Never trust a memecoin dev who can't explain their supply distribution + "weird mechanics". The tools are there for proper launches. You know the games you're playing, either do it properly or get dragged through the mud, rightfully so.

made token launches easy, simple, and technically unruggable. We no longer have LPs getting pulled, honeypots, and the other scams of days past. We also now have tools that allow people to "bundle" -> buy into your own token across multiple wallets in the same block at launch.
So I always find it funny when someone says "we got sniped" or "we bundled but one of our team members had access, I didn't." It's all pretty much bullshit. You control the keys. You control the wallets. Own it.
The cost to launch a quality memecoin is so low at this point that I'm genuinely surprised by the lack of effort. You can vibe code a clean website in an hour. You have Pumpfun to launch and bundler tools to secure your position. The barrier isn't money or tech, it's creativity and integrity.
I ran the numbers. (Well Claude did)
The cost to bundle ~60% of supply at launch is roughly $3,200.
That's it. 10-15 SOL at the bottom of the bonding curve, split across 16-20 wallets. You're buying at the absolute floor of an exponential curve where your dollars stretch the furthest.
The cost to get a token to a $1M market cap? ~$48K in total buy pressure through PumpSwap.
And that's not even sunk cost, you still hold the tokens. Your actual risk capital is the bundle ($3K) plus whatever you spend on a website. If the token dies, you're out $3-5K. That's a rounding error for most ppl in this space.
Now here's where it gets interesting. Since Project Ascend, creators earn 0.3% on every single trade. At a $100K market cap with even modest daily volume of $50K, that's $150/day in creator fees, you'd recoup your entire bundle cost in about three weeks just from fees, without selling a single token.
At $500K daily volume (normal for a token with momentum), that's $1,500/day. The economics of grinding are actually viable if you're not speedrunning the dump.
"But 60% supply control is a red flag!"
Here's my take: every token that's actually running probably has side wallets quietly dumping on you anyway. The difference is they're hiding it. I'd rather see a team be upfront -> "we hold 60%, here's our lockup schedule, here's the vesting, watch the wallets" and build trust through transparency than deal with the current meta of anonymous deployers with hidden bundles pretending they hold 2%.
The play is simple: lock a meaningful chunk, publish the wallet addresses, set a public vesting schedule, and let the community verify on-chain. Supply control isn't the problem, hidden supply control is.
Don't be a moron. Don't be greedy. If you have a genuinely good meme, a clean site, and transparent tokenomics, the volume will come.
The market is clearly there for high-quality launches. We just don't get runners because most devs suck.
Proper supply management is actually your moat. And if you do it right, PvP won't matter. The degens sniping and dumping aren't spending $3K. They're spending 0.5 SOL and praying. You can outclass the entire field for the price of a nice dinner. $1-3K to bundle a token with 40-60% supply control and some of you still can't hold a $100K market cap. That's not a market problem. That's a you problem.
Literally what WhiteWhale did. Plus others, most coins that are dead are because of dev selling or side wallets selling. There is enough distribution that anything under a $100k was rugged by launch team, under $1M is probably bad meme or again launch team selling etc.
Anyways this probably oversimplies the problem but whatever. Cheers.