Anything You Want

Sivers built CD Baby, a service selling independent musicians' CDs online, from a side project into a company with eighty-five employees and around eighty-five million dollars of sales, and sold it in 2008 for twenty-two million dollars, which he transferred to a charitable trust for music education. The book is roughly forty short chapters and takes about an hour to read.

The recurring argument is that a business exists to serve a purpose the founder chose, that growth and revenue are means rather than ends, and that most business advice assumes objectives the founder never actually selected.

His specific positions include that a business should start by solving your own problem for yourself, since that is how CD Baby began; that customer service is the entire business and should be treated as such; that a company should be designed around what the founder wants their daily life to be; that a plan should not be announced before it is built, since revenue is the only proof of demand; that saying no to most opportunities is what allows the remaining ones to work; that a founder should make themselves unnecessary to daily operations deliberately; and that ideas without execution are worth nothing, which he states as a multiplier where execution ranges from one to a thousand.

He is candid about his own errors, including a period when he stopped enjoying the business, delegated badly and made decisions that cost the company money. The book contains no evidence and generalises from one company in a market that no longer exists. The advice suits founders of small profitable businesses and contradicts what venture-funded companies require. Its brevity is deliberate and it makes its case without padding.