My Notes -

When you make a company, you make a utopia. It’s where you design your perfect world.

Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently promoting what’s not working.

Your business plan is moot. You don’t know what people really want until you start doing it.

You can’t please everyone, so proudly exclude people.

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.

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.

People think a revolution needs to involve loud provocations, fists in the air, and bloodshed. But if you think true love looks like Romeo and Juliet, you’ll overlook a great relationship that grows slowly. 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.

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.

Don’t waste years fighting uphill battles against locked doors. Improve or invent until you get that huge response.

If you’re not saying, “Hell yeah!” about something, say no. When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” then say no.

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.”

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

Necessity is a great teacher.

Eight years later, the desks were just planks of wood on cinder blocks from the hardware store. I made the office computers myself from parts. My well-funded friends would spend $100,000 to buy something that I made myself for $1,000. They did it saying, “We need the very best,”but it didn’t improve anything for the customers.

Never forget that absolutely everything you do is for your customers.

It’s counter intuitive, but the way to grow your business is to focus entirely on your existing customers. Just thrill them, and they’ll tell everyone.

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.

Starting small puts 100 percent of your energy into actually solving real problems for real people.

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?

As your business grows, don’t let the leeches sucker you into all that stuff they pretend you need. They’ll play on your fears, saying that you need this stuff to protect yourself against lawsuits. They’ll scare you with horrible worst-case scenarios. But those are just sales tactics. You don’t need any of it.

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. If most of your customers love what you do, but one doesn’t, you can just say good-bye and wish him the best, with no hard feelings.

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.

In a perfect world, would your website be covered with advertising? When you’ve asked your customers what would improve your service, has anyone said, “Please fill your website with more advertising”?
Nope. So don’t do it.

You can’t pretend there’s only one way to do it. Your first idea is just one of many options. No business goes as planned, so make ten radically different plans.

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?
It’s important to know in advance, to make sure you’re staying focused on what’s honestly important to you, instead of doing what others think you should.

I don’t want to pick on anyone’s favorite pharmaceutical company or online productivity subscription tools, so let’s just say that any business that’s in business to sell you a cure is motivated not to focus on prevention.

It's kind of like the grand tales in which the hero needs to be prepared to die to save the day. Your company should be willing to die for your customers.

That’s the Tao of business: Care about your customers more than about yourself, and you’ll do well.

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.

It’s another Tao of business: Set up your business like you don’t need the money, and it’ll likely come your way.

When one customer wrongs you, remember the hundred thousand who did not. You’re lucky to own your own business. Life is good. You can’t prevent bad things from happening. Learn to shrug. Resist the urge to punish everyone for one person’s mistake.

When we yell at our car or our coffee machine, it’s fine because they’re just mechanical appliances. So when we yell at a website or a company, using our computer or our phone, we forget that it’s not an appliance but a person that’s affected.

It’s too overwhelming to remember that at the end of every computer is a real person, a lot like you, whose birthday was last week, who has three best friends but nobody to spoon at night, and who is personally affected by what you say.

Even if you remember it right now, will you remember it next time you’re overwhelmed, or perhaps never forget it again?

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.

I see new websites trying to look impressive, filled with hundreds of puffy, unnecessary sentences. I feel bad that the people behind those sites haven’t felt the pain of trying to e-mail that text to thousands of people, to directly see how misunderstood or ignored it is.

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.

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.

Don’t try to impress an invisible jury of MBA professors. It’s OK to be casual.

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.

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.

Never be the typical tragic small business that gets frazzled and freaked out when business is doing well. It sends a repulsive “I can’t handle this!” message to everyone. Instead, if your internal processes are always designed to handle twice your existing load, it sends an attractive “come on in, we’ve got plenty of room” message.

When you want to learn how to do something yourself, most people won’t understand. They’ll assume the only reason we do anything is to get it done, and doing it yourself is not the most efficient way.

But that’s forgetting about the joy of learning and doing. Yes, it may take longer. Yes, it may be inefficient. Yes, it may even cost you millions of dollars in lost opportunities because your business is growing slower because you’re insisting on doing something yourself. But the whole point of doing anything is because it makes you happy! That’s it!

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.

I never again promised a customer that I could do something that was beyond my full control.

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.

Happiness is the real reason you’re doing anything, right? Even if you say it’s for the money, the money is just a means to happiness, isn’t it? But what if it’s proven that after a certain point, money doesn’t create any happiness at all, but only headaches? You may be much happier as a $1 million business than a $1 billion business.

Trust, but verify. Remember it when delegating. You have to do both.

I learned an important word: abdicate. To abdicate means to surrender or relinquish power or responsibility; this word is usually used when a king abdicates the throne or crown.

Lesson learned too late: Delegate, but don’t abdicate.

When I decided to sell CD Baby, I already had enough. I live simply. I don’t own a house, a car, or even a TV. The less I own, the happier I am. The lack of stuff gives me the priceless freedom to live anywhere anytime.

Business is as creative as the fine arts. You can be as unconventional, unique, and quirky as you want. A business is a reflection of the creator.

• Some people want to be billionaires with thousands of employees. Some people want to work alone.

• Some want as much profit as possible. Some want as little profit as possible.

• Some want to be in Silicon Valley with Fortune 500 customers. Some want to be anonymous.

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.

Even if what you’re doing is slowing the growth of your business—if it makes you happy, that’s OK. It’s your choice to remain small.