Georg Aare is a 20-year-old founder from Estonia who walked away from basketball, learned to sell through real estate cold calls, and now builds RankUp — SEO software that runs a team of AI agents for company founders. His answer to the question every young builder faces, “what do you do when the first dream ends,” is simple: you find the next one and you rebuild until it works. Georg rebuilt his product four or five times before it started closing customers, and that persistence is exactly why Dennis Yu put him on the show.
Georg does SEO and GEO (generative engine optimization) for a living, and he speaks the language of founders who need to show up in Google and in AI answers. Connect with him on Georg Aare’s LinkedIn profile or book his AI-powered SEO service. What follows is his story, in his own words.
In this article about Georg Aare
- Why Georg Aare quit basketball at 20
- An $80 check and a real lesson in sales
- From a sports agency to his first taste of SEO
- Georg Aare’s first $10,000 month
- SERP Engineers: friends, family, and fools
- The birth of RankUp
- Down to the last $1,000
- The founders were already buying
- September 1st: the pivot and the fourth rebuild
- What Georg Aare gets right about selling
- Where RankUp is headed
Why Georg Aare quit basketball at 20
Georg Aare played basketball because he loved it, but the money mattered too. He watched LeBron James and did the math on a professional career, and the numbers did not work. “Why I quit basketball is because I realized, okay, I’m not making the NBA in the next five years,” he said. Average European players earn almost nothing, a rung up earns a few thousand a month, and only the very top reach real money.
So he made a decision that sounds obvious in hindsight and brave at 20: “I did that math, and I was like, okay, there must be a better way.” He got into business in 2023.
An $80 check and a real lesson in sales
Real estate came first, and Georg is blunt about how it started. “The first four, five months, I made nothing as a real estate agent. Zero. Like, not even a cent.” When the first commission finally landed at the end of October 2023, it was not the payday people imagine.
$80 — Georg’s very first commission check. “My first check wasn’t 1,000, wasn’t 5,000… it was 80 bucks or 80 euros.”
He closed a bigger deal worth about a thousand euros in early 2024, but the real payoff was the training. “My career started with cold calls… best introduction to sales I could have get, honestly.” Georg Aare came to see selling as more than persuasion. It is pattern recognition — spotting opportunities and cooperation before anyone else does. That instinct shows up in every chapter that follows.
From a sports agency to his first taste of SEO
Alongside real estate, Georg started a sports agency, placing Estonian and Finnish players into United States high schools and colleges. The checks were bigger per player, and the work needed almost nothing to run. “All you need is a phone, connections, and a charger,” he said.
The agency became his door into search. To find players, Georg and his co-founder built a rough blog generator that pushed out roughly fifty AI posts a month. The content was thin, but the results were not. “That first site took off just with some random AI-generated blogs, got new leads. Like, what the hell?” He had discovered SEO by accident, and he started studying it in January 2024 — beginning, like many do, by watching Julian Goldie on YouTube.
Georg Aare’s first $10,000 month
By stacking three income streams — selling an entire apartment building through the real estate agency, placing players through the sports agency, and taking on early SEO work — Georg hit a milestone most 20-year-olds never see.
$10,000 — his first five-figure month, in May 2024. That same month he sold the apartment building and quit real estate to go all-in on search.
SERP Engineers: friends, family, and fools
Georg and two co-founders launched an SEO agency, SERP Engineers, in March 2024. The first clients came fast and close to home. “We closed four clients very fast here in Estonia. Of course, friends, family, and fools, right? That’s how it goes.”
The work was mostly web development with some SEO on top — meta descriptions, schema, a few blogs and directories. It paid, but it buried the team. By July 2024 they paused the client work, kept the capital, and made the shift that would define the next two years: from doing SEO by hand to building software that does it. As Georg puts it, he stopped being “just a pure hustler” and started building a real business with proper positioning.
The birth of RankUp
The product went through as many names as pivots — SaaS Writer, Advanti, Outrank, and finally RankUp. The first paying SaaS customer arrived in the least corporate way possible. “I got it when I was in Montenegro, clubbing around… I basically was chatting with the guy in the club, and then we closed the deal.”
Georg Aare’s co-founder Martin taught himself to code in August 2024 and, within months, was building the full application and the AI agents behind it. On January 3rd, 2025, the team made a hard call: drop their one paying client — a high-ticket compliance SaaS they were ranking for SOC 2 keywords — and commit fully to building RankUp. “That client was our only source of income at the time,” Georg said. They walked away anyway.
Down to the last $1,000
Going all-in nearly ended the company. Georg Aare spent the first five months of 2025 running customer-discovery calls with SEOs he had met at a retreat in Chiang Mai, but almost nothing sold. He credits a mentor from Estonia’s startup schools for keeping him honest with one question — “okay, so what problem are you solving?” — that he could not clearly answer. He went back and watched every customer-discovery video from Steve Blank, the man he calls the godfather of the discipline.
$1,000 — all that was left in the RankUp account by May 2025. “By the end of May I had to inject money into the account to keep it afloat.”
What saved RankUp was a deal, not a customer. At the SEO Vibes Conference in Poland, Georg closed an SEO-automation project building a link-building system for an agency. “That kind of saved RankUp… it gave us the capital we needed to continue without me going bankrupt myself.” RankUp launched officially that same month, unfinished on purpose — because, as Georg says, it is “better to launch sooner than later.”
The founders were already buying
RankUp’s first real customer came in late June 2025, a $20 subscription from a lead-gen agency founder. A second, an Estonian SEO, followed in July. Then a pattern emerged that changed the whole company. By August, most of the handful of paying users were not the SEOs Georg had been targeting.
“We were targeting SEOs with our software, but we got more founders as customers,” he said. Founders knew a good agency costs five to ten thousand dollars a month, they could not or would not pay it, and RankUp did the job for a couple hundred. Meanwhile tools like AirOps were winning the SEO crowd because SEOs want custom, technical automations — “every SEO has their way of approaching SEO.” Three signals pointed the same direction: founders bought, SEOs wanted custom builds, and the market for “SEO software sold to SEOs” was brutal.
September 1st: the pivot and the fourth rebuild
Georg Aare is a milestone person, and he remembers the exact date. “We made the pivot, literally on September the 1st, we made the pivot to focusing on” founders who do not have SEO figured out — a cheaper alternative to an agency, delivered as a team of AI agents. The night before, his co-founder pushed back. “He was like, ‘we built the product… do we really have to rebuild it again?’ It was a big decision… but very crucial for our success.”
4th–5th rebuild — RankUp has been rebuilt three or four, then four or five times, alongside as many business pivots. The current version is “a team of AI agents that actually work together, and they really have the SEO intelligence in them.”
The second time through customer discovery, Georg Aare was fast. What took four painful months the first time took a week, because he knew the call setup, the questions, and the exact information he was hunting for.
What Georg Aare gets right about selling
The sharpest lesson in the episode is about the ask. On his early discovery calls, Georg treated them as research and never asked for money — a repeatable mistake. So he changed the rule: “okay, George, do you really wanna go through this shit again?… I’m gonna actually ask them to pay at the end of my call.”
Asking for money surfaced the truth. SEOs suddenly had another meeting to run, or needed “something custom.” Founders said yes. The result was a close rate most salespeople never touch.
60% — Georg’s close rate with founders. As Dennis Yu put it, “anyone over 20% is a very high close rate.”
Dennis, a former search engine engineer, summed up why Georg is worth watching: “You’re selling in the most difficult market — getting SEO people to buy SEO software and customization. That shows that you have some kind of talent.”
Georg’s playbook, in four takeaways:
- Learn to sell first. Cold calls in real estate taught him more than any course could.
- Ask for the money. A discovery call that never asks for payment hides the real objections.
- Watch who actually buys. The founders bought before he ever aimed at them — and that signal drove the pivot.
- Rebuild without ego. Four or five rebuilds later, the product finally fit the market.
Where RankUp is headed
RankUp now starts at around $280 a month and keeps climbing as the AI agents get stronger. Georg is doing the unglamorous version of AI — not posting hot takes, but wiring up agents that plan, write, and optimize the way a real SEO team would, for founders who cannot hire one. It is the same shift every local business is living through: getting found is moving from a monthly retainer to software, and the owners who adopt early quietly pull ahead.
If you are a young builder who wants to learn this on real projects, that is exactly what Dennis Yu teaches through the BlitzMetrics Academy — hands-on AI and digital marketing on live client work. You can also apply to the AI Builder Program and start where Georg started: by shipping.
Follow Georg Aare on Instagram, X, and YouTube, and see more founder stories from Dennis Yu.
Produced and edited by Leo Pohlmann for the Rising Talent Podcast.