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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: February 2010
Not All Email is Created Equal
Despite getting less email with our recent changes, I still get a decent amount of email. Some of it needs a reply from me, some of it needs to be looked at and reviewed by me but doesn’t require a reply, and the rest of it isn’t very important at all. I’ve written before about how I handle my email. I still think that the majority of people leave their inbox open all day long with little alerts popping up every time new mail arrives, and I still think that doing so is a very very bad thing for productivity. … Continue reading
What People Don’t Like to Hear
We often get asked about our e-commerce platform by other business owners. They like the functionality and want to know exactly what we’re using so that they can use it too. We reply with something to the extent of “our team built the platform in-house for solely our own use”. If I get the question, I also tend to then suggest Shopify and Magento as solutions that might work for them. I enjoy the question because it really validates the hard work that we all put into it. I often wonder how much more interested people would be if they … Continue reading
Changes in Work, Sleep, Learning, & More
In looking back at posts from previous years, I realized that I used to post more frequently about all of the other things I think go into running a business and being an entrepreneur. Stuff like sleep and happiness and work ethic. As I’ve slowed a bit with my posting, it seems like those posts have been fewer and farther between. This certainly wasn’t intentional, but it’s always easier to put off a post about sleep & productivity than it is a post about a new feature on one of our sites. Nevertheless, I don’t want to lose that balance, … Continue reading
Announcing LockerPulse – Our Next Venture
Yesterday Mike and I finally put the finishing touches on the splash page for LockerPulse, our next web venture that we plan on launching May 1 if all goes according to plan. As the site says, we’re promoting it as “an innovative new way to stay connected to your teams” The story behind how LockerPulse has unfolded is an interesting one. For years, I’ve had a rather unique way of tracking my favorite sports teams using Google Reader, RSS feeds, and some creative tagging. It isn’t so much about the tools involved, but the process of researching the proper amount … Continue reading
Two Great Talks Every Entrepreneur Should Watch
I’m not really much of a conference guy. Even if I had the money and time to fly all over the world to attend tech conference after tech conference, I don’t think I’d do it. In terms of interaction, I’ve met tons of great young business owners from around the world online using this blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and through all of our sites. Example – I have a direct link to Gary Vaynerchuk because I sort of interviewed him. If I went to a conference, I might be able to speak to him…or maybe not. But now I can … Continue reading
Don’t Fail Your Employees
Last night I finally went on to the CBS website and watched the first episode of Undercover Boss. The premise of the show is pretty interesting – presidents/CEOs of large companies go “undercover” and work as front-line employees for their own organizations. The assumption being that they’ll see things completely differently if they work in the positions that directly interact with their customers. And of course that’s what happened in the first episode. It featured president and COO of Waste Management Larry O’Donnell. WM is a great first company because 1) they are huge 2) Larry was really really excited … Continue reading
You Don’t See This…Ever
Our neighbors in our industrial park are Ruan Transportation, a large trucking company. We share part of a really big building. As we pulled into the parking lot on Monday morning, we saw this: That’s insane. I’ve never seen anything like it. Normally they just have a handful of relatively new, clean trucks sitting outside. After a quick Google News search, we may have linked it to this accident on January 26 on I-40 in Tennessee. If so, I’m happy to hear that everyone survived…but also mystified at HOW everyone survived…
Free Weekly Special off to a Great Start
I like it when I’m wrong but in a good way. On Monday when we announced some new Detailed Image features, I wasn’t sure how the Free Weekly Special would go over. Essentially we’ll always have a coupon code on our home page for a free product. The minimum spend to get the free product is determined by our cost of the product (cheaper products have a lower min spend, more expensive ones have a higher min spend). Well, so far so good. The Chemical Guys Citrus Wash code has been coming through like crazy. We had a huge Wednesday … Continue reading
New Essay: SEO & Web Marketing For New Web Ventures
While we’re in the process of consolidating our sites, I decided to do something I’ve long been intending to do: put the final nail in the coffin of Faceup-Sites and create an essay to replace the downloadable e-book that was what remained of the site. That e-book was very exhaustive and had some really good information. The problem was that I hadn’t updated it since July of 2008, and in the web world that’s an eternity. So I re-wrote it to match the style of the Web Design & Development for Business essay: a quick read that is in a … Continue reading
New to DI: Ask a Pro Detailer, Weekly Free Product
After spending most of January getting rid of things (Tastefully Driven, Amazon, and international shipping), it’s time to start rolling out some of the new stuff. For the second time in less than six months, we just unveiled a major change to the Detailed Image home page. The intent is to have a little more uniformity and a little more focus on our content. I’d imagine that detailing is a rather unique industry in that people who read our content tend to buy more (as measured by several metrics, such as Google Analytics $index) than those who jump right to … Continue reading