Anything You Want

Most people don't know why they're doing what they're doing. They imitate others, go with the flow, and follow paths without making their own.

Don't be on your deathbed someday, having squandered your one chance at life, full of regret because you pursued little distractions instead of big dreams.

You need to know your personal philosophy of what makes you happy and what's worth doing.

I wrote down my utopian dream-come-true distribution deal from my musician's point of view. In a perfect world, my distributor would...

I was just daydreaming about how one little thing would look in a perfect world.

When you make a business, you get to make a little universe where you control all the laws. This is your utopia.

a business, you get to make a little universe where you control all the laws. This is your utopia.

When you make it a dream come true for yourself, it'll be a dream come true for someone else, too.

“revolution” is a term that people use only when you're successful. Before that, you're just a quirky person who does things differently.

Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what's not working.

quote from Steve Blank: No plan survives first contact with customers.

Since I couldn't afford a programmer, I went to the bookstore and got a $25 book on PHP and MySQL programming. Then I sat down and learned it, with no programming experience. Necessity is a great teacher.

Since I couldn't afford a programmer, I went to the bookstore and got a $25 book on PHP and MySQL programming. Then I sat down and learned it, with no programming experience. Necessity is a great teacher.

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 want to be useful, you can always start now, with only 1 percent of what you have in your grand vision.

Never forget that there are thousands of businesses, like Jim's Fish Bait Shop in a shack on a beach somewhere, that are doing just fine without corporate formalities. As

most businesses are trying to be everything to everybody. And they wonder why they can't get people's attention!

Banks love to lend money to those who don't need it. Record labels love to sign musicians who don't need their help. People fall in love with people who won't give them the time of day. It's a strange law of human behavior. It's pretty universal.

Writing that email to customers—carefully eliminating every unnecessary word, and reshaping every sentence to make sure it could not be misunderstood—would take me all day.

The most successful email I ever wrote When you make a business, you're making a little world where you control the laws. It doesn't matter how things are done everywhere else. In your little world, you can make it like it should be.

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!!

If you find even the smallest way to make people smile, they'll remember you more for that smile than for all your other fancy business-model stuff.

I added two little lines of programming code that counted how many hours and minutes remained until 5 p.m. and then showed the result by the shipping options. “You have 5 hours, 18 minutes until our next FedEx shipment.” Customers LOVED this!

Every outgoing email has a “From:” name, right? Why not use that to make people smile, too? With one line of code, I made it so that every outgoing email customized the “From:” field to be “CD Baby loves {firstname}.” So if the customer's name was Susan, every email she got from us would say it was from “CD Baby loves Susan.” Customers LOVED this!

If you needed a big special favor, we'd give you the number of our local pizza delivery place. If you bought us a pizza, we'd do any favor you wanted. When we'd tell people about this on the phone, they'd often laugh, not believing we were serious. But we'd get a pizza every few weeks. I'd often hear from musicians later that this was the moment they fell in love with us.

At the end of each order, the last page of the website would ask, “Where did you hear of this artist? We'll pass them any message you write here.” Customers would often take the time to write things like, “Heard your song on WBEZ radio last night. Searched Yahoo!. Found it here. I'd love to have you play at our school!” The musicians absolutely loved getting this information, and it always led to the customer and musician getting in touch directly. This is something that big stores like Amazon would never do.

Even if you want to be big someday, remember that you never need to act like a big boring company.

Over ten years, it seemed like every time someone raved about how much he loved CD Baby, it was because of one of these little fun human touches.

Notice that “more of the same” is never the answer. You'd have to do things in a new way to handle twice as much business. Processes would have to be streamlined.

the whole point of doing anything is because it makes you happy! That's it!

“Yes, refund his money in full. We'll take a little loss. It's important to always do whatever would make the customer happiest, as long as it's not outrageous. A little gesture like this goes a long way toward him telling his friends we're a great company. Everyone always remember that helping musicians is our first goal, and profit is second. You have my full permission to use that guideline to make these decisions yourself in the future. Do what makes the musicians happiest. Make sure everyone who deals with us leaves with a smile.” I asked around to make sure everyone understood the answer. I asked one person to start a manual, write down the answer to this one situation, and write down the philosophy behind it. Then everyone went back to work. Ten minutes later, new question. Same process:   Gather everybody around.

Answer the question and explain the philosophy. Make sure everyone understands the thought process. Ask one person to write it in the manual. Let everybody know they can decide this without me next time. After two months of this, there were no more questions. Then I showed someone how to do the last of the stuff that was still my job. As part of learning it, he had to document it in the manual, and then show it to someone else, too. (Learn by teaching.) Now I was totally unnecessary.

No matter which goal you choose, there will be lots of people telling you you're wrong. Just pay close attention to what excites you and what drains you. Pay close attention to when you're being the real you and when you're trying to impress an invisible jury.