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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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Monthly Archives: July 2008
Cuil is Horrible and Will Never Challenge Google
To the Cuil Management Team: Earlier this week it was brought to my attention that you launched your new search engine. With an index of some 120 billion web pages, you claim to be the largest and most relevant search engine around. So I just took a spin over and executed a few queries. And I must say – the results are horrible. How can a search for “SportsLizard” result in a link to my old blog that was moved over here a year ago? SportsLizard does happen to be one of the more popular collectibles sites on the web. … Continue reading
Selling Push vs. Pull Products
One of our Tastefully Driven vendors recently contacted us to see if we were ready to re-order their products yet. We’ve placed one other re-order since the launch of the site, but overall their products haven’t sold very well compared to other brands. We don’t have a ton in stock, but they’re moving so slow that we’re certainly not inclined to re-order at this point. So, we bluntly told them as much. Their response? Push the product more. Give out samples, hold contests, give some away to bloggers in the industry. Not bad ideas, but the premise is that WE … Continue reading
FaceUp Web Marketing eBook Updated, Still Free
Quick post here guys. Just wanted to let everyone know that I’ve updated our free FaceUp Web Marketing eBook. It’s been over six months since the last update. The book still gets a decent amount of downloads so I want to be sure that the information conveyed is accurate. The biggest update has to do with the Keyword Research section. Google recently started displaying search volume on their AdWords Keyword Tool. This is HUGE for anyone with a website and an interest in SEO. Prior to this we were left to extrapolate data from Yahoo (Overture) or Wordtracker and “guess” … Continue reading
Productive Output Update
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my productive output post where I declared that I would never work more than 35 hours in a week again (see Productive Output: What the 9-5 Misses and Why I’m Done with a 40 Hour Workweek). It was only two months ago, but a lot has changed since then. At the time I had just come off of 2+ years of pushing my entire life aside. In college I worked hard, but I played hard too. I might not have partied as much as some of my friends (some of which are still … Continue reading
How We Reduced Phone Calls by 94% AND Increased Sales
Earlier this year we were getting crushed with customer service contacts. Particularly with Detailed Image, but also to a lesser extent with SportsLizard. It became apparent that emails and phone calls were becoming a full time job and that we either needed to A) find a way to reduce contacts, or B) hire someone to handle customer service. In my previous life I actually tackled a similar project as an engineer on a much larger scale and was able to significantly reduce customer contacts without impacting sales or satisfaction. So naturally, we gave option A a shot. Before getting into … Continue reading
Dynamic Banner Ads With PHP and Javascript
Last month we struck a deal for Detailed Image to sponsor Autopia.org, definitively the largest online community of auto detailers. Clearly our target market for DI – a community that can exponentially increase our foothold in the detailing community. The potential is very large. Part of the sponsorship agreement included a 120 x 600 banner ad thrown into the rotation on the homepage. George came up with the idea of having the banner show our automated Daily Special. Autopia (like most sites) will pull your ad from an image or from Javascript. So he approached me and asked me … Continue reading
Does This Happen to Anyone Else?
This is driving me nuts. So I’m on browsing stories on Digg, which I am now officially obsessed with and fascinated by from a user perspective, a community perspective, and a business perspective. I click on a story in Firefox (3.0, but also happened previously in versions 2.xx) and about 1/10th of the time a page that should have a banner ad that looks like this: Has a banner ad that looks like this: With the javascript actually typed out: Am I the only one that this happens to? Wtf Digg. If this happens to anyone other than me, you’re … Continue reading
Sex vs. Changing the World
One of my huge pet peeves is when someone is in a difficult situation and they whine and complain about it, but proceed to do nothing to change the situation. Usually this comes in two flavors - relationships and jobs – although it really can apply to anything. It drives me nuts. If you don’t like a situation in life get off your ass and do something about it. When it comes to starting your own business, everyone has a tendency to talk a big game. You might succeed, you might fail, but to me it’s unacceptable to talk about … Continue reading
Book Review: Stall Points
Virtually all corporations stagnate at some point in their lifetime, and their stall typically follows the period of their highest growth. Why? That’s the question that Matthew Olson and Derek Van Bever of the Corporate Executive Board attempt to answer. I’m going to cut to the chase on this one so I can get to the good stuff: This is an absolutely exhaustive study of over 600 companies, on par in level of depth with Good to Great. Because of how exhaustive it is, I had a hard time reading more than 10 pages in a sitting (very atypical for … Continue reading
Pure Adapt Rocks The AMEX Plum Card
Have you seen the commercials for the AMEX Plum Card? It’s freaking unreal. Mike talked us in to applying for one earlier this year and it was one of the best financial decisions we’ve made. There’s no limit – we each carry a card around and we charge all of our purchases on it, with the exception of a few places that don’t take AMEX If you pay within 10 days of your statement closing you get 2% cash back. When you buy ~$30k/month in inventory and supplies, $600 back is no joke. We also get 5% off of our … Continue reading