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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
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
Wohoo a Paycheck!
Back in February we made the somewhat difficult decision to self-fund our move and expansion by not paying ourselves for three months. In retrospect, this was a riskier move than I think we all realized. It’s really, really stressful to see your bank account dwindling without anything to replenish it. It’s also really, really stressful to work 12 hour days and see nothing in return. That said, it was the best move we ever could have made. Taking no pay brought us together as a team – we united around the fact that we needed to work our asses off … Continue reading
When Customers Give You an Idea
It’s easy to become jaded and begin to dislike your customers for asking you the same questions over and over again. In a way, who can blame you: 99% of the interactions with customers that most businesses have are repetitive and don’t do much to make you a better business owner. Then – every once in a while – someone comes along and gives you a simple idea that’s so obvious you kick yourself and say “duh, why wasn’t that already on our to-do list?” The other day in the comments field of a Tastefully Driven order someone said: “please … Continue reading
Now Comes the Fun Part
So we’ve just spent nearly six-months and thousands of dollars to make Tastefully Driven a reality. Sweet…but then comes the realization that every business owner has: “oh crap, now we actually need to start making money”. It’s a daunting task, but we went into this knowing that we know what to do (or thinking that we know what to do, I suppose). There are five stores on Tastefully Driven. Each one is it’s own niche that could be a business in and of itself. If you do the keyword research (we did) you’ll learn that each of those niches are … Continue reading
Carpooling Doesn’t Save Me Money
Let’s be clear about something: carpooling or using alternative transportation is absolutely great for the environment. That’s not what this post is about. This post is directed to everyone who says “I love carpooling, it saves me so much money.” See, most people I know carpool for just that reason: to save money. But do you really save money? Consider the example of my three partners and I. Let’s say that all four of us carpool to our warehouse for four days each week. It’s a ~9 mile drive to work for each of us, or an ~18 mile round … Continue reading
The Art of the Launch
I’m going to take a step back from our pre-launch marketing for Tastefully Driven to go over our overall launch plan – from conception to where we are now to what we have left to do. I’m not saying that there aren’t different or even better ways to deploy a site, just that this process is how we do things, in large part based upon prior failures, successes, and other professional experiences (I’d be lying if I said my engineering background didn’t play a large role in the way I structure a project). None the less, I’ve never in my … Continue reading
The Best Way to Raise Money? Don’t Pay Yourself
It’s the dirty little secret of running a business. I hear about it all the time, but rarely hear it publicized. It’s glossed over by Karen Northup of Corefino in this Churchill Club Video, and it’s mentioned by store owner Dan Fox in this article: founders of seemingly successful businesses who don’t take a penny of salary for themselves. The reasoning is quite simple: it’s expensive to run a business, and faced with the choice of paying themselves or furthering the business, most entrepreneurs will choose the latter 10 times out of 10. This past weekend we made a similar … Continue reading
Boy Was I Wrong About That Feature
When it comes to matters of web development and SEO, I’d like to think that more often than not I make the right decisions. When I am wrong, I’d also like to think I learn from the experience, minimize the damage, and apply it to the future. Of course, that’s assuming that being wrong is a bad thing. Last summer, when we first committed to developing the Detailed Image shopping cart ourselves, we had an array of potential features that we had to pear down before launching. If we didn’t, we’d have spent six months doing what we needed to … Continue reading
There’s Nothing Ballsy About It
We fired our accountant the other day. And we did it with a month left to file our corporate taxes. The reasoning isn’t important – let’s just leave it at: he works for a very reputable firm but we saw nothing but very unprofessional activity from he and his peers throughout our dealings and we wanted to stop the bleeding before it got worse. When I tell people about decisions like this – quitting my job, getting rid of all of our client work, turning down a questionable lease to a place we loved, saying ‘no’ to a potential partnership … Continue reading
How I Feel a Day Later
That didn’t really go as I expected at all. Here’s what I thought would happen: Most people would question the business decision to get rid of clients. I know we went back and forth on it a lot, and clients have always been a source of revenue for me long before Pure Adapt, so there is a risk involved of cutting yourself off completely from that revenue. Clients would get back to me ASAP and my phone/email would be blowing up with questions. I’d have a real difficult time with a few bigger clients, especially ones that have 50% finished … Continue reading