The genius of Derek Sivers' CD Baby confirmation email

Derek Sivers sent the same ridiculous over-the-top email to every CD Baby customer. They loved it so much they posted it online thousands of times. No ads. No budget. Just one silly message that made people smile.

The email claimed sterilized gloves, satin pillows, and a private jet delivered their CD. Complete nonsense but it worked.

When everyone else is boring, absurd becomes memorable

Order confirmation emails in 1998 sounded identical, robotic, and boring:

"Your order has shipped. Thank you for your business."

Functional. Forgettable. Dead on arrival.

Sivers looked at that template and torched it. He injected personality where no one expected it.

He injected personality where no one expected it, using pattern disruption to break through the monotony.

Your brain skips past predictable messages. It stops cold when something doesn't fit the expected pattern.

Most businesses optimize for professionalism. Sivers optimized for delight. That single choice created thousands of unpaid advocates.

The shareability built into obvious fiction

Traditional confirmation emails serve one purpose: prove the transaction worked. Sivers' email served 4 purposes:

1. Emotional payoff: You just bought music from an independent artist. The email validates that choice felt special, not transactional. The absurdity matches the dopamine hit.

2. Story architecture: The email has a beginning, middle, and end. It's not information. It's entertainment. Stories spread. Facts don't.

3. Social currency: Forwarding this email proves you shop at the cool place that gets it. It signals taste and insider knowledge without trying.

4. Built-in virality: Search "private CD Baby jet" today and you'll find thousands of results. Each one represents someone who loved the email enough to share it publicly. That's organic reach money can't buy.

Why cringe marketing worked when sincerity failed

This email should have bombed. It's over-the-top. It's ridiculous. It's the opposite of professional business communication.

But CD Baby wasn't selling to corporate buyers. They served independent musicians and music fans. People who valued personality over polish. Who appreciated when businesses didn't take themselves seriously.

The email worked because it matched the brand promise: this isn't another faceless music distributor. This is a human running a business who actually cares about making you smile.

Most companies fear being silly because they're optimizing for the wrong metric. They want to appear credible. Sivers optimized for memorable. Credibility without memorability is worthless.

The tiny detail that built thousands of customers

Sivers spent just 20 minutes writing one email. That email ran for years. It created more word-of-mouth marketing than most advertising budgets could buy.

The lesson isn't "be random and funny." The lesson is to find the boring moment in your customer experience and make it remarkable.

Order confirmations. Password reset emails. Unsubscribe pages. These moments exist in every business. Most companies mail them in with templates. Smart businesses recognize them as opportunities.

CD Baby's confirmation email became famous because it violated expectations at precisely the moment customers were most receptive. They'd just completed a purchase. They were checking email. They were paying attention.

That's when Sivers hit them with something that demanded to be shared.

Your customers want to talk about you

Every business wants customers to spread the word. Most try to force it with referral programs and share buttons. CD Baby did something simpler: they gave customers something worth talking about.

The email excerpt comes from Sivers' book Anything You Want, where he explains his philosophy of building businesses that prioritize joy over growth metrics.

The CD Baby jet never existed. But thousands of customers believed in it enough to tell their friends. That's not marketing. That's magic disguised as an order confirmation.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Super interesting findings.

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In any marketplace, bring in the desired audience and the other side will automatically appear.

On another note, hopium is a good product to sell.

Men pay in hopes to get laid. Ironically, the ones who have to pay are less likely to get laid.

When you analyze most businesses, you'll find that dark patterns are everywhere. And the pricing gurus you admire optimize more for dark patterns more than anything else.

3/

Anti-ads social network or anti-ads video platform at scale doesn't make sense at all. Most people can't pay. The world has a lot of poor people.

An interesting insight from this is that the ad platforms will show your products to people who will never buy. They have the data that people never buy but they'll still show them to unprofitable users anyway.

Meta Ads won't make you as profitable as it can. They'll make you just enough profitable for you to keep paying for it. This is why high-ticket products worth $5k-$25k can spend profitably because they can afford to get just 1 profitable customer out of 1000 customers and do so profitably.

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