What it argues
Anything You Want is Derek Sivers' account of building, running, and eventually selling CD Baby, the independent musician distribution company he founded accidentally in 1998 when a few friends asked him to sell their CDs online. The company grew to 150 employees and over $100 million in revenue before Sivers sold it in 2008 for $22 million and gave the proceeds to charity. The book is short—around 90 pages—and deliberately so. Sivers writes the way he thinks: plainly, directly, without filler.
The core argument is that business is a creative act, not a formula to execute, and that the measure of success is whether the business serves your own definition of what you want from life—not revenue, not headcount, not exit multiples. Sivers describes running CD Baby without seeking outside investment, without growth for its own sake, and without a conventional management structure, because those things would have required him to optimize for metrics he didn't care about.
What it gets right
- 1.
A business is a tool to serve your life, not the other way around. Define what you want your life to look like first, then design the business to support that.
- 2.
No funding means no investors to answer to and no external pressure to optimize for metrics you don't care about. CD Baby grew entirely from revenue.
- 3.
Customer service is a direct expression of company values. Sivers wrote personal, often funny emails to customers himself, and that voice became the company's identity.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Derek Sivers is an American musician, writer, and entrepreneur. He founded CD Baby in 1998 as a way to sell his own music online; it grew into the largest seller of independent music on the internet before he sold it in 2008 for $22 million, donating the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. After the sale he lived in Singapore, New Zealand, and various other locations, writing and programming and declining most speaking invitations. He writes at sivers.org, where he publishes short essays, book notes, and occasional longer pieces. Anything You Want was first published in 2011 and has remained in print since.
