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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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4 Rules for Fantastic Internal Email
Internal email (or inter-company email as some people like to call it) is one of those topics that unfortunately seems to get omitted when discussing the keys to creating a successful business. My experience has always been that if it’s done well it can improve productivity and moral drastically. Conversely, if it’s done poorly it can do the exact opposite. I think that this is one area that our current team excels in. For us this is especially important because we’re scattered in various locations. It’s very rare that my partners and I are all at the warehouse on the … Continue reading
After Plenty of Setbacks, We’re Getting Close with LockerPulse
Whew. What a crazy project this new LockerPulse has been. Remember when I posted in February that we were half done after about 6 weeks of work? Well, that 3 month project has turned in to a 6 month project. Generally I’m pretty spot-on with my estimates when I plan these types of large development projects out. What slowed us up this time? Without a doubt, running Detailed Image is reason #1. We’ve grown significantly since our last large development project, the original launch of LockerPulse in 2010. I severely underestimated how much time Mike and I have to spend … Continue reading
A Randomly Selected, Potentially Awesome Post From 12/12/2008
My Email Bliss
Back in September I wrote a post entitled Making Email Efficient about how much I detest the distraction of email and what I’ve done to minimize that distraction without hurting our business. The quote I posted from Tim Ferris pretty much sums up how I feel: E-mail (and all of its Crackberry/digital leash/Twitter cousins) is the largest single interruption in modern life. In a digital world, creating time therefore hinges on minimizing e-mail. Since then I’ve made some major improvements. Here is the addendum to that post, particularly to #4 “Only receive emails that you need.” I had two big … Continue reading
Making Business Decisions That Don’t Suck When You Have No Data
My business partner Greg and I always joke about how one of the biggest differences between college and the real world – specifically running a business – is that in school you almost always have all of the information that you need to make a decision or solve a problem, whereas when you’re running a small business you rarely do. The funny thing is that he’s basing this on his MBA classes and I’m basing it on my engineering classes, which on the surface one would think couldn’t be more different. This problem is especially evident when you’re building something … Continue reading
Helping Your Employees Succeed
A few months back we started transitioning our Twitter and Facebook management over to our new employee Reece. It’s a perfect compliment to his customer service work. While Facebook has been a huge success for us, Twitter has been only a moderate success. During a meeting that he and I had we discussed ways to better captivate the Twitter audience and take advantage of the immediacy of Twitter as a platform. A few minutes in he had an idea: what if every Thursday we do some sort of Twitter promotion and call it “Twitter Thursday’s.” We could do a variety … Continue reading
Larry Page on Competitors
On Wednesday, Businessweek published a rare candid interview with Google CEO Larry Page. My favorite quote is in the last paragraph: For a lot of companies, it’s useful for them to feel like they have an obvious competitor and to rally around that. I personally believe that it’s better to shoot higher. You don’t want to be looking at your competitors. You want to be looking at what’s possible and how to make the world better. Now, in context of the previous questions, he was partially taking a jab at Apple when he made that remark. Still, I find that … Continue reading
You Are Who You Follow on Twitter
As Nev says, you are often the “composite average of the top five people you hang around.” Which can sometimes be bleak for an aspiring entrepreneur that doesn’t live in Silicon Valley in the sense that the top five people you hang around aren’t likely to have the traits that you need to be successful in business. But, as Nev also points out, you can get around this: Let’s get started fixing this problem immediately. The goal here is to become influence by GREAT people who have legitimately achieved GREAT things. And here’s a way to get DIRECTLY INFLUENCED by … Continue reading
Small Businesses vs. The Common Cold
Here’s something you won’t hear discussed in business school. It’s an unpredictable and very real problem that we’ve encountered consistently over the years. While it’s something we’ve discussed quite a bit, we’ve never been able to improve upon our “solution.” What problem you ask? Everyone in the company getting sick at the same time. In retrospect this has actually been less of a problem for us than I’d imagine it is at most small businesses. Because roughly half of our team is working from home on any given day, and because we’re all relatively healthy and sanitary, we tend not … Continue reading
The March Madness Draft – An Alternative to the Bracket
March Madness is upon us. Due to the NCAA Basketball Tournament “First Round” (commonly referred to as play-in games) starting on Tuesday, everyone is frantically trying to fill out and submit their brackets for their office pools today. I’ll be filling out a bracket or two this year as I always do because it’s fun, but over the past handful of years I’ve spent less time on my brackets and more time preparing for something different: a March Madness draft. The basic idea is that each person involved drafts a group of teams in a fantasy-style draft and then receives … Continue reading
Disagreeing with Norm – Defending the Part-Time Web Entrepreneur
Inc. is my favorite magazine. It’s probably my single favorite source of news. If I was limited to one hour of business/tech/entrepreneurship news per month, I’d probably spend 45 minutes of it reading Inc. Norm Brodsky authors one of my favorite columns, Street Smarts, in which he fields questions from business owners. Norm is a veteran entrepreneur who has probably forgotten more business than I know. However, I have to take him to task for his latest column. Norm Brodsky on the New Breed of Entrepreneur ventures in to something I do know quite a bit about – web entrepreneurship … Continue reading
Volunteering as a Team for a Great Cause
On Tuesday we shut down operations at the warehouse and our entire team volunteered to help move a soup kitchen in downtown Albany to it’s new location. The project is a Roman Catholic-Jewish partnership between the Blessed Sacrament parish in Albany, Catholic Charities of the Albany Diocese, and Temple Beth Emeth in Albany. They serve over 150 meals, three days a week to the poor in the community, as well as provide a clothing thrift shop, medical screenings, legal advice, and other assistance programs. In order to make the move happen, Father John Bradley of Blessed Sacrament was tasked with … Continue reading