Anything You Want

About the book

Book author: Derek Sivers

To quote Derek, “This book is 10 years of my business experience condensed into an hour”. It’s a short book, a mere 100 pages or so. It tells the tale of Dereks’ business CD Baby, how it grew from self-publishing his own music into something he sold for $20M and some life advice scattered in-between.

Reflection and takeaways

I like this book, and I like Derek. Derek seems to have a healthy outlook on business and life in general.

It’s something like this: the best businesses solve actual problems. The worst businesses are just trying to make money.

Derek’s business solved the problem of indie artists wanting to publish and sell their albums. Physical stores weren’t interested in selling this kind of music. His business model came from him publishing his album. He made this possible online. Then one of his friends asked to also publish his album on Derek’s website. Because it took some time, Derek did this for a small fee, eventually figured out that $4 per album sold and $25 setup fee was a simple and killer business. Thousands of indie artists published their albums eventually.

If you do ‘extra mile’ work for customers, such as always having a human pick up the phone, or “do anything for a pizza”, they will be loyal to your business and also tell their friends. This is the best type of marketing. And be fun about running your business.

Derek had some good tips on delegation: you must delegate, but he did it a little too much, which eventually made him sell his company.

After he sold his company, he put all of the money inside a trust, and “burned the boats” by saying that it pays out 5% of the amount to him every year. This way, he never has to think about how to manage his money. Many people that I know with a lot of money complain about the stress of managing a lot of money.

He also believes that an idea is nothing, execution is everything. I agree with this. Inititally when starting with entrepreneurship, I thought ideas were worth a lot, but they’re really not. It’s rare that ideas are stolen too. People just mind their own business usually.

What I don’t like about this book is that I can’t decide if it’s survivorship bias and luck or a genius at play. With that said, I still like the advice and book.

My reflection is that I don’t think businesses of this “general niche market” type can be made today because of the sheer size of commerce on the internet, platforms, and VC mechanics. A simple idea of “I want to put albums online” is probably already done.. by 100s of players. And among these, there are giant platforms. In the music case, it’d be Spotify, Apple Music and such. A new type of market, like “I want to put albums with indie music”, if it received growth, would need to exist where these massive players don’t, and if it received a lot of growth, competitors with VC investment would appear fast. In this case, I think the advice is a little outdated. Today, I think you need novel ideas for really niche markets, like “indie jazz musicians in Scandinavia” and cater the experience to that alone. As such, I feel some advice is a little outdated.

Why did I pick it

I like Derek’s stuff. Had it on my Kobo since reading How to Live. Wanted to read a short book.

Verdict

4.0/5. Short and sweet.