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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: Marketing
How We Compete on Black Friday
We’re smaller than most of our competitors. Particularly in automotive detailing, Detailed Image is chasing large sites like Autogeek and Proper. Black Friday is a great microcosm of how we manage to compete with them and rapidly steal market share, despite having a team of only four people and an array of other projects we’re working on. Below is the newsletter that went out this week to our customers. We think we have the best sales of anyone in the industry. This is where all of the hard work and minor efficiency improvements really pay off. There are three … Continue reading
Profitability Update
Back in April I did a post entitled Thoughts on Pricing and Profitability where I basically pondered the advantages of become a higher volume, lower margin retailer: Generating sales is the hardest thing to do in the world of business. If I find a hands-off way to drive sales AND can turn over inventory faster by doing it, I’ll gladly sacrifice some profitability. The comments were mixed – some in agreeance, some not. And rightfully so. It’s an interesting debate with no clear cut right answer for every business in every situation. In the time since, we’ve become more and … Continue reading
FaceUp Web Marketing eBook Updated, Still Free
Quick post here guys. Just wanted to let everyone know that I’ve updated our free FaceUp Web Marketing eBook. It’s been over six months since the last update. The book still gets a decent amount of downloads so I want to be sure that the information conveyed is accurate. The biggest update has to do with the Keyword Research section. Google recently started displaying search volume on their AdWords Keyword Tool. This is HUGE for anyone with a website and an interest in SEO. Prior to this we were left to extrapolate data from Yahoo (Overture) or Wordtracker and “guess” … Continue reading
New TD Store – Electronics Cables
A few months back one of our friends – a former business owner who has now cashed out and is “living the good life” – turned us on to a distributor of high quality cables for low prices. We take his word pretty highly since he’s hardcore into ultra high-end audio equipment. He told us that the quality of these cables are equal to the quality of Monster cables, but for 1/20th the price. So we picked a few up, liked them, and decided we wanted to carry the line on Tastefully Driven. With that, the Electronics Cables & Accessories … Continue reading
A Really Cool New Detailed Image Feature
Earlier this week we launched a feature called the Detailed Image Daily Special. It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds – each day one of our products is on sale for 24 hours. The Daily Special is featured on the homepage with a nifty little countdown clock: A special message and countdown clock are also on the product page in case someone reaches the product from somewhere other than the home page: Here’s how we do it: each night at midnight Eastern time our system automatically selects an item and places it on sale. The sale prices is determined from … Continue reading
Sell Products? Do This
I’ve said it before, but it amazes me how many online retailers don’t submit their products to Google Base. It’s free, they support a slew of formats (upload products one at a time, upload a spreadsheet, or auto-FTP from your database like we do), and it gets your products shown on Google Base, Google Product Search, and – most importantly – normal Google searches. Take the example below (click to view full size screenshot). When someone searches for Men-U Healthy Face Wash, a product we sell on Tastefully Driven, Google automatically recognizes the query as a product search and displays … Continue reading
Thoughts on Pricing and Profitability
Last week for the first time we listed our products for sale on Amazon.com. I put up about half of the Tastefully Driven catalog because products must have a US UPC code to be on Amazon and some of our detailing products and supplements do not have UPC codes. The entire process was a complete pain in the ass (at least compared to Google Product Search and Yahoo Shopping) and the whole time I was saying to myself “this is a waste of time and money”. Amazon charges $39.99/month and 15% of the purchase price, which eats into profit quite … 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
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 Tastefully Driven Wall
A few weeks back Mike ordered a bunch of Tastefully Driven promo cards, which essentially say “Tastefully Driven: 4.1.08″. We’ve sent batches to friends around the country, handed them out to our friends and family around here, and even just (like 20 minutes ago) slipped one into our bill at TGI Fridays. However, despite our best efforts we still have a crapload of these things sitting around. After becoming frustrated with my master plan of building a huge card tower, Mike and I decided to turn one of the walls in the warehouse into a big “TD” with the cards….pretty … Continue reading