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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: Efficiency
The Advantage of Skimming
Sometimes I think skimming gets a bad rap. We’re worried that people in the future won’t be able to focus long enough to comprehend anything of real value. While there’s likely some truth to that, I also see huge opportunity and huge value in skimming…especially for business owners. Half of the battle when it comes to making business decisions in our current landscape is knowing what’s possible. Whether we’re talking specifically web development (HTML5, CSS3, responsive design, etc), or any other aspect of running a business – marketing, customer service, human resources, legal, accounting, strategy, and the like – it’s … Continue reading
A Huge (& Highly Efficient) Cyber Monday!
That picture says it all. I couldn’t stand back far enough to get all of the boxes in the shot! I’m writing this at 4:45 PM on Monday, so I’m not sure whether or not today will break our record for sales in a day. I think it will based on our pace, but if it doesn’t, it will be close*. Regardless, we’ve already surpassed last November in sales, and the year as a whole surpassed 2010 a while back so in some ways it’s kind of insignificant. To me, the real significant thing about today was just how easy … Continue reading
Creating a Better Customer Service Workflow: Part 3 – Synchronized Text Expansion with AutoHotKey & Dropbox
In part one of this series about creating a better customer service system, I wrote about the problems with our existing customer service setup, in part two I wrote about our new solution using Google Apps Gmail. In this last post of the series I’m going to cover how we use AutoHotKey and Dropbox to synchronize text expansion across our company. What is Text Expansion? Text expansion is one of those things that’s somewhat difficult to explain, but once you see it or try it you instantly realize the value of it. Lifehacker did a great feature on text expansion … Continue reading
Creating a Better Customer Service Workflow: Part 2 – Our Solution
In my previous post, Creating a Better Customer Service Workflow: Part 1 – The Problem, I gave an overview of the issues we’ve begun to face as we’ve introduced multiple people into our customer service workflow. As you can see from the graphic above, our solution was simply Gmail. Well, a pimped out version of Google Apps Gmail that takes advantages of all of the unique features that Gmail has to offer in a manner that actually turns it into a pretty awesome customer service system for a small team. This solution sort of came about by accident. Since we … Continue reading
Creating a Better Customer Service Workflow: Part 1 – The Problem
One of the ways that any small business can outdo the competition is with great customer service, something we’ve been dedicated to providing since day one. Given that we don’t provide phone support, it is even more important for us to provide the absolute best email customer service that we can. We’ve recently overhauled our customer service workflow so that it’s simpler, more scalable, and more efficient. These changes apply to all of our sites that generate a lot of customer questions – Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and SportsLizard, but primarily you can assume that I’m talking about Detailed Image throughout, … Continue reading
Attempting to Quantify How Busy We Are
Detailed Image has had a really busy Spring season. Everyone has had to chip in a bit extra at the warehouse to ensure that we get all of the orders out the door in a timely manner. This past week was so busy that Mike, Greg, and I went in Sunday to pack boxes for about five hours, something we’ve never done before outside of the Black Friday to Cyber Monday rush. We’ve also each had many days where we’ve had to go into the warehouse unplanned to help out. One of the more difficult things has always been figuring … Continue reading
Happy to be Finally Paying for Google Apps Premiere
One of the goals of our company has always been to keep as much of our data on the web as possible, preventing the loss of a single computer from hurting us, and making it simple for anyone to get up and running on a new machine in minutes. We’ve also always tried to have redundant backups of everything. However unlikely, it’s always possible that the worst case emergency scenario can happen. Back in 2008 we migrated all of our email to Google Apps. Along with email, we also moved all of our documents and wikis. It’s almost impossible to … Continue reading
The Big Impact of Little Time Savings
It’s really easy to get blinded by the routine tasks that you do. So much so that sometimes I don’t step back and think critically enough about them. I have a lot of recurring tasks on my to-do list that fall into this category. When it pops up, I do it. Generally without much thought. It’s just a necessary road block to pass so that I can actually start my work for the day. Lately we’ve been trying to take a critical look at everything we do. As we grow, you can only do so much and still keep your … 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
Why I Check Email First Thing Every Day
Every once in a while when reading an article about email productivity I’ll see a reference to the book Never Check E-Mail In the Morning: And Other Unexpected Strategies for Making Your Work Life Work by Julie Morgenstern. Right up front I’ll say that I haven’t read the book, but have seen it referenced enough to know the idea behind the technique. From this Lifehacker article Top 10 Smart and Lazy Ways to Save Your Workday: Author of Never Check Email in the Morning Julie Morgenstern suggests waiting for one hour before you open up your email inbox in the … Continue reading