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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: March 2011
Experimenting With Random Posts on My Homepage
One of the things that I’ve struggled with on my blog is that by nature the latest content is by far the most prominent. Sure I have my essays and the “most popular” on the sidebar, and there’s always categories, archives, and search, but those all tend to favor the same 10 most commented posts, or the most recent, or they require you to know what you’re looking for. There’s no easy way to expose people to some of the good posts with good discussion from years past. I decided to try something new and have the third post on … Continue reading
The Joys of Internal Programming Projects
In any job, the majority of the important work you do will go unseen to the outside world. When it comes to the programming work I do for our company, many of the projects that have been the most beneficial to us will never see the light of day. Some of the stuff I can blog about, like our inventory zone system, and other stuff is unfortunately better off kept private. Earlier this week we had our most successful Detailed Image sale ever. Any time we’re doing volume at a level that we haven’t experienced before, there are a few … Continue reading
The Benefits of a “How Can We Get Better?” Box
When you’re starting a new site, especially something like LockerPulse that doesn’t fit into an existing category with an existing set of “rules” (like say e-commerce), you really have no idea what people are going to love about your site and what they’re going to hate, what they wish was better and what they wish was the same. Studying analytics is one part of the conversation, but equally as important, maybe even more so early on, is just talking to users. The problem becomes how to go about talking to your users in the most authentic manner. I want to … Continue reading
90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. Do People Care? Let’s Find Out
That’s the cover of last month’s Wired magazine. The corresponding piece by Joel Johnson, 1 Million Workers. 90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. Who’s to Blame? is a really thought provoking read about the Foxconn plant in China where iPhones are manufactured…and where 17 people have killed themselves in the past five years. It probably would be more if they didn’t install “suicide nets” to safely catch anyone who tries to jump: The sister piece, Made in America: Small Businesses Buck the Offshoring Trend discusses a trend of American businesses who are choosing to manufacture in the US to cut down … Continue reading
38 Straight Days of Awesome Sleep
My fascination with sleep is pretty well documented. Rightfully so, I think, given how “no single behavior, we’ve come to believe, more fundamentally influences our effectiveness in waking life than sleep.” From January of 2008 when I became an early riser through early 2010 I had my morning alarm set for 6 AM and almost every day that was when I got up. In my 1 month update and 7 month update I used phrases like “amazing” and “life-changing” to describe my new sleep schedule. At some point last year though, I got off track. Too many things were keeping … Continue reading
Check Out LockerPulse on Google’s College Basketball Page!
Updating my last post about LockerPulse and college basketball, Google has had us on the homepage of the Chrome Web App Store for the past few days: I thought that this might be the extent of their “promotion”. Then I read their blog post Baseline to baseline, we’ve got the basketball games covered and saw that they’ve added LockerPulse to a special College Basketball Tournament 2011 page where you can check scores, schedules, use Google Maps and Google Earth to explore the cities and venues, and of course use Chrome Web Apps like LockerPulse to keep up with the news: … Continue reading
College News on LockerPulse: Start to Finish in 5 Days
On Tuesday morning I received an email from two people at Google asking for some vector graphics for LockerPulse. They said that they were going to be featuring it in an upcoming March Madness promotion, presumably for the Chrome Web App Store, although they didn’t specifically say so (“March Madness” refers to the NCAA basketball tournament that starts this Sunday night with the selection show, with play beginning Tuesday). This would be an awesome opportunity to promote LockerPulse, especially because we haven’t really started our full-fledged marketing campaign. There was just one problem: LockerPulse didn’t cover college sports, something that … Continue reading
Jack Dorsey is Really Smart
I’ve always “known of” Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and current CEO of Square. Until recently though I hadn’t heard him speak. A few weeks ago I watched the initial episode of Foundation with Kevin Rose where he interviewed Jack over tea, and then during my commute today I listened to his recent lecture at Stanford as a part of their Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series that I love. He’s just an absolutely fascinating person to listen to. From his youth of creating dispatch systems to entertain himself, to stories about his family and his dad’s pizza shop, his attempts … Continue reading
Looking Back: It’s Been Five Years Since I Left My Job
In the midst of a really busy January and February I sort of forgot that it’s been more than five years since that day that I quit my job back in 2006. You know how people always say “it feels like yesterday”? Well in this case, it feels like a different life to me. It feels like it was much longer than 5 years. In a lot of ways, I feel like I’ve always run Pure Adapt. Anyway, I know there are a lot of people out there who have quit their job recently or are considering doing so. I … Continue reading