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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: Decision Making
Decision Making and the Competition
One more thought on us shutting down Tastefully Driven. I find it interesting to ponder how little we factor our competition into making decisions like this. Clearly shutting down our Amazon store will help our detailing competitors. They will sell more products and probably will sell more at a higher margin since there’s one less competitor in the fold (many times it was just us and one other company bidding each other down on a product). But we never mentioned that in the decision making process. Not once. And from that last post it’s obvious that there were a lot … Continue reading
Goodbye Tastefully Driven, So Long Amazon
In an effort to become more efficient, more profitable, and more flexible, we’ve decided to close Tastefully Driven and stop selling our products on Amazon. Effective March 1 the e-commerce store will be closed down and we will sell any remaining inventory (non-detailing of course) on Amazon. We’re running a 30% off sale to try to blow out as much of the inventory as we can before that date. We’ve already pulled all detailing items down from Amazon and have no plans on listing them again in the future. As soon as the fitness items, poker cards, and personal care … Continue reading
The Difference Between School, Work, and Entrepreneurship
Effort. You need effort to succeed a traditional corporate environment. You need it to succeed in academia. You need it to succeed when you start a business. But when it comes to running a company, effort doesn’t guarantee that you succeed like it does in the other two. When you’re in school, your grades are – for the most part – tied to your effort. If you study hard, you’ll score higher on tests. Even if you do bad on tests, you get credit for attending class, asking questions, and doing homework. If you put in extra time after class, … Continue reading
The Manager – Programmer Disconnect
Nethy left an interesting comment the other day in regards to a potential new feature I mentioned: I’m always impressed with how your processes [flow]. Having a system like this that works properly needs: a) the programming doing the work and b) someone to plan the process. That’s something that’s very hard to do on a small business budget. It’s something that’s hard to do via consulting, for example. For a competitor, they might think “Adam blogged that he took 1 week to do this. 40 hours. I can get that done for $4000 (or $400 on elance) by a … Continue reading
Breaking Down the New Detailed Image – Part 3 of 3
Now that I’ve outlined the majority of the improvements on Part 1 and Part 2, I want to take a step back and quickly talk about why I think this was a successful project. The Process & The Time Frame We didn’t really plan it this way, but from the time we launched the previous cart in 2007 we were planning for this one. We kept track of every potential feature that we’d want, both on the front end and the back end, we collected data in any instances where we weren’t sure about something, and we kept tabs of … 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
Breaking Down the New Detailed Image – Part 1 of 3
Now that the dust has settled a bit and everything seems to be going well with the new Detailed Image, I want to go back and dissect the project and discuss the major decisions we made and why we think they will help our business. A ton of things go on behind the scenes on a large project like this. When you’re on a tight time frame and a limited budget as we were, you’re forced to make some very creative choices that either may or may not work. Nonetheless, it’s a very fun process that I think is worth … Continue reading
Chargebacks: how we were taken for $6k and how we’re fighting back
This post has been a long time coming, but it’s one that I finally made sure I sat down and wrote because I’m sure it can save someone from getting scammed the way that we did. What is a chargeback? According to our good friend Wikipedia: A chargeback is the return of funds to a consumer, forcibly initiated by the consumer’s issuing bank. Specifically, it is the reversal of a prior outbound transfer of funds from a consumer’s bank account or line of credit. The chargeback mechanism exists primarily for consumer protection. U.S. credit card holders are afforded reversal rights … Continue reading
Does Location Matter? Why Albany is Perfect for Us
A few weeks back Penelope Trunk wrote a really interesting article about deciding where to locate your start-up, entitled Starting a company in Silicon Valley is stupid. Clearly from the title of the post, she isn’t one of those people that preaches that you have to be in the Valley or in NYC to run a successful start-up. She herself moved from NYC to Madison, Wisconsin to start her new company, simply because the cost of living was low and the quality of life was high (according to studies on that sort of thing). A couple of my favorite quotes … Continue reading
How to Know When to Scale
Two business owners. The first hasn’t had their first customer yet. He has spent countless hours and dollars on market research, developing and re-developing his website and logo, projecting revenues and costs, and developing procedures for future employees. He wants everything to go perfectly. The second is a seasoned business owner. He has been in business for years, but over time his workload has increased and his revenue has leveled off. He is great at closing a sale and great at what he does, however he is the one who does it all. He’s never bothered to hire staff … Continue reading