-
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.
-
If that sounds like something you're into, you can subscribe to blog updates via RSS or email, or follow me on Twitter. You can get in touch by leaving a comment or through email at
Monthly Archives: January 2008
Early Riser – 1 Month Update
On January 1 I wrote about how I hate New Years Resolutions and then proceeded to make one myself: to improve my sleep schedule. Throughout college and my early professional life I’ve always been an erratic sleeper to say the least, and I became envious of those who were able to wake up early and start the day “ahead” of me. I decided on 6 AM as my new wakeup time because it’s early, but not so early that you have to be asleep at a ridiculous hour every night to get your 8 hours. So how has this past … Continue reading
It’s a Barrier to Entry Thing
I recently went back and visited with one of my old engineering professors. He seemed happy that I had started my own business, but the whole time we were talking I could sense a bit of skepticism. Then I said “I went into industry for a while after college but didn’t like it”. He looked at me with sort of a puzzled look and bluntly said “why?” Here’s the thing – product development and web development are very similar. At their core, each is just a challenge in problem solving and that’s why I love both. Hell, gun to my … Continue reading
Identity Theft From 2000 Keeps Haunting Me
Back in the year 2000 I was an 18 year old freshman in college and living in Albany, NY. Somewhere 150 miles away in New York City (Bronx to be exact) some guy opens an account with Sprint Long Distance for his home long distance service. He uses the name ‘Adam McFarland Jr.’ and opens the account with my social security number. He runs up $517 in charges and then cancels the account. In November of 2003 I start getting phone calls from a collection agency looking for an Adam McFarland Jr. At first I just say ‘you have the … Continue reading
Another Pure Adapt Blogger
Following in George’s footsteps, Mike has launched a blog at Michael-Li.com to chronicle his entrepreneurshp experience. Now this is getting cool – we’ve got 3/4th of our company blogging, and anyone subscribing to all three will get the same story told from three uniquely different viewpoints. In Mike’s second post he talks about how he’s always been an entrepreneur from day one. George has told me similar stories about himself. Funny thing is, I was most definitely not like that. I didn’t have mini-businesses as a kid like these guys, and I never even considered running a business as an … Continue reading
What I Read
In this day and age there’s an overload of information available to us without much effort to get it. If you’re not careful you can spend all day reading books and magazines and blogs, or watching YouTube, DVDs, and TV. Pretty soon the only thing you DO is consume and you forget to actually do anything yourself. The answer is certainly not to cut yourself off from the world. Business owner or not, the information available to us you can help improve the quality of your life. And as a budding entrepreneur, the information available to you can give your … Continue reading
Download My Marketing eBook for FREE
We’ve made the decision to make my Faceup Web Marketing eBook available for free download. After filling out the form on the eBook page you’ll be emailed a link to download the book directly. I updated the book last week, and it now includes updated information on keyword research tools, link building, Google AdWords, and more…in addition to all of the topics outlined on the eBook page. I’m hoping this: Helps spread what I’ve learned in SEO/web marketing in the past few years to all web entrepreneurs. Now that it’s free, everyone can afford it Creates new business for Faceup … Continue reading
We Got Our Money Back
At 12:34:28 PM this afternoon George sent us all a message via Skype: good news fuckers, time to party – reopened 40k line What ensued in our chat room was an onslaught of remarks that were an equal mix of extreme joy and extreme slandering of Bank of America and everyone who works there. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier in my life. It was only about 28 hours since this fiasco began yesterday, but losing an important $40k line of credit sent my mind into a tailspin: How would we account for the missing money? Would we still … Continue reading
How We Lost $40k Before Noon Today
Small business finance is a tricky thing. Contrary to popular belief, more startups are funded on debt than on equity and Pure Adapt falls into that category. We value our stock immensely and would prefer to intelligently manage our debt as opposed to giving up equity. Up until this morning, that process had worked out well for us. At any given point we generally have about as much revolving debt as the value of our Detailed Image inventory – which is pretty good considering if we liquidated we’d be in the positive (not including the value of our sites, client … Continue reading
Melinda Gates is Amazing
To replace the remaining issues of my subscription to the now-defunct Business 2.0 Magazine I was given a subscription to Fortune. Surprisingly, I really like it. I learned about this sick web based golf game, and more importantly I was able to take a lot away from their amazing article on Melinda Gates – her first ever profile in a major magazine. We all knew that she was one of the worlds largest philanthropists, and that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation does great things for the world. After reading the article, she comes across as what we should all … Continue reading
Dominating With Our Shopping Cart
In my post earlier this morning I mentioned that this was probably the most productive week of my life. It’s partly because I’ve become an early riser, but mostly because we’ve had such success with the Detailed Image shopping cart that it’s eliminated a lot of the questions we had about our company direction. The back-end automation, SEO friendliness, and built-in upsell system have more than doubled sales and we’ve recognized that continued efforts in e-commerce are probably our best chance at using our skills to thrive as a company. Before doing much with the cart though, we needed to … Continue reading