Four wishes Derek Sivers wrote down before CD Baby existed

In 1997, Derek Sivers was a working musician with a CD nobody would sell for him online. Every major record store told him the same thing: independent musicians needed a distributor, and distributors were slow, expensive, and often crooked, taking thousands of CDs and paying royalties a year later, if ever. So Sivers built his own little website with a Buy Now button, just to sell his own music.

When friends asked him to sell their CDs too, he agreed, almost by accident. Word spread, and soon he was running something that looked suspiciously like a business, which was a problem, because he already loved his life as a full-time musician and didn't want a business eating into it.

So instead of writing a growth plan, he wrote a wish list. He imagined the distribution deal he would want if he were still just a musician trying to sell his own CD. He wanted to be paid every week. He wanted to know the name and address of every fan who bought his music, because those people belonged to him, not to a middleman. He wanted a guarantee that no one would ever get kicked out of the store for selling too slowly. And he wanted a promise that no one could pay for better placement, because that would be unfair to the artists who couldn't afford it.

He called this little company CD Baby, posted those four promises on the website, and repeated them at every conference he attended. They were not a business plan. They were a description of a perfect, small world, built from the point of view of the person the business was supposed to serve.

That is the core of what Sivers calls treating your business as a utopia: when you start something, you are not just launching a product, you are building a little universe where you get to decide the laws. The temptation is to copy the rules everyone else follows. Sivers argues the more useful question is different: if you were the customer, what would the perfect version of this look like, and are you willing to make that the actual rule, even when it costs you convenience or money.

Start today by writing down, in plain language, what the perfect version of your service would feel like from the other person's side of the table, not from yours. Picture yourself as your own customer and ask what would genuinely delight you, then commit to only the promises you can actually keep every single time. Write those promises down somewhere visible, on your website, in your team meetings, in your own head, and repeat them often enough that they become the standard everyone measures decisions against. When a choice arises that would break one of those promises to save time or money, treat that as the signal to say no, because the whole value of a utopia is that its laws hold even when it's inconvenient.