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by
Derek Sivers
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December 9, 2020 - January 12, 2021
Derek shares some of the principles (and anti-principles) he learned and applied during his time as an accidental entrepreneur and how to grow a business without losing your soul’
Dedicated entirely to Seth Godin. This book only exists because of his encouragement.
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.
These are my philosophies from the ten years I spent starting and growing a small business. ▸ Business is not about money. It’s about making dreams come true for others and for yourself. ▸ Making a company is a great way to improve the world while improving yourself. ▸ When you make a company, you make a utopia. It’s where you design your perfect world. ▸ Never do anything just for the money. ▸ Don’t pursue business just for your own gain. Only answer the calls for help. ▸ Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently promoting what’s not working. ▸ Your
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“Ah, screw it. I’ll just set up my own online store. How hard could it be?” But it was hard!
When you make 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.
Because it was taking me about forty-five minutes of work to add a new album to the site, I also had to charge $25 per album as compensation for my time (shows you how much I thought my time was worth in those days).
# naval
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.
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.
When you’re onto something great, it won’t feel like revolution. It’ll feel like uncommon sense.
A songwriter can write a hundred songs; then suddenly one of them really resonates with people and becomes a hit.
It’s not that it’s necessarily better. But through some random set of circumstances or magic combination of ingredients, people love it.
Once you’ve got a hit, suddenly all the locked doors open wide. People love the hit so much that it seems to promote itself. Instead of trying to creat...
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Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what’s not working.
We all have lots of ideas, creations, and projects. When you present one to the world and it’s not a hit, don’t keep pushing it as is. Instead, get back to improving and inventing.
Present each new idea or improvement ...
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Don’t waste years fighting uphill battles against locked doors. Improve or invent until you get that huge response.
When you say no to most things, you leave room in your life to throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say, “Hell yeah!”
We’re all busy. We’ve all taken on too much. Saying yes to less is the way out.
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.”
Then they would talk about LOI, ROI, NDAs, IPOs, and all kinds of things that also had nothing to do with actually helping people.
I’m so glad I didn’t have investors. I didn’t have to please anybody but my customers and myself. No effort was spent on anything but my customers.
I’d get weekly calls from investment firms, wanting to invest in CD Baby. My immediate answ...
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I’d say, “No. I want my business to be smaller, not bigger.”
you never waste money. 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.
Even years later, the desks were just planks of wood on cinder blocks from the hardware store.
My well-funded friends would spend $100,000 to buy something that I m...
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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.
but the way to grow your business is to focus entirely on your existing customers. Just thrill them, and they’ll tell everyone.
anyone (including you) says he wants to do something big, but can’t until he raises money. It usually means the person is more in love with the idea of being big-big-big than with actually doing something useful. For an idea to get big-big-big, it has to be useful. And being useful doesn’t need funding.
If you want to be useful, you can always start now, with only 1 percent of what you have in your grand vision. It’ll be a humble prototype version of your grand vision, but you’ll be in the game. You’ll be ahead of the rest, because you actually started, while others are waiting for the finish line to magically appear at the starting line.
Start now
Starting small puts 100 percent of your energy into actually solving real problems for real people.
And it will let you change your plan in an instant, as you’re working closely with those first customers telling you what they really need.
So no, your idea doesn’t need funding to start. (You also don’t need an MBA, a particular big client, a certain person’s endorsement, a lucky break, or any other common excuse not to start.)
Ideas are just a multiplier of execution
It’s so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas
The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $200,000,000. That’s why I don’t want to hear people’s ideas. I’m not interested until I see their execution.
Do you passionately love the “Terms & Conditions” and “Privacy Policy” pages on other websites? Have you even read them? If not, then why would you go putting that garbage on your website?
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.
Many small entrepreneurs think, “If we can just land Apple, Google, or the government as a client, we’ll be all set!”
this approach has many problems:
Instead, imagine that you have designed your business to have no big clients, just lots of little clients.
When you build your business on serving thousands of customers, not dozens, you don’t have to worry about any one customer leaving or making special demands.
notice that most businesses are trying to be everything to everybody. And they wonder why they can’t get people’s attention!
Notion
It’s a big world. You can loudly leave out 99 percent of it.
the people in that 1 percent will come to you because you’ve shown how much you value them.
“I’m just trying to help musicians. CD Baby has to charge money to sustain itself, but the money’s not the point. I don’t do anything for the money.”
When you’ve asked your customers what would improve your service, has anyone said, “Please fill your website with more advertising”?
