Marketing Meetup
host: Joe Glover
self-awareness, enthusiasm, balancing business and personal values, service to customers, India insights
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Transcript:
Joe
I watched a talk that you did at the World Domination Summit from a few years ago, and you called it-- I think you called it on your website, the favorite talk that you’ve ever done. And one of the points that you made on it was about finding the journey that you really want to go on. And I found that a really interesting thing because I think this comes so much self awareness from that point and so much introspection. And I was curious about how you started to identify what the journey was that you wanted to go on, either in business or in life in general.
Derek Sivers
I think there are two ways. First, you just notice internally what excites you and what drains you. Even just thinking about it, there’s some ideas that when you hear them, you say, “Ooh, oh, wow. Yeah, that sounds funny.” You feel yourself getting charged up just with the idea of something. And then of course, there are other ideas that you can just feel them draining your soul away. You know, the funny thing is that’s separate from whether somebody can argue that it is a smart thing to do or not, right? So sometimes the smart thing to do is something that just makes you sad thinking about it. You think, yeah, I probably should do a lot of social media marketing or whatever it may be right. And so I think you need to pay attention to that feeling in yourself of what excites you and what drains you. And you should use that as a compass. Because besides time, I think time we can have ways of compressing time and being more efficient and delegating. But enthusiasm is precious. Enthusiasm gives you the energy that makes you want to get up and do these things. So I use that as an indicator so enthusiasm embodies itself in how you have your energy for the day.
Derek Sivers
So if you find yourself just hating going into work each day. Well, this is kind of a clue that you’ve chosen the non-optimal strategy for yourself, and you should look at doing things a different way, even if others might say it’s not as smart, right? I do a lot of things that are very inefficient and maybe not the smartest, most optimized thing to do, but they make me happy, so that’s why I do them. Okay, so number one is the initial thinking of the idea and noticing in yourself that gaining or draining of energy. And then number two is just trying them out. Small tests. You can just try things without too much commitment, but say, I’m going to try this to see what happens, because very often the reality of doing something is very different than the theory. The idea just in theory. So you just have to go try things. So to answer your question, of course I’ve been steered by just ideas that excited me and doing them and avoiding ideas that drained me. But then also I just try lots of things and I abandon ship quickly, if I feel that this isn’t working for me.
Joe
I love that. Have you always been as enthusiastic about enthusiasm as your answer? Just so to give an example, then, I wrote only a couple of days ago about my experience at school, which was almost a bit tall poppy syndrome, where you would you would walk in and if you showed any enthusiasm for something, you were almost lambasted. You’re almost, sort of slated because you stood out one way or another. And so certainly in the British system, I would be far more likely to say I’m not clever than I am clever, and I would be far more likely to say, oh, that’s nothing rather than bloody hell, I love this. Is that something that’s always been natural within you to be enthusiastic about enthusiasm, or has that been a skill that you’ve learned over the course of time?
Derek Sivers
Joe, I’m so glad you asked this. I had never realized this before, that my decision to choose enthusiasm is actually rebellion, because I know England is more known for that. But everywhere has an aspect of that, especially in high school, where it’s not cool to be happy. Right? I’ve always deliberately rebelled against that. Like when I went to Berklee School of Music in Boston, that was my university. Everybody was wearing black in Boston. So when I arrived there and I saw everybody wearing black, it was one of the only times in my life I went out and deliberately bought clothes. I went out and bought all white clothes. I found white jeans and a white leather jacket. Everybody was dyeing their hair black. So I actually dyed-- I had light brown hair at the time. I dyed my hair purple on one side and red on the other, and I was just deliberately rebelling against this mopey conformity. So same thing with energy. When I walk into a room, say, like a conference and everybody’s sitting in the back, I go, I’m sitting in the front row like I do it rebelliously. I think it’s-- you know, you talk about marketing. I think I’ve always thought of this as a differentiation. Did I pronounce that right? Differentiation. Yeah. So, I do that on a day to day level of choosing if everybody’s doing. A, then I’ll do Z. You know, I try to do the opposite of everybody else as a rule, just because it also seems like it balances out the energy. And I’m not saying this in any new age way, I just mean if you walk into a room and everybody’s mopey, I feel it’s almost like my duty to be the opposite. But on the other hand, if I walk into a room and everybody’s being zany and crazy, I feel it’s almost my duty to do the opposite, which is why I never attend a Burning Man. I think it would just make me depressed and.
Joe
You know, I can really relate. There’s almost, perhaps it’s not the same as rebellion. I think I’ve got something in me, which is, I hate being told what to do. And so the worst part in music concert for me is when the artist tells you to put your hands up. And I’m like, “No. I’m not putting my hands up.” You told me to keep them down.
Derek Sivers
As a musician for years, I made my living touring and putting on concerts, right? And so it was part of my job since I had a funk band and I was the lead singer, part of my job was to say like, “All right, everybody, get up.” And there was this one time at a university gig in I think it was Vermont that the whole room got up. But there was one guy that just refused. So I don’t know if you could see I’m like crossing my arms in this defiant kind of like. And he was sitting in his chair and everybody was like, “Come on, Jeff, get up, get up.” He was just sitting there going, “Umm.” And the funny thing is, from the stage, I actually called him out. I was like, “Dude, I like you. I know that my job here is to get everybody to dance, but I like that this dude is defying my orders. Thank you for doing that.” And I still remember that guy. That’s funny.
Joe
I will have fun how I want to have fun. Yeah, I love that. And I love that you can appreciate that, too. I think that’s very thoughtful of you. So that’s really interesting. So without meaning to characterize a lifetime in a career, is it one of rebellion in general that it feels like that’s a theme coming out. You know, build a company, give it to charity, you know, except one example. But there are many, is there?
Derek Sivers
Yeah. I think it’s rebellion mixed with that thing I said about balancing out what others are doing and also the differentiation. That’s maybe a little bit of feeling like your life has value if you’re not doing the same thing as everybody else. If you’re doing the same thing as everybody else, then what are you doing? We don’t need somebody else to do the same thing as everybody else. That’s not needed. What’s needed is somebody to do something that everybody isn’t doing.
Joe
Hang on. I love that. I love that. Thank you, Derek. That’s a great way to start. What a lovely, lovely thing. I appreciate your thoughts.
Derek Sivers
Well, thanks for the question. I never connected those two things when you talked about the fitting in. Everybody’s doing this, you know, the tall poppy. Yeah. I’d never connected those things before.
Joe
It’s a lot. It’s a lot. So your story. It feels like as much as we speak about conformity. I think something that you do very well as an observation from the outside in is you listen. And I’m going to speak in a business context here, because the foundation of the CD Baby story is one where you did a thing and then people started coming up to you and saying, “Can you do this thing for me?” And then over the course of time, momentum built and so on and so forth. I love that listening, but something I observe is that sometimes it’s hard to listen to the good ideas versus the bad ideas. Sometimes it’s difficult to say, “You know what, I appreciate you coming to me with this thing, Mr or Mrs.Customer, but I’m going to continue doing the thing my way because that’s the business that I want to build.” So reflecting on the CD Baby journey, or indeed a wider life spent listening to folks, how do you pick out the good ideas versus the bad ideas when people come to come to you with them?
Derek Sivers
I think I use the same measure as the thing we talked about a few minutes ago of whether the idea excites me or drains me. For example, with CD baby I had an idea proposed to me, not even by a customer, but by my VP saying, we’ve got this huge warehouse and we’re shipping CDs from independent musicians. He said, “I looked into it and dude, we could make a ton of money by warehousing and shipping porn DVDs.” Well, because this is back in that day of DVDs, right? And it’s like, no, absolutely not. And he’s just like, “But come on, we could give it a different brand name. We could just hide the fact. Nobody would know it’s us.” I’m like, “No, I have no interest in doing that. I would not want to put forth any single minute of my effort to do that. I just have no interest. I don’t care how many millions it might make. That doesn’t excite me.” And same thing with ideas that would come from customers. Somebody would say, “You know what you should do? You should do such and such.”
Derek Sivers
And I’d say, “Mm. Okay, thank you.” Usually I just thank them in the moment. I only thank them. I don’t argue against it. I just thank them for their time and consideration and going out of their way to take their time to tell me. I think it’s very thoughtful and considerate and I appreciate it. So I just thank them for their time. Then usually I just see how the idea sits in my head because there have been some times that in the moment. The idea doesn’t strike me. But then the next day I think, “Oh, actually that idea that somebody said yesterday could be really exciting. This could work. This could be fun.” Yeah. So I think you can hear between the lines, the exciting, fun, interesting. These are the real measures. I have always thought of money as the side effect. The money is like the odometer on your car, right? It’s not the point of what you’re doing. It’s a side effect of you traveling and going where you want to go.
Joe
Hang on. I couldn’t agree more. I couldn’t agree more.
Joe
I was listening to your interview with Guy Kawasaki yesterday. And so the first thing to point out is you are the king of nuance. I think you are the king of living a world of both, which is one of the biggest realizations I’ve had in my own life. You know, you can be both happy and carry sadness. You can be both for and against something and so on and so forth. And so it’s with that knowledge in mind that I asked this question, which is when you were speaking with a guy, you were speaking about parenthood and there was a perception there was a there was a quote in there. It wasn’t a quote. It was a paraphrase where you mentioned an ambition to essentially earn money while you were young, to enable you to be a present parent when you are older. With that thought in mind and balancing that against your perception of money is a byproduct of your business. It’s a byproduct of you having fun. How do you balance those two things in your mind? I guess the question is what were you driven by money but also not driven by money? Or was there a balance which existed at different points in your life and so on and so forth?
Derek Sivers
I was driven by money more at the beginning when little amounts would make a big difference. When I only had a few thousand dollars to my name and if I could negotiate an additional $500 out of, say, as a musician, booking my band to do gigs at universities. If I could talk them up from, say, 800 to $1200, that felt like a major win. So I would read books on negotiation and books on sales techniques and books on marketing so that I could learn how to make a few thousand dollars more. And at that time, the money made a big difference and I really felt it. Which is funny. I shouldn’t name names, but twice I’ve gotten into conversations with famous musicians, household names and to different musicians. And I have reminisced about how exciting it is in the early days when you make your first thousand dollars making music, when you get your first gig for $10,000 or something and like, how exciting that is. And then after a while, it’s like, all right, well, there’s a million in the bank and I won’t even notice if I get another thousand or not. And both of the musicians separately. This is like two conversations, two years apart said that they really kind of miss that early excitement because now it’s like, well, been there, done that. So I think for me, yes, money early on was an exciting thing.
Derek Sivers
And after I hit a certain point. I just have a strong sense of the word enough that once there’s enough in the bank, well, then what are you doing? Yeah. It’s like if instead of money you think of tea or something, it’s like I have enough tea. How hard am I going to work to go get more tea? What would I even do with more tea? I have more tea than I can drink. Why do I want more tea? In the closet there’s enough. And so if you saw somebody that had, like, 700 boxes of tea and told you that they were going to work really hard to go get some more tea, you’d think, “I think you have a problem.” So I do feel that way about money when I see people working really hard to make more money when they already have enough. So, yes, my answer is both at different times in life. See, that gets into the metaphor of “How To Live” as instruments in the orchestra. Like we don’t need to go there now. But my most recent book is called “How to Live”. And in it there are 27 chapters, each one disagreeing with all the others because it says this is how to live, that’s how to live.
Derek Sivers
And one of them, for example, is get rich. But the chapter says, no, this is just straight up how to live. You should get rich, This is how to live. But then the next chapter is “Here’s how to live. Do nothing, do nothing at all.” You know, kind of very Buddhist, just like the way to live is to do nothing. But the end of the book shows an orchestra seating chart with 27 instruments in the orchestra. And that’s all it shows with no explanation. The metaphor is meant to be that kind of like music. We use the different approaches to life at different times in our life. You know, the clarinet does not play the entire time for every piece of music. Neither does the French horn. But at different times you bring in the French horn for a bit and then let it rest. You bring in the clarinet and it does its thing and then it stops. And then later you might combine the flute with the viola at the same time. So the different approaches to life, like focusing on money versus focusing on your new baby, it’s not either or. You can combine them or you can bring them in at different times to make them your primary focus. And then at other times you can combine them for a while and then let them take a solo.
Joe
I love that. Thank you. That’s really beautiful. Where are you now? In your orchestra.
Derek Sivers
Oh, I thought you meant physically. I’m standing in this recording booth. Yeah, just.
Joe
Yeah just a real divergence.
Derek Sivers
You’re asking, where am I now? Let me think. I really just have two focuses right now. It’s writing, specifically writing my next book, which I’m almost done with. It’s called “Useful Not True”. And I’m so excited about it. It’s been a fascination of mine for ten years, and I’m finally writing about something that I’ve thought a lot about for a lot of years. And so it feels good to hone my thoughts and try to describe them and parenting. Or rather just being with my boy. He’s 11 now, which is a different thing because now it’s like we’re best friends. We’re best friends, but I’m still an influence on him. We hang out a lot. We spend a lot of time together talking about everything. It’s amazing after a certain age, all filters are off. I even had to sneak him in to see the new John Wick four because he had already seen and loved John Wick one, two and three. But it has one of those ratings where absolutely no one under 16 is admitted, not even with a parent. But the movie came out. We wanted to see it. I bought the ticket and they stationed a guard at the door so that nobody sneaks in. So we actually had to hide around the corner and wait until the movie had begun. And so the guard left the door and then I snuck him in quickly. And I’m just saying that as like a little example of realizing that, yeah, after a certain age, all the filters are off. Like, we can talk about anything, right? He asks me about sex. He asks me about relationships, he asks me about alcohol, everything. And we just talk openly about everything. And it’s a great relationship. So yeah, that’s a major part of my life. That and writing, my life is very simple right now.
Joe
That’s incredible. That’s really, really lovely. That’s a cool dad move, you know. It’s the type of thing you’ll remember.
Derek Sivers
So it was an adventure, actually. They wouldn’t give me the tickets on until I showed them like I bought the tickets online and I had to go to get the tickets, show them my QR code. They said, “Okay, I need to see both people that are here.” I said, “Oh, well, my friends outside.” They said, “I need to see your friend before I can give you the ticket.” So I had to go outside and get some dude from South Africa that was walking by. I was like, “Hey, can you can I borrow you for a second?” So he came in, they gave me my tickets. I said, “Thanks.” And he said, “No problem. I saw it earlier today. It was a good movie.” So then my kid waited outside until I, you know--. Anyway, it was a fun adventure.
Joe
Yes, I love that. That’s so, so good. So so one of my observations about parenting as we’re on the topic, but I’m going to move this into a business place because we’re here for for the listeners. That’s what people are expecting here. Yeah, so one of my observations about parenting to your point, is that I feel like I’m living for my daughter. I feel like there’s four words that change my life, right? Which is, it’s not about you.
Joe
Those four words change my life. And I try my best to live my life in that way. And acknowledging that there is nuance where it is precisely about you as well. And in the business world, however, is interesting. So there was an analogy that you used yesterday on Guy Kawasaki’s podcast, which was describing someone who was a concert pianist. I think he was, and originally he went for 1000 to 1, so he used to perform to a thousand people at once. And he was like, “No, no, no, this isn’t good.” And so then he started to 1 to 1, which was like, he started recording and so people could enjoy his music on a 1 to 1 basis. And eventually he realized that it was a 0 to 1 basis. You know, in fact, the thing that wasn’t important was him. The thing that was important was the music. And I think in your experience of business. It strikes me that you spent a lot of time not really worrying about yourself as part of the process. You tended to worry about your customers through your listening skills, but I wondered whether that was true because I wondered whether you viewed your experience of CD Baby. And your part as you being an important part of it, or whether you are completely unimportant and you were just the conduit for the business’s growth, the customers and so on and so forth. Or whether if it was anyone else in that process, whether there would have been a different outcome.
Derek Sivers
I saw myself as being in service to the musicians. I didn’t think of the business as a separate thing at all. It was me serving the musicians, and then it was a system I built serving the musicians. But I never did what was best for the business because to me, that was just the system that existed for their sake. So that would be really perverted incentives to do what was best for the system that existed just to serve them, right? So it was always doing what was best for the musicians. A really telling moment was when I was on stage at a conference once and somebody asked a provocative question about PayPal saying, “What if every musician just used PayPal from now on and didn’t use CDBaby anymore? What would you do then? How would you defend yourself against that?” And I said, “Oh, well, I wouldn’t if everybody used PayPal, I would just shut down CDBaby and just get on with my life. Like this thing only exists because musicians need it. If musicians didn’t need it, I would shut it down. Like, why the hell would I do something to benefit my system if it’s adversarial against the musicians? That would be perverted incentives.” So yeah, that’s how I thought about it. But if it seems weird or if I seem like I’m being goody two shoes, altruistically generous, you need to understand that I had just come out of 15 years of focusing on me.
Derek Sivers
So from the age of 14 to 29, my entire focus in life was on my music. Getting my music out to the world. My thoughts through those speakers, my ideas into your eardrums. It was all me, me, me. So after 15 years of that, at the age of 29, when I accidentally started CD Baby, I kind of went,” Ah. It’s nice to just serve others.” So that was the DNA that created that creature CD Baby, that was its birth. That was its DNA. And so I think I’ve also just kept that first because now that I felt not just the joy, but the reward. So I think I don’t know what-- I’ve never studied Taoism, but I’m going to use the term recklessly. To me, the Tao of Business is, if you forget about yourself and just completely serve others, you will be rewarded. You’ll be handsomely rewarded because people are happy to open up their wallets and pay for something when they can tell that you’re doing it for them.
Joe
Yeah,I love that. Thank you. That’s really instructive and useful. I think, weirdly, it’s almost common sense. But in fact, your talk at World Domination Summit was uncommon sense. So, you know, I think that probably sums it up quite neatly. You have this way of making things sound so simple. You know, I don’t know whether that’s your gift or whether that’s just how your mind works. But when you get to an 85 person company, if there’s one thing that people are, it’s messy, right? You know, and that’s tough, was it? Or well so I can either ask, was it that simple or there’s another question, which is how can we avoid overcomplicating business?
Derek Sivers
Oof!
Derek Sivers
Yeah. The less people, the better. That’s step one. I did not like having 85 people working for me. That was painful. In fact, it took me years to recover from that. It was traumatizing. I ran from it and I hid for years after that because of the bad experience I had trying to look after 85 people and their well-being and their happiness and all of that. So the funny thing is, so I had two businesses, we talk about one and we never talk about the other because it wasn’t as exciting. So there was CD Baby, which had 85 people, but then there was Host Baby, which was just four people. And the funny thing is CD Baby was famous, but Host Baby was actually equally profitable. Those four people in one room that I adored, we ran a web hosting business for musicians that was making between 2 to 4 million USD a year, and so was CD Baby. So CD Baby had 85 employees and a big team and a big warehouse. Net profits 2 to 4 million a year. Host baby was four people in a room. Chill happy fun doing web hosting. Also made 2 to 4 million a year. I don’t tell stories about Host Baby, but it actually made me happier. Well yeah maybe equally happy as CD Baby. I did enjoy the public appreciation of it. I liked the social reward, but Host Baby was just such a joy to run because it was only four people.
Derek Sivers
And those four people, they all loved each other and I loved them and they loved me. And we were just a happy little group doing web hosting for musicians. And it was a simple business and the musicians loved it. And you just go into work happy every day. Whereas yeah, CD Baby with the 85 people in the drama turned into like, “Oh, God. All right, here we go. Employee Health Benefits Compensation Plan.” Okay, Jeff wants a new title. Mary wants to bring her dog to work. You know, Veronica insists that fluorescent lighting is hurting her head and needs a different kind of lighting. Oh, my God. You know, it was every day. I just felt like near the end, I was spending most of my energy trying to keep my 85 people happy, whereas from zero people up till about 50 people, it felt like the focus was outwards towards the musicians. Like all of us came into work each day. On a mission to serve the musicians. And after about 50 people, I won’t blame it just on the sheer headcount. But the the internal culture accidentally got corrupted. And it focused inwards. It just seemed like everybody was coming to work every day just to-- I don’t know. Like angrily try to improve their work life somehow, you know? And it’s like they were forgetting that they were musicians and that’s why we’re here. But yeah, hearing myself say this out loud, I think it wasn’t just because of the head count. I probably shouldn’t correlate those two things with that correlation causation. I probably shouldn’t blame the head count for that internal change of culture. It probably had something to do with it, but not entirely.
Joe
Okay. And you’re you’re very welcome to not answer this question, but I would be remiss to ask if you had your time again based on that answer, would there be anything that you would do differently?
Derek Sivers
I would have sold CD Baby sooner and found a way to keep Host Baby. I actually tried to keep Host Baby. I would have happily just run Host Baby for years. Unfortunately because of the name, the purchasing company said sorry there’s no way, all of your Host Baby clients are CD Baby customers. There’s just no way that you can keep that business and sell this one. I went, “Yeah, you’re right.” And it was good for me to just slough off the whole thing and just walk away. But yeah, if I had to do it all over again, actually, if I had to do it all over again. And my advice to anyone listening. Is to make sure that you not only love the people you work with, but that you love the people you’re serving. I’ve been thinking about how it would feel to become a millionaire, doing something like an all night vaping shop. Where I don’t think I would like those customers that would come in at 3 a.m. looking for a quick vape. They probably wouldn’t be my friends, so I probably wouldn’t enjoy serving them. So I think you can use this as a compass to find the people that you enjoy serving. And find the people that you enjoy being with and prioritize that over a profit or whether you’re in the smartest possible industry you could be in. You know, you could be extremely happy. Say, if you love bicycles and you love steel frames and bicycle parts and you really nerd out on that, you would be much happier making a high end steel bicycle. Artisan made handcrafted bicycle. Even if you only sell a few per month, you’d be much happier because you’d be around people that you love, that have the same nerdy fascination as you, and you’d be selling to customers from around the world that can appreciate the fact that you’ve nerded out on your steel frame bicycle. You’d just be happier even if somebody could argue that you could make more money starting a social network or something. Bad example, but you know what I mean.
Joe
Vaping shop. So yes. You could make more money doing your all night vaping shop. I love that you use the word love. But also just to summarize a few points here. We’ve got love the people that you work with, we’ve got love, the people you do it for. We’ve got the concept of enough and we’ve got find the things that give you energy and find the things that drain you. I mean like all of this is is really golden and very much appreciated and often understated I think for its importance. So thank you for sharing all of these points because they’re gratefully received and very refreshing. And it’s one of the reasons why I find you so inspiring. So thank you for sharing all of these so far. And you’ve given some examples of sweating the small stuff that you don’t necessarily enjoy. So the fluorescent lights, the pension policies or whatever it may be. But something you’re really well known for is sweating small stuff such as email confirmations and so on and so forth. Where you perhaps-- I’m connecting dots that don’t necessarily need to be connected here, but there’s almost an act of rebellion against the rubbish, the rubbish, all the confirmations and how much of sweating the small stuff do you feel was important for your success as a company? Was it the small stuff that accumulated? The big stuff? Or was it a big mission that everyone got on board with one by one?
Derek Sivers
I think this small stuff, if public facing can be very important. Because it determines how you’re perceived. Little things like the email confirmation or a quirky logo or a funny little slogan underneath your company name or the difference in a sentence or two in your marketing copy that’s kind of irreverent and wacky instead of standard. Completely changes how people see you. Kind of like if you were to show up and meet a stranger for the first time and you’ve got a streak of dyed purple hair. Yeah. That one little thing you’re choosing to dye a streak of your hair purple completely changes how somebody would see you even if everything about you was conventional in every other way. But you had a streak of purple hair. They see, okay, something’s up here and they would remember you. Like, what was with that dude with the streak of purple hair? And I think it’s the same thing with the little things we do, especially that are public facing. Because I’m thinking as a programmer, there are hundreds of little things I do behind the scenes that nobody ever sees, and I just do them for my own pleasure. I didn’t have to do them. Nobody knows they’re there. They don’t make a difference. To answer your question. But the public facing ones do.
Joe
And so on the basis of that is fun important as part of your service? And so, for example, you sort of speak there as as an example of something nobody will ever see, but presumably will impact your mood and how you approach work and so on. And so presumably fun sort of comes into this one way or another.
Derek Sivers
Well, I don’t want to give the impression that it’s just fun, maybe because I’m talking about my old company as an example, that was just a record store. You know, we just sold music. So in that case, yes, but now let’s use a different one. Here’s a tiny thing that I love. When I log in to Stripe.com, the credit card processing service and I do the two factor authentication, so I have the app on my phone. I think it’s called Rovio that does the two for generated keys. And so it says enter your two code. So I pull up the app, I type in the six digits and Stripe has this thing that first the digits are in huge giant, you know 60 pixel font and when I type in the sixth digit, it automatically submits it. It isn’t that I have to type in six digits and then submit they made it. So once you type in the six it submits maybe because they know that you’ve probably like got one hand holding a phone or something like that. And I’ve always really appreciated that move. It was like, “Wow, that’s always a little joy when I log into Stripe and I don’t have to hit return or a click after those six digits.” That to me is a different example to make clear that we’re not just talking about being silly or fun. Yeah, Stripe put attention into that detail. Their visual design, they use a relatively small font, but somehow it’s just right and you can see everything and their visual design is perfect when you’re logging into that portal to see your monthly stuff. I appreciate the effort they put into that. Little things like that are another example. So yeah, in my wacky, silly example I said the streak of purple hair. It can also be somebody that shows up to a meeting wearing like, really nice Chelsea boots instead of sneakers. And you notice these things, you go, “Wow, dude cares, you know?” Sorry. That just sounded like a line from a The Big Lebowski. Dude cares, Dude cares. Dude cares.
Joe
But it speaks to thoughtfulness. And I guess it depends on the context, but it’s also about caring. Right?
Derek Sivers
Right, right. Or so again, we’ll go back to the fictional steel bike artisan. There might be things that somebody does like maybe your there are parts that need to be shipped with the bicycle that need to come separately that aren’t attached to the bike when the bike is sent to you. And maybe those parts would come in like a wooden box instead of just the bare standard, you know, plastic wrap in a cardboard box. And you’d get it and you’d go like, “Damn, they didn’t need to do that.” But that extra $4 makes this whole ceremony of receiving my bicycle even more special, you know? So it’s again, the public facing things. The little details really matter because they shape the subconscious impression that people have of you, which then shapes how often people go tell their friends about you, because it’s all part of that whole hearted in appreciation of what you do.
Joe
100%. 100%. That brings me on nicely to the next question, which is about follower by follower, because it seems like-- so another long question here, but I’m going to give some context. So the best piece of advice that I’ve ever received is from my dad who said, “Don’t give advice, share experiences or opinions.” And that’s something that’s stuck with me in the sense that I spend most of my time sharing the experiences or opinions because that’s what people really want rather than the advice. I rarely say what you need to do is dot, dot, dot. And it strikes me that through a lot of your talks and interviews that you’ve done over the course of time, people have said, “What do you need to do?” And then you’ve gone, “Well, I did this.” And so that’s a sharing of an experience more than anything. And nonetheless, acknowledging that some thing that I’ve seen you advocate in the past and sort of attribute possibly part of the success of the business to was a follower by follower approach, which was that one by one people told each other and one by one the company grew one by one. You got more artists on the platform, one by one more people bought from you. Is that true to your experience or have I missed something there? Because I wasn’t sure whether that was kind of the entirety of your, “marketing strategy” or whether that was which I see in a more immediate wry smile at. Or was there bits there which I was missing which were a little bit more grand attempts to gain more customers in big, big chunks.
Derek Sivers
Okay. So for the first part, right.
Derek Sivers
On advice. Advice is difficult because it takes more than a single question and a single answer to give people advice. If I am in Budapest and a stranger, a voice comes in from the ether and I don’t know where they are and they’re saying, “How do I get to you? How do I get where you are?” I think, well, I don’t know where you are and I don’t know what vehicle you’re using. I don’t know what your budget is to get here. Yeah. So I don’t know. The North Pole. South Pole. Are you in China? Where are you? Are you going to walk? Are you going to fly? I don’t know. So when people ask for advice, especially when it’s presented as a simple question and answer like an email, here’s my question. You know, what advice would you give me? People really do ask that generically. I get emails from strangers, just an email from j39782@Gmail. “Hi. What advice would you give a 30 year old?” Go to bed.
Derek Sivers
So thanks for saying that about advice because I do find that I don’t really want to tell other people what to do. I’ll tell you what I did and see what you make out of it. Use it only you know your unique situation. Okay. So now completely different subject, the one by one marketing approach.
Derek Sivers
For the most part, yes. I always made a point of thinking of everybody as individuals. I don’t believe there’s hardly such a thing as a crowd. A crowd is just a bunch of individuals, and I’d rather think of them as individuals instead of thinking of trying to get a crowd or trying to get a million users. You know, that’s an unhealthy way to think about them. So maybe I also just find it less rewarding to think of a million people as a single thing. I find it more rewarding to think of unique individuals, and that’s why I do things like keep an open inbox and ask people to email me and ask people to introduce themselves and tell me something about you. Like, don’t just get on my mailing list. Okay, great. There. Now you’re on my mailing list. That means nothing to me. On the other hand, if you introduce yourself and say, “Hi, I’m an accountant in Nairobi, Kenya, and I moved here from Dubai. And I heard you on this podcast and now I want to be on your list.” Like, now that means something to me. Now it’s humanized my inbox a little more. So yes, I probably chose a more 1 to 1 at a time, one by one marketing approach because it meant more to me.
Derek Sivers
But let me think. That said. I would do things to try to get many musicians to know about CD Baby or join CD Baby. I would attend many conferences back in the day to reach as many musicians as possible in one day. You know, at a music conference that thousands were attending, or at least hundreds. I did run some advertising actually for a couple of years. Cdbaby had the back cover of the most popular music industry magazine in Los Angeles that every musician read. We had the back cover for a couple of years, and I think that helped. Yeah. So I wasn’t refusing to get quantities of people, but I did always just try to think of them as individuals. Yeah, because it was more heartwarming.
Joe
Oh, so good. Thank you. I find that again, very refreshing. It’s one person is a human. A million people is a statistic, right? So I really relate to that thought process. But I have to say that even at the stage we’re at with growing our community, which is a community based activity, sometimes when you say there’s 40,000 people around the world who attend marketing meetup events and so on and so forth, it’s easy to forget or not forget, but think of the 40,000 number sometimes more often than you do the one number. So yeah, I find that really useful and refreshing and I hope the folks listening in today are getting an awful lot from that. But I know that I did. So I appreciate that, sir, very, very much.
Derek Sivers
It’s a reason why I think every C-level executive should occasionally work a day in customer service. Where they can hear the concerns and complaints of people ideally on the phone. I think it’s unfortunate that right now we’re in a cultural swing away from talking on the phone. I don’t think it’s a permanent change as less people text and use voice recognition more. I think it might just end up just being easier to just click the button that connects you directly to another person that’s using the voice. You know, it’s just more direct. But it was so helpful to always do lots of customer service interaction and hear real people with real problems telling me their hopes and complaints and frustrations. To always keep your finger on that and never just look at the numbers like, okay, how many users we got? You know? So I do think that every person in every department, at every job of the company should work in customer service occasionally to hear those things and keep their finger on the pulse of of what people want. And as a visceral reminder that these are real people here that are using your service or product to solve a problem.
Joe
Bang, bang on. Oh, you’re warming my heart in a really helpful way. So thank you.
Joe
A slight divergence of divergence of questioning here. But I know you’ve just come back from India and you seem to enjoy it. And I read that you were in meetings from 9:00 till 10:00 at night or something like that. So I don’t know whether these were business meetings. I guess the first question is, were they?
Derek Sivers
No, not at all. I did no business. I was just there to make friends.
Joe
That’s so lovely. That’s so lovely. I was going to ask, so I’m going to remove the business context from this and just head into a broader context, which is what did you learn while you were out there that you taken back into into your life? Now you’re back in New Zealand.
Derek Sivers
I’m back into my life. I don’t think I have an answer for that. But I was there to learn about India. I was there to learn about people in India, there to learn about those specific 50 people that I met with. I learned a lot about India. And let’s not forget, you know, the phrase developing world, if we don’t mind using that phrase, some people do. It’s a nice reminder that things are changing fast in places like that. Right? Like things might not be changing very fast in Germany or in Australia or in America. And I don’t mean just like, you know, tech, but I mean just culturally. Whereas in India, oh my God, if you haven’t been there in even ten years, things are so different from ten years ago. If you were just there ten years ago when the trains were all dilapidated and everybody was using crumply little rupee paper notes to pay for things, you just come back ten years later and the trains are super nice. They’re as nice as anything in Europe and everybody’s just doing electronic payments with QR codes. Just everybody, every little vendor selling papayas on the side of the street as a QR code. And everybody just pays with the QR code. The government has mandated like direct bank to bank transfers for no fee. So every bank sends money to every other bank for for absolutely no fees. So you can sell things for $0.05. And use bank transfers to pay for them. And everybody does. I love it. Visa MasterCard doesn’t get a single rupee of that.
Derek Sivers
And what else. Yeah they have like a digital ID card now it’s not mandatory, but it’s recommended because it has a lot of benefits. If any villager anywhere goes down to their local police station. Just so some kind of proof of who they are. They’re issued-- it’s called the Aadhaar card, Aadhaar, H.R. That’s a government digital ID and once you have that, all of the KYC know your customer stuff the banks usually have to do for every single customer that would use to make it like half an hour of processing and onboarding to give a new customer a bank account. All that stuff is automatic now because the government has basically taken care of the KYC already. So if you have your local Aadhaar card, your government ID card, you can just go to any India bank online. Just type in your thing, beep, okay, and get an instant bank account. And thanks to that, like literally millions of people that didn’t have bank accounts a few years ago now have them. And that’s how every seller of anything can have the QR code that goes directly to their bank account. Whereas before they couldn’t get a bank account or it was just too hard or they didn’t have time. So things like that have happened just in the last six years even, and it’s just so exciting. It’s so cool. And Bangalore in particular impressed the hell out of me.
Derek Sivers
I went there intending to check out a few different places equally, but in Bangalore I was so impressed. It feels like the new San Francisco. So many people are moving there from all around India because it’s the best quality of life. It’s where all the smart people are. It’s where all the cool stuff is going on. Not just tech, but even like artistically, like musicians are moving there and artists are moving there and writers are moving there just because that’s that’s where it’s all happening and because the quality of life is so good. Now the money made in Bangalore is staying in Bangalore, whereas maybe 20 years ago people used to make $1 million and then move to London. To raise their kids in a better quality of life. Now they’re staying there. And so the schools are better, the art scene is better, which then improves the quality of life even more. I know it’s really exciting. If it weren’t for my wonderful boy who I adore here, who needs to be in New Zealand because that’s where his mother is. If it weren’t for that, I just wanted to stay in Bangalore. It’s such a cool place.
Joe
That’s awesome. You know, it’s something that I don’t think gets enough conversation about, in a way and certainly within and maybe I’m showing myself more than anything, you know. But within my circles that I interact with, I think it’s such an exciting opportunity, almost such an exciting country. And I’m not sure how many people Have their eyes open to that. So it’s really exciting to hear you sort of speak about that and get excited by it. Your whole sort of body language just opens up when you speak. I love that excitement. So that’s really, really cool. And you are very, very kind in that you didn’t put a time limit on today. But I’ve actually only really got one one big question left, which is that it is 5548 days since the transaction for CD Baby went through, which is a decent amount of time. And with that thought in mind, I’m gonna keep it so general. But what’s your biggest reflection since. What would be the three things that you’ve learned in the past 5548 days that we could leave with as the marketing meetup community one way or another? Not necessarily marketing, but I feel like you’ve got so much to give and one hour, ten hours is never going to be enough to spend with you. So if there were a few little nuggets or even just one.
Derek Sivers
I’ll do one for now because it encompasses other implications, which is I think a lot of people feel I’m good at this game. Therefore I should keep playing. But I want to propose that it can be very rewarding to say I’m good at this game, therefore I should stop playing. Use the metaphor of board games, video games, whatever it. Is like once you win the game, you should stop playing. So when it comes to marketing and money. I’m not saying everyone should stop, but everyone should consider that they don’t need to keep playing once they’ve won the game.
Joe
Nice. I love that. It opens up another question, which is how do you know when you’ve won?
Derek Sivers
That’s just your own definition. See, my definition of success is that you achieved what you set out to do. It has nothing to do with external measures. What anybody else thinks doesn’t matter at all. The numbers in a bank account do not matter at all. Yeah, my definition of success is only just you set out to do something difficult and you achieved it. That’s a success. So everybody gets to make their own definition of whether they’ve won the game.
Joe
That’s such a great note. Such a great note to end on. Derek, you’re just a gorgeous human being. So thank you.
Derek Sivers
Thanks, Joe. It’s just the lighting, you know? Anybody listening to this if you can’t tell, I really enjoy meeting people, So go to my website. Go to sive.rs and introduce yourself. Email me. Say hello.
Joe
And I can speak from personal experience over a number of years that Derek is fabulous at getting back to people.
Derek Sivers
Joe and I have been emailing for, I think, eight years. That sound about right? 2015 I think.
Joe
Maybe something like that. It’s a really lovely thing for us to go full circle on this. So I appreciate you giving up your time as well because it’s no small thing. I know that there’s many, many people who would treasure an hour with you as I have. So I appreciate it. With all that said, let’s close out the podcast and say thank you very much, Derek. Appreciate you.
Derek Sivers
Thank you. Cheers.