2007 September | Derek Sivers

September, 2007

Wikinomics at work

September 25th, 2007

If you own or run a company, and haven’t read Wikinomics yet, you really should.

It gives some amazing examples of how companies in many different industries from gold mines to pharmaceuticals are learning that if you give anyone-interested full access to the data, they collectively can do much better work than any in-house staff.

Seth Godin pointed at a new example of how this is working picking winning stocks.

Of course I’ve been thinking about the different ways this could apply to CD Baby.

I started with a tiny move, letting anyone skin the cdbaby.com website.

Any ideas for other places the world, collectively, would do a bunch better job than a few people, in-house?

Read the 1 Comment »

the public you is not you

September 25th, 2007

If everyone is famous for 15 minutes, we need to learn a quick lesson in celebrity : the public you is not you.

Over the summer, I rewrote the CD Baby software. I learned some programming lessons along the way, so I felt a kind of social obligation to share my lessons learned, to help a future person in a similar situation.

It took 90 minutes or so to write out my explanation of the situation and lessons learned, then I posted it on my (other) blog, not thinking many people would see it, read it, or care.

The next day I found out that many of the top programmer-focused websites had linked to my story with a sensationalist headline. Hundreds of people screamed their anger in the blog comments, calling me an idiot, saying my website sucks, the world is crap because of people like me, any warthog could have programmed my site in a tenth of the time without opposable thumbs, etc.

It reminded me of the times in the past when I’ve posted things on the CD Baby message board that got hundreds of people calling me a genius, saying my website rules, the world is great because of people like me, and nobody else on earth could have done the brilliant things I’ve done.

In both cases, people are talking about the public version of me, not the real me.

Neither one should be taken personally. (Unless you’re feeling down, then go read the compliments and taken them very personally, temporarily, to get back in gear.)

For musicians, it’s especially important to remember this, since your music is not you, but just something you’ve done.

Some easy ways to practice this mindset:

* – Put your songs out there for anonymous critique. garageband.com used to do this, though I don’t know who else is, now. anyone?

* – Put your songs out for non-anonymous critique, and realize it’s the same as anonymous. They never were critiquing you, just the notes, words, and recording quality.

* – Publicly say something controversial. I wonder if the Dixie Chicks were able to remember that none of the uproar was about them, as people?

Read the 9 Comments »

7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails

September 23rd, 2007

When I’m posting about something that’s technical-geek-programmer talk, I’m going to keep it on the O’Reilly blog, instead of here.

So – here’s a story I just posted about why we kept CD Baby in PHP instead of switching it over to Rails, called 7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails.

Only of interest to other programmers.

Be the first to comment? »

What it would be like to open up ALL aspects of CD Baby

September 20th, 2007

Had an interesting conversation with an ex about what makes you feel loved.

Turns out we had quite opposite definitions.

Mine was feeling transparent. Holding nothing back. Revealing everything, faults and all, and still feeling accepted.

Later, I was thinking about CD Baby and how fun it’s been to open up and show our numbers. (See a history of this, below.)

Then I was thinking about collaboration, Wikipedia and all that. How the collective intelligence of the world is always better than what you’ve got in-house.

Combine those two thoughts, and I’m imagining what it would be like to open up ALL aspects of CD Baby:
* show not just our sales numbers, but ALL numbers, including expenses, salaries, income, taxes and everything else
* (clients’ and customers’ info would be show only collectively not individually, for obvious privacy reasons)
* if a paper supplier sees what we’re paying for our mailers and knows they can beat it, they can contact us to let us know
* show performance numbers, such as # of CDs shipped per-day, emails answered per-person, # of albums added each day
* post audio of our company meetings on the site for all to hear
* open all of our internal knowledge-base, form-letters, etc
* encourage suggestions on how we could be running things better
* open the PHP source code that runs the site
* allow any webdesigners to make their own CSS skin for the site
* encourage corrections to anything on the site. spelling fixes in artist bios, etc.

I like this for a few reasons:
* keeps us on your toes by encouraging competition
* reminds us that the real value here is in our relationships with the musicians. anyone can take our PHP source code and make "another CD Baby", but not anyone can win the trust and relationships we’ve built one at a time over the last 10 years.
* makes us double-check our internal decisions against public scrutiny. (we already always do this, but this would emphasize it even more)
* shows everyone we’ve got nothing to hide. that we really are trustable. (hey – was there any doubt?)
* gets others involved. allow anyone to buy shares in the company, so they can have a vested interest in our success.
* makes it easier to get our financials to our accountant (“just go to the site. it’s all there.”)
* it’s contrarian.

What are the downsides?
* big security risk if my PHP code has bugs that can be exploited to get customer/client data
* pain in the ass, having to hear the world’s opinions on every internal thing every day.

Any benefits or downsides I’m missing?

A walk down CD Baby numbers-posting memory lane…

2002-01-03 = 3147 checks for $69,050.13 last week!

2002-01-13 = CD Baby Has Paid Over $1 MILLION to Musicians for CDs sold

2002-06-04 = CD Baby Sales – doubled again!

2002-10-24 = CD Baby has now paid $2 MILLION to musicians

2003-03-11 = CD Baby pays out $3 million to musicians. Sales doubling.

2003-08-12 = $4 Million Paid to Musicians. Sales keep growing.

2004-01-13 = CD Baby sales doubling. Over $6 million paid to musicians.

2004-02-16 = CD Baby passes $10 MILLION in CDs sold

2004-03-30 = Over $7 million paid to musicians. That’s $100,000 a week.

2004-10-22 = CD BABY PAYS $10 MILLION TO MUSICIANS FOR CDs SOLD