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Hi. My name is Adam. I am the co-founder of Pure Adapt, Inc in Albany, NY. We own Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and a bunch of other websites. I write about our company, entrepreneurship in general, work-life balance, and whatever else interests me.
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The Data That Drove Our Responsive Design
In my last post breaking down the new Detailed Image, I wrote the following about our responsive design: If you haven’t figured it out by now, this was the main driving force behind this project. Mobile and tablet usage on our site has skyrocketed, with Safari on iOS becoming our #1 browser/OS combo. It’s a trend that’s only going to continue. We needed to up our game. This will be the topic of my next post where I’ll dive into some of the data. We cut the project down significantly so that we could release ASAP because every day we … Continue reading
Breaking Down The New Detailed Image
Over on The Detailed Image Blog I wrote a post outlining the features of the new DetailedImage.com. I copied that post below, and then added in some additional thoughts about each feature in italics. — Yesterday we were extremely excited to unveil our new DetailedImage.com website. Our goal is to provide you with the simplest, fastest, and most secure shopping experience in the industry. Let’s take a look at what’s new: The Design We’ve kept the important functionality where it’s familiar – navigation on the left, search box up top, My Account and Cart information in the header – while … Continue reading
A Randomly Selected, Potentially Awesome Post From 9/13/2011
LockerPulse Fantasy Player Tracking Launched!
On Saturday we wrapped up and released one of my favorite projects I’ve ever worked on: LockerPulse fantasy player news tracking. My partners and I have all been avid fantasy players for years (I was in leagues where Barry Sanders and Emmitt Smith were the consensus top 2 picks!) and like all fantasy football players, we’re looking for any informational edge that we can get to help us win. Especially Sunday mornings, and especially when injuries are involved. There’s nothing worse than starting a guy who isn’t going to play. After launching LockerPulse it didn’t take us long to realize … Continue reading
The New Detailed Image is Here!
This morning we launched our new Detailed Image site. The largest improvement is the responsive design: take a look on your computer, tablet, and phone. We’re still working out a few minor kinks. The homepage just has a placeholder Ship & Save graphic that will be replaced with a nice big sale in the coming days! More to come soon…
Almost There…
We’re almost ready to launch the new Detailed Image site. The planned launch day is Saturday, April 20th. We’re putting the finishing touches on everything and then later this week we’ll start testing pretty heavily. It’s nice having an entire team of people to test. Last year prior to launching the revamped LockerPulse we found quite a few little bugs by having our employees use it for a while. An e-commerce site is a little tougher to dogfood than a sports news app. But given the amounts of money exchanging hands on any given transaction, it’s also much more important … Continue reading
The Little Things That Win Customers
Somewhat surprisingly, today we shipped out a record number of orders as a part of our Spring Sale, beating even Cyber Monday 2012. I took a shot of the package pile towards the end of the day: As our FedEx pickup arrived we were literally sprinting around the warehouse trying to pack the last few orders. The interesting thing is that we didn’t have to do that. On our busiest day ever, we had already packed up every order that came in after 12:15 PM, which is our “guaranteed” same-day shipment cutoff time. We had run our afternoon batch around … Continue reading
A Post About Not Posting
My posts have come to a screeching halt lately. I don’t think I’ve ever gone a month without a post since I started blogging back in 2005 so I didn’t want to start now! Mike and I have been pushing really hard to release the aforementioned new version of Detailed Image. As a company we’re probably devoting close to 40% of our time right now working on new site related tasks. Things are busy for me personally right now as well, so I’m pretty much ripping through my day-to-day work tasks as fast as possible and then spending every remaining … Continue reading
Our Caching System, Guide Improvements, and the Exciting Next Step
Continuing the theme from Adding To The Foundation [Of Our Cart] and A Better Search Experience on Detailed Image, I recently wrapped up a few more important features. Caching One big opportunity for improvement on any database driven website is caching. Let’s take the example of our sitemap. When someone used to land on that page, it would run a database query to extract the product name and URL of every product on our site. If it’s hypothetically accessed 100x/day, that would have been 100 queries. They’re not particularly taxing queries, but there are hundreds of similar scenarios happening simultaneously … Continue reading
Why We Still Pay For Health Insurance In Full For Every Employee
Last month I had a dentist appointment. The dental hygienist – who I’ve known for my entire life – was asking me how business was and we eventually got on the topic of health care costs. I mentioned that our plan was being canceled and we had to pick a new plan for 2013. After quite a bit of research we were able to find a pretty good new plan. Of course, it’s still significantly more expensive than the old plan and has significantly worse coverage. Since we set up our health insurance in early 2007, costs per employee have … Continue reading
A Better Search Experience on Detailed Image
I’ve been chipping away at the next round of improvements to our shopping cart. The past week was one of those really good weeks where I deployed a ton of code. jQuery A precursor to moving forward was to (finally) switch our javascript library from using the outdated script.aculo.us to the more lightweight and more powerful jQuery. This required quite a bit of code to be rewritten, most of it critical to the shopping experience, but it has paid immediate dividends: the site is significantly faster, jQuery is much easier to develop with, and the plug-ins available make it extremely … Continue reading
An Abject Fear of Failure
I’m currently reading Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football by John U. Bacon. (The book really should be called “Three and Out: How Everyone Involved in Michigan Football Tried to Systematically Sabotage Rich Rodriguez.”) While reading, I highlighted this quote on my Kindle: The best competitors are motivated less by a desire to win than an abject fear of failure. At the highest levels, even one loss diminishes them in some deeply personal way. For them, a victory is not a victory. It is simply a loss avoided. Rodriguez was squarely … Continue reading