Kalin Karakehayov
Hi!
I'm Kalin and I haven't had a day job for a day of my life.
From professional chess to freelancing to co-founding a profitable startup, I had the chance to dive deep into psychology, economics, marketing and web technologies.
After identifying the golden opportunities of SEO (in 2008) and domain name investing (in 2012) I still managed to make my fair share of bad choices and fail countless side projects. This was all valuable experience.
I finally managed to fully focus onto domain investing in 2018 and this brought stable growth to my startup Edoms (and its popular brand Seo.Domains), which now employs ~120 people, has $6 million yearly revenue and owns 200,000+ domains.
In 2021 I felt if was time to give back and started several non-profit initiatives.
These were not chosen randomly. Just like in my entrepreneurial journey I wanted to achieve out of this world efficiency. With a 7-figure budget (hopefully to grow) I wanted to somehow touch and meaningfully improve the lives of every human being on the planet.
This called for a unique strategy based on...
....my main observations about the world:
- Most humans are very kind and generous when not feeling threatened.
- The world would have enough resources for all of us if the greed of a small but powerful group didn't totally screw up the distribution.
- People with power and resources don't have enough empathy and kindness.
- People with empathy and kindness don't have enough resources and power to make change happen.
Currently the non-profits + random decent people do more or less the following:
- They pressure people with power and resources (and the companies and governments they run) to follow rules and ethical principles. This is a much needed fight but it's like spitting into the wind, since people with power and resources will always do whatever the fuck they want. They write and enforce the rules. Just look at the politics of the world's largest economy - mostly just an extension of the worst side of capitalism. Huge efforts are needed for marginal success and if the pressure is not maintained, results are quickly lost.
- Individual people are being helped a lot, especially marginalized groups. This is precious work but is not fundamentally targeted at global change since the people helped have a lot of personal challenges to solve first. The focus is on personal happiness and social fairness and not much resources are left for changing the big picture.
- Random nice stuff like art. When something is fun or beautiful, it has a value of its own and should happen. However, from our perspective, art is only changing the world if people see it. So we're back to the scaling challenge. Paradoxically, untargeted efforts like art need even more promotion and efficient scaling.
- Saving the environment and biodiversity. Non-negotiable. We should also stop destroying it, which will make future saving efforts easier.
What is left out?
Some people.
While clearly we are starting to take care of humanity's weak (not nearly enough), no one has much resources left to empower our strong. They don't need it. But they can change the world so actually everyone who wants a better world needs it.
We do little to engage and empower the hundreds of millions of people in this world who live a normal, healthy life. Each of them can turn out to be our world-changing superhero if we give them some support to scale.
Some global systems.
It looks like the world is too big and no one really makes any attempts at global change. Everyone from Bill Gates to your local AA group just focuses on specific or local problems (totally worth the effort!). People with power and resources don't really fight for major status-quo changes. Makes sense.
Our only truly global and truly big effort of tackling climate change has so far been a spectacular fuck-up (fossil fuel companies received $500,000,000,000+ of government subsidies in 2021).
But should we automatically dismiss all global problems due to sheer scale? Are there global and solvable problems?
Plenty of them it turns out. We can divide them in 3 major categories:
Category 1: Personal level
Personal happiness, mental health, self-improvement, critical thinking, rational behavior with regard to education, jobs and finance.
This is not an easy path but the actions everyone can take on it are very simple. And similar. Humans share at least 99,5% of their genes with one another. And we live in the same free market economy.
Psychology is complicated but its foundations are understandable to anyone. The same can be said about the economy from a personal perspective.
My effort to address the personal level stuff is
I Grow Younger (https://i.gy).
Do you remember those phrases, sentences and paragraphs you randomly read/hear and they hit home so hard that you saw clearly through the fog and changed your ways forever? This is what we want to deliver here.
I Grow Younger is forged out of life-changing material.
Every article is a 5-figure investment of writing, editing, fact-checking and illustrating.
Every sentence is crafted to simultaneously fully reflect the truth and trigger the positive emotion needed to shatter the internal barriers standing between you and success/happiness. The barriers we all share.
Category 2: Social and economic systems
If you think all the win-win solutions that can improve society in a way no one would say no to, have been implemented, you are underestimating the complexity of the systems we have built and the insane amount of yet untested possible solutions.
The economy has millions of potential improvements that can change a zero-sum microsystem into one that creates value for everyone. Or prevent value from being destructed. We just need to find them.
My effort to address the systems level stuff is
Spectern.com (yet unlaunched)
Category 3: Data, Digitalization and The Internet
The Web has been around for more than a generation and we still cannot still fully grasp the potential of that instant connectivity (for both good and evil). We don't feel the potential and we don't use the potential.
My effort to address the Digital stuff will be at
Spamson.com (yet unlaunched)
But a side project about the specific problem of harmful online advertising is already live at
No Cheap Traffic (https://nocheaptraffic.com) and you should definitely check it out.
If you have ideas regarding any of this, contact me.
What I Do
Testimonials
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