-
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
Category Archives: Customer Service
Making Shipping Estimates a Little More Obvious
Back in September when we did our exhaustive shipping project on Detailed Image, one of the more interesting features was a system we developed to estimate the ship date and arrival date of the package based upon the delivery location, time of day (before or after our last shipment time), day of the week, upcoming holidays, and shipping service selected. It’s a pretty sweet system. In the comments, Oke suggested that we include the day of the week so that the customer doesn’t have to peek at a calendar to figure out when their package will arrive. I agreed and … Continue reading
Phone Support and Great Customer Service
About two years ago I wrote a post about how we essentially stopped taking customer service phone calls on Detailed Image and still increased revenue that month. Fast forward to 2010. We have a “real” phone system with multiple lines at our warehouse now, but we still don’t answer the phone. Greg checks the messages daily and responds to the person via email if he can, or phone if he can’t find an email address. We still have essentially no phone support. We’ve doubled in size several times since that post. Seemingly not having phone support hasn’t hurt us. In … Continue reading
Customer Service Quote of the Year
From Small by Choice, Whether Clients Like It or Not, a New York Times article about a successful small Chicago pizza shop that only opens 4 days a week, doesn’t do deliveries, has an owner that makes every pizza by hand, and refuses to allow customers to customize their own pie (emphasis is mine): Q. In online reviews, some customers have complained about rudeness or arrogance. Where do you think that perception comes from? A. Mr. Lessins: I think that perception of arrogance has to do with the sense of entitlement and a lack of respect for someone wanting to … Continue reading
This is Why I’ll Probably Never Pursue VC Funding
From Rand Fishkin’s post about his long, expensive, and ultimately unsuccessful journey trying to raise VC money for his company SEOmoz (emphasis is mine): I tell this story about our VC experience to a lot of people – it seems to be a subject that attracts great curiosity and I, of course, love to share. Most of the time, folks follow up by asking “are you disappointed?” and my answer has been the same since October. I’m not disappointed we didn’t get funded. In fact, the more time passes and the more I think about the pitfalls that could have … Continue reading
How I Handle Customer Service on a New Feature
Graceful error handling is something that all good web developers pay attention to. There are too many weird scenarios out there for everything to work perfectly. Too many browsers, too many flavors of operating systems, and too many people that will do things that you never could have dreamed of. When we were developing the new Detailed Image we weren’t sure what to do with people who were trying to place an order so large that we couldn’t return a shipping quote from the FedEx or USPS API. As you can tell from our shipping study, we take pride in … Continue reading
Customers Never Cease to Amaze Me
This weekend we’re running a 20% off coupon code on Detailed Image. Coupled with our free shipping on orders over $150 for the rest of the year, it’s a pretty enticing pre-holiday sale. Apparently it’s not quite good enough for one customer. Said customer decided that he was going to outsmart our system by buying a gift certificate at 20% off and then turn around and use the gift certificate to then place his actual order for 20% off, effectively double-dipping and getting 36% off (20% off of 20% off). Since we do not allow discounts on gift certificates, this … Continue reading
Understanding Your Target Market…In War
I saw a fantastic piece about General Stanley McChrystal on 60 Minutes this past weekend. McChrystal is the new commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan. He’s absolutely brilliant. He is completely changing the approach to winning the war. He understands that the goal isn’t to beat the Taliban, it’s to free the Afghani people. Understanding that simple thing changes the fundamental approach to fighting and winning the war. Instead of being bullies, he has his troops visit towns and become friendly with the people. He himself visits towns without any armor whatsoever and asks the locals simply “how can we … Continue reading
Misc Entrepreneurship Ramblings
I always jot down notes when I get the idea for a new post. This week I’ve had quite a few ideas, none of which are enough for a full post really. Too big for Twitter. Too tiny for a full blog post. — Two final thoughts on funding your first business and generating your first cash flow. I just got my Inc. Magazine in the mail the other day. The cover story is titled “How to Build Your Dream Company: Here’s how 10 savvy entrepreneurs got their dream companies up and running – and how you can do the … Continue reading
Breaking Down the New Detailed Image – Part 2 of 3
In Part 1 I took a look at some of the more obvious improvements on the major pages of the site. I think some of the subtleties are even more interesting. Things that might go unrecognized at first, but make a small positive impact on your business. Banner System One time during one of our sales a while back Mike decided to throw a banner announcing the sale into our template on the old site. It looked totally out of place, but sure enough, that sale performed exceptionally better than previous ones, most likely because every visitor on the site … Continue reading
Do Consumers Expect too Much?
A while back I signed up for a KODAK Gallery Account to view a friends photos. Otherwise though, I’ve never used it. Then the other day there was an email in my inbox entitled “Important: From the Gallery’s General Manager”. Curious, I opened it. In part, it read (bolding is my emphasis): Let’s put the issue right on the table: nobody likes paying for something that they thought was free. I recently received some strong responses from Gallery customers after we asked them to make a small purchase in order to continue enjoying photo storage benefits. This may be a … Continue reading