Your business plan is moot. You don’t know what people really want until you start doing it.
Just selling my CD
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He was trying to solve a problem for himself when it turns out other people had the same issue. Once others heard about what he’d done they wanted it as well.
Make a dream come true
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He decided on 4 values to be central to how he ran his business. These values basically guaranteed that CD Baby would never become a massive business. But that was the point, he was already happy living as a musician, he didn’t want to become a billionaire running a massive company.
When you make a business, you get to make a little universe where you control all the laws. This is your utopia.
A business model with only two numbers
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He decided on taking $35 per album people wanted listed and a $4 cut on every CD that was sold. That was his entire business model. Deliberately very simple.
A business plan should never take more than a few hours of work—hopefully no more than a few minutes. The best plans start simple. A quick glance and common sense should tell you if the numbers will work. The rest are details.
This ain’t no revolution
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He was a quirky weirdo until people realised how successful he was, then all of a sudden, he was a revolutionary figure in the music business. Like he says here, “if your looking for your life’s purpose to hit you like a lightning bolt, you’ll overlook the small day to day issues that need solving.” At the end of the day if your confident that what your doing is helping others, why do you care what is said about you or your process? If your doing good things and becoming more and more successful, eventually someone will take notice. In the mean time though, it’s another great example of why you have to love the process for anything to be successful.
Five years after I started CD Baby, when it was a big success, the media said I had revolutionized the music business. But revolution is a term that people use only when you’re successful. Before that, you’re just a quirky person who does things differently.
If you think your life’s purpose needs to hit you like a lightning bolt, you’ll overlook the little day-to-day things that fascinate you. If you think revolution needs to feel like war, you’ll overlook the importance of simply serving people better.
If it’s not a hit, switch
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He spent so much time trying to push ideas that people either didn’t like or didn’t care about. Now that he had something people wanted they were knocking him over to sign up for it. If what you create is not something people want then you need to get back to creating. Try again. Don’t stop, but make sure that with every creation you get better, you improve. Learn from the mistakes. Eventually you’ll have something that people do want and the game will change.
Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what’s not working.
No “yes.” Either “Hell yeah!” or “no.”
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This is Derek Sivers famous phrase “either hell yes or no.” When we’re trying to manage a full schedule and only take the time for things that really matter this is an incredible mantra. However if your just getting started I feel like it’s better to start taking on pretty much any opportunity your given. When your still growing and need to make a name for yourself or get your thing in front of people, sometimes you have got to say yes and make the most of every opportunity. Once your past that phase though and your product or service is viable and growing by itself, then it’s time to switch to “hell yes or no.”
Just like that, my plan completely changed
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His idea of what his business was, ended up being completely different to what the expectations of the customers were. Through interactions with the customers he ended up being able to expand and grow the business, simply by learning the expectations of the customers. For example, he thought his website was a glorified payment processor for musicians, turns out that customers started to contact him looking for a way to find the new content that was being added to his site. So then it evolved into a proper music store.
Anytime you think you know what your new business will be doing, remember this quote from serial entrepreneur Steve Blank: “No business plan survives first contact with customers.”
The advantage of no funding
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He refused to take on investors even through the dot com boom. By keeping the business solely owned by himself, he was able to keep pushing it in the direction he wanted. Ultimately he just wanted to help people with a specific problem and taking on investors and funding wouldn’t help him do that, it would simply get him lost in the weeds.
Never forget that absolutely everything you do is for your customers. Make every decision—even decisions about whether to expand the business, raise money, or promote someone—according to what’s best for your customers. If you’re ever unsure what to prioritize, just ask your customers the open-ended question, “How can I best help you now?” Then focus on satisfying those requests.
It’s counterintuitive, but the way to grow your business is to focus entirely on your existing customers. Just thrill them, and they’ll tell everyone.
Start now. No funding needed.
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Start small, but start now. Don’t worry about getting the funding to launch your big grand idea. What can you start today? How can you begin with the smallest version of your idea? If it helps people and is successful you can grow it from there. Most people will never start because they want to do it perfect and big from the start, but imperfect and small can still be a massive success.
Starting small puts 100 percent of your energy into actually solving real problems for real people.
Ideas are just a multiplier of execution
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This theme appears in most books. The idea that talk is cheap, and that actions are everything. And it’s true. Actions have always spoken louder than words, nowhere is it more true than in a business where your trying to serve customers.
ideas are worth nothing unless they are executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.
Formalities play on fear. Bravely refuse.
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Don’t let fear of the unknown stop you. Get started and learn along the way. Most of the things your concerned about are optional extras anyway.
The strength of many little customers
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Build your business to focus on serving the needs of many small customers. Don’t chase the big fish. Chasing the big fish is a huge gamble and may never pay off. Small fish allow you flexibility in how you grow and they also mean you don’t need to worry about 70% of your revenue moving to a competitor one day.
Proudly exclude people
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Win over your core audience by keeping your offerings with them in mind. Not selling out to try and appeal to the masses. Pick your niche and stick to it. The more successful your project becomes, the harder this will be, but the more rewards it will also provide.
It’s a big world. You can loudly leave out 99 percent of it. Have the confidence to know that when your target 1 percent hears you excluding the other 99 percent, the people in that 1 percent will come to you because you’ve shown how much you value them.
This is just one of many options
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There’s never one right way to do something. “life is choice and sacrifice, a little more of this, a little less of this”. It’s the same in business, do it the way you want, for your own reasons.
After all of this, he’d say, “Now, how did that song go again?” It was the clearest proof that what I thought was “the” way the song went was really just one of an infinite number of options.
You can’t pretend there’s only one way to do it. Your first idea is just one of many options.
You don’t need a plan or a vision
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It’s perfectly fine for your big plan or vision to be to simply help people. Set goals sure, but dont forget the reason you got into this business in the first place. Don’t forget the reason you’ve become successful.
don’t think you need a huge vision. Just stay focused on helping people today.
Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing. Are you helping people? Are they happy? Are you happy? Are you profitable? Isn’t that enough?
How do you grade yourself?
make sure you’re staying focused on what’s honestly important to you, instead of doing what others think you should.
That’s the Tao of business: Care about your customers more than about yourself, and you’ll do well.
Act like you don’t need the money
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People and business seem to sense desperation. Its the same when you need to borrow money from the bank, if you dont need it right now they’re happy to lend. But the minute you need it, your high-risk and the terms become very unfavourable.
Tao of business: Set up your business like you don’t need the money, and it’ll likely come your way.
A real person, a lot like you
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Consider that a real person is likely on the other end of your remarks, especially if right now your only doing it because of a particularly sour mood. Write it all down somewhere, and then burn it, if you really need the release.
You should feel pain when you’re unclear
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Make sure you feel some pain whenever you make a mistake. The lessons will come easier if you do, and you’ll be far less likely to repeat them.
The most successful e-mail I ever wrote
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Sometimes the most success you’ll have is from something that was essentially a ‘throw away’. Something you just belted together in 20 minutes but turns out to have meant the world to other people. Another point for why you should be constantly trying to create things. You never know which one will be the one to have this effect.
Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing. Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy. We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Friday, June 6th. I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year.” We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!
Little things make all the difference
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Be unique, sometimes it makes all the difference. Also by being unique you increase the likelihood of ‘your people’ finding you, and becoming customers.
Sometimes, after we had done the forty-five minutes of work to add a new album to the store, the musician would change his mind and ask us to do it over again with a different album cover or different audio clips. I wanted to say yes but let him know that this was really hard to do, so I made a policy that made us both smile: “We’ll do anything for a pizza.”
Also at the end of each order, there was a box that would ask, “Any special requests?” One time, someone said, “I’d love some cinnamon gum.” Since one of the guys in the warehouse was going to the store anyway, he picked up some cinnamon gum and included it in the package. One time, someone said, “If you could include a small, rubber squid, I would appreciate it. If this is unobtainable, a real squid would do.” Just by chance, a customer from Korea had sent us a packaged filet of squid. So the shipping guys included it in the box with the other customer’s CDs.
Naive quitting
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Just because something is the ‘accepted’ way of doing something doesn’t mean it has to be the way you do it.
Since I had never quit a job before and didn’t know how, I did what seemed to be the respectful and considerate thing to do: I found and trained my replacement. (It wasn’t my boss’s fault I wanted to quit, so why should I make it his problem? If I want to quit, it’s my problem.) I called on my old friend Nikki, who I knew would be perfect, and offered her my job at my current salary. She came with me to the office for a week while I trained her in every aspect of the job. Once she had it mastered, I went into my boss’s office on a Friday afternoon and said, “I need to quit now, but I’ve already trained my replacement. She’s great. She’ll take over for me starting Monday.” My boss just looked a little stunned, then said, “Uh. Well. OK. We’ll miss you. Tell her to see HR about the paperwork.” And that was that.
There’s a benefit to being naive about the norms of the world—deciding from scratch what seems like the right thing to do, instead of just doing what others do.
Prepare to double
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Early in business, its not unheard of for businesses to grow by 100% each year. Just like CDBaby did. If your in the process of growing something try to buy whatever you currently need to upgrade with an eye toward the future. Your business has a 100 customers now? Well what would you need to be able to handle 200? You have 200 what do you need to invest in to handle 400? Work on the theory that it will double and make appropriate decisions.
Because the business needed a warehouse for the CDs, I always had to buy more shelving. Each time I did, I’d buy twice as much as I had before. It always filled up fast, even when it got warehouse-sized. When I had filled a 5,000-square-foot warehouse, I rented 10,000 square feet. When I filled up 10,000 square feet, I rented 20,000 square feet. Even that filled up fast. But no matter what business you’re in, it’s good to prepare for what would happen if business doubled. Have ten clients now? How would it look if you had twenty at once? Serving eighty customers for lunch each day? What would happen if 160 showed up?
It’s about being, not having
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All the skill in world can’t make up for determination and hardwork.
After fifteen years of practice, and about a thousand live shows, I was finally a very good singer, at least by my own standards. (Someone who heard me for the first time then said, “Singing is a gift you’re either born with or you’re not. You’re lucky. You were born with it!”) Point is: It’s not that I wanted to get it done and have good vocals. It’s that I wanted to be a great singer.
When I started CD Baby, I knew only some basic HTML, no programming. But as the site grew, basic HTML wouldn’t do it anymore. My tech friends told me I had to make a server-side database-driven automated system. Since I couldn’t afford to hire a programmer, that meant I had to learn it myself. I went to the bookstore and got a book on PHP and MySQL programming. It was the slow road, but I loved it! As with being in the recording studio again, it was wonderful to learn how to make the technology do what I wanted and not be a mystery. And it was nice to be self-sufficient.
In the end, it’s about what you want to be, not what you want to have. To have something (a finished recording, a business, or millions of dollars) is the means, not the end. To be something (a good singer, a skilled entrepreneur, or just plain happy) is the real point. When you sign up to run a marathon, you don’t want a taxi to take you to the finish line.
The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote
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Try hard not to promise things that you have no control over. Be upfront about the possibilities but don’t make it a promise.
Delegate or die: The self-employment trap
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If your building a business, make sure you take the time to document and train effectively. By doing this early you can empower your employee’s to make decisions in your absence and be comfortable that they are doing what you would have told them to anyway. Train others to take over your role, replace yourself, so that you can move on to bigger picture items.
There’s a big difference between being self-employed and being a business owner. Being self-employed feels like freedom until you realize that if you take time off, your business crumbles. To be a true business owner, make it so that you could leave for a year, and when you came back, your business would be doing better than when you left.
Make it anything you want
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You never need to conform to others expectations of your role. Especially if the business your working in is your own. Build it so that you can do the parts you love and outsource the parts you don’t.
Never forget that you can make your role anything you want it to be. Anything you hate to do, someone else loves. So find that person and let her do it.
Make sure you know what makes you happy, and don’t forget it.
