“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

There are a lot of business guides out there. This is not one of them. There are a lot of parenting guides. This isn’t one of those either.

I find most “business guides” to be rather unhelpful.  Even among the best, they are often so high level as to be merely theoretical and rarely dive into the operational details of what needs to get done in the beginning. Honestly, it seem that many become money making engines for the producers themselves. The business that they are creating is that of getting other people to launch more businesses. This is why you see loads of courses and paywalls before any substance.

Parenting guides can be awesome. You can learn a lot of things from the points of views of others and from those who have gone before. Parenting guides can also be confusing, outdated, unhelpful, or downright dangerous. All we offer here at EntreBurnor is our journey, our experiences, and observations we make along the way of ourselves, our children, and our environment. Please agree, disagree, comment, provide feedback, and help us learn and grow!

In both fields, I know that there are many, many people who genuinely wish to help others succeed. This is not meant as an effort to throw shade everywhere or on anyone. I’m not here to shame and I won’t bother sharing material that I do not feel is worth your time. There are great resources and guides and there is a lot of fantastic information out there that has been directly beneficial to me. So I will certainly do my best to throw praise and attribution where it’s due! As well as share those resources forward.

Our goal for EntreBurnor is to be an active, real-time journal of launching businesses coupled with our family’s life story of adoption, parenting, and growth. That means that downs will be recorded alongside ups and successes will be explored along with failures. My hope is that this will turn into inspiration and a useful reference library for those who want to start their own journey whether into parenting or entrepreneurship (or both!).

The business that I am working on right now is MirthnCo (or Mirth and Company) which is aiming to be a new kind of publishing company that will utilize new platforms, tools, and methodologies to share stories (and yes, create revenue). At the beginning, this will be the outlet for me to publish the stories that I’ve been writing for Calvin (and now Aaron and Lily!) since he was quite young. I have a huge library of stories, some better than others, that I’ve been told are quite decent to even good. I would like to not only share these stories but to share them in a way that explores new ways to consume stories and entertainment and ways that are more convenient for consumption. The first step is to get them out of my head and into some shareable form in order to begin building.

The initial launch will be a story podcast. The free tier will have either a sponsor or affiliate marketing. Then, a subscription tier will allow for a full story without interruptions or insertion. This is not a groundbreaking publishing concept. I am pursuing it for two reasons. First, it is brand new to me! Collective knowledge is wonderful but not necessarily to the individual. I view this as a major step in my own educational journey and will share all I learn along the way. Second, I’ve been encouraged by multiple friends and parents that, done right, it is a great way for them and their children to consume stories. Thus, it is a great way to share my stories somewhere, anywhere, and to meet customers where they are. 

So here I go in that direction. I’d like to respond to feedback and build products that will really be used. The broader models for publishing have not evolved much in a while and I’d like to do what I can to, just maybe, push it along.

Of course, any business launch should be coupled with ambition. From observation, I believe that a business that launches with limited scope may well end up hobbling itself out of existence. Thus, through my own arrogance and optimism, I do hope to turn MirthnCo into a much larger platform! I’d love for it to become a place for many authors to find a way to share their stories, to be a place for fans to connect with those authors and creators in new ways, for readers to be able to customize stories from their favorite authors to include them and their ideas. This path will utilize familiar tech like podcasts and newsletters, Twitter and Instagram; but it will also include new technology like NFT’s and Web3. We are on the edge of a new paradigm and I’m so excited to see where it goes!

Back to the current moment, I have not posted for awhile. June and July were crazy months with travel, vacation, visitors, and sickness, ups and downs, and many stories in the making. I find it somewhat ironic that the gap comes after I wrote a post about learning about the hard slog from a game but I’ll dwell on that later. I do not necessarily view a lack of posting as a failure as this is a journal not the business itself, still my plan was to be consistent and that flew out the window! So here’s to brushing off and getting going.

Through the break, my focus has been on developing ideas and writing down stories for MirthnCo. As illustrated by these last few weeks, you always need more content than you think you do. When I finally launch the podcast, I’d like to have at least 6-8 weeks of material prepped to allow for accidents, sickness, travel, etc. I have been reminded that I need the same amount of material on EntreBurnor, so my apologies, and I will not leave the blog hanging!

So, here we are and moving forward. Writing is a process that is hard to pull the curtain back on but I will do my best to discuss my methods and thought processes (no matter how random, disconnected, and absurd they may be), as well as, operational next steps, and all the other thoughts that rattle about the collective Burnor mind.

Here’s to opening the door and stepping out(.