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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
Teamwork
We have a pretty stressful few months ahead of us. It’s not the same type of stress we had last year when we feared that one wrong move would crush us and eventually decided to not pay ourselves for a few months, but nonetheless it’s still a little more stress than anyone would like. We’ve set up a culture of constant improvement, and because of that we expect a lot out of ourselves. Like any business owner, we see all sorts of opportunities that we’re leaving on the table because we haven’t had the time or money to get to … Continue reading
The Good and the Bad
That was the view from my apartment earlier this afternoon. We’re in the midst of yet another big storm that will probably drop over a foot of snow and ice on us by tomorrow morning. If you asked me on Monday how I thought my Wednesday would go, I would have said I’d be up at 6, hit the gym, pack orders at the warehouse, kick out early (I’m working a reduced warehouse schedule to give me more time to program), meet up with Mike to program for a few hours, and finally head to my parents house to do … 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
How to Prioritize Work
One of the hardest things to do as a business owner or aspiring business owner is prioritizing your work. If you’re anything like me, the ideas pour out faster than you can execute and you always end up staring at an endless task list. It can be very frustrating. From what I’ve seen, most people do one of two things: they either procrastinate and do nothing, spending too much time staring at their to-do list and writing up business plans, or start attacking the to-do list feverishly without really thinking about what is most important. I think the majority of … Continue reading
The New SportsLizard is FINALLY Done
Over the weekend I finally completed everything for the SportsLizard revamp I was working on. Yesterday I made the official announcement on the blog and sent out a newsletter. Now that I’ve had a few days to calm down from everything, I’m not really sure how I feel about it. Weird is the best word to describe it. This wasn’t a “typical” project for me/us. Usually there’s the hope that a project will hit it big and make us a ton of money. While I’ve always thought this had the potential to be huge, that wasn’t really what I set … Continue reading
Growth and Time Management
If last year I started a project like this SportsLizard revamp that I’m working on now, it would have gone a lot differently. For one, it would have been programmed a lot worse and probably taken twice as many hours of work to get the same result. In my head I think that and say “cool, what was a four week project a year ago is a two week project now” and then I expect myself to fly through it and get it done in two weeks. Then I realize that I go to the warehouse three days a week … Continue reading
The Most Efficient Way to Scale a Process
My college degree is in Industrial Engineering. Unlike other forms of engineering, IE is focused on process design and improvement and not product design and improvement. Using this mindset, I spent a considerable amount of time building to scale aspects of SportsLizard before I even launched it back in ’04. Most of what I did never ended up being applicable to the site…or needed to be tweaked considerably to be useful. I tried to automate things so that I could handle thousands of transactions a day before I even was getting one a day. Clearly I took the wrong approach. … Continue reading
Linksys WRT54G3G / Sprint Mobile Broadband Review (Hint: Well Worth Every Penny)
Back when we moved into our warehouse we were shocked to find out that there was no high speed internet available in our building. When we contacted local high speed providers, we quickly realized that adding a line to the building would cost a ton (like either $4,000 down plus $140/mo, or $300/mo with a 5 year commitment). So our somewhat risky solution was to get a Sprint Mobile Broadband card and use it in conjunction with the Linksys WRT54G3G router below. We didn’t know how good of cell phone reception we’d get. We didn’t know if the router would … Continue reading
When to Hire: Our Next Big Task
If this first story sounds familiar, it is – I touched upon it in my Productive Output post. A few weeks ago the owner of a local large online retailer (approx 10x bigger than us) visited the warehouse. George worked for him prior to starting DI, and he based much of early DI off of this particular website. After seeing our shipping process on the back-end of our shopping cart, the owner turned George and his co-owner and said “I could fire two employees if I had that technology”. I unfortunately was not there to hear this, but upon getting … Continue reading
Server Problems Suck
We had what we thought was a great situation for our web hosting. One of George’s friends from college runs a small hosting company. The server we are on has only a few sites in addition to ours, is blazing fast (4 GB of RAM I believe), and extremely affordable. While the company was a one man operation, we were generally satisfied with the level of service. All in all, nothing to complain about. Unfortunately on Friday night one of the nameservers (that he does not control) went down….it’s still down, causing Detailed Image to load sloooooow. We eventually learned … Continue reading