Hey, guys, this is Tony.
And before we jump into today's episode, I want to give you a quick heads up about something special that I've got lined up for you.
At the very end of this show, I'm going to play one of my newest songs.
It's a track inspired by four powerful words that are printed on every US coin and every dollar bill.
You've seen these words your whole life, but when you hear them on a song, they carry a completely different weight.
So stick around to the end.
I can't wait to share it with you.
Welcome back to the podcast.
What if every domain name that you bought could become an appreciating asset?
Not just the web address, but digital real estate with real market value?
My guest today, Kalin, is the founder of SEO domains, and he's the man behind over And fifty thousand.
SEO domain names.
Yeah, you heard that right.
He's built one of the most unique business models in the online world, where strategic thinking meets long term vision.
Kalin combines the mind of a chess master with the insight of a digital investor.
His journey shows how to scale intelligently, automate systems, and build wealth without burnout.
Something every entrepreneur can relate to.
Today, 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.
So stay tuned, because this conversation is going to open your mind to new levels of strategy, creativity, and freedom in business.
Let's begin.
Hi Kalin, welcome to the Tony D'urso show.
Hi.
Thanks for having me, Kalin.
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, it's, it's a very difficult Slavic name and uh, it's you're in you're in Bulgaria.
Yes.
Okay.
Well, wonderful what you've built and we the audience that we have are is from all over the world, and we're all looking forward to learning about strategic moves for building an SEO empire.
You've built quite the empire.
What I'd like to do 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 one hundred and fifty thousand domains?
I'm very freedom loving.
So I started as a kid playing chess.
I love chess, individual sport, like sky is the limit.
If you win games, you become better and better, win prizes.
So this really grabbed my attention.
As a kid.
I wanted to become a pro.
Eventually, aged twenty something, I was in top one thousand in the world.
Grandmaster level.
Not yet grandmaster, but a similar rating.
Unfortunately, back then it was hard to make your link in chess from playing because I was in Bulgaria and low cost flights were not yet a thing and the tournaments were mostly in Western Europe, so I had to travel with trains back and forth.
I went for day train from Bulgaria to Spain one direction for example, when I was twenty, so it was a lot of traveling.
It seemed a bit unbalanced.
I tried to become a coach for a bit.
This was very helpful in developing my understanding of psychology from this part of my of my life.
I remember that actually kids and teenagers are much like grown ups, so trying to teach something to a kid is not that different in to teaching it to a grown up.
So this was a very nice period.
But then I was not fulfilled because I was the kids were changing, but I was, uh, the same person.
And I was explaining to kids again and again, uh, the same stuff.
So I got bored eventually and, uh, out of, uh, mostly boredom and quitting my university, which was, uh, quite useless.
It was not practical enough.
And it was really, really ineffective way of learning anything.
I was studying computer science, so 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.
And 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 without being a total nudity and disregarding both legality and common sense.
And some of these things work.
And, uh, then I got spotted by, uh, someone who wanted to cooperate.
And from this person, I, for the first time heard the word SEO search engine optimization.
And I was like, really?
You can do stuff that can make the website go up in Google.
This seems like very a 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.
And I was like, that's my thing.
So I started learning it.
Two thousand and eight uh, in the beginning, it was a disaster.
The first website I tried to promote actually tanked down and didn't appear in Google at all for six months.
So the beginning was a disaster.
I had no mentors.
I didn't read any books.
All I did was read forums on the internet.
So like not any system, not any course, nothing systematic, just chaotic learning.
And it turned out that it's good because the brain starts connecting a lot of dots.
It's slow, but it's very sustainable.
And I still remember some of my experiences from this period, even though it was fifteen years ago.
Eventually I ran into problems with Google because I became locally successful.
So not like rich or globally successful, but I have a small empire of websites in Bulgaria.
So Google targeted me personally and penalized them in twenty thirteen.
And then I was like, okay, if getting the link juice and setting links gets you penalized, maybe I can sell the domains to the people who get the link juice.
So that's how we turn the SEO empire into the beginning of a domain empire.
I got a co-founder, we founded a startup, and we got some very tiny initial seed funding.
Well, we called it Seed in Bulgaria, but it was actually like accelerator level money.
We used US terms because in Bulgaria, seed funding was like one hundred K, not millions.
But still it helped us try different business models.
Within two years most of them failed.
But then we got a good business model, which was the simplest one.
We buy domains, we hold them and then we sell them.
And we made so many mistakes in this company that it should have been a disaster.
But it wasn't because the domain industry, the SEO domain industry, while we were making the mistakes, it appreciated like twenty times for ten years.
So we were the we called this rising tide that lifts all boats, including ours.
And, uh, yeah, our company had ups and downs but had a good growth.
And now we're evaluating it at about maybe seventy, eighty million dollars.
I still hold, uh, more than half the shares.
So it's, uh, good for me.
We also got new, new shareholders.
We now have a board, so it's a bit more corporate for my liking.
But, uh, again, as a freedom loving person, but, uh, it's a great company.
One hundred and twenty people, uh, and we're still growing it.
And, uh, now that CEO is actually has a fork.
Before it was only SEO for Google, but now there's also SEO for ChatGPT and all the other AIS.
Now we have a new chance to be the pioneers in this new kind of SEO.
So future is looking good for now.
Wow, that is quite the mouthful.
It'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.
But what you've done is on such a another stratospheric level, and I'm thinking one hundred and fifty thousand domains.
I don't think I got past that part yet.
How do you manage so many domains without exhausting you?
I understand there's technology that can keep track of things to a degree.
You've got employees, but it's so much and I'm thinking from the point of view of the audience that's listening entrepreneurs, business people, how can they learn from, uh, running some things and growing it so big without and still, as you mentioned, maintaining that joy and freedom?
Well, my top advice for maintaining the joy and freedom is depends only on people you can depend and if possible, short term.
So often there's a founder with a good business vision, but they depend on a tech guy, or there's a tech guy who 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.
In my case, I was the business guy with some tech knowledge, and I had a very high tech tech tech co-founder.
And a lot of the things that helped in the beginning was that we relied on each other very well.
Over time, some tension builds up and he is no longer in the company.
But the the thing is that I was never completely dependent on the tech.
For 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.
So for a long time I was managing the domains using only free text files.
That's no joke.
It's only free text files.
All of the domains we have our own, all of the domains we have are sold, and all of the domains we have are abandoned.
So from these files, whenever you catch or register a new domain, you just put it in file number one.
If you sell it, you put it in file number two.
And if you sell one hundred domains, you put them in file number two.
If you abandoned a thousand domains at once, both at a prom or something, you just put them in file number three that we have a script that our developer wrote that anytime we need something, uh, we just it gets the files in the script and it says, okay, now you have these domains so we can put in the script ten thousand domains.
It browses the files and says, okay, this eight thousand, this exact eight thousand are yours.
So in this case you have like a database without a database and it's super easy to do something.
All of the three files are chronological, and this chronological order is never broken.
And let's say I need all of the UK domains we ever sold.
I just go into Notepad++.
I have this file file open and in five seconds I get this.
While a developer will have to build a filter for this in a week.
So going manual for a long time was a good decision.
Eventually we got too big, and the developers eventually built a good system that we can rely on.
But I think that, uh, in many cases people overcomplicated, uh, managing, uh, stuff.
Uh, basically everything around an operation is lists.
And if you have a good structure of lists, you can export anything from them.
And of course, if you have very complex stuff where you need overlapping filters, then you can use Excel.
And if it's too tough to Excel for Excel then you code.
But starting with coding for a task that's not that complex is just wasting precious developer resources.
We're speaking with Kalin Kay.
He's the domain grandmaster.
We're talking about strategic moves for building an SEO empire.
You can find him at SEO.
It's not Comments.
SEO dot domains, is that right?
Kalin.
Yes.
Kalin story is a reminder that great businesses don't happen by accident.
They're built through clarity, smart positioning, and a willingness to take the right next step.
And if you're building something of your own, a brand, a business, or a new idea, what are the smartest ways to bring it to life is with Shopify?
You know, every successful entrepreneur I've interviewed on this show started out exactly where you might be right now with an idea, a dream, and plenty of questions.
How do I turn this into something real?
How do I build a professional online presence?
And how do I actually reach the people who need what I offer?
That's where Shopify comes in.
It's the platform built to help you launch, grow, and scale with zero guesswork and total freedom.
Whether you're selling a digital product, physical goods, or a brand new business model, Shopify gives you everything you need to start growing scale all in one place.
Shopify is the commerce platform powering millions of businesses worldwide, handling ten percent of all e-commerce in the US, including household names like Mattel and Gymshark, as well as countless entrepreneurs.
Just getting started.
Exactly like you worried you can't design a website?
No problem.
Shopify has stunning ready to go templates that perfectly match your brand's style.
No design experience needed.
Need a little extra help along the way?
Shopify has powerful AI tools created specifically for commerce, helping you enhance product images, write compelling product descriptions, and even generate discount codes.
Effortlessly.
Concerned about marketing your new brand, Shopify makes it simple to attract customers through easy to run email and social media campaigns, Pains, turning casual visitors into loyal fans.
And here's the best part if you ever feel stuck.
Shopify's award winning customer support is available twenty four over seven, ready to help whenever you need advice.
So stop asking what if and start saying why not?
Turn your entrepreneurial dreams into reality with Shopify by your side.
Try Shopify today and bring your business dreams to life.
Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side.
Sign up for your one dollar per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com.
Go to Shopify.
Shopify.com.
NY.
And now back to the great chat with Kalin.
Now you're.
You are a very accomplished chess master.
And I'm getting what you're saying here, and I'm following you on a lot of it.
I've been in promotion and marketing for a couple of decades, and and I've been through the days, or should I say the years of just working with rudimentary spreadsheets or spreadsheets on paper.
So I kind of get it a little bit here.
But what I really liked about this interview, where what piqued my interest is the chess part.
Now, I am not very much of a chess player at all.
I'm I'm nothing.
But I know good chess players.
And you compare this business strategy to playing chess.
And there's, what should I say, mental moves.
There's things that the entrepreneur should learn to master in order to make better long term decisions.
So 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.
I get asked this question, of course, everywhere.
Everyone knows I was a chess player.
Uh, but 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 like at all.
There's a few very important things that I learned from chess, so it was not a waste.
And surely the brain developed in ways that, uh, I, uh, cannot directly relate to my success.
But 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.
So, like, it would seem that you are totally responsible.
But in chess, there's luck.
So, like, it's not like you throw a dice or draw cards or something.
But there's luck because sometimes the sometimes the position is so complicated that, uh, both you and the opponent do stupid stuff, and it just lacks sometimes.
Besides, a game actually does.
And it's the same in life.
Like you are responsible for your actions, but there's also luck.
So you are responsible for increasing your chances and you can increase them greatly.
But don't underestimate luck.
And whenever your success has luck in it, like don't be too proud for it because and a lot of times they will be lacking it.
Actually, there's a lot of studies on this that luck plays a significant role.
So this is one of the parallels.
So the level of responsibility and the the share of luck is similar I think between chess and life.
Uh, the 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.
So how do we give an example for this?
Rafael 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 opponent, but his opponents are not used to playing left hand opponent, so he gets a left hand advantage, which is a very basic evolutionary thing 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.
And experience is very important in chess to fill the position so you can play well.
So I assume that a lot of people would want to play a rare opening.
Basically, 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 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.
And very few chess players are doing it.
If everyone was doing it.
We wouldn't have mainstream openings because then everyone would just be going in some rare direction.
So I couldn't explain this to myself.
For many years I was playing rare openings and this meant that I had results, which, uh, basically, uh, were higher than my actual strength as a player because I was using a good shortcut to getting better results, but the other players were not doing it.
And I figured out after many years they were not doing it because it would look bad, like there's no other reason.
The only reason is that it looks like you're running away from battle, and especially like men don't want to be looking like they're running away from battle.
You know, men like to accept the challenge.
So I was like, wow, you're pros.
You're supposed to be doing whatever contributes to success, and it's not cheating or something.
You're just being smart.
You're just being like Nadal.
Like he's not running away from challenge, right?
You know how Nadal plays tennis.
So it's just about being smart and effective and still people don't do it.
And I was like, well, why are people so irrational in all areas of life?
And it turns out, yes.
And this, uh, discovery later contributed a huge lot to our business because we are often exploiting people, being really irrational, mostly our competition or potential competition.
It's just that the low hanging fruits.
But they are somehow annoying, somehow boring somehow.
You need to do stuff that's, uh, out of your comfort zone, and we can figure out which those low hanging fruits are.
And we don't trust people that they would have picked them up.
We 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.
And then we go and pick them, even though many other people would not even expect for these low hanging fruits to exist.
And a lot of our business is built on that exact idea.
One thing I think about with chess is 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, there's that stress of, you have an opponent, someone is trying to beat you.
There's you, there's him.
It's just one on one.
The entrepreneur, the business person.
You don't necessarily think of your opponent or competition right away.
You're taking a product to market.
You're you're trying to make something really good, whether it's technology, the service or physical product.
You're trying to make something good that fits the demand fits, fits what people want.
And you don't necessarily.
And there's too many different varieties, but you don't necessarily think of all the competition, but 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, cheaper, faster, better, whatever.
So you're thinking of your competition, but you're not directly trying to beat them on their own product.
So 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.
So there's many, many options here.
And it all depends on what you are selling.
But the one thing I'm thinking of is you don't necessarily go think, do you?
You don't start off thinking that you've got a competitor standing there that you've got to hurry against.
You're just trying to develop your product.
You're just trying to make make it all fit and make it all make make sense right at the beginning.
Isn't that right?
Or what do you think about that?
We begin from one single thing when we, uh, do the like the evaluation.
And it's mostly an intuitive thing.
We begin with freedom.
Like, just like we try to maximize freedom and good future for a human.
We do it for the company.
We do it.
So how can we do the company that has the most freedom?
So if you can earn a million a month and still have all our team free, have 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.
Because when we started the domain thing, we could have done an SEO agency instead.
And we actually did an SEO agency.
Uh, now, after eleven years as a side thing.
But if we had started eleven years ago as an SEO agency now, we would have been worth half a billion.
But I would have gray hair from dealing with all of the annoying clients.
So that's like and very possibly if I had grinded it out, I would have money, more money, but, uh, I would be unhappy.
But very often people overestimate their ability to grind it out.
And after three years they'll be burnout and they'll be failure.
And you have no money and no happiness.
So freedom takes you away from this, uh, bad direction.
So how do you optimize for freedom?
You have to ask everything.
So you ask a lot of money.
Low risk, adaptable business with like plan B, plan C.
No dependencies so it can be done with low capital.
No investors and so on.
And you want all of this at once.
Intuition is about wit and about looking at billions of possible combinations of businesses, products, services, go to markets, business models, everything possible, pricing everything possible.
You try to evaluate all at once in your head after being experienced in business.
And 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.
But if you aim super high, then you lose all the stupid options instantly.
So okay, if you want to earn a million till the end of the year, okay, you have many options.
Then let's say you can, uh, get, uh, just like a highly paid corporate job, which is something that you earn a lot of money, but not yet a lot of, uh, room to grow.
Okay, so you also want room to grow.
Okay, so now you're entrepreneurs or corporate jobs are out the window.
That's good because, uh, the better entrepreneur journey will be better than the better corporate job usually.
So like, you're throwing the bad options out the window.
Okay, now you want ten million and grow, uh, and low capital, and if possible, uh, the money to come, uh, fast.
Okay, so what option is left, like, rob a bank?
Okay.
High risk.
Okay.
So also lower the risk.
So all the stupid ideas like going into the stock trading with leverage are out the window.
So you throw and you throw away and you throw away.
And in the end, you're like, okay, so little is left that actually the choice is quite clear.
So this is how our company was formed.
We 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, like literally things that we can sell in the entire world without having subscriptions.
So because subscriptions means that clients will need support and you will have this ten percent super annoying clients draining your support, draining your sales, that will stop you to grow.
So lowering your freedom.
So how can we make a business that has only one time transactions, but is as profitable as possible and as low risk as possible?
And this is how we got to selling links for the SEO industry and selling domains.
So our business in its ideal form, which we haven't achieved yet, is like we have a big fixed cost for catching domains.
Then we catch a domain for only ten dollars above the fixed cost.
Then we sell this domain to ten thousand for ten thousand dollars to someone on the other side of the world.
It's a one time transaction, so you don't need an NDA.
You don't need a contract, you don't need anything.
You just need an invoice.
They pay, you send them a transfer code.
Transaction takes two minutes for a hugely huge ROI, and domains will drop all the time and we catch them all the time.
And this is a small enough industry that, like someone with huge capital, would not be interested in it.
But it's a big enough industry to basically out, uh, scale all of the freelancers that we try to do it, like all of the grifters.
So this perfect space, once we get it, we can't be moved out because there's no, like, force to move us out of this space.
And this is the main thing in our business.
It's not like it's something genius.
It's just that we fit in our space like a puzzle piece.
And then there can be no, uh, big competition.
I'm thinking that this is brilliant.
And, uh, for anyone in the audience that wants to buy domains or or try it themselves, you've reviewed over eight hundred thousand domains.
You know what makes a domain valuable?
What doesn't?
What kind of mistakes should we avoid when buying a digital asset?
Well, uh, you can buy domains for three reasons.
Good name.
Most common reason SEO value, which you will try to transfer to another website or to the list, or to a new website on this domain and rank it in Google.
This is like high risk, high reward, but the reward can be very high if you try to do it on the same website.
If you try to transfer to another website, then it's low risk, low reward and a very good strategy.
And then you can try to buy a domain with traffic.
It will be very hard to buy a domain with good like existing traffic, like directory referral traffic not coming from Google, because domains without websites don't get traffic from Google yet until you put a website.
And 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.
So basically, traffic is mostly for just monetizing with ads and not for selling.
And then you get left with the names and the SEO thing.
If you don't know anything about SEO, definitely ask an SEO agency or consultant or even ask us like we consult our buyers for free.
What would be a good choice for the SEO, their budget and their country, their niche, and so on.
So there are a lot of people who will be willing to help, like don't uh, if you're not into like high competition SEO, don'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 because of course, we have a bit better domains and a bit worse domains, and they are priced accordingly.
But you have a domain very suitable for something and a domain not really suitable for the same thing, like different country, different niche, but history for some type of usage.
Like there's a lot of nuance, but we see a lot of buyers buying not the right thing they need, which means that they could use some consulting.
Uh, and basically that's it.
Uh, domains are like the few of link building, which is a part of SEO, and we are part of a very big, uh, supply chain.
But our domains are mostly used for high competition SEO.
So, uh, here we're talking people who are spending six or even seven figures a month in their link building.
Now, these, uh, these domains, they're just domains.
It's, you know, SEO domain.com, whatever it is, it's just a domain.
There's no website to it.
What makes a business think that it's got value to it because it's got the best keywords for the business.
Let's pick something.
Let's pick a coaching business.
The executive coaching business.
What makes a good domain a good SEO domain for them?
Like what?
Because of the just because it's got the keywords just in the name of it.
Uh, the keywords could help if you like.
Want to rank for best executive coach?
You can get best executive coach.
Com.
And it will help you for this keyword in Google, but not for any other keywords.
And there are a lot of keywords.
So there's not a very big win that you can do in this way.
But, uh, if you get an previously existing coaching website or even if it's not coaching even it was, let's say, a magazine about CEOs, or if it was something about finance, or something about psychology, or something about mindset.
All of these are related enough, and the name can be super stupid.
Like it can be, uh, something, something, something.
And you will never put your website, 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, because domains can be redirected to websites and this is how you pass the value.
Another 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.
Both strategies are good and pretty safe.
Now, before we continue, it's time for my Facet Minute.
This is a quick story about something close to my heart.
You know, when I was a kid, I had this unusual little hobby.
I used to take apart anything.
Electronic radios, clocks, whatever I could get my hands on, and I'd spread everything out on the floor.
All the tiny screws, springs, wires, everything.
And I would study how every piece worked, and my parents would walk in and see a perfectly good radio completely torn apart, and I'd get scolded.
But I always saved myself by saying, don't worry.
Wait, wait.
I'll put it back together just fine.
And I did every single time.
And they never bothered me again when I took things apart.
And what I didn't realize back then was that this became the way that I see the world.
To me, a podcast episode is one hundred tiny pieces of businesses, a thousand pieces a song, maybe even more.
But if you understand the parts and you respect how they fit, you can build something that works beautifully.
So I guess I've been rebuilding things my whole life.
I just use different parts now.
And before we dive back into this great conversation, I just want to take a quick moment to thank you for being here.
Thank you.
Your support means the world to me, and I truly appreciate you following and listening to the Tony D'urso show on your favorite podcast platform like Apple Podcasts.
If you're enjoying this conversation and getting real value, would you please hit that follow button and tell your friends about what you've learned?
It helps me to continue bringing you these incredible guests and impactful discussions.
And one more quick note if you are loving the insights you're hearing today, would you make sure you're getting my twice monthly Elite Entrepreneurs newsletter?
It's packed with actionable strategies from the show, highlights from top books and podcasts, and special shout outs to our community.
No cost, no gimmicks.
Join me at Tony D'urso.
Let's grow together and keep rising.
That's Tony D'urso.
And now back to the great chat with Kalin.
While you're saying this, I'm thinking it could be anything.
A magazine, it could be something that's very strong in the US with CEOs or a club or how do you pick the niche?
I mean, you can go to a company such as yours and you'll help people and consult with them.
But 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?
Well, where a domain marketplaces like ours, where basically you go enter your keywords, find some domains, and then you can buy them.
But usage requires a SEO skill.
So buying is easy, but actually using them.
So redirecting them in the right way requires skill.
But it's not something that's uncommon.
And this skill you can get from a consultant, from an SEO agency, even from some freelancer that just has experience with these same things or from us?
Yeah, yeah.
Which is great that you offer some free help to people that are interested in this.
That's very, very good.
And another thing you mentioned early on in this interview is you talked about you looked in psychology.
So is there an influence there or is this something that psychology does that has helped you grow this business that you'd like to share with us?
Yes.
Uh, so I have been very interested in psychology my entire life.
As you know, chess is an individual sport.
Mental sport is very connected psychology.
Then when I was a chess coach and I get to see the same picture from the side, let's say two fifteen year olds playing, and I see the drama unfolding.
So 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.
And you have all of these psychological, micro situations that go back and forth, and you often have this, uh, situation which you can very often see in, uh, tennis where one of the or other individual sports, like, uh, one of the players gets like super confident, gets into flow and stuff like finishing all the points and the other the other is just making errors and cannot get their game together.
And it's like this for, let's say, half a set, and then all of a sudden it turns around and then the other gains the confidence.
And the one who played flawlessly starts making inexplicable errors.
You know, these situations I'm super interested in, like started from the chest then and then chess coach.
And then I started helping a lot of my friends and closest people in my life about making change.
Let'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 like specific skill.
If you go on in Bulgaria, studying computer science in university is just such a waste of time.
Like terrible, terrible waste of time.
Everything you learn is outdated and no one is motivated.
Students are not motivated and the teachers are not motivated.
It's just like a clown show.
So it's like, just do it for the degree.
Yeah, but people stay for the degree, and I, like you don't need this degree.
No one in it asked for degrees anymore.
So why do you why do you waste years of your life?
And it's it's your best years with the highest energy, while you're still young and energetic and don't have a wife and kids?
Yes.
And now is the time to do something great.
Really?
Like experiment.
Do different things every day.
But people, uh, would just cling to the idea of a degree and cling to this sunk cost fallacy that they already spent a year or two and they don't want to quit.
But this is just, of course, completely irrational.
So I was wondering, like, what makes people change?
And 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.
And you know how how it happened. happens.
I was going to the universities like to, to the lectures and to, to this like laboratory hours.
And I got like super slightly pissed off by a lab assistant there who was like, it was something really minor.
It was like, uh, you didn't come to the last one.
So like, come next week to, to get it done or something because you need to, to get pass through the whole like lab experiment.
It was something super minor.
I didn't even get so annoyed.
But like, I was like, okay.
And I walked out of his, uh, of the lab and I was like, why don't I just quit?
I thought about it for three minutes, and I was like, this is the best idea ever, and I'm fucking quitting and never returning to this stupid building again.
And I just took a beeline to the bus stop, and I never returned to the university, ever.
Like, I didn't, uh, even I think I went there ten years later to get back my high school degree because the university holds it or something.
That was the only time I went back to the university.
Maybe I went for a few times to see friends who are still studying, but I never went back to study and it was a big clash with my parents because the my father is university professor and my mother is a high level university assistant.
So like and my father was in the same university.
So like imagine the shame I brought to the family.
And 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.
So we still have this like clan pride thing, a bit like not as bad as Asia, but a bit.
So I was like, shame for the family and, you know, all of this shit.
So um, so 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.
So, okay, so once I get the idea, I got the idea.
It was obvious that it was a good idea.
I took responsibility and I, uh, opened space in my life for new things.
But the interesting question is why did I head?
Why did I need like three years?
Two years and a half?
Okay.
First year was nice.
Like social life, girls.
Uh, but then, like, I was at least half a year late with this decision.
At least half a year late.
And why do good ideas don't just pop up into our minds?
Why are we so stuck in just following the the structure that the world gives us and peer pressure and everything?
And I was wondering about these questions.
And in the end, uh, I started writing stuff about it.
I started drawing stuff about it.
I talked to a lot of people about it.
And, uh, in the end, I was like, okay, I need to like, I discovered some stuff which are not mainstream, but I also don't know what mainstream is because I never read a self-help book or listen to something.
I just listen to stuff, uh, about psychology out of interest.
Let's say I listen to Brené Brown's Ted talk about vulnerability and other tech talks in a video here and an article there.
But I didn't read any books about it, so it was not systematic.
And I want I want a system.
I want to build a system about this.
I want to build a system for life.
And all of these hidden driving forces, like no psychologist can explain why I was half a year late and have a definitive explanation.
I want to have the definitive explanation, even if it's complex.
So I started building this system and it didn't.
Turned out that it's not complex at all, like if you have a few driving forces in your life.
And so you have a lot of barriers in their path, and that's basically that's it.
Things don't happen when they hit a barrier.
And when the barriers overcome, they happen.
And it's like like life is very complex, but living life, like the process is not really complex at all, that some illusion that we are fed, that the process of living life is complex.
It's not complex.
Well, 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.
That's as the probably the the biggest reason why we think is complex.
But when you figure time into the equation, you have like this flow like equations about how things develop like a graph, then it's not that complex, it's just that we're using maybe the wrong part of our brain to look at it.
And so when I started putting things on paper and in articles which are online at I Grow younger, I got this absolutely non-profit, completely free.
I'm doing this for the world to help people, not trying to sell anything.
There's no paid product or service or courses or anything.
Once you start looking at like a life, accepting that maybe it is actually simple and this oversimplification is 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.
And maybe if we incorporate this idea, maybe we can live a simple and very happy and successful life.
And I've been integrating the ideas into my own life wherever possible, and they absolutely work.
I started my life as, uh, let's say, um, emotionally and developed because I had engineer parents so very profit oriented, uh, and also played chess and went to a math and science high school.
So I was very good with stuff like numbers and, uh, like language and science, but not very good in, let's say, uh, humanities or expressing myself or expressing my emotions or sharing or, uh, having unconditional love or having self love and a lot of things that you cannot measure well.
Well, I was optimizing for the measurable, but not for the important.
And over time, I figured out how to change this.
So it's not like I was born perfect or something.
And I was just just trying to explain life to others.
It's like I was born with a lot of bad cards dealt, and then I, uh, gradually, without help from therapy or even reading a single self-help book as gradually, very slowly but sustainably, I managed to rearrange my life and how I feel about myself into something I actually like now.
So I wanted to put this into writing.
It became like eight hundred pages.
But the reason it became eight hundred pages is not because it was complex.
The main problem is that we lack the language, like their cornerstone object building blocks of life for which we don't have words.
And when you don't have words, a word for it, it doesn't enter your mental structures, intuition doesn't develop.
And there are these crucial missing pieces where you have a few concepts that you have heard of, you have an idea of, and 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, like intuition or something, which for some people is like a super intellectual, for others super spirito for third person.
It's their connection to the universe.
Like everyone has their own idea of how it works and what it is.
And when those confusing words or lack of words hit the structure of reality, there's like a total loss of coherence.
And this is what I grow younger is fighting.
It's eight hundred pages because we have to define stuff like in like in maths you define okay.
This is an axiom.
We cannot prove it, but we know it's right.
So we build on it.
Then there's the theorem okay.
We prove this with axiom.
And you define define define.
So you have a working language because the the common language is just a bunch of text.
So we understand each other.
It's not a working language to explain reality because reality.
And we looked at it from many different angles.
And some of the angles are like closer to reality, but let's say a bit more abstract.
And some are not close to reality and not very helpful and just, let's say, evolutionary adaptations that have outlived their usefulness.
And these parts, however, remain ingrained in language and keep pulling us down from intuition and understanding.
And that's what I grow younger is fighting.
We are absolute idea with clarity.
If it's not clear, like don't touch it.
Like reduce your life from clear building blocks, things that you can intuitively wake up in the middle of the night and feel like I know what this is.
So I know what unconditional love is.
I know what self-love is.
I know what intuition is.
I know what chaos and structure are like basic building blocks.
And then you can analyze parts of of our world that are not biological, not evolutionary things like numbers, like money, like business, like work.
And these things, you can take your building blocks and see what goes in them.
Because otherwise, if you try to just have a feeling about business, you can't.
It's just an instant block.
The moment you hear the word business.
Your mind only sees one thing.
Complexity.
I may go crazy.
That's the low level reaction to any very complex word.
One that didn't exist in the Stone age like business.
Obviously in the Stone age we didn't have business, so we didn't evolve our brains for such complex concepts in one word.
And this is the this language bridge between reality and our existing language is what I grow younger is.
It's like a 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.
So a system that's better than language, better than the existing words.
And it's you don't need to invent thousands of words to do this.
You need like one hundred.
It's not like inventing a new language.
I'm not talking, you know, I don't need to invent something huge.
It's just the bridge.
As you're saying this.
You're saying quite a lot.
I'm thinking with this.
I'm thinking you can't control everything.
You don't create everything, but you can optimize for what's happening.
You can make changes based on what you see happening for a better outcome.
Very much like a like a chess game.
Very much like a chess strategy.
Very, very interesting.
It's there's just a lot going on there.
And I'm thinking for us entrepreneurs and business people, what would be like the most important mindset?
Or 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 tomorrow, something new can come down and it just changes the whole playing field.
So I think, I believe we need that firm mindset on how to deal with this.
Just like sitting there in a chess game, you know you want to win, but you've got to go through all the moves and maneuvers to get there.
So what would you say to today's crowd?
I think that, um, chess is a limited space and it's like, what Simon Sinek says a finite game.
You know the rules and you know the the goals and you just play to win.
But 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.
You play to keep playing.
So 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.
We don't measure it.
So I don't know.
We throw it out.
It's supernatural, it's woowoo, it's whatever.
So we introduce in I Grow younger a middle category.
So things that you can define and measure and things that we know are real but we cannot measure things like love, self love, meaning stuff like this.
There's not a lot of those actually.
And then the supernatural we leave aside uh, so like no magic.
It's all real.
It's all scientific.
Just science is not able to measure everything.
And whenever you have a why question.
So why someone does something since it's super hard to measure this if it happens in the subconscious, how do you measure it?
So for these why questions that are very important to understanding change, which is our main like our main direction in psychology is we want to understand how people change and why they change.
And how can we, uh, stimulate positive change.
And we work with the things that we can define, and we work with the things that we cannot define and 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 things like lab meaning, but also something like creativity, curiosity, a love for searching for the truth, and a lot of these, uh, weird things that are like a part of us.
For example, motivation is a part of us.
Usually when we're motivated, we're motivated for a lot of things.
And when we're not motivated, we're motivated for nothing.
So it's like a quality.
It's it flows everywhere.
That's why we call them flows because it's a part of us.
So it flows into our entire life.
And these boxes and flows concept is not something new.
Of course.
It's I think there's also such, such concept concept in Buddhism and in other places.
But the thing is that the modern world is different than the world that we evolve boxes.
So, uh, and in very connected to boxes is logic is very important for the progress of humanity.
But we should never forget that this is not a good personal instrument.
Intuition is a good personal instrument.
It's made for your own use.
It's millions of times more powerful than logic.
It leaves no logs because it's too powerful.
That logs would be confusing and like take too much mental space.
So don't know how it works.
But it works.
And it's for personal use because we cannot share it.
Logic is not for us.
Logic is for the tribe.
Logic is okay.
I have an idea.
I can describe it to you.
So it's logic.
The brain has huge processing power, but the output in speaking and writing on even playing like highly competitive PC game, it's just like fifteen bytes a second.
So the brain can process terabytes of information, but the output is only fifteen bytes.
Our logic is super simple because you need to.
It's made for the tribe for sharing, so you need to be able to let it out via this tiny bandwidth.
Compared to the power of the brain.
The brain has more synapses than the data center that ChatGPT was trained on.
So imagine, like the processing power of the brain with full parallelism, higher parallelism than the GPUs.
So the brain is just a monster intuitively, to crunch patterns and get to some outcome, but then you have a tiny bottleneck to share it.
So logic is super simple evolutionary move prone to fifty something different types of fallacies listed in Wikipedia.
And it's for the tribe so I can share.
Then we go back and forth, we correct each other's mistakes, and then we share with the tribe, and then we test, and then we see and then we iterate.
And it's it's for a collective action logic.
Personally thinking about something without sharing.
For me it's useless.
The intuition would always give you a better answer than logic personally.
Fabulous, fabulous.
Once again, this is Colin Kay, the domain grandmaster.
You spoke about strategic moves for building an SEO empire.
You can find him at SEO SEO.
Thank you so much.
So much advice.
The one thing I remember, I remember a lot of things, but intuition is greater and more important than logic.
I'm going to think about that.
I'm going to ponder that some more.
It's really, really good point.
I just want to say thank you so much for spending this time with us and giving us what an insight into this world.
Thank you so much.
Thank you too.
And you can also find the I Grow younger, uh, on YouTube mostly, but also on just Google.
I grow younger and you get, uh, everything you need.
Everything is free again.
Like there's no catch.
It's made to help you.
And I hope it does.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you so much.
Wonderful.
All right, well, there you go.
Wow, this was great.
Guys, if you like this, share this with your friends.
Tell them about Kalin.
Tell them about the SEO empire, what he's done, how he's thought it through like a chess grandmaster, and how he's worked out his moves and how everything isn't always perfect.
But you just have to work through it and optimize what you have.
There's so much good information, so many good takeaways.
And please, wherever you're getting this, please follow the show.
It helps to bring in more amazing guests to you.
Thank you so much.
All right.
Let's use this and let's help you move on your journey to success.
Thanks.
Remember, just take action.
Success awaits those who persevere and remain steadfast despite the odds.
So good seats do good deeds.
And I'll see you on the next episode.
And before we close today's episode, I just want to share something special with you.
Something that I mentioned at the start of the show.
This is my brand new song, inspired by four powerful words that are printed on every US coin and every dollar.
You see these words your entire life, but when you hear them as a song, they carry a whole new meaning.
It's called In God We Trust.
Here it is.
Walking by a bus stop, not even a buck. Feeling everything is just plain ol’ stuck.
A dime on the ground, I held it to the light — what it said restored my sight!

In God we trust, the words shine true, guiding my steps in all I do.
Through trials and storms, I find my place. In God we trust — amazing grace!

I took the next bus, though my pocket had no fare. I told the driver my life with a humble prayer.
He gave a smile and said, “Go on, son.” I knew then that my hope had begun!

In God we trust, the words shine true, guiding my steps in all I do.
Through trials and storms, I find my place. In God we trust — amazing grace!

I found a diner with a crowd at the door, and asked the kind lady if I could do more.
She smiled and said, “You can stay if you try.” With the dime in my hand, I whispered on high!

When the road feels heavy and hope runs thin, that coin reminds me where faith begins.
One small coin, yet a truth so wide — “In God we trust,” forever my guide.

In God we trust, the words shine true, guiding my steps in all I do.
Through trials and storms, I find my place. In God we trust — amazing grace!

Forever we sing: In God we trust. Forever we sing: In God we trust.
Once again, that's in God We Trust.
It's a song that truly came to me as a gift from God.
I hope you enjoyed it and I'd love to hear your feedback.
Thank you so much for listening and thank you for spending this time with me today.
I hope this episode and this song gives you something meaningful to take with you.
And by the way, this song is part of my very first album, which is now out.
And if you want to hear more of the new music, visit Tony.
That's Tony.
I appreciate you.
All right.
Thanks.
So remember, just take action.
Success awaits those who persevere and remain steadfast despite the odds.
So good seeds do good deeds.
And I'll see you on the next episode.