Derek Sivers

Here I am, thinking, “Just tell me what to do.”

My kindred Chris Guillebeau is visiting every country in the world, on a surprisingly small budget. He shares what he’s learned in two great e-books: “The Unconventional Guide to Discount Airfare” and “How to Become a Travel Ninja”. They’re filled with advice on how to get the lowest rates, which airlines and airports are best, how to fly around the world for $1000, and much more.

Matthew Bennett writes a monthly newsletter called First Class Flyer full of strategies on how to get first class seats for the same price as economy.

They’ve both done a great job at summarizing thousands of hours of experience into a quick overview you can read in a few hours.

But what if I don’t even want to spend a few hours?

I need to go to London, Australia, and India for three conferences in July, September, and November.

I want someone who’s thoroughly read and understood these guides to hook me up. Get me a free upgrade to first class. Make me a Platinum member. Get me a pass to the red-carpet lounge. Take advantage of every loophole to get me the the best possible deals.

A commission-based travel agent couldn’t take care of all of these loopholes. They get no commission for getting me these freebies. So it needs to be someone who knows all this info, so they can tell me what’s best for me.

I’m sure if I were to call Chris or Matthew they’d know off the top of their head. But that doesn’t scale.

But thanks to these great summaries, someone can become a semi-expert for under $100 and a few days’ time, then offer their semi-expertise at $20 per hour to all those people (like me) who just want someone to tell us what to do. They could be anywhere in the world, working from home in their spare time. At that rate, anyone who travels would be silly not to spend $10 for them to tell you the benefits that apply to you, or another $10 to have them take care of it.

This applies to all industries. There’s so much info out there, so cheaply, that anyone looking for a self-employed career could become a semi-expert at anything.

For example, someone could read How to Be Your Own Booking Agent, Tour Smart, and The Tour Book in a week, and become a pretty good booking agent the following week, available for $20 per hour. Hundreds of musicians would use them.

The pitch is a humble one: “I’m only doing what you could do yourself, if you felt like taking the 100 hours to learn how. But if you don’t, I’ll be glad to tell you what to do, or do it for you.”

Know anyone doing this?

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© 2009 Derek Sivers. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

In the comments to Version 0.1 = Start lo-fi, Larry Rood pointed out that start-up companies who have too much money often blow it. That there’s an advantage to being under-funded to keep you from making mistakes.

It reminds me of what it was like to have a CD Baby booth in the exhibit hall of conferences:

1998

Me at a plain table, talking with people and handing out flyers. Not many other booths.

1999

Me at a plain table, talking with people and handing out flyers. Other booths have big LCD displays and fancy corporate backdrops.

2000

Me at a plain table, talking with people and handing out flyers. Other booths have booth-babe models, fancy multimedia displays, and giving away $50 items.

2001

Me at a plain table, talking with people and handing out flyers. Others have bought out an entire pavillion, laser light shows, giving away cars, offering a million dollar prize.

2002

Me at a plain table, talking with people and handing out flyers. Not many other booths.

I remember being pressured during the dot-com boom to take venture capital. But my response was always, “I’m profitable and have plenty of cash. The company doesn’t need more money.”

They’d come back saying we could “expand our reach” or other vague terms that to me sounded like blowing money on ineffective advertising.

They’d say we could have a big marketing budget, but I’d say, “Marketing doesn’t cost money. ‘Marketing’ is another way of saying ‘being considerate’. It’s all in how you talk with people.”

By then they’d decided I was just crazy and would surely fail, which was fine with me, because it let me get back to focusing on my clients and customers, undistracted by investors.

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© 2009 Derek Sivers. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

First read “Version ∞” and “Early drafts…”. Here’s an example of how I think of “Version 0.1”:

A guy at a conference was telling me how he really wanted to build a music recommendation service, but had been trying for a year to raise the $2 million dollars he said it’d take to build it.

My suggestion for him: Don’t wait for funding. START NOW. Like this:

1. get a dedicated phone number like Google Voice
2. tell friends to call you at that number for music recommendations
3. they call you, tell you what they like, and you recommend something they might like
4. write down in a spreadsheet what they requested and what you recommended
5. afterwards, ask how happy they were with your recommendation. write that down, too.
6. eventually put this spreadsheet into a database
7. eventually put this database on a website – letting people browse past satisfied recommendations
8. keep improving your ability to recommend (by asking experts, learning more)
9. eventually write a program to have the computer recommend without you

By getting that initial lo-fi hands-on experience, you’ll have a deeper understanding of what people really want from music recommendations.

Then you can build your service incrementally based on real user communication, instead of hiding in a lab for a year programming in isolation based on a year-old hunch.

If you say you want to do something, DO IT! Never blame outside forces stopping you. Work around obstacles to start immediately.

(P.S. He didn’t like my advice. That was a few months ago. He’s probably still looking for funding.)

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© 2009 Derek Sivers. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

I get so encouraged looking at early drafts of great work, thinking, “I can do that!”

In this clip from “Le mystère Picasso”, you watch Picasso start with a simple scribble of a goat, then flesh it out. Not only adding textures, but changing his mind and removing things as well.

After making the brilliant movie Sin City, director Robert Rodriguez was cool enough to include the entire film as it was really shot on a green screen, sped up and included on the DVD.

One of my favorite essayists, Paul Graham, lets you watch as he types one of his essays. It’s incredibly encouraging (and funny!) to see how many times he’ll re-write a sentence, and discover what he’s saying as he goes.

The Beatles’ “Anthology” had some great outtakes and early versions of songs I thought of as untouchably perfect. Like seeing stars without makeup, you realize how much of the magic is in the finishing touches.

Archive.org’s wonderful Wayback Machine lets us see:

• yahoo.com from 1996
• cdbaby.com from 1998
• google.com from 1998
• myspace.com from 2003
• facebook.com from 2005 “Thefacebook”

I meet so many potential entrepreneurs who think they have to spend millions and months in development before launching. (And therefore, they often never launch.)

For the first nine months of CD Baby, every page was hand-coded HTML and the site did nothing but email the order details to me. I had to copy-and-paste all the info from each email into four places: a mailing label, a thank-you email, a vendor-alert email, and a Filemaker database. It was as lo-fi as can be, but it was enough to get started, and it was profitable.

So I’m writing this in hopes that we get more of these “Version 0.1” stories out there. Encouraging potential entrepreneurs, songwriters, artists, and inventors to compare themselves to the early drafts, not the final polished perfection.

If you’ve got a story from inside a company (“In the old days of __[big company]__ we used to __[something inspiringly primitive]__.”)…

If you can share a recording of an early demo of a song that went on to become a big hit record….

… or anything else like that, please email me at derek@sivers.org or leave a reply here, below. I’ll share the responses in a future article.

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© 2009 Derek Sivers. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

Over at Hacker News, someone asked if we could recommend any fundamental reading on internet marketing. Here is my reply:

To get fundamentals and theory foundation, drop the “internet” part of your requirement. The internet is just another way to connect people.

All successful marketing comes down to a fundamental understanding of people, how we like to be spoken to, what captures our attention, and what messages stick.

Read my notes and excerpts on some of these books to get an idea if they’re what you’re looking for:

Small is the New Big – by Seth Godin

A “best-of” collection of small essays about marketing. Seth writes in general terms meant to give you perspective, change the way you think about marketing, and inspire you to actions, no matter how small, that make all the difference. Read anything by Seth Godin (as others here have said), but this is his best overview.

http://sivers.org/book/SmallIsTheNewBig

Made to Stick – by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

A deep analysis of what makes certain ideas or stories memorable.

http://sivers.org/book/MadeToStick

You, Inc – The Art of Selling Yourself – by Harry Beckwith

Harry Beckwith is amazing. Read everything by him. This is just his newest. He’s the best at reminding you how basic human consideration translates into marketing.

http://sivers.org/book/YouInc

Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got – by Jay Abraham

Jay Abraham is an absolute marketing genius from an angle the others here don’t cover. This gets you into his mindset, seeing profitable aspects in your business you never noticed before, and how to communicate them to your audience. Sorry I don’t have notes on this one:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0312284543

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© 2009 Derek Sivers. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.