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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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Category Archives: Competition
What About Competitors?
Whenever I give a talk to college students, I always get asked about our competitors. How do we follow what they do? How do we react to what they do? What do we do to protect ourselves from them? The answer is pretty simple: we don’t. I’m of the opinion that business do not fail because of anything that their competition does or doesn’t do. They fail because of what they do or don’t do. The second you start focusing on your competition is the second that you stop focusing on your customers. You also become a defensive company. You’re … Continue reading
Amazon Let’s Us Pay Them to Grow
In my continuing efforts to prepare for the holidays, I’ve spent the last few weeks reviewing and improving our product listings in our Amazon Seller Central account. We sell on Amazon under the Tastefully Driven name. We list almost everything that’s up on the TD website, but the majority of what we actually sell is either fitness equipment or detailing supplies. I automated a few of the mundane tasks, added new products (which involved building a bridge to easily migrate products from DI to TD and then to Amazon), and reviewed pricing. There’s one other thing I’m really excited about … Continue reading
The People that Ruin Blogging for Me
A few weeks back Nev wrote a post asking for feedback from his readers about his blog and himself in general. In the comments someone mentioned that they wished he would post more about his e-commerce site, House of Rave. He responded: I sincerely wish I could post more about House Of Rave since I love writing about it. I’ve refrained quite a lot to reveal less to competitors and avoid copycats. There is a DIRECT correlation between how much I write about my business and how many people immediately try to emulate it. His next post was about how … Continue reading
Understanding Competitive Advantages
Compared to our e-commerce auto detailing competitors, we have a lot of competitive disadvantages: less space, less available cash, less employees, and less control over vendors and distribution. It can be frustrating and intimidating when entering a new industry. The incumbents will try to use those things to crush you (or at least make your life more difficult). From the beginning we’ve been about finding different things that turn the tables and give us the advantages. We don’t want to play their game – we’ll lose at that. We want to play our game. We have lower expenses. We don’t … Continue reading
’08 Grade, ’09 Goal
While I was working on the time line the other night I began to notice that I wasn’t all that happy with what I accomplished for the business in ’08. Don’t get me wrong – we had a great year and I was super excited to see the growth laid out in numbers during our ’08 company review this afternoon. I’m very very happy, content, and proud at what we achieved as a business. Our goal was to double in revenue from ’07. Instead, we doubled plus an extra $50k. In a down economy, I’m not so naive that I … Continue reading