This is the beginning of the 5th month of Longbars. At the beginning of September we filed the “Articles of Organization” for Newtrition, LLC with the Arizona Corporation Commission.  Just before Thanksgiving the ACC sent notice that the Newtrition, LLC entity had ‘been approved’ (whatever that means).  Next step after filing with the Arizona Corporation Commission was to publish a “Notice of filing”.

Filing the notice was pretty simple.  With the notice that was sent back by the ACC was also a listing of newspapers in which we could publish.  For just $37.00 and a short phone call with a pleasant and helpful woman named Laura and the Articles of Organization were published through AZcapitoltimes.com

Now I want to talk a bit about where we stand in the process and what the upcoming hurdles will likely be. First off, the bars are delicious, and I’m excited to have processed a sample order through the website.  Also, thinking about how to begin letting people know about Longbars has been some what of a challenge.  A month and a half ago I set (what seemed like) a very realistic personal goal of having the bars in hand by the first of November, and actually selling them by the first of December.

As it turns out, I may have given myself too much time to attain that second goal of selling the bars by the first of December… we’ll have to see at the end of the day. But I did learn an important lesson about setting goals: don’t set them too far apart, and try to articulate the goals more specifically. So, I’ll be working on that going forward.

Some good news on the sales front. There’s a good possibility that we’ll be selling the bars in a local nutrition shop that also sells Vibram’s awesome five-finger shoes (more on that in a later post). As more information becomes available about where Longbars are available I’ll be sure to spill the details.

Until then.

Our page is currently under development, but you can get an idea of what we’re striving for.  We hope that this site will eventually become home to a new breed of business… remember, it’s a work-in-progress.

Longbars is being built on entirely open-source tools.  We are also building to be flexible to our customer’s needs.  Please let us know if you have any questions or comments or suggestions… or if you just feel like getting in touch with us.  You can either leave a comment at the blog, or contact us through the “Contact Us” page.  Don’t hesitate… let us know you’re looking.

To start, Longbars has been developed entirely on Open Source tools… that includes our WordPress webpage, and the Linux based server we’re running it on.  As the company gets bigger, we may need to change our webpage, or if our customers tell us that we need to get fancier… you might see changes to our logos and color-schemes.  But you will never see us change our message.

We believe that the community of an open source project create an exciting product that is better than any small group could create.  Accordingly, our goal is to create a community that we serve by providing lots of information in addition to some products that we are proud to stand behind.  However, we won’t just provide the product to the community, we will give that community the opportunity to influence the product and collectively steer it towards being better than what we could accomplish on our own.

We hope that you will enjoy our product, but even if you don’t, we hope that you will join our community that has the common goal of:

Health. Integrity. Happiness.

A lot of time has been spent trying to really nail down our message.

That’s what we’re about and that’s what we care about in companies that we trust… but without action, it’s really only a slogan.

Stay tuned for some actions.