I Own Three Little Corners of the Internet. Here's Why.
Not everything you create needs to become a business. Sometimes it's worth building simply because you can.
Not everything you create needs to become a business. Sometimes it’s worth building simply because you can.
I was having a conversation with a coworker recently when the topic of my website came up. She was fascinated that I’d built it myself, especially when I started explaining some of the tools and processes I’d used along the way.
Then I casually mentioned that I actually have three websites. Which, admittedly, sounds a little more impressive than it probably is.
To be clear, I’m not running three successful internet businesses. Of the three, only one is currently generating revenue, and most of that business comes from referrals, friends, and family rather than people discovering me online. But I do own three little corners of the internet. And each exists for a different reason.
The more I thought about our conversation, the more I realized that the interesting part wasn’t necessarily the websites themselves. It was why I keep building things in the first place.
First, there’s Eric Church Travel
I love traveling. I love finding great restaurants, discovering places that aren’t necessarily on everyone’s itinerary, and helping people experience parts of the world they might otherwise miss. So, when I became a travel advisor, I wanted somewhere to send people who asked what I do. That’s primarily what Eric Church Travel is.
It’s a landing place for my travel business. Somewhere I can explain what I offer, share a little of my philosophy around travel, and give people an easy way to connect with me. It’s also where I’ve started creating resources like my Field Guide, a tool designed to help people find great restaurants wherever they happen to be.
Eventually, I hope to write more about how I approach travel, how I find restaurants, and even how I think about traveling for work. Because I’ve come to believe that travel doesn’t have to be extravagant to be meaningful.
We spend a tremendous amount of our lives working. Sometimes we genuinely love what we do. Sometimes we’re simply working hard to provide for the people we love. Either way, when we have an opportunity to travel, I think there’s something special about making the most of it.
Not in an obsessive, optimize-every-minute kind of way. More in the sense of appreciating the places, people, landscapes, and experiences God has created, or that people He’s created have made possible. Even if it’s just finding a fantastic local restaurant after a long day at a conference.
That’s the heart behind my travel business. And the website gives that passion a home.
Then there’s The Eric Church
First, a quick explanation of the name.
I would’ve loved to own EricChurch.com. Unfortunately, a country singer named Kenneth Eric Church got there first. You might’ve heard of him.
So I settled on The Eric Church, which makes me laugh a little every time I think about it.
This website actually came out of a mistake I made with my travel site. I kept adding things to it.
A productivity tool here. An article about marketing there. Some random experiment I’d built because I wanted to see if I could. Before long, I had a website that was supposed to help people understand my travel business, but was also trying to represent nearly every other interest I had. And that’s not particularly helpful to someone who just wants to plan a vacation.
As a marketer, I should’ve known better. So I started separating things.
Eric Church Travel could focus on people interested in travel. That gives me the opportunity to build a clearer experience, offer relevant resources, and eventually communicate with people who might want help planning a trip.
The Eric Church could be something different. A home for my professional interests, creative projects, experiments, and ideas.
I’ve spent nearly a decade working in marketing, operations, and events. I’m passionate about productivity, organization, technology, and finding better ways to do things. I also serve as board chair for The Living Room Disciple, a nonprofit that’s important to me. This site gives those parts of my life somewhere to live.
It’s also where I can share things I’ve created.
For example, I once needed to visualize a trade show booth we were designing. Rather than trying to imagine how different backdrops, furniture, and flooring would work together, I built a tool that allowed me to experiment with the layout in a 3D environment. That tool helped me think through our approach to a major conference booth at SHRM in Orlando in 2026, something I wrote more about in my article on rethinking how to show up at trade shows.
I didn’t build that tool because I thought thousands of people would use it. I built it because I needed it. And then I realized someone else might find it useful too.
That’s really the purpose of this second website. It’s a place to share things I’m proud of, things I’m learning, and occasionally things that might solve a problem for someone else. Even if that someone else is just me.
And finally, there’s MyEventMarketer.ai
This one’s a little different. Of the three, it’s the one I’ve approached most intentionally as a potential standalone product.
I’ve spent years managing and improving B2B event marketing programs. And I’ve seen how overwhelming events can be for someone who’s suddenly responsible for planning a trade show, especially when they don’t have a dedicated event marketer. There’s so much more to it than ordering a booth and showing up.
What are you trying to accomplish? Who are you hoping to reach? How will you get people to stop by? What happens to those conversations afterward? How will you know whether the event was worth the investment?
Over time, I’ve built processes, frameworks, and tools to help answer those questions. So I started wondering: what if I could turn that knowledge into something other people could use? That’s the idea behind MyEventMarketer.ai.
It’s essentially a digital event marketer that walks someone through planning, executing, and evaluating an event. It helps them think through their goals, audience, timelines, action items, and all the little things that can make or break an event.
I still believe there’s a market for it. I still believe it could be genuinely helpful. But believing in an idea and proving that people will pay for it are two very different things.
And that’s where this project currently sits. It’s built. It’s something I’m excited about. But it still needs refinement, validation, and the kind of consistent attention that turns an interesting idea into a sustainable business.
Which brings me to something I’ve learned about myself.
I’m really good at starting things
I love having an idea. I love figuring out whether it’s possible. And with AI, I’ve discovered that the distance between an idea and something tangible has become remarkably short.
That’s exciting. It’s also a problem.
Because I can move from one idea to another to another without always giving the first one the attention it deserves. I can build a tool, publish it, get excited about the next thing, and forget to ask some fairly basic questions.
- Who’s this for?
- Why would someone spend their time here?
- Is the messaging clear?
- Does it actually solve the problem I intended it to solve?
- And perhaps most importantly, have I spent enough time refining it to make it genuinely useful?
These aren’t unfamiliar concepts to me. They’re marketing fundamentals I’ve spent years thinking about professionally. But somehow, when I’m working on my own projects, I can get so excited about the act of creating that I skip right past them.
I’ve also made plenty of practical mistakes. For months, I didn’t even have Google Analytics properly set up on my first website. People could’ve been visiting, leaving, clicking around, or encountering problems, and I had almost no visibility into what was happening.
I’ve published changes without thoroughly checking them. I’ve overlooked broken links. I’ve forgotten that when someone shares a page in a text message or Teams conversation, the image and description that appear are part of the experience too. And I’ve created experiences that made perfect sense to me, because I built them, but weren’t necessarily intuitive to someone visiting for the first time.
Even this article probably has places where I repeat myself, wander down a rabbit trail, or could’ve communicated something more clearly.
I’m still learning to slow down.
So why keep doing it?
Because I really enjoy creating things. That’s probably the simplest explanation. I enjoy solving problems, experimenting with new technology, and seeing something that existed only as an idea become something real.
Sometimes that results in something useful for other people. Sometimes it creates an opportunity for a business. Sometimes it’s a tool that makes my own work easier. And sometimes it’s just something interesting that I wanted to see if I could make.
I don’t think every project needs a monetization strategy. I don’t think every website needs thousands of visitors. And I don’t think every experiment needs to become something bigger.
There’s value in learning. There’s value in creating. And there’s value in having a place to explore ideas without knowing exactly where they’ll lead.
That doesn’t mean I want to ignore the fundamentals or keep publishing half-finished things forever. Quite the opposite.
One of the things I’m learning is that the ability to build quickly makes it even more important to be intentional about what I build and how I improve it. Because just because I can create something doesn’t necessarily mean I should. And just because something exists doesn’t mean it’s helpful yet.
Three websites. A lot of unfinished ideas. And plenty more to learn.
I don’t know exactly what these three corners of the internet will look like a year from now. Maybe my travel business will grow because of something I publish. Maybe MyEventMarketer.ai will find its audience. Maybe someone will stumble across a tool on The Eric Church and find that it solves a problem they’ve been dealing with. Or maybe some of these projects will simply remain things I enjoyed creating.
I’m okay with that.
Because for me, the reward isn’t always the finished product. A lot of the time, it’s the process of figuring out how to make something that didn’t exist before.
And if you’re someone who has ideas but has always assumed you need to be a developer, designer, or entrepreneur to bring them to life, I hope this encourages you to experiment. You might surprise yourself with what you can create.
And speaking of creating things, there’s another part of this story I haven’t told yet.
How did someone who doesn’t really know how to code end up building and maintaining three websites?
That’s probably worth its own article. 😉