Michael Cyger sells Brew.com in cash and equity deal.
Michael Cyger of DNAcademy has sold the domain name Brew.com to the team behind BuyMeACoffee.com, which is a sort of tip-a-creator service. Here’s co-founder Jijo Sunny mentioning the acquisition on Twitter:
1/ 👋 Excited to share what we’ve been building at https://t.co/GOQJ7LjQ2t + we are going to tweetstorm our progress every week!
Week 1 highlights: getting shortlisted for YC W2019🤞, acquiring a premium domain💰, meeting Substack’s @hamishmckenzie and Stripe CEO @patrickc 🤩
— Jijo Sunny ☕ (@JijoSunny) November 6, 2018
Cyger had been using BuyMeACoffee on his website. As Sunny describes it, a deal quickly transpired from there:
It started with a cold email. Guess what? He was using BuyMeACoffee on his blog, and was excited to hear about what we’re building next. Within 2w, we signed the deal at @Escrowcom’s SF office. You’re a pleasure to work with @MichaelCyger!
Cyger told DNW:
I actually read about Buy Me A Coffee on HackerNews in February and thought their design and implementation was elegantly simple and beautiful. So I signed up for an account to check it out, and then integrated the Buy Me A Coffee button on the public blog of DNAcademy to see how it worked. So far, about 10 people — who are not subscribed to DNAcademy as students — but who appreciate the content I produce — have purchased me a cup of coffee, which I like much more than displaying programmatic ads because it’s cleaner, creates a more direct relationship with readers, and earns more revenue per reader.
While financial terms were not disclosed, Cyger expects the deal to eventually be worth seven figures after the company gains traction. He will join Brew’s Advisory Board.
Cyger met up with the BuyMeACoffee team at Escrow.com’s office to complete the deal (see photo).
The company will not rebrand its BuyMeACoffee.com service as Brew.com. Instead, it’s launching a new site on Brew.com using what it has learned running BuyMeACoffee. Based on Sunny’s tweets, it seems like it will be a type of Patreon service, perhaps providing people with an ad-free subscription to content.
Looks like he is taking a flyer with his domain, and if it fails the domain comes right back to him.
Congrats!
Congrats to Mike!
Equity! 🙂
Great story and congrats to Mike.
Looks like he practices what he preaches, thru his course.
wtg mike…
couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy…mazeltov bro
Well done Cyger.
Thanks for staying active in the domain game.
We need to wake up and promote this industry.
He is actually being philanthropic because that domain is worth at least 7 and even 8 figures just by itself. It’s a remarkably top level (pun intended) domain.
Congrats Perfect
It is interesting that the brew.com domain is not being used for a beer or coffee site. On the other hand, the buymeacoffee.com seems a little limiting in terms of becoming a big company, so using a new domain might work out well for them. Not because the buymeacoffee.com domain is long, but because it implies content creators will only get a small amount of money from using it. Brew.com does not really imply anything so it lets them become the Paypal or Venmo of the content payment/donation industry.