The Research Rabbit Hole
In 2023, my wife decided to start a business.
She had the expertise, the drive, and the willingness to jump. What she didn't have was a roadmap. Neither did I. So I did what engineers do - I started researching.
What I found was a mess. State filing requirements scattered across government websites. Conflicting advice from Reddit threads, YouTube videos, and blog posts written to sell services rather than inform. Legal distinctions between LLCs and S-Corps, multiple lawyers with opposing advice, explained in language designed to confuse rather than clarify; To make you depend on their expertise, instead of to help remove the barrier. Every answer spawned three more questions.
She's off and running now, and it's been an adventure all its own. Months later, I realized that having a clearer picture on the way in, and on the way through, would have been helpful to me, and likely to others. I spent weeks pulling together what should have been obvious: the actual sequence of steps, the real decisions that matter, the gotchas nobody warns you about until you're already in trouble.
My wife built the business. I built a playbook.
The Chamber Problem
Traditional Chambers of Commerce served a purpose. They gave local business owners a place to network, access resources, and navigate the bureaucracy of starting and running a company. They were community hubs.
But they were, and still are, also tied to geography, often to politics, and almost always to a specific type of business owner - the kind who could show up to breakfast meetings, shake hands, and work the room. The kind who already knew people who knew people. The kind who's customers were also local.
What about everyone else?
What about the person starting a consulting business from their apartment? The creator building a brand without a storefront? The professional who left corporate America and realized they have no idea how any of this works?
The Chambers weren't built for them. The internet generation learned to figure things out themselves.
What OpenChamber Actually Is
OpenChamber is the playbook I wish existed when we started.
It's a guided path through business formation - from the first spark of an idea through entity selection, state registration, tax setup, banking, operations, and growth. Not a service that files your paperwork for you (there are plenty of those). A system that shows you what needs to happen, in what order, and why.
The core insight is simple: most first-time entrepreneurs aren't afraid of doing the work. They're afraid of not knowing what work needs to be done. They're afraid of missing something obvious, making an expensive mistake, or discovering six months in that they should have done things differently from the start.
OpenChamber exists to eliminate that fear. You can see the entire journey before you take the first step.
Why AI Changes Everything
I need to be direct about something: OpenChamber wouldn't exist without AI.
Not because AI wrote the content (though it helped). Because AI made it possible for one person to build something in months that would have required a team of twenty 2 years to do only 2 years ago. It made it possible to research fifty states' filing requirements, synthesize guidance across dozens of entity types, and create adaptive recommendations - all while holding down a day job.
This isn't a confession. It's a feature.
AI is what will let OpenChamber scale horizontally - adding partners, industry-specific guidance, and location-aware detail without hitting the walls that would have stopped a traditional content operation. It's what will let the playbook get deeper and more personalized over time, not shallower.
I'm building OpenChamber with AI because I believe AI is how small players compete with established giants. If that makes some people uncomfortable, those probably aren't my people anyway. At OpenChamber, AI will never learn from your user information.
Who This Is For
OpenChamber is for the person who wants to see the whole picture before they jump.
Not because they lack courage - it takes plenty of courage to leave the safety of a paycheck and bet on yourself. But because they're methodical. They want to understand what they're getting into. They want guidance available front to back, top to bottom, before they commit.
It's for people who don't have a business network to lean on. Who don't have a mentor who's done this before. Who are smart enough to know what they don't know, and honest enough to admit they need help figuring it out.
It's for the generation that knows 70% of the work currently occupying office desks doesn't require those desks. Who are building businesses online, from home, from anywhere - and who need resources that meet them where they are, not where the old institutions expected them to be.
What Comes Next
OpenChamber launches this month with a core playbook covering the foundational phases of business formation. It's not complete - no honest guide to entrepreneurship ever could be.
But it's a start. A real one.
The roadmap will grow and deepen. Partners and Contributors will join. The guidance will get more specific, more personalized, more useful. The community will form around shared challenges rather than shared geography.
This is the new Chamber of Commerce. Not a building. Not a network you have to be invited into. A resource that's there when you need it, showing you what comes next.
Welcome.
Warren Walker is the founder of OpenChamber. He built it because he needed it, and figured others might too.