Adam McFarland

It’s been eight days since I last posted. Normally I try to post every few days, but the combination of Thanksgiving and being busier than normal has led me to procrastinate on this post for a while. Anyway, I’ve found myself thinking a lot lately on how to make Pure Adapt a great company, primarily for two reasons:

1. I’m in the middle of reading Good to Great, and it’s one of the few business books I’ve ever read that actually makes me think (as opposed to saying “duh, that’s so obvious” throughout the entire thing).
2. Our November is going waaaaay better than we ever anticipated. Mike and I are quickly getting backed up with jobs for Faceup-Sites, and more importantly Detailed Image is having a record-breaking month…we’re talking 3X revenue from what George and Greg did last November combined with the fact that it’s our largest month in one of the traditionally slowest months for auto-detailing supplies (the cumulative impact of our new SE friendly site combined with being first to market with a new product).

One of the things that Jim Collins, author of Good to Great talks about is the “hedgehog concept” where to become a great company you need to have equal parts of:

• What you are deeply passionate about
• What you can be best in the world at
• What drives your economic engine

And after reflecting on that, I had an epiphany of sorts: we are not a web development company (at least in the traditional sense). Our programming skills are adequate to accomplish our business goals, but if you put us in a programming competition with any other four person web development company in the world we’d finish last. There are however, two things that we are passionate about, can be best in the world at, and are currently accounting for 90%+ of our revenue:

1. We are a great operations company. The primary reason we overhauled the Detailed Image site was because of the back-end automation. Most e-commerce sites have several steps from purchase to shipment (charging out the customers credit card, creating invoices, entering the order into an accounting system, creating a shipping label, etc) and we have all of that 100% automated - saving hours of time and eliminating human error. On the other side, Mike has become so efficient at WordPress, that Faceup-Sites is able to provide our clients with search engine friendly, aesthetically pleasing, and easy-to-update sites in about 1/5 the time it used to take us. We charge less, and we still profit more. Other examples: we have an internal Wiki where we document everything we do so all partners can do any process at any time (this was the idea I got from Anthony from Xonatek web development…don’t want to take credit for an idea that isn’t mine). I also built an internal project management system to organize all of our clients and their account information. Another good example is setting up our payroll service to automatically direct deposit our checks and pay our taxes for us. I think you get the idea. But I ask you: how many ~1 year old companies owned by four 25 year olds have these systems in place?
2. We are great at marketing/sales/customer service (yea I kind of lump these things together). Prior to forming Pure Adapt, George and Greg built Detailed Image on sheer will - they sponsored forums and taught others how to detail, and in doing so were able to pitch their products. The secondary reason we overhauled the DI site was for the SEO impact, and now (only a few months later) that accounts for almost as much in sales as their direct sales approach. On the client side of things, Mike and I are closing 80%+ of our leads, mostly because we take the time to listen to the customer, put ourselves in their shoes, and suggest the solutions that fit their unique case the best. And for all of our sites we answer questions rapidly and never, ever attack customers…going above and beyond to make sure they know we care about their experience and want them to be treated fairly. Again, how many companies have the web marketing knowledge we do and combine that with exceptional sales and customer service?

A large part of why we’re good at these two things is because we all have an operations background, and we all have significant sales experience. None of us really have a programming background. This “realization” doesn’t much change our current position, but it does change the way I think of Pure Adapt in the years to come. I always pictured us creating a lot of web2.0 style sites, but that’s clearly the wrong approach. We’ll be in a warehouse/office by 1.1.2008 (we’re actively looking right now) and at that point we’ll start planning our next move. Rather than thinking of software or web apps, I think we’ll focus on growing our niche client services and creating more e-commerce platforms like Detailed Image. After all, we already have the shopping cart in place that gives us a huge competitive advantage on the front-end and the back-end, so it just makes sense to port that cart over to other sites and ship products from the same warehouse (saving on boxes, shipping costs, etc).

Finally, as we approach our one year anniversary, it seems like everything is becoming clear. Over 90% of our revenue comes from those things, so it makes sense to spend 90%+ of our time on becoming great at e-commerce and client work. I’ll always spend the remaining 10% of my time creating Music-Alerts-type sites because they’re fun and that’s how I advance my programming skills, but the difference now is that I want to spend my time working on making us great and not making just enough money so I can create crazy web apps and try to become rich by hitting a home run with one of them. I *think* we just figured out how to become a great company. Now we just have to do it

In college, I downloaded music from our school’s network and used Winamp to play my music. I swore I’d never be one of those “fools” who actually paid for music and fell into the iTunes/iPod trap. Then I got an iPod for Christmas one year and realized I should start paying for my music (you know, since it’s legally and morally the right thing to do), so I fell in love with iTunes and to date haven’t looked back. Amazon’s affordable DRM free store is a great start, but they don’t have near the selection iTunes does. So I figured I’d always be an iTunes Store guy.

That is, until I started seriously playing around with Grooveshark. One of the best parts about Music-Alerts drawing some attention is that I’ve received praise from - and consequently struck up conversations with - some young startups in the music industry. One such new acquaintance is Andrew Wise of the upstart company Grooveshark, which was started by three University of Florida students. It’s so unique and has so many features, that I’ll just cut to the chase and list off what it does:

• There are two components - your online profile and the file-sharing software (like old Napster or Limewire) that accesses your MP3 files.
• You can listen to streaming music for free on the site as much as you want.
• You can create playlists, add friends, receive suggestions, etc (all the social networking stuff).
• When you want to download a track, you add funds to your account and buy it DRM free for $0.99. Royalties are paid to the labels, to Grooveshark, and to the person who you’re downloading the song from. Hence the slogan “everybody gets paid”.

After being invited to be a BETA tester, I just went in minutes ago and set up my profile and added $5 to my account. I then proceeded to search for a song, download it, and import it into iTunes (gotta be able to transfer it to the iPod). It worked awesome. Bottom line - as long as Grooveshark is able to strike up deals with all the labels and be legal, it’s now where I’m starting my music search. It’s a cross between a social network, p2p file sharing system, and streaming music service. For the same price as a song on iTunes, I get it DRM free and I get the advantages of a social network that knows my music habits (incidentally, if I have a feature request it would be to import my iTunes library XML file so it already knows what music I like).

The only real question is about the legalities. What are the origins of the music I’m downloading, and if 90+% of the music on the site is bootleg, how will record companies feel about it? On one hand, they might like the fact that they’re actually making money from it when they otherwise wouldn’t be. On the other hand, they might not like the fact that other people are getting a cut for uploading it. Only time will tell. I’m certainly rooting for it to work.

P.S. - the Music-Alerts Facebook App is REAL buggy. I know about it, I just hate debugging under the constraints of Facebook. I’ll fix it…eventually. My bad

Since Music-Alerts caught on last week, my partners and I debated exactly what to do with it. We pretty much concluded what I’d mentioned previously: try to grow the user base by keeping the core application simple, and strategically place affiliate links to buy/download items. Instead of whoring out the site with ads and other content to try to make affiliate sales and force ad clicks, our approach ensures we keep the appeal of the site. As I’ve mentioned previously, the only way this will make us any kind of substantial money is if it takes off BIG, and for that you need to focus more on growth and less on squeezing every penny out of every visit. It’s not like we’re relying on this as a revenue source for the company. This is still very much a “side project”.

With that, we needed a way to get out of the “techsphere” and into the mainstream…where most people don’t know what RSS is. The simplicity of Music Alerts coupled with the social nature of music preferences, makes it the perfect candidate for a Facebook Application. I haven’t really drank the Kool-Aid on Facebook apps like everyone else has, but I do see them as a valuable marketing tool for the right type of site.

The Music-Alerts Facebook Application actually expands a bit on the Music-Alerts site. You can install the application by going to http://apps.facebook.com/music-alerts/. Once installed, the app looks just like the Music-Alerts site:

After entering your list, your profile is updated with some of your favorite artists and their recent releases.

When you go back to the application, you now see all of your upcoming album releases and have the option to add/delete artists.

Of course, all of this means that I finally had to actually sign up for a Facebook account:

The app has a few bugs that I know about, but in most instances it seems to work fine. It’s hard to tell if the known issues are caused by Facebook (there are a lot of reports that the Facebook platform isn’t always stable) or by my code…so I’m going to wait to see if/when I should address them. Developing on the Facebook platform wasn’t really what I expected, but I am overall impressed with how they’ve set it up, and I’d definitely recommend that any PHP programmer spend a weekend learning it - the Facebook community is too powerful not to know how to develop for it. I only spent about 10 hours programming the MA app, and a simpler app could be developed in an hour or two. Tip: if you don’t have PHP 5 installed on your server, you’ll likely run into issues using Facebook’s PHP 4 Client Library like I did. This third party Client Library did the trick for me.

If you get a chance to take the app for a spin, I’d appreciate a quick comment below on your experiences.

Aside from the business-related ones, I subscribe to only two magazines: Men’s Health and Sports Illustrated. Despite the rise of blogging and up-to-the-second sports updates, SI has been able to adjust their philosophy and remain a must read every week for any sports fan. The photography by the best photographers in the world is jaw-dropping, and the writing by the best writers in the industry reads more like a bunch of sports novels and less like a news magazine.

However, I’m pretty disappointed in how they market their “free gifts” on TV. Anyone who has turned on ESPN the last few weeks has seen this presumably sweet offer for Red Sox fans: subscribe to SI and get a free hard-cover commemorative World Series book, Official 2007 World Series DVD, and Championship Baseball Set. Any Sox fan would be crazy NOT to consider getting a subscription. It’s worth it alone for the free gifts…or is it?

Mike is a HUGE Red Sox fan, so he signed on to buy the pack. I said “cool, what’s it like $50?” I knew my subscription was somewhere in that vicinity. He tells me it’s $89.04 for 56 issues.

I thought to myself “damn, has the price of SI gone up without me realizing it.” Nope. A regular subscription costs $39.00 for 56 issues.

How nice of SI to charge you $50.07 for your “free” book, DVD, and baseballs! Seriously, I expect more from one of the great American sports magazines. They do theses “offers” every time a team wins a championship, and presumably they make a KILLING and also get subscribers to their magazine that’ll probably continue on with them for years. What they should do is include a smaller bonus item for FREE (that means it’s included with the $39 subscription) and then offer the other items only to subscribers for an extra $20/$30/$40. At least then they aren’t tricking people into subscribing. What ever happened to giving up something to get something? That’s how good promotions work…isn’t it? They give you a free gift, and in return they get a subscriber that will pay subscription fees (presumably for more than a year) and add another number to their subscription totals so they can jack up advertising, which is where they make their money anyway.

I’m very, very disappointed in you Sports Illustrated.

Last night I set the alarm for 5:50 AM and this morning I forced myself out of bed prior to 7 AM for the first time in recent memory. Why? Because today - at 6 AM Eastern Time - OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) started their Give One, Get One program.

The mission of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is to empower the children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child. In order to accomplish our goal, we need people who believe in what we’re doing and want to help make education for the world’s children a priority, not a privilege. Between November 12 and November 26, OLPC is offering a Give One Get One program in the United States and Canada. During this time, you can donate the revolutionary XO laptop to a child in a developing nation, and also receive one for the child in your life in recognition of your contribution.

For $399 ($200 of which is tax-deductible) a laptop is sent to a child in a developing nation, and one is also sent to you. In addition, you also get one year of free T-Mobile HotSpot access (a $350 value).

For those of you who haven’t heard about the laptop, it is absolutely revolutionary. It can be built for under $200 (soon to be under $100), and runs a plethora of custom open source software on a special Linux operating system. To accommodate the developing nations ,the laptop has long battery life (and can be re-charged using a hand crank on the device), a screen that can be viewed outdoors, and antennas to act as relays for wireless internet access!

I became very intrigued by the mission of the program when I first heard about it, and once the Give One, Get One program was announced I was absolutely thrilled to have the opportunity to donate one of these amazing machines AND get one myself. My hope is to eventually have Pure Adapt develop web applications to work specifically with the laptops unique resolution and web browser to help make the knowledge of the web more accessible to these kids, but in the short term it’s just going to be a fun toy. On top of that, I’m pumped to get the T-Mobile HotSpot access so I can finally get free wi-fi at Starbucks (Albany, like every other city in the country, has about 500 Starbucks and maybe 5 other coffee shops with wi-fi…it’s nice to have 500 more places I can get out to do some work and grab a good drink).

Some people have been critical of the mission of the organization, namely their focus on developing countries over domestic kids in need. From their FAQ:

Why are these laptops going to children in developing nations when there are needy children in the U.S.?

In the U.S., the average expenditure for education is $7,500 dollars per child. In developing countries, the average expenditure is typically less than $300 dollars per child. One Laptop Per Child is initially focused on where the need is most urgent. A number of U.S. states have approached One Laptop Per Child and expressed interest in the program, and in the long run, One Laptop Per Child hopes to work with those states and help children everywhere.

I can certainly understand the opposing view, but I happen to agree 100% with that sentiment - I view the entire world as one family and our brothers and sisters in the most need are in developing countries.  If you happen to agree too, there’s no better Holiday gift that you can give than the gift of education to a needy child.

Yesterday my business partner Mike sent me a link to FreeRice, a site that teaches you vocabulary….and for every question you get right donates 10 grains of rice to hungry communities help accomplish their mission of ending world hunger. How freaking awesome is that? You don’t have to pay anything to donate, and you can actually learn something by playing their vocab game! Absolutely amazing!

It works because of the large sponsors: Time Magazine, Apple, Office Depot, Toshiba, etc. Their ads are shown along the bottom while you play, and they are the ones making the donations to the UN World Food Program. The site - which is a sister site of Poverty.com - has simple goals:

FreeRice has two goals:

1. Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.
2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

This is made possible by the sponsors who advertise on this site.

Whether you are CEO of a large corporation or a street child in a poor country, improving your vocabulary can improve your life. It is a great investment in yourself.

Perhaps even greater is the investment your donated rice makes in hungry human beings, enabling them to function and be productive. Somewhere in the world, a person is eating rice that you helped provide. Thank you.

Task: get everyone you know to play the game for 10 minutes a day. You’ll get smarter and do some good while you’re at it.

Since forming Pure Adapt and having a relatively successful first year, I have gotten a lot of partnership questions from people.  Sometimes it’s from friends, sometimes it’s from family, but usually it’s from fellow business owners.  I guess it’s kind of unique that four guys who have known each other since elementary school form a company and it actually works, and because of that people are interested in the social dynamic that we have.

How do I know if I need a partner?

I almost want to say “if you have to ask yourself that question, you probably don’t need one”.  Let’s face it - every task known to man can be accomplished by an employee.   However, I started as a solo-entrepreneur and, looking back, it’s a really tough road.  Having a partner allows you to have a bad day here and there because now there’s someone to pick up your slack.  Having a partner gives you someone of equal stature to bounce your ideas off of, and because their interests are the same as yours, you’ll usually get a better answer than you’d get from an employee (who wants to kiss your ass) or an outside adviser (who really doesn’t care about your biz).  Also - instead of isolating yourself, you now have people who can relate to EXACTLY what you’re going through.  That comradery is priceless to me.   I know many successful solo-entrepreneurs, but I personally will likely never start a company on my own again.

How do I know if a person is right as a partner? 

This is the million dollar question.  I’ve known my partners to some extent for the majority of my life.  I know their families, I know how they were brought up, and I know they are honest, caring, hard-working, passionate, and intelligent people.  Most people aren’t going to be in my situation, but whatever the situation remember this:  business partnerships are like marriages with no sex that are probably going to end in divorce. That means you damn well better trust your partners like you trust your parents or your spouse, and you better be prepared (legally and personally) for it to end someday.  Just like in any other relationship, you don’t trust someone like that over night.  That’s why most business partners I know have some sort of previous relationship - either personally or professionally - that solidifies that trust prior to the business partnership.

What’s it like working with friends?

It’s awesome.  We have a lot of common interests (sports, cars, beer, girls, movies, and pretty much anything most 25 year old guys like) and it makes the work environment so much more fun to be able to laugh and enjoy the time you’re spending with your partners.  Provided everyone is able to check their egos at the door, and everyone knows when it’s time to stop messing around and time to start working, working with friends is great.  There are definitely some friends I would never work with because they are lazy or not very talented, but these guys don’t fit that bill at all.

Don’t you guys get distracted? 

Of course.  Distraction is good.  The human mind needs breaks, and it’s nice to be able to have fun with the people you spend most of your day with.

Aren’t there work issues that spill over into personal lives? 

Here’s where I think people don’t “get it”.   Anytime you have a business partner they become part of your family.  We all live off of the same pot, and if my partner has a personal issue than it becomes our issue.  So far, we haven’t had any problems.  My partners and I care about each other like we’re family because, well, we kind of are family.  We act as a support system when something is wrong, and people are rarely critical of each other unless it’s constructive criticism.  If we happen to have a heated argument at work, it’s forgotten by the time we sit down for beers at the end of the night.

What happens if there’s an argument that can’t be solved?

This is another one I don’t think people “get”.  Most people say that they’ll never fight with their partners and there will never be an issue that they can’t solve.  Just because it hasn’t happened to us, doesn’t mean that at some point it won’t.  Remember:  a marriage that’ll probably end.  Spend the necessary time and money with a good lawyer to draw up a partnership agreement so that if there is a problem you have a solution that’s fair to everyone.  We have an arbitration clause in place in case we are 2-2 on a vote, and we have our “break up agreement” meticulously outlined so when someone does want out they get a fair shake.  Ultimately, there’s almost no situation where there won’t be an amicable resolution.  That gives everyone peace of mind and allows them to focus on their job and not worry about being squeezed out unfairly.

P.S. - Music-Alerts slowed down a bit today, but still growing rapidly.  I’m going to spend the weekend trying to grow and monetize it…we’ll see.

OK, so I know I’ve been posting a lot about Music-Alerts. I was intending on writing a post today about how this has been a really up and down week. A lot of great stuff has happened, and a lot of frustrating stuff that makes me want to run full speed into a wall has happened too. It really has been one of those weeks where you drain yourself by running through the entire gamut of human emotions.

Instead, I’m posting about Music-Alerts. After my little marketing challenge was done I expected traffic to taper off and traffic to level off. Then I could get back to “real work”. Instead - in true roller-coaster-week fashion - something inexplicable has happened: the site has worked it’s way UP the blogsphere and landed itself on giant tech sites like Lifehacker and MakeUseOf. Previously with iPrioritize I worked my ass off for months to get a mention on a big blog, and then watched the press mentions and traffic trickle down to smaller sites and eventually taper off. Instead, it seems like every day a bigger blog or site picks it up, and traffic just keeps growing. The site also now ranks top 5 for popular terms like”album release dates” in Google, which kind of solidifies the stream of traffic and means there won’t be a total crash once this PR wave stops.

The only explanation I can give is that it’s a really, really simple service that fills a need that was somehow unmet…and people love it. Honestly, it’s kind of cool and also kind of depressing at the same time. I mean, today Music Alerts will more than double the traffic for all of the rest of our sites combined! That’s SportsLizard + Detailed Image + Detail University + this blog + iPrioritize + the rest…all of which do pretty well for themselves. If traffic continues at todays levels, it will be well over 1 million unique visitors this month…wtf!!! Has everything else we done been so shitty compared to this? We’ve spent years on other sites and I spent a few hours on this one, and yet this one is really that much better???? Really makes you think.

My inbox has been flooded with “thank you” notes about the service, one person even going as far as saying “it’s guys like you that make the internet a better place”, when in reality all I was trying to do was make a feed for myself so I didn’t miss another album release. I even had a large Web2.0 music company contact us about integrating it with their application (we had a quick phone chat). It’s just been an insane day. This is probably the first project I’ve done where I really didn’t even think about as a business - aside from this blog - and it’s the most successful day (in terms of traffic) that one of my sites has ever had.

I don’t even want to think about what would happen if it lands on TechCrunch and continues to grow. At what point do you try to monetize something that is very tough to monetize…and is there a way to do it that doesn’t turn people off from the simplicity that attracts people to the site in the first place? Obviously, more affiliate links to buy/download + feed ads wouldn’t be overwhelming, but also probably wouldn’t make much money. Maybe the user base - which has grown by almost 1k today - will be worth something in and of itself…kind of like how Kiko made a business of growing a large user base and selling off.

Oh - and I now have an addiction to checking my stats every 10 minutes. I’m like a crack addict who can’t get off the high, but who knows he’s going to crash and crash bad. There’s no way it can keep growing…can it?

The best answer I can come up with to that question is: it depends.  I know a lot of people who swear by never hiring people they know.  Those are the same people who also say they’ll never date a colleague, or never mix any form of business and pleasure.  Those things all sound noble, but they’re just blanket statements that don’t hold up in the real world.

How many companies do you hear about that are founded by two brothers, or two sisters, or father + son, or lifelong friends (like in Pure Adapt’s case)?  A lot.  Know why?  Because those are the people you trust.  There the ones you know you can count on because you’ve been through difficult times with them before and you know how they react.  There’s also the other side of it: that you have a more complex relationship than just business partners, and when things go awry you’ll have another layer of the relationship to deal with.  So a lot of people just avoid working with friends and family solely for that reason.

If you take that approach, you make running a business a lot harder on yourself (not to mention the ironic fact that you’ll probably meet a large portion of your friends at your job…so the more friends you make, the less potential job candidates you’ll have…which is ridiculous).  The value of your network is probably the best hiring asset you have.  I know I have a mental list of about 15 people I know that I’d LOVE the chance to hire.  Some are friends, some are relatives, some are former co-workers, some are former teachers, and some are classmates from college.  I have a relationship beyond a typical professional relationship with each of them, but given the resources I’d hire them in a second because I know exactly what they bring to the table.

First and foremost, they’re all good, honest, trustworthy people.  They’re also all very intrinsically motivated people who take pride in doing a good job - no matter what they’re working on.  And of course they are all extremely good at what they do.  I know all of this because  I’ve been through the trenches with them before and I know how they work under pressure.  Think I could learn all of that from a few interviews with someone I found on Monster.com?  I’d be insane not to hire those people, and if I ever get the chance I sure as hell will hire them in a second.  See, I also know that each one of them is a professional in every sense of the word and I know they can handle the complexities of the relationship.

The key in my mind is being able to separate your business relationship and your personal relationship.  We do an amazing job of that at Pure Adapt - when we’re watching a football game together that’s what we’re focusing on, regardless of how the work week went.  That’s how I know it can be done.  I guess the bottom line is this:  if you know someone who is perfect for the job, and you are fairly certain they’ll be able to separate the two relationships, you’d be stupid not to hire them.  

I wasn’t really sure how my one hour of marketing Music Alerts would pan out.  Turns out it went well…really well.  The StumbleUpon traffic has been nice, but it was those 10 or so emails that I sent that got the viral bug started.  Blogs like Emily Chang’s eHub, KillerStartups, and even a popular Italian tech blog gave it good reviews, and the site went from about 30 visitors a and 1 feed created per day, to over 500 visitors and over 50 feeds created each day this week.  Now I realize those aren’t HUGE numbers, but it’s a hell of a lot for an hours work.

If those numbers keep up, this site will have a sizable user base in less than a year, and it may just have a chance at making us some $.  I think the next step will be to add more to each feed - include affiliate links to download the album and buy from several places other than Amazon, and also insert AdSense-like ads into the feeds.  I’d say that I’ll probably do that sometime in the next few months, and I’ll re-evaluate things if it really grows.  I love the simplicity of the site, so I’m going to try to work around making people register when monetizing it, which will likely limit what can be done.  Then again, keeping it simple and forcing those constraints might be what makes the site standout from all of the cluttered crap out there.

I did add one feature to the site today:  you can now add artists to your feed.  All you need to do is click the “Add to Your Feed” in the upper-right, enter your feed key (the last 8 digits in the feed URL), and enter the artist name.  A nice simple feature that addresses one of the main weaknesses of the site.