference. STR by domain length (based on Atom.com sales): * 3-letter = 5.1% * 7-letter = 4.8% * 12-letter = 2.3% The curve isn’t steep at first, then it drops. All else equal, buyers want short, memorable domains. 
This is what most investors would expect. But it's nice to have the data to back up our intuition. Thanks, Darpan and @AtomHQ. #5️⃣ You don't do this?
Do people actually use the long-press feature to insert domain extensions? 
I do this every day. And I'm in the minority. I bet if we asked domain name investors, it would be higher than 36%. But I also bet it wouldn't be more than 70%.
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