-
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: Decision Making
Learning What to Learn
When I first quit my job and decided to venture out on my own, I was working alone, had almost no resources, had very few connections, and almost no web experience. What I did have was time. And the desire to learn anything and everything that could help me be successful.* So, naturally, if there was something that needed to be done I picked up a book and learned it. This is a great thing. It’s probably a necessary trait to bootstrap your own company, especially if it’s your first company and you’re in a situation like I was. Thankfully … Continue reading
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
How We Make Business Decisions – The CAG Model
I’ve noticed over the years that we’ve become very balanced in our decision making. I think that comes from having a very diverse set of partners. Almost every major decision involves a group discussion in which we discuss the pros and cons of the decision, as well as the priorities of making a decision (sometimes the best business decision is to just leave something alone). And, for the most part, we’ve been successful with this approach. Not like billion dollar successful, but continuous, steady, profitable growth in a down economy. I was thinking a lot about this the other day. … Continue reading
Why We Made LockerPulse Completely Free
We’ve done away with the Premium Accounts on LockerPulse and have instead moved to an ad-supported model. This was something we had discussed for a long time, even prior to launch, and knew might be the best path for success for the site. The #1 factor in the decision was simply that the limited ads that we’ve tested out have performed surprisingly well, while the Premium Accounts have tailed off after a promising start. Being featured in the Chrome Web App store gave us an additional wave of data and feedback to help make the decision easier. We anticipate launching … Continue reading
Common Sense and Snow
If you haven’t heard, it’s snowing a lot today in the Northeast. My constant interest in the weather, and the fact that I’m up early, has sort of led to me becoming the guy who makes the decision on whether or not to close the warehouse for the day. It wasn’t a very difficult decision today. The timing of this storm essentially makes for the worst-case scenario of bad commutes both ways. Plus all of the schools were closed too, which always solidifies my decision if I’m on the fence. Still, when I turned on the news and looked at … Continue reading
The Story Behind the Detailed Image Mobile Site
Yesterday we launched a dedicated mobile site for Detailed Image. Above are a few screenshots. Overall I’m extremely pleased with how it came out. The functionality is nearly 100% of the full site. That said, the story of how this mobile site came about over the past two weeks is much more interesting than the functionality of the site so that’s going to be the focus of this post. Why a Mobile Site? I think the main answer to this is obvious – more and more people are browsing the web from mobile devices. The second reason, and what threw … Continue reading
Chargeback Fraud – Customer Caught Red Handed (Finally!)
Without a doubt the most popular post I’ve written was last years post about chargebacks. Like most retailers, we feel pretty helpless when it comes to chargebacks, and I think that resonates with people. Since the system at it’s core is very broken, retailers don’t have a whole lot of options. Any system you put in place to reduce chargeback fraud invariably creates issues for legit customers. Creating new problems for all customers when a very small few are causing the issues, without guaranteeing any higher success rate, is what makes us tread very carefully. Dave wrote a post about … Continue reading
Inventory – the Death of e-Commerce Companies, Large and Small
A New Company Let’s take, for example, a brand new company that’s getting into the blue widget business. For fun, let’s call the owner Carlos. Widgets cost $50, and retail for $100. For simplicity, we’ll assume that Carlos has to pay in cash up front (which is somewhat common when you just start out), that he orders once per month, and that he receives his inventory immediately (clearly, not very common). Carlos has saved up and he has $5k to start out with, so he buys 100x widgets. In the spreadsheet, Qty is the quantity that Carlos has in stock, … Continue reading
How to Figure Out What to Automate
I think everyone who owns a web business wants to do as little work as possible to make as much money as possible. That’s pretty obvious right. Given that we’ve built our cart from scratch, we have the ability to automate just about anything that can be automated. So why don’t we? I get that question from time to time, particularly from people who have just caught the internet business bug and think that they can just automate everything, do nothing, and sit back while the money rolls in. The answer is pretty simple: because in many instances there are … Continue reading
No Longer Shipping Internationally
Effective yesterday we are no longer shipping packages internationally. This also includes US Territory addresses and APO addresses. Much like closing down Tastefully Driven, there were a lot of reasons behind our decision, but it can all pretty much be summed up by saying that it was too much work for how small of a part of our business it was, and that we’d rather focus our time and energy elsewhere. However, unlike with Tastefully Driven, I think this will get a little backlash from our customers, which I’ll touch on more below. Here is the in-depth reasoning behind our … Continue reading