Kalin Karakehayov is a digital strategist, investor, and founder of SEO.Domains, where he oversees an extraordinary portfolio of over 150,000 SEO domain names. His approach fuses the precision of a chess grandmaster with the foresight of an entrepreneur — turning digital assets into strategic instruments of leverage and long-term value.
In this conversation, Kalin and Tony explore how mental models, strategic patience, and clarity of purpose can redefine how entrepreneurs build wealth and freedom in the digital age.
What You’ll Learn
• The mindset and systems behind owning 150,000 SEO domains
• How “chess thinking” leads to smarter business decisions
• Strategies for digital asset investing and valuation
• Avoiding burnout while scaling an empire
• The future of SEO and domain-driven business growth
• How to optimize for life’s “immeasurables” — freedom, creativity, and intuition
About Kalin Karakehayov
Kalin Karakehayov is the founder of SEO.Domains, a global marketplace that specializes in aged and SEO-rich domain names. With over 800,000 domain evaluations under his belt, he’s built one of the most extensive domain portfolios in existence. His entrepreneurial philosophy emphasizes clarity, strategic structure, and the integration of life and work — a balance that allows him to grow without burnout.
Sponsors & Partners
• Turn your dreams into cha-ching with the best platform for entrepreneurs. 👉 Start your $1/month trial today: https://shopify.com/tony
• For sponsorship opportunities, email ad-sales@libsyn.com.
Resources & Links Mentioned
1 Connect with Kalin: seo.domains, i.gy, youtube.com/@growyounger
2 🎧 Listen on Apple: https://tonydurso.com/apple
3 🎧 Listen on Spotify: https://tonydurso.com/spotify
4 🎵 Tony’s Music: https://tonydurso.com/music
5 📧 Newsletter: https://tonydurso.com/news
6 🎥 Video: https://tonydurso.com/videos
Tony’s Closing Words
Use this and let’s help you Move on YOUR Journey to Success!
Just Take Action. – Success awaits those who persevere and remain steadfast despite the odds. Sow good seeds, do good deeds and join me on the next episode.
digital asset investing, domain portfolio strategy, SEO domain names, business chess strategy, entrepreneur mindset, scaling without burnout, digital real estate investing, long-term wealth frameworks, automation for entrepreneurs, strategic decision-making, business clarity, investing in domains, leveraging SEO for growth, freedom through digital assets, strategic patience in business, digital entrepreneurship, business mental models, chess-based strategy, building wealth online, mastering scalability.
#Entrepreneurship #DigitalAssets #ChessMindset #SEO #DomainInvesting #StrategicThinking #EntrepreneurMindset #OnlineBusiness #BusinessFreedom #WealthBuilding
In this conversation, Kalin and Tony explore how mental models, strategic patience, and clarity of purpose can redefine how entrepreneurs build wealth and freedom in the digital age.
What You’ll Learn
• The mindset and systems behind owning 150,000 SEO domains
• How “chess thinking” leads to smarter business decisions
• Strategies for digital asset investing and valuation
• Avoiding burnout while scaling an empire
• The future of SEO and domain-driven business growth
• How to optimize for life’s “immeasurables” — freedom, creativity, and intuition
About Kalin Karakehayov
Kalin Karakehayov is the founder of SEO.Domains, a global marketplace that specializes in aged and SEO-rich domain names. With over 800,000 domain evaluations under his belt, he’s built one of the most extensive domain portfolios in existence. His entrepreneurial philosophy emphasizes clarity, strategic structure, and the integration of life and work — a balance that allows him to grow without burnout.
Sponsors & Partners
• Turn your dreams into cha-ching with the best platform for entrepreneurs. 👉 Start your $1/month trial today: https://shopify.com/tony
• For sponsorship opportunities, email ad-sales@libsyn.com.
Resources & Links Mentioned
1 Connect with Kalin: seo.domains, i.gy, youtube.com/@growyounger
2 🎧 Listen on Apple: https://tonydurso.com/apple
3 🎧 Listen on Spotify: https://tonydurso.com/spotify
4 🎵 Tony’s Music: https://tonydurso.com/music
5 📧 Newsletter: https://tonydurso.com/news
6 🎥 Video: https://tonydurso.com/videos
Tony’s Closing Words
Use this and let’s help you Move on YOUR Journey to Success!
Just Take Action. – Success awaits those who persevere and remain steadfast despite the odds. Sow good seeds, do good deeds and join me on the next episode.
digital asset investing, domain portfolio strategy, SEO domain names, business chess strategy, entrepreneur mindset, scaling without burnout, digital real estate investing, long-term wealth frameworks, automation for entrepreneurs, strategic decision-making, business clarity, investing in domains, leveraging SEO for growth, freedom through digital assets, strategic patience in business, digital entrepreneurship, business mental models, chess-based strategy, building wealth online, mastering scalability.
#Entrepreneurship #DigitalAssets #ChessMindset #SEO #DomainInvesting #StrategicThinking #EntrepreneurMindset #OnlineBusiness #BusinessFreedom #WealthBuilding
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00:00My guest today, Kalen, is the founder of SEO.domains, and he's the man behind over 150,000 SEO domain names.
00:00:11Yeah, you heard that right.
00:00:12About making change.
00:00:14Let's say someone wants to quit a bad job or quit university, which in Bulgaria is very useless if you're not studying medicine or anything like that requires a degree on specific skill.
00:00:25So if you go in Bulgaria studying computer science in university, it's just such a waste of time.
00:00:42Welcome back to the podcast.
00:00:44What if every domain name that you bought could become an appreciating asset, not just a web address, but digital real estate with real market value?
00:00:55My guest today, Kalen, is the founder of SEO.domains, and he's the man behind over 150,000 SEO domain names.
00:01:06Yeah, you heard that right.
00:01:07He's built one of the most unique business models in the online world where strategic thinking meets long-term vision.
00:01:16Kalen combines the mind of a chess master with the insight of a digital investor.
00:01:22His journey shows how to scale intelligently, automate systems, and build wealth without burnout, something every entrepreneur can relate to.
00:01:33Today, we're going to dive into how he uses chess thinking to guide life and business decisions, how he spots undervalued digital assets before the marketing does, and how you can apply the same frameworks to your own ventures.
00:01:46So stay tuned, because this conversation is going to open your mind to new levels of strategy, creativity, and freedom in business.
00:01:55Let's begin.
00:01:56Hi, Kalen.
00:01:56Welcome to the Tony D'Erso Show.
00:01:59Hi.
00:02:00Thanks for having me.
00:02:02Kalen, your last name is a little difficult for me to pronounce, so if you could say very clearly for the audience here, so we have it.
00:02:11It's Karakihayov.
00:02:14It's a very difficult Slavic name.
00:02:17And you're in Bulgaria.
00:02:20Yes.
00:02:21Okay.
00:02:22Well, wonderful what you've built.
00:02:24And the audience that we have is from all over the world, and we're all looking forward to learning about strategic moves for building an SEO empire.
00:02:34And you've built quite the empire.
00:02:36And what I'd like to do, Kalen, is let's start at the beginning and kind of tell us, how did you first get into domain investing and some of the early steps that took you to the 150,000 domains?
00:02:48I'm very freedom loving.
00:02:50So I started as a kid playing chess.
00:02:53I love chess, individual sport, like sky is the limit.
00:02:56If you win games, you become better and better, win prizes.
00:02:59So this really grabbed my attention as a kid.
00:03:03I wanted to become a pro.
00:03:04Eventually, aged 20-something, I was in top 1,000 in the world, grandmaster level.
00:03:11Not yet a grandmaster, but the same ELO rating.
00:03:14Unfortunately, back then, it was hard to make your earning in chess from playing because I was in Bulgaria and low-cost flights were not yet a thing.
00:03:24And the tournaments were mostly in Western Europe, so I had to travel with trains back and forth.
00:03:29I went four-day train from Bulgaria to Spain, one direction, for example, when I was 20.
00:03:36So it was a lot of traveling.
00:03:37It seemed a bit unbalanced.
00:03:40I tried to become a coach for a bit.
00:03:41This was very helpful in developing my understanding of psychology.
00:03:45From this part of my life, I remember that actually kids and teenagers are much like grown-ups.
00:03:54So trying to teach something to a kid is not that different to teaching it to a grown-up.
00:04:01So this was a very nice period, but then I was not fulfilled because the kids were changing, but I was the same person.
00:04:09And I was explaining to kids again and again the same stuff.
00:04:12So I got bored eventually.
00:04:14And out of mostly boredom and quitting my university, which was quite useless, it was not practical enough and it was a really, really ineffective way of learning anything, I was studying computer science.
00:04:29Third year, I quit and I had so much free space and time in my life that I decided to create a website of my chess club.
00:04:35And when I created this website, I did all kinds of things with this website, including like uploading piracy software and like anything you could possibly do on a website while being a total nudie and disregarding both legality and common sense.
00:04:52And some of these things were, and then I got spotted by someone who wanted to cooperate and from this person, I, for the first time, heard the word SEO, search engine optimization.
00:05:06And I was like, really?
00:05:07You can do stuff that can make the websites go up in Google?
00:05:10This seems like a very good way to make money and still maintain a high level of freedom because you can do it from anywhere, anytime you want, no bosses.
00:05:18And I was like, that's my thing.
00:05:20So I started learning it 2008.
00:05:24In the beginning, it was a disaster.
00:05:26The first website I tried to promote actually tanked down and didn't appear in Google at all for six months.
00:05:33So the beginning was a disaster.
00:05:34I had no mentors.
00:05:35I didn't read any books.
00:05:36All I did was read forums on the internet.
00:05:39So like not any system, not any course, nothing systematic, just chaotic learning.
00:05:45And it turned out that it's good because the brain starts connecting a lot of dots.
00:05:49It's slow, but it's very sustainable.
00:05:51And I still remember some of my experiences from this period, even though it was 15 years ago.
00:05:57Eventually, I ran into problems with Google because I became locally successful.
00:06:01So not like rich or globally successful, but I have a small empire of websites in Bulgaria.
00:06:06So Google targeted me personally and penalized them in 2013.
00:06:11And then I was like, okay, if getting the link juice and selling links gets you penalized, maybe I can sell the domains to the people who get the link juice.
00:06:22So that's how we turned the SEO empire into the beginning of a domain empire.
00:06:27I got a co-founder, we founded a startup, and we got some very tiny initial seed funding.
00:06:35Well, we called it seed in Bulgaria, but it was actually like accelerator level money.
00:06:40We used US terms because in Bulgaria seed funding was like 100k, not millions.
00:06:47But still, it helped us try different business models within two years.
00:06:53Most of them failed, but then we got a good business model, which was the simplest one.
00:06:57We buy domains, we hold them, and then we sell them.
00:07:01And we made so many mistakes in this company that it should have been a disaster.
00:07:06But it wasn't because the domain industry, the SEO domain industry, while we were making the mistakes, it appreciated like 20 times for 10 years.
00:07:15So we were the, we called this rising tide that lifts all boats, including ours.
00:07:21And yeah, our company had ups and downs, but had good growth.
00:07:27And now we're evaluating it at about maybe 70, 80 million dollars.
00:07:33I still hold more than half the share, so it's good for me.
00:07:37We also got new shareholders.
00:07:41We now have a board, so it's a bit more corporate for my liking.
00:07:44But again, as a freedom-loving person, but it's a great company, 120 people, and we're still growing it.
00:07:54And now that SEO is actually, has a fork, before it was only SEO for Google, but now there's also SEO for ChatGPT and all of the other AIs.
00:08:06Now we have a new chance to be the pioneers in this new kind of SEO.
00:08:11So the future is looking good for now.
00:08:13Wow, that is quite the mouthful.
00:08:14It's so much, because when I first started my podcasting, I worked towards, you know, picking up domains, a couple of domains that I could, that had a lot of people.
00:08:24But what you've done is, is on such another stratospheric level, and I'm thinking 150,000 domains.
00:08:32I don't think I got past that part yet.
00:08:35How do you, how do you manage so many domains without exhausting you?
00:08:40I understand there's technology that can keep track of things to a degree.
00:08:44You've got employees, but it's so much.
00:08:46And I'm thinking from the point of view of the audience that's listening, entrepreneurs, business people, how can they learn from running some things and growing it so big without, without, and still, as you mentioned, maintaining that joy and freedom?
00:09:03Well, my top advice for maintaining the joy and freedom is depend only on people you can depend, and if possible, short term.
00:09:16So, often there's a founder with a good business vision, but they depend on a tech guy, or there's a tech guy who has great technology but doesn't have the business vision, and they rely on a business guy, and that's how a lot of startups are founded.
00:09:33In my case, I was the business guy with some tech knowledge, and I had a very high tech, tech, tech, co-founder.
00:09:43And a lot of the things that helped in the beginning was that we relied on each other very well.
00:09:52Over time, some tension built up, and he is no longer in the company, but the thing is that I was never completely dependent on the tech.
00:10:03For example, for a long time, we had very high tech solutions about catching the domains, for which my co-founder did great work, but we didn't manage to click together and build a good solution for managing the domains.
00:10:17So, for a long time, I was managing the domains using only free text files.
00:10:22That's no joke.
00:10:23It's only free text files.
00:10:24All of the domains we ever owned, all of the domains we ever sold, and all of the domains we ever abandoned.
00:10:28So, from these files, whenever you catch or register a new domain, you just put it in file number one.
00:10:35If you sell it, you put it in file number two.
00:10:38And if you sell 100 domains, you put them in file number two.
00:10:43If you abandoned 1,000 domains at once, bought at a prom or something, you just put them in file number three.
00:10:48So, basically, we have a script that our developer wrote that anytime we need something, it gets the free files in the script, and it says, okay, now you have these domains.
00:11:02So, we can put in the script 10,000 domains.
00:11:06It browses the files and says, okay, these 8,000, these exact 8,000 are yours.
00:11:10So, in this case, you have, like, a database without a database, and it's super easy to do something.
00:11:17All of the free files are chronological, and this chronological order is never broken.
00:11:23And let's say I need all of the UK domains we ever sold.
00:11:27I just go into Notepad++.
00:11:29I have this file open, and in five seconds, I get this.
00:11:34While a developer will have to build a filter for this in a week.
00:11:38So, going manual for a long time was a good decision.
00:11:42Eventually, we got too big, and the developers eventually build a good system that we can rely on.
00:11:49But I think that in many cases, people overcomplicated managing stuff.
00:11:57Basically, everything around an operation is lists.
00:12:02And if you have a good structure of lists, you can export anything from them.
00:12:06And, of course, if you have very complex stuff where you need overlapping, let's say, overlapping filters, then you can use Excel.
00:12:16And if it's too tough to Excel for Excel, then you code.
00:12:20But starting with coding for a task that's not that complex is just waiting precious developer resources.
00:12:26We're speaking with Kellen Kaye.
00:12:28He's the domain grandmaster.
00:12:30We're talking about strategic moves for building an SEO empire.
00:12:34And you can find him at SEO.domains.
00:12:37It's not .com.
00:12:39It's SEO.domains.
00:12:41Is that right, Kaye, Kellen?
00:12:43Yes.
00:12:44Now, you are a very accomplished chess master.
00:12:48And I'm getting what you're saying here.
00:12:50And I'm following you on a lot of it.
00:12:54I've been in promotion and marketing for a couple of decades.
00:12:57And I've been through the days or, should I say, the years of just working with rudimentary spreadsheets or spreadsheets on paper.
00:13:06So I kind of get it a little bit here.
00:13:09But what I really liked about this interview, what piqued my interest is the chess part.
00:13:17Now, I'm not very much of a chess player at all.
00:13:19I'm nothing.
00:13:21But I know good chess players.
00:13:25And you compare this business strategy to playing chess.
00:13:29And there's, what should I say, mental moves.
00:13:32There's things that the entrepreneur should learn to master in order to make better long-term decisions.
00:13:38So whether we are chess players or not, there's things that, there are items, there are modes, models that you as a chess master can teach us to be a better entrepreneur.
00:13:50Well, I get asked this question, of course, everywhere.
00:13:54Everyone knows I was a chess player.
00:13:56But to be honest, although this answer doesn't feel great because I invested a lot of hours, days and years of my life studying chess, I think that chess and life are not really similar at all.
00:14:12So there's a few very important things that I learned from chess.
00:14:16So it was not a waste.
00:14:17And surely the brain developed in ways that I cannot directly relate to my success.
00:14:24But if we try to do a parallel between chess and life, I think the two best parallels are in chess you are mostly responsible for your success or failure.
00:14:37So, like, it would seem that you are totally responsible, but in chess there's luck.
00:14:43So, like, it's not like you throw a dice or draw cards or something, but there's luck because sometimes the position is so complicated that both you and the opponent do stupid stuff.
00:14:55And it just luck sometimes decides again.
00:14:58It actually does.
00:14:59And it's the same in life.
00:15:00Like, you are responsible for your actions, but there's also luck.
00:15:05So you are responsible for increasing your chances and you can increase them greatly, but don't underestimate luck.
00:15:14And whenever your success has luck in it, like, don't be too proud for it because a lot of times there will be luck in it, actually.
00:15:24There's a lot of studies on this.
00:15:26Luck plays a significant role.
00:15:28So this is one of the parallels, so the level of responsibility and the share of luck is similar, I think, between chess and life.
00:15:36The other thing that I learned very much from chess was that people are always irrational and they will be irrational in everything they do, even super smart people like chess players, and even about extremely basic things.
00:15:52So, how do we give an example for this?
00:15:58Rafael Nadal plays tennis with his left hand because it gives him a left hand advantage in sports because he's used to playing right hand opponents, but his opponents are not used to playing left hand opponents, so he gets a left hand advantage, which is a very basic evolutionary thing.
00:16:16In chess, in chess, I learned that playing rare openings gives me a left hand advantage because I play them all the time while my opponents face them rarely, so I have much more experience in them.
00:16:29And experience is very important in chess to just feel the position so you can play well.
00:16:34So I assume that a lot of people would want to play a rare opening.
00:16:39Basically, it's your choice whether you play a rare opening, like, opponent can go mainstream, but you can always go rare, like, they cannot stop you from, like, going in some fringe direction, which may be objectively a tiny bit worse, but if you have the big experience advantage, it's a win more than it's a loss.
00:16:56And very few chess players are doing it.
00:16:58If everyone was doing it, we wouldn't have mainstream openings because then everyone would just be going in some rare direction.
00:17:05So, I couldn't explain this to myself for many years.
00:17:11I was playing rare openings, and this meant that I had results which basically were higher than my actual strength as a player because I was using a good shortcut to having better results.
00:17:24But the other players were not doing it.
00:17:26And I figured out after many years they were not doing it because it would look bad.
00:17:34Like, there's no other reason.
00:17:35The only reason is that it looks like you're running away from battle.
00:17:40And especially, like, men don't want to be looking like they're running away from battle.
00:17:45You know, men like to accept the challenge.
00:17:47So I was like, wow, you're pros.
00:17:51You're supposed to be doing whatever contributes to success, and it's not cheating or something.
00:17:55You're just being smart.
00:17:56You're just being like Nadal.
00:17:57Like, he's not running away from challenge, right?
00:17:59You know how Nadal plays tennis.
00:18:01So, it's just about being smart and effective, and still people don't do it.
00:18:05And I was like, well, are people so irrational in all areas of life?
00:18:09And it turns out, yes, and this discovery later contributed a huge lot to our business
00:18:17because we are often exploiting people being really irrational, mostly our competition or potential competition.
00:18:24It's just that they're low-hanging fruits, but they're somehow annoying, somehow boring, somehow you need to do stuff that's out of your comfort zone.
00:18:34And we can figure out which those low-hanging fruits are, and we don't trust people that they would have picked them up.
00:18:43We say, oh, they very often don't get picked up due to people being irrational, due to the low-hanging fruits picking being boring or something that's not being a challenge.
00:18:53And then we go and pick them, even though many other people would not even expect for these low-hanging fruits to exist.
00:19:00And a lot of our business is built on that exact idea.
00:19:02One thing I think about with chess as you're saying this, I'm thinking about when I'm playing chess, which is very, very, very few times in my life, you know your opponent.
00:19:13There's that stress of you have an opponent, someone is trying to beat you.
00:19:18There's you, there's him.
00:19:20It's just one-on-one.
00:19:21The entrepreneur, the business person, you don't necessarily think of your opponent or competition right away.
00:19:29You're taking a product to market.
00:19:31You're trying to make something really good, whether it's technology, a service, or a physical product.
00:19:37You're trying to make something good that fits a demand, fits what people want.
00:19:42And you don't necessarily, and you know, there's too many different varieties, but you don't necessarily think of all the competition.
00:19:50But you just think of, well, in a way, but you think of, I've got a good widget, and this is a better widget, and this will do something better, better, cheaper, faster, better, whatever.
00:20:01So you're thinking of your competition, but you're not directly trying to beat them on their own product.
00:20:07Though, I guess if you have an Amazon store or whatever, then that's a different thing because everything, you know what the products are, and you just have to, if you can cut down the cost, you know you've got a better chance of making a better sale.
00:20:20So there's many, many options here, and it all depends on what you are selling.
00:20:24But the one thing I'm thinking of is you don't necessarily go think, you don't start off thinking that you've got a competitor standing there that you've got to hurry against.
00:20:37You're just trying to develop your product.
00:20:38You're just trying to make it all fit and make it all make sense right at the beginning.
00:20:43Isn't that right?
00:20:43Or what do you think about that?
00:20:45We begin from one single thing when we do the evaluation, and it's mostly an intuitive thing.
00:20:54We begin with freedom.
00:20:55Like, just like we try to maximize freedom and a good future for a human, we do it for the company.
00:21:01We do it.
00:21:02So how can we build a company that has the most freedom?
00:21:06So if you can earn a million a month and still have all our team free half the time to develop new stuff, it's better for us than earning two million a month and having to deal with annoying clients all day long.
00:21:19Because when we started the domain thing, we could have done an SEO agency instead.
00:21:25And we actually did an SEO agency now after 11 years as a side thing.
00:21:31But if we had started 11 years ago as an SEO agency, now we could have been worth half a billion, but I would have gray hair from dealing with all of the annoying clients.
00:21:42So that's like, and very possibly, if I had grinded it out, I would have money, more money, but would be unhappy.
00:21:54But very often people overestimate their ability to grind it out.
00:21:59And after three years, there will be burnout and there will be failure and you have no money and no happiness.
00:22:03So freedom takes you away from this bad direction.
00:22:08So how do you optimize for freedom?
00:22:10You have to ask everything.
00:22:11So you ask a lot of money, low risk, adaptable business with like plan B, plan C, no dependencies.
00:22:21So it can be done with low capital, no investors and so on.
00:22:24And you want all of these at once.
00:22:26Intuition is about with and about looking at billions of possible combinations of businesses, product services, go to markets, business models, everything possible.
00:22:38So pricing, everything possible, you try to evaluate all at once in your head after being experienced in business.
00:22:46And the end result is if you aim low, you have millions of options and you either choose a bad option or you get into analysis paralysis.
00:22:55But if you aim super high, then you lose all the stupid options instantly.
00:22:59So, OK, if you want to earn a million till the end of the year, OK, you have many options.
00:23:07Then let's say you can get just like a highly paid corporate job, which is something that you earn a lot of money, but not have a lot of room to grow.
00:23:16So, OK, so you also want room to grow.
00:23:18OK, so now you're an entrepreneur.
00:23:20So corporate jobs out the window.
00:23:22That's good because the better entrepreneur journey will be better than the better corporate job usually.
00:23:29So like you're throwing the bad options out the window.
00:23:32OK, now you want 10 million and growth and low capital and if possible, the money to come fast.
00:23:40OK, so what option is left?
00:23:42Like rob a bank.
00:23:44OK, high risk.
00:23:45OK, so also lower the risk.
00:23:47So all the stupid ideas like going into the stock trading with leverage are out the window.
00:23:53So you throw and you throw away and you throw away and in the end you're like, OK, so little is left that actually the choice is quite clear.
00:24:00So this is how our company was formed.
00:24:02We asked basically intuitively, I asked myself the question, how much money can I earn from digital assets, things that you cannot touch, where shipping cannot go wrong,
00:24:13like literally things that we can sell in the entire world without having subscriptions.
00:24:20So because subscriptions means that clients will need support and you will have these 10 percent super annoying clients draining your support, draining your sales that would stop you to grow.
00:24:31So lowering your freedom.
00:24:33So how can we make a business that has only one time transactions?
00:24:38And this is how we go to selling links for the SEO industry and selling domains.
00:24:49So our business in its ideal form, which we haven't achieved yet, is like we have a big fixed cost for catching domains.
00:24:57Then we catch a domain for only $10 above the fixed cost.
00:25:01Then we sell this domain to 10,000 for $10,000 to someone on the other side of the world.
00:25:07It's a one time transaction.
00:25:08So you don't need an NDA.
00:25:10You don't need a contract.
00:25:11You don't need anything.
00:25:11You just need an invoice.
00:25:13They pay.
00:25:13You send them a transfer code.
00:25:14Transaction takes two minutes for a hugely huge ROI.
00:25:20And domains will drop all the time and we catch them all the time.
00:25:23And this is a small enough industry that, like, someone with huge capital would not be interested in it.
00:25:32But it's a big enough industry to basically outscale all of the freelancers that will try to do it, like all of the grifters.
00:25:40So this perfect space, once we get it, we cannot be moved out because there's no, like, there's no force to move us out of this space.
00:25:50And this is the main thing in our business.
00:25:52It's not like it's something genius.
00:25:55It's just that we fit in our space like a puzzle piece and then there can be no big competition.
00:26:01I'm thinking with this is brilliant.
00:26:02And for anyone in the audience that wants to buy domains or try it themselves, you've reviewed over 800,000 domains.
00:26:13You know what makes a domain valuable, what doesn't.
00:26:16What kind of mistakes should we avoid when buying a digital asset?
00:26:19Well, you can buy domains for three reasons.
00:26:24Good name.
00:26:25The most common reason.
00:26:26SEO value, which you'll try to transfer to another website or to a new website on this domain and rank it in Google.
00:26:35This is, like, high risk, high reward, but the reward can be very high if you try to do it on the same website.
00:26:40If you try to transfer to another website, then it's low risk, low reward, and a very good strategy.
00:26:48And then you can try to buy a domain with traffic.
00:26:50It will be very hard to buy a domain with good, like, existing traffic, like director referral traffic, not coming from Google,
00:26:56because domains without websites don't have traffic from Google yet until you put a website.
00:27:02And in this case, traffic will usually die out, and it's hard to see what the traffic is of a website or domain that you don't own.
00:27:10So, basically, traffic is mostly for just monetizing with ads and not for selling.
00:27:16And then you get left with the names and the SEO thing.
00:27:20If you don't know anything about SEO, definitely ask an SEO agency, a consultant, or even ask us, like, we consult our buyers for free.
00:27:29What would be a good choice for their SEO, their budget and their country, their niche, and so on.
00:27:36So, there are a lot of people who will be willing to help, like, don't, if you're not into, like, high competition SEO,
00:27:44don't try to do the choice yourself, because a lot of our buyers, we see that they don't buy the best domains that we have.
00:27:50Because, of course, we have a bit better domains and a bit worse domains, and they are priced accordingly.
00:27:57But you have a domain very suitable for something and a domain not really suitable for the same thing,
00:28:02like, different country, different niche, bad history for some type of usage, right?
00:28:09There's a lot of nuance, but we see a lot of buyers buying not the right thing they need,
00:28:14which means that they could use some consulting.
00:28:17And, basically, that's it.
00:28:19Domains are, like, the fuel of link building, which is a part of SEO.
00:28:23And we are part of a very big supply chain.
00:28:27But our domains are mostly used for high competition SEO.
00:28:30So, here we're talking people who are spending six or even seven figures a month in their link building.
00:28:39Now, these domains, they're just domains.
00:28:42It's, you know, seodomain.com, whatever it is.
00:28:45It's just a domain.
00:28:47There's no website to it.
00:28:48Like, what makes a business think that it's got value to it because it's got the best keywords for their business?
00:28:54Let's pick something.
00:28:55Let's pick a coaching business, an executive coaching business.
00:29:00What makes a good domain a good SEO domain for them?
00:29:04Like, because it's got the keywords just in the name of it?
00:29:08So, the keywords could help if you, like, want to rank for best executive coach, you can get bestexecutivecoach.com.
00:29:17And it will help you for this keyword in Google, but not for any other keywords.
00:29:21And there are a lot of keywords, so there's not a very big win that you can do in this way.
00:29:26But if you get a previously existing coaching website, or even if it's not coaching, even if it was, let's say, a magazine about CEOs, or if it was something about finance, or if it's something about psychology, or something about mindset, all of these are related enough.
00:29:44And the name can be super stupid, like, it can be something, something, something.org, and you will never put your website on this domain, but you can take this name with the backlink profile, and maybe some traffic, and redirect it to your new or existing coaching website.
00:30:01Because domains can be redirected to websites.
00:30:04And this is how you pass the value.
00:30:06Another way is you put a small website, and you pass the value with links to your website, especially if you have more than one website.
00:30:13Both strategies are good and pretty safe.
00:30:16While you're saying this, I'm thinking it could be anything, a magazine, it could be something that's very strong in the U.S. with CEOs or a club.
00:30:27Yeah.
00:30:28How do you pick the niche?
00:30:30I mean, you can go to a company such as yours, and you'll help people and consult with them.
00:30:36But if a business wants to do it and pick up some domains or find out about it, how do they, where do you even start on something like this?
00:30:44Well, where domain marketplaces like ours, where basically you go, enter your keywords, find some domains, and then you can buy them.
00:30:55But usage requires SEO skill.
00:30:58So buying is easy, but actually using them, so redirecting them in the right way requires SEO skill.
00:31:03But it's not something that's uncommon.
00:31:06And this skill you can get from a consultant, from an SEO agency, even from some freelancer that just has experience with these same things.
00:31:13Which is great that you offer some free help to people that are interested in this.
00:31:18It's very, very good.
00:31:19And another thing you mentioned early on in this interview is you talked about you looked in psychology.
00:31:25So is there an influence there?
00:31:27Is this something that psychology does that has helped you grow this business that you'd like to share with us?
00:31:33Yes.
00:31:34So I have been very interested in psychology my entire life.
00:31:39As you know, chess as an individual sport, mental sport, is very connected to psychology.
00:31:45Then when I was a chess coach and I get to see the same picture from the side, let's say two 15-year-olds playing, and I see the drama unfolding.
00:31:54So they made a mistake and they, like the other kid doesn't know that it's a mistake, thinks it's some kind of genius bluff, and they just get scared or something, don't punish it.
00:32:04And you have all of these psychological micro situations that go back and forth.
00:32:09And you often have this situation which you can very often see in tennis where one of the, or other individual sport, like one of the players gets like super confident, gets into flow and starts like finishing all the points.
00:32:25And the other, the other is just making errors and cannot get their game together.
00:32:30And it's like this for, let's say, a half a set.
00:32:33And then all of a sudden it turns around and then the other gains the confidence.
00:32:37And the one who played flawlessly starts making inexplicable errors.
00:32:42You know, these situations I'm super interested in.
00:32:44Like it started from the chess, then chess, and then chess coach, and then I started helping a lot of my friends and closest people in my life about making change.
00:32:55Let's say someone wants to quit a bad job or quit university, which in Bulgaria is very useless if you're not studying medicine or anything like that requires the degree on like specific skill.
00:33:06So if you go in Bulgaria studying computer science in university, it's just such a waste of time, like terrible, terrible waste of time.
00:33:16Everything you learn is outdated and no one is motivated.
00:33:20Students are not motivated and the teachers are not motivated.
00:33:22It's just like a clown show.
00:33:24So it's like...
00:33:26Just do it for the degree.
00:33:28Yeah, but people stay for the degree.
00:33:29And I'm like, you don't need this degree.
00:33:32No one in IT asks for, ask for degrees anymore.
00:33:35So why do you waste the years of your life?
00:33:38And it's your best years with the highest energy while you're still young and energetic and don't have a wife and kids yet.
00:33:46And now is the time to do something great, really, like experiment, do different things every day.
00:33:51But people would just cling to the idea of a degree and cling to this sunk cost fallacy that they already spent an year or two.
00:34:00They don't want to quit.
00:34:02But this is just, of course, completely irrational.
00:34:04So I was wondering, like, what makes people change?
00:34:08And for a long time, I couldn't answer the question even for myself because I quit in the middle of the third year in the university.
00:34:16And you know how it happened?
00:34:17And I was going to the universities, like, to the lectures and to this, like, laboratory hours.
00:34:27And I got, like, super slightly pissed off by a lab assistant there who was like, it was something really minor.
00:34:36It was like, you didn't come to the last one.
00:34:38So, like, come next week to get it done or something because you need to get passed through the whole, like, lab experiments.
00:34:46It was something super minor.
00:34:47I didn't even get so annoyed.
00:34:49But, like, I was like, okay.
00:34:51And I walked out of the lab and I was like, why don't I just quit?
00:34:57And, like, I thought about it for three minutes and I was like, this is the best idea ever.
00:35:02And I'm fucking quitting and never returning to this stupid building again.
00:35:05And I just took a beeline to the bus stop and I never returned to the university ever.
00:35:10Like, I didn't even, I think I went there 10 years later to get back my high school degree because the university holds it or something.
00:35:18That was the only time I went back to the university.
00:35:21Maybe I went for a few times to see friends who were still studying, but I never went back to study.
00:35:25And it was a big clash with my parents because my father is a university professor and my mother is a high-level university assistant.
00:35:36So, like, and my father was in the same university.
00:35:38So, like, imagine the shame I brought to the family.
00:35:41And, you know, in Bulgaria we have a bit of this, like, it's not as clan-based as Asia, but let's say it's middle ground between Western Europe and US and Asia.
00:35:51So, we still have this, like, clan pride thing a bit, like, not as bad as Asia, but a bit.
00:35:59So, I was, like, shame for the family and, you know, all of this shit.
00:36:03So, I had a lot of opposing forces, but I was, like, definitely that's the thing I'm doing because I don't want to participate in the clown show anymore.
00:36:13So, okay, so once I get the idea, I got the idea.
00:36:17It was obvious that it was a good idea.
00:36:19I took responsibility and I opened space in my life for new things.
00:36:24But the interesting question is, why did I need, like, three years, two years and a half?
00:36:31Okay, first year was nice, like, social life, girls.
00:36:35But then, like, I was at least half a year late with this decision, at least half a year late.
00:36:41And why do good ideas don't just pop up into our minds?
00:36:46Why are we so stuck in just following the structure that the world gives us and peer pressure and everything?
00:36:54And I was wondering about these questions.
00:36:56And in the end, I started writing stuff about it.
00:37:00I started drawing stuff about it.
00:37:01I talked to a lot of people about it.
00:37:04And in the end, I was, like, okay, I need to, like, I discovered some stuff which are not mainstream.
00:37:12But I also don't know what mainstream is because I never read a self-help book or listened to something.
00:37:17I just listened to stuff about psychology out of interest.
00:37:20Just, let's say, I listened to Brina Brown's TED talk about vulnerability and other TED talks and a video here and an article there.
00:37:28But I didn't read any books about it.
00:37:30So it was not systematic.
00:37:31And I want a system.
00:37:33I want to build a system about this.
00:37:34I want to build a system for life.
00:37:36And all of these hidden driving forces, like, no psychologist can explain why I was half a year late and have a definitive explanation.
00:37:44I want to have the definitive explanation, even if it's complex.
00:37:48So I started building this system.
00:37:51And it didn't turn out that it's not complex at all.
00:37:54Like, you have a few driving forces in your life.
00:37:58And so you have a lot of barriers in their path.
00:38:00And it's basically that's it.
00:38:02Things don't happen when they hit a barrier.
00:38:04And when the barrier is overcome, they happen.
00:38:07And it's life.
00:38:09Like, life is very complex.
00:38:10But living life, like the process, it's not really complex at all.
00:38:14That's some illusion that we are fed that the process of living life is complex.
00:38:18It's not complex.
00:38:19Well, people are mostly bad at it because we are bad at moving through time and assessing what's past, present, and future, and how time evolves.
00:38:26That's probably the biggest reason why we think it's complex.
00:38:30But when you figure time into the equation and have, like, this flow-like equations about how things develop, like a graph, then it's not that complex.
00:38:39It's just that we're using maybe the wrong part of our brain to look at it.
00:38:44And so when I started putting things on paper in articles, which are online at iGrowYounger, i.gy, this is absolutely non-profit, completely free.
00:38:53Maybe I'm doing this for the world to help people, not trying to sell anything.
00:38:57There's no paid product or service or courses or anything.
00:39:01Once you start looking at life, accepting that maybe it is actually simple, and this oversimplification, it's not harmful, and it's not trying to get people to buy something or become part of some code group or anything, then you realize that maybe it's possible.
00:39:20And maybe if we incorporate this idea, maybe we can live a simple and very happy and successful life.
00:39:30And I've been integrating the ideas into my own life, wherever possible, and they absolutely work.
00:39:36I started my life as, let's say, emotionally undeveloped because I had engineer parents, so very process-oriented, and also played chess and went to a math and science high school.
00:39:50So I was very good with stuff like numbers and language and science, but not very good in, let's say, humanities or expressing myself or expressing my emotions or sharing or having unconditional love or having self-love.
00:40:09And a lot of things that you cannot measure well.
00:40:12Well, I was optimizing for the measurable, but not for the important.
00:40:16And over time, I figured out how to change this.
00:40:18So it's not like I was born perfect or something and I was just trying to explain life to others.
00:40:24It's like I was born with a lot of bad cards dealt.
00:40:29And then I gradually, without help from therapy or even reading a single self-help book, I gradually, very slowly, but sustainably, I managed to rearrange my life
00:40:40and how I feel about myself into something I actually like now.
00:40:44So, I wanted to put this into writing.
00:40:49It became like 800 pages.
00:40:51But the reason it became 800 pages is not because it was complex.
00:40:56The main problem is that we lack the language.
00:40:58Like they're cornerstone objects, building blocks of life for which we don't have words.
00:41:05And when you don't have words, a word for it, it doesn't enter your mental structures.
00:41:11Intuition doesn't develop.
00:41:12And there are these crucial missing pieces where you have a few concepts that you have heard of, you have an idea of,
00:41:19and there's a single thing that connects them, then there's no word for it or there's some stupid word that everyone uses in their own meaning,
00:41:25like intuition or something, which for some people is like super intellectual, for others, super spiritual, for third person, it's their connection to the universe.
00:41:33Like everyone has their own idea how it works and what it is.
00:41:36And when those confusing words or lack of words hit the structure of reality, there's like a total loss of coherence.
00:41:46And this is what I grow younger is fighting.
00:41:49It's 800 pages because we have to define stuff.
00:41:52Like in maths, you define, okay, this is an axiom.
00:41:55We cannot prove it, but we know it's right, so we build on it.
00:41:58Then there's the theorem.
00:41:59Okay, we prove this with the axiom.
00:42:01And you define, define, define.
00:42:04So you have a working language because the human language is just a bunch of hacks so we understand each other.
00:42:10It's not a working language to explain reality.
00:42:13Because reality can be looked at it from many different angles.
00:42:21And some of the angles are like closer to reality, but let's say a bit more abstract.
00:42:27And some are not close to reality and not very helpful.
00:42:30And just, let's say, evolutionary adaptations that have outlived their usefulness.
00:42:35And these parts, however, remain ingrained in language and keep pulling us down from intuition and understanding.
00:42:46And that's what I grow younger is fighting.
00:42:48Our absolute idea is clarity.
00:42:51If it's not clear, like, don't touch it.
00:42:54Like, rebuild your life from clear building blocks.
00:42:57Things that you can intuitively wake up in the middle of the night and feel like, I know what this is.
00:43:02So I know what unconditional love is, I know what self-love is, I know what intuition is, I know what chaos and structure are.
00:43:09Like, basic building blocks.
00:43:11And then you can analyze parts of our world that are not biological, not evolutionary.
00:43:21Things like numbers, like money, like business, like work.
00:43:24And these things, you can take your building blocks and see what goes in them.
00:43:30Because otherwise, if you try to just have a feeling about business, you can't.
00:43:37It's just an instant block.
00:43:38The moment you hear the word business, your mind only sees one thing.
00:43:43Complexity, I may go crazy.
00:43:44That's the low-level reaction to any very complex world, one that didn't exist in the Stone Age, like business.
00:43:52Obviously, in the Stone Age, we didn't have business, so we didn't evolve our brains for such complex concepts in one world.
00:43:58And this language bridge between reality and our existing language is what I Grow Younger is.
00:44:07It's like a concept for connecting what we know about the world, our intuition, our data points that we already have, into a system that is beyond the language.
00:44:19So a system that's better than language, better than the existing words.
00:44:23And you don't need to invent thousands of words to do this.
00:44:28You need like a hundred.
00:44:29It's not like inventing a new language.
00:44:31I'm not talking, you know.
00:44:33I don't need to invent something huge.
00:44:35It's just the bridge.
00:44:37As you're saying this, you're saying quite a lot.
00:44:39I'm thinking with this.
00:44:40I'm thinking you can't control everything.
00:44:42You don't create everything.
00:44:43But you can optimize for what's happening, and you can make changes based on what you see happening for a better outcome, very much like a chess game, very much like a chess strategy.
00:44:57Very, very interesting.
00:44:59There's just a lot going on there.
00:45:01And I'm thinking for us entrepreneurs and business people, what would be like the most important mindset?
00:45:11Or maybe you've already mentioned it, but I just want to really focus on what's that mindset that people have to focus on for success as opposed to because the world keeps changing.
00:45:23Tomorrow, something new can come down, and it just changes the whole playing field.
00:45:28So I think, I believe, we need that firm mindset on how to deal with this.
00:45:34Just like sitting there in a chess game.
00:45:36You know you want to win, but you've got to go through all the moves and maneuvers to get there.
00:45:41So what would you say to today's crowd?
00:45:44I think that chess is a limited space, and it's like what Simon Sinek says, a finite game.
00:45:53You know the rules, and you know the goals, and you just play to win.
00:45:56But in an infinite game like life, you don't know the rules, you don't know the players, and you don't play to win.
00:46:03You play to keep playing, basically.
00:46:06So if you use the infinite game mindset, you can divide things, not like people divide them, like things you can see, define, measure, and things that are okay.
00:46:19We don't measure it, so I don't know.
00:46:21We throw it out.
00:46:21It's supernatural.
00:46:22It's woo-woo.
00:46:23It's whatever.
00:46:23So we introduce, in I Grow Younger, a middle category.
00:46:28So things that you can define and measure, and things that we know are real, but we cannot measure.
00:46:34Things like love, self-love, meaning, stuff like this.
00:46:38There's not a lot of those, actually.
00:46:39And then the supernatural will leave aside.
00:46:44So, like, no magic.
00:46:47It's all real.
00:46:48It's all scientific.
00:46:49Just science is not able to measure everything.
00:46:52And whenever you have a why question, so why someone does something, science, it's super hard to measure this.
00:46:59If it happens in the subconscious, how do you measure it?
00:47:02So for this why questions that are very important to understanding change, which is our main direction in psychology,
00:47:11is we want to understand how people change, and why they change, and how can we stimulate positive change.
00:47:20And we work with the things that we can define, and we work with the things that we cannot define.
00:47:26And the things we can define, we call them boxes, and the things that we cannot properly define, put them in a box, we call them flows.
00:47:34Things like love, meaning, but also something like creativity, curiosity, love for searching for the truth,
00:47:42and a lot of these weird things that are like a part of us.
00:47:48For example, motivation is a part of us.
00:47:51Usually when we're motivated, we're motivated for a lot of things, and when we're not motivated, we're motivated for nothing.
00:47:55So it's like a quality, it flows everywhere, that's why we call them flows, because it's a part of us, so it flows in our entire life.
00:48:04And this boxes and flows concept is not something new, of course, I think there's also such concept in Buddhism and in other places,
00:48:12but the thing is that the modern world is different than the world that we evolved.
00:48:17So boxes, and very connected to boxes is logic, is very important for the progress of humanity,
00:48:26but we should never forget that this is not a good personal instrument.
00:48:32Intuition is a good personal instrument, it's made for your own use, it's millions of times more powerful than logic,
00:48:37it leaves no logs, because it's too powerful that logs will be confusing and like take too much mental space,
00:48:43so we don't know how it works, but it works.
00:48:46And it's for personal use, because we cannot share it.
00:48:49Logic is not for us, logic is for the tribe.
00:48:51Logic is, okay, I have an idea, I can describe it to you, so it's logic.
00:48:56The brain has huge processing power, but the output in speaking and writing and even playing a highly competitive PC game,
00:49:03it's just like 15 bytes a second, so the brain can process terabytes of information,
00:49:09but the output is only 15 bytes, so logic is super simple because it's made for the tribe, for sharing,
00:49:15so you need to be able to let it out by this tiny bandwidth compared to the power of the brain.
00:49:20The brain has more synapses than the data center that ChatGPT was trained on.
00:49:24So imagine like the processing power of the brain with full parallelism, higher parallelism than the GPUs.
00:49:29So the brain is just a monster, intuitively, to crunch patterns and get to some outcome,
00:49:37but then you have a tiny bottleneck to share it.
00:49:41So logic is super simple, evolutionary new, prone to 50-something different types of fallacies listed in Wikipedia,
00:49:48and it's for the tribe.
00:49:51So I can share, then we go back and forth, we correct each other's mistakes,
00:49:56and then we share with the tribe, and then we test, and then we see, and then we iterate,
00:50:01and it's for a collective action.
00:50:03Logic, personally thinking about something without sharing, for me, it's useless.
00:50:07Your intuition will always give you a better answer than logic, personally.
00:50:11So this comes from a lot of imbalance between the left and the right hemisphere.
00:50:19So the right hemisphere of the brain deals with the flaws and creativity, a large part of the intuition,
00:50:27and a large part of the things that make us happy, like love, they come from there,
00:50:32and it sees the world in motion, and it understands the world.
00:50:36The left part of the brain is a super simple thing that is just about processes, language, manipulating the world,
00:50:43how do we find food, how do we catch it, how do we eat it, while the right part of the brain needs to answer
00:50:52to the super complex question, how do we not get eaten, how do we survive, what is our place in the world,
00:50:58how do we understand?
00:50:59And these two halves of the brain are, crucially, fighting with each other.
00:51:04The corpus callosum that connects us is made mostly from inhibitory neurons,
00:51:09so they are fighting for dominance and basically trampling on each other.
00:51:14But it's not symmetrical, because the right part of the brain sees the whole picture,
00:51:19knows that there are two halves of the brain, and say, okay, we work together.
00:51:22Okay, sometimes you lead, sometimes I lead.
00:51:25But when the left brain gets the wheel, they are like, oh, I have a goal, fuck you.
00:51:30So, like, I'm taking the wheel, I'm not letting it go, I don't need you, I'm enough.
00:51:36So, it's not symmetrical, and it's, again, because this collection of the two is,
00:51:42they have evolved in a tribal evolutionary context where the left brain and its logic
00:51:50and its language with which we cooperated and took over the world, you know,
00:51:55humans took over the world by cooperation and language.
00:51:58So, basically, the left brain played a huge role in this.
00:52:02And it only happened very slowly, and it happened for the species, for the tribe,
00:52:08not for the individual, for the individual.
00:52:10Basically, the left brain, apart from, like, language and stuff,
00:52:16you should not let it lead, because then you get to the boxes,
00:52:20and the world is already full of boxes.
00:52:23That's our work, mostly.
00:52:24That's our education system, almost totally.
00:52:27And the kids get, like, slammed into this boxy framework,
00:52:31and you give the wheel to this part of the brain that should not be given the wheel too much,
00:52:37because there's a total imbalance.
00:52:39There's a very famous book about it.
00:52:41It's called The Master and its Emissary.
00:52:44And it's not a new concept, but the way that we use it in I Grow Younger
00:52:48to analyze modern life and connect it to our other concepts
00:52:53and to, like, cultural ideas about how living life is simple or complex
00:53:00and what ideologies tell us and what religion tells us
00:53:03and their evolutionary fights between them.
00:53:05We have a whole framework about how, actually,
00:53:08the driving forces of life work on a personal level
00:53:11and on a cultural level.
00:53:13And what we see as a final is that, on a personal level,
00:53:17we are screwed by the imbalance in the brain.
00:53:20We are also screwed by the depleting dopamine from all of the addictions,
00:53:24the phones, and so on.
00:53:26Without dopamine, we don't have any types of motivation,
00:53:30but it's especially hard to get intrinsic motivation.
00:53:33Without intrinsic motivation, we don't get the flaws,
00:53:36the self-love, the unconditional love, the meaning.
00:53:39Without those, we don't activate the right brain.
00:53:41And then we get stuck with this imbalance forever.
00:53:45And it just, people cannot break it.
00:53:47That's why they're stuck.
00:53:48And there are ways out, of course,
00:53:52because the right part of the brain,
00:53:57you may have not seemed to use it for a long time,
00:54:01but it's still there.
00:54:01You know, you're not with half a head.
00:54:03So it's just kind of moth boat.
00:54:05It can still spring into action if you have the right stimuli.
00:54:12So like go, get lost in a forest, safely, of course.
00:54:14So dance, do sports, like paint.
00:54:18Do whatever things you can do that doesn't have boxes.
00:54:21That's fluid.
00:54:22And this helps rebalance.
00:54:24There are a lot of things in I Grow Younger
00:54:26that help rebalance this.
00:54:28And this is extremely important also for business.
00:54:30Because in business, if you only have logic,
00:54:33if you only have Excel sheets, ERPs, and so on,
00:54:37you see the current nature of business.
00:54:39You measure, you crunch the numbers.
00:54:41But what you miss?
00:54:42You miss the evolution of your company culture.
00:54:45You miss the non-monetary factors for gaining talent.
00:54:49Because people are not only motivated by money.
00:54:52In fact, money is less than half of the total motivation
00:54:55for most people.
00:54:56People just want to work somewhere with great people
00:54:59where they can be happy.
00:55:00Money is secondary to most people, not to all, but to most.
00:55:04And you are losing this immeasurable stuff
00:55:07that are in the company culture, in the motivation of people,
00:55:10in the team spirit, in the responsibility that people are taking.
00:55:15And when you do it the corporate way,
00:55:17you end up with a huge corporation,
00:55:19which is super ineffective
00:55:21because all of the departments are boxes
00:55:23and they silently sabotage each other
00:55:25in a war for attention, funding, praise, recognition,
00:55:29bonuses, and all of this.
00:55:30And this is why big corporations are super inefficient
00:55:32because it's just,
00:55:34there's so much silent infighting.
00:55:37It's not about only sabotaging each other.
00:55:40It's about not helping each other
00:55:41when you see the chance,
00:55:42like from department to department.
00:55:44Like reaching out to solve each other's problem
00:55:47when you see the solution right there in front of you.
00:55:50And all of this has, of course,
00:55:52the reflection in business and everywhere.
00:55:55Our company has done a ton of mistakes,
00:55:57but we try not to screw up the important things.
00:55:59The motivation of the people,
00:56:02good leadership in terms of like
00:56:04taking actual care for the people
00:56:06so they know we actually care,
00:56:08our employees trying to keep the spirit really high,
00:56:13trying to be optimistic,
00:56:15even when we have gone through
00:56:17like nasty cash crunches.
00:56:21And basically optimize for the things
00:56:23that we cannot measure
00:56:25will long term be more important
00:56:27than optimizing for the things
00:56:28that you can measure.
00:56:30And this is how you don't end up
00:56:32also personally in burnouts
00:56:35and in all of these states
00:56:36where you just let the boxes lead your life.
00:56:39But also there's another thing,
00:56:41because if you let the Excel
00:56:45or the ERP manage your business,
00:56:47it will do the job better than you today.
00:56:50But if tomorrow the industry length changes
00:56:52and you have thousands of different paths
00:56:56to adaptation with small but important nuances
00:56:59that are different,
00:57:00different business models,
00:57:01different pricing models,
00:57:02maybe change some product or service,
00:57:05then the Excel cannot give you the answer.
00:57:07It's only looking at the past.
00:57:09And if you leave the numbers,
00:57:12the intuition about the quantities,
00:57:13the money flows to the Excel or the ERP,
00:57:16when you don't have it in your head,
00:57:17the good ideas among these thousands
00:57:20of possible paths
00:57:21would not come into your head
00:57:22and you will do just mediocre ideas instead.
00:57:25And this is how, for example,
00:57:27in these key moments,
00:57:28like when Nokia lost the race to the iPhone,
00:57:31like what were they looking at?
00:57:33I'm sure they were looking at numbers,
00:57:35not like actual people reacting to iPhone,
00:57:38because when I first held an iPhone in my hand,
00:57:42even if it was iPhone 1,
00:57:43it was like this tiny shitty device,
00:57:45I was like, wow, it's a miracle device.
00:57:48It has only displayed.
00:57:49Like I had an emotional reaction to it.
00:57:51But the people in Nokia's office
00:57:53and the BlackBerry's office,
00:57:56like they were looking at Excel sheets at this moment.
00:57:58So that's where the measurable
00:58:00and the immeasurable actually,
00:58:03and the boxes and the flows
00:58:04on both hemispheres of the brain,
00:58:06that's where they actually come together.
00:58:10And of course you need both,
00:58:11but we are super overemphasizing on the boxes
00:58:14and super under emphasizing on the flows
00:58:17that you cannot measure.
00:58:18Fabulous, fabulous.
00:58:20Once again, this is Colin Kaye,
00:58:23the Domain Grandmaster.
00:58:25We spoke about strategic moves
00:58:27for building an SEO empire.
00:58:29You can find him at seo.domains,
00:58:32seo.domains.
00:58:34Colin, thank you so much.
00:58:35So much advice.
00:58:37The one thing I remember,
00:58:38I remember a lot of things,
00:58:39but intuition is greater
00:58:41and more important than logic.
00:58:44I'm going to think about that.
00:58:45I'm going to ponder that some more.
00:58:46It's really, really good points.
00:58:48I just want to say thank you so much
00:58:50for spending this time with us
00:58:51and giving us what an insight into this world.
00:58:55Thank you so much.
00:58:56Thank you too.
00:58:57And you can also find iGrowYounger
00:58:59on YouTube mostly,
00:59:01but also on i.gy.
00:59:03Just Google iGrowYounger
00:59:04and you get everything you need.
00:59:07Everything is free.
00:59:08Again, like there's no catch.
00:59:09It's made to help you
00:59:10and I hope it does.
00:59:12Thanks for having me.
00:59:13Thank you so much.
00:59:14Wonderful.
00:59:15All right.
00:59:16Well, there you go.
00:59:17Wow.
00:59:17This was great.
00:59:18Guys, if you like this,
00:59:19share this with your friends.
00:59:21Tell them about Callan.
00:59:22Tell them about the SEO empire.
00:59:25What he's done.
00:59:26How he started through
00:59:27like a chess grandmaster
00:59:29and how he's worked out his moves
00:59:31and how everything isn't always perfect,
00:59:34but you just have to work through it
00:59:37and optimize what you have.
00:59:39There's so much good information,
00:59:41so many good takeaways.
00:59:43And please, wherever you're getting this,
00:59:45please follow the show.
00:59:46It helps to bring in more amazing guests to you.
00:59:50Thank you so much.
00:59:51All right.
00:59:52Let's use this
00:59:53and let's help you move
00:59:54on your journey to success.
00:59:55Thanks.
00:59:56So remember, just take action.
00:59:59Success awaits those who persevere
01:00:01and remain steadfast despite the odds.
01:00:04Sow good seeds, do good deeds,
01:00:07and I'll see you on the next episode.
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