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- Issue #22: September 29, 2025
Issue #22: September 29, 2025
CygYour Meme Lord; You just never know; Dharmesh & domain valuations; Portmanteau names; Flex this
Michael Cyger
September 29, 2025
Hi there, Whoops! I forgot to queue and send my Cyger Selects email today, so here it is a bit late. 🤪 Here 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 Your Meme Lord
The $100k cinematic launch video trend is retarded. You're wasting your VCs money in a desperate attempt to look cool. But the real flex is spending as little money as possible to hit as high of an ROI as possible. I made my launch video for $300. By myself. On my own software. And we hit ROI in minutes. Imo, the $100k launch video is just a cope for not building a real marketing system. Wanna see what a good marketing system looks like? The night before launch, I forwarded our old domain to the new website. Within minutes, we were getting signups on the new site because I built a rock-solid marketing system for 3+ years. The signups won't stop coming. And it's just the beginning. This whole thing makes me wonder: what happened to the scrappy founders in Silicon Valley?????? Has capital been that plentiful that you think it grows on trees??? Or are young founders that big of spoiled brats they think they can just ask daddy for more money whenever they want? Idk about you, but I'm grateful af my VCs gave me money at all and I'm not wasting a dime. Only pussies don't return capital. "Wait, your new domain must've been so expensive" I bought my domain for $25,000. With my own capital. Before the fundraise. Y'all flexing how much money you spent (and lying about it!!!) Meanwhile I'm bragging about how much money I saved I'm the Lil Dicky of Silicon Valley At memelord.com we're gonna save dat money because we're grateful we get to wake up everyday and live our childhood dreams and we ain't blowing it    
I never would have bought the domain MemeLord.com. If I did, I wouldn't have priced it at $25,000. Because who would think you could raise $3 million building memes? TIL (today I learned). #2️⃣ You just never know
I sold the domain putty. me for $10k. I hand registered this domain in Dec 2014 and only received one offer (in 2015) before this sale. And this was the offer: "Hey, let's be real. No one will ever want putty. me. I'll take it for a high $30." I don't think I even responded. There were times when going over my portfolio of domains that I probably considered not renewing this domain and just letting it expire, but that one offer in 2015 made me hold on. Domain investing is paying $16 per year for a shot at $10k.
You just never know which domain will sell today from your portfolio. Or if it will ever sell. Or if it will just take 11 years to sell. Congrats to Mike on another great sale. #3️⃣ Dharmesh & domain valuations
An incidental impact of vibe coding and agentic coding: Website domains are becoming more valuable. The *reason* is that it is now easier (and cheaper) to build *something* of value on a domain than it was before. Case in point: I own 500+ domains. Almost all of them had some idea behind them at the time but very few of them were something I could get around to building something on. Just not enough hours in the day. Now that creating software is easier, I find myself going back to some of the domains in my portfolio and seeing if I can launch something on it. A recent example is: MetaPrompt .com (which is a simple AI app that helps you improve the prompt you use with ChatGPT).
I'm doing the same as Dharmesh. I love acquiring great domains with the intention of maybe, possibly someday build them out. But if I don't, I also agree with Dharmesh that the values will continue of increase. But how can they keep going up?! That's the same thing I said every time I bought a new house, and I've owned five houses in my life. #4️⃣ Portmanteau names
People often wonder how startups came up with their names. In Greptile's case, it was brainstorming on slack with YC partner @bradflora during the batch. "You could add some stuff after grep to make a new word" "What do you think of greptile.com?" "but is it a multi billion dollar public company? $GREP?" "$GREP would be sick ticker. Sick"   
Greptile has raised $25M to Kill The Bug. The round is led by Benchmark with @ericvishria joining our board. Today, code is written by humans and a variety of coding agents like Devin, Claude Code, and Cursor. Greptile serves as the independent and universal code review layer. This month alone, Greptile reviewed 500M lines of code for top companies like Brex, Substack, PostHog, Bilt, and even YC’s internal software team, helping prevent 180,000+ bugs. Alongside our Series A - we’re excited to announce Greptile v3 - a brand new agent architecture capable of catching >3x more critical bugs than Greptile v2. Available now to all users. 🧵 
"Greptile" is a portmanteau. A portmanteau is a word created by blending parts of two or more words, combining both their sounds and meanings into a new word. "Greptile" is a portmanteau because it blends "grep," a command-line search tool, with "reptile," combining the sound and meaning of both words into one new term that evokes characteristics of search functionality with the idea or image of a reptile. Reptiles often eat bugs. So this is a fun name for a SaaS that helps teams catch and kill software bugs up to three times faster. #5️⃣ Flex this
It's ironic that buying a $100k domain is a flex, but no one notices those owning hundreds of such brands.
we spent $100k on the cutest domain in tech and shipped a brand new way to code with ai 
Well said, Samit.
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