Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur

by Derek Sivers

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.

When you’re onto something great, it won’t feel like revolution. It’ll feel like uncommon sense.

Present each new idea or improvement to the world. If multiple people are saying, “Wow! Yes! I need this! I’d be happy to pay you to do this!” then you should probably do it. But if the response is anything less, don’t pursue it. Don’t waste years fighting uphill battles against locked doors. Improve or invent until you get that huge response.

By not having any money to waste, you never waste money.

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.

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.

blasts are the best training for being clear. CD Baby had about two million customers. When writing an e-mail to everyone, if I wasn’t perfectly clear, I’d get twenty thousand confused replies, which would take my staff all week to reply to, costing me at least $5,000 plus lost morale.

Writing that e-mail to customers—carefully eliminating every unnecessary word, and reshaping every sentence to make sure it could not be misunderstood—would take me all day. One unclear sentence? Immediate $5,000 penalty. Ouch. Unfortunately, people writing websites don’t get this kind of feedback. Instead, if they’re not clear, they just get silence—lots of hits but no action.

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.

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.