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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: Programming
LockerPulse Fantasy Player Tracking Launched!
On Saturday we wrapped up and released one of my favorite projects I’ve ever worked on: LockerPulse fantasy player news tracking. My partners and I have all been avid fantasy players for years (I was in leagues where Barry Sanders and Emmitt Smith were the consensus top 2 picks!) and like all fantasy football players, we’re looking for any informational edge that we can get to help us win. Especially Sunday mornings, and especially when injuries are involved. There’s nothing worse than starting a guy who isn’t going to play. After launching LockerPulse it didn’t take us long to realize … Continue reading
LockerPulse Launches in the Toshiba App Place
A few months ago I received an email from SnappCloud, a company that builds cloud app stores, on behalf of Toshiba. They were interested in including LockerPulse in an app store that Toshiba was launching. Now, I’ll admit, I was a little skeptical at first. I mean, just how many app stores can there be? Then again, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to schedule a call with them, so I did. And I was really impressed. They had “soft launched” the app store, named the Toshiba App Place and had some pretty impressive results. They came with hard data that … Continue reading
A Milestone For Our Shopping Cart Software
Upon finishing a programming project to improve how we manage out of stock products and then integrate it with our shipping estimates (see image above), I completed all of the major initiatives that we wanted to complete in 2011 to improve our shopping cart software that powers Detailed Image. The reason why we’re at this point and it’s only June 5th is a pretty simple one – most of the important stuff is finally finally done! We’ve built a stable, scalable, easy-to-manage and easy-to-use platform that will serve us well for years to come. There’s nothing “major” left to do…at … Continue reading
The Joys of Internal Programming Projects
In any job, the majority of the important work you do will go unseen to the outside world. When it comes to the programming work I do for our company, many of the projects that have been the most beneficial to us will never see the light of day. Some of the stuff I can blog about, like our inventory zone system, and other stuff is unfortunately better off kept private. Earlier this week we had our most successful Detailed Image sale ever. Any time we’re doing volume at a level that we haven’t experienced before, there are a few … Continue reading
College News on LockerPulse: Start to Finish in 5 Days
On Tuesday morning I received an email from two people at Google asking for some vector graphics for LockerPulse. They said that they were going to be featuring it in an upcoming March Madness promotion, presumably for the Chrome Web App Store, although they didn’t specifically say so (“March Madness” refers to the NCAA basketball tournament that starts this Sunday night with the selection show, with play beginning Tuesday). This would be an awesome opportunity to promote LockerPulse, especially because we haven’t really started our full-fledged marketing campaign. There was just one problem: LockerPulse didn’t cover college sports, something that … Continue reading
Good Web Apps Take Time
Yesterday @DHH wrote a great post on the 37signals blog titled The obsession with next. The basic premise was: Outside of a few breakthroughs here and there, most things that are good are good because they got there slowly. He also linked to the Joel Spolsky article Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To it., which DHH referenced as a classic, but was new to me. I really like Joel and I’ve read a good amount of his posts and articles in Inc. over the years, but I missed this one, since, you know, I was a sophomore in … Continue reading
LockerPulse Ads Up & Running, Version 0.0.0.1
OK so we really don’t version our projects like that. The point is that this is a really early stage project. From the very beginning, prior to even deciding whether or not to have a paid version, we recognized that there was a lot of opportunity in targeting ads to sports fans. SportsLizard does this in a very basic way. On our Price Guide we target eBay ads based upon what card/collectible the user is valuing. Search for a Michael Jordan card, and we’ll show you a banner ad of Michael Jordan cards. It’s worked really well for us over … Continue reading
New LockerPulse Features – Search Engine, AJAX Crawling, and Custom Wallpaper
Over the past two weeks we released a couple of important features for LockerPulse. As I touched upon when I returned from my trip, we’ve got a few interesting opportunities in the works so I’m spending as much time as I can building out the software. The first thing we tackled was a custom wallpaper feature. Users can now upload a background image of their choice, or choose from our various background images. This is one of those things that doesn’t appear to be that important, but when you’re using the site multiple times per day it adds a nice … Continue reading
Testing a New Promo Upsell for the Holidays
I’ve mentioned on a few different occasions that offering free shipping all of the time, say for orders over $100 or $200 doesn’t work well for a business like ours. We’re in a unique industry where weight doesn’t correlate at all to money spent – you can spend $60 on three heavy gallons that cost us maybe $20 to ship to CA, or you can spend $200 on a wax that costs us $8 to ship to CA. We’ve found that as a policy it’s much more fair to everyone if we charge you based on weight, not on amount … Continue reading
My Productive Fall
Towards the end of Summer I decided to sit down and make a list of things that I wanted to accomplish this Fall before the Holiday Season started. It was a lot – more than I thought I could get to – but I like to challenge myself. We consider our “Holiday Season” to start on November 1. I like to have every new cart feature in place by mid-October so we have some time to work any kinks out before the big rush. I’m taking some time off this week and next week to head back to James Madison … Continue reading