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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
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
Coupon Code Strategy Ramblings
We run a ton of sales. Just check the Detailed Image home page at any given time you’ll always find a daily special, weekly free item if you spend $x, and products on sale for monthly special. There’s also a good chance we’re running a big site-wide promo, such as free or flat-rate shipping, a brand or category of products on sale, a percentage off of everything on the site, buy product x get product y for free, or some combination of those things. At any given time we’re also running countless promos behind the scenes for various segments of … Continue reading
A Big Week for LockerPulse
Last week we completed our revamp of LockerPulse. On Wednesday we launched our re-design, on Friday we completed our source project, and I spent the last few days tying up a few loose ends and debugging a few minor issues. By my count, in total there were about 40 changes – design/UI improvements, feature improvements, and fixed bugs – and 567 new news sources added, bringing the total number of sites that we’re indexing to around 1400. If you’re interested in checking out the Premium Version, this link is good for free access for life for the first 100 people … Continue reading
Obscurity is Your Friend
Last month during the Facebook privacy backlash, Jason Fried from 37Signals wrote a great post about Diaspora, the “open source” Facebook that raised $200,000 on Kickstarter before even beginning their project. They received publicity from mainstream media outlets like the NY Times and the fund raising took off. His argument, one that I agree with, is that Diaspora is taking the wrong approach: Diaspora has all the wrong things at the wrong time. Competition that kills isn’t pre-announced — it catches an unsuspecting incumbent by surprise. In particular, I found one of his points to hit home: The spotlight is … Continue reading
How to Figure Out What to Automate
I think everyone who owns a web business wants to do as little work as possible to make as much money as possible. That’s pretty obvious right. Given that we’ve built our cart from scratch, we have the ability to automate just about anything that can be automated. So why don’t we? I get that question from time to time, particularly from people who have just caught the internet business bug and think that they can just automate everything, do nothing, and sit back while the money rolls in. The answer is pretty simple: because in many instances there are … Continue reading
The LockerPulse “Thank You” Post
With any web project it just makes sense to utilize a lot of the existing software out there to help speed up development time. With LockerPulse in though, I feel particularly indebted to several of the libraries that we use. Many are open source, some are not. Either way, we would not have been able to develop a full fledged RSS reader in such a short time without these projects that have been being developed for years. In almost every case we had to hack things up to get them just the way we wanted for our usage, but the … Continue reading
The LockerPulse 30 Day Update…on Day 15
I’m breaking my own rule about waiting 30 days before issuing any updates to a new web project, but it’s with good reason. Mike will be heading to China for a month-long vacation starting Saturday and I wanted to work with him to push out the changes rather than try to go at it solo (things tend to come out much better when we do that…) There were also several common threads in the feedback we received that pointed out some problems that I wanted to try to fix sooner rather than later. I do feel a bit bad about … Continue reading
Managing Out of Stock Products
Back when we were several magnitudes smaller, managing out of stock products was easy. If a customer ordered the product, we’d just send them an email and discuss with them whether they’d rather substitute a different product, get a refund, or have us hold their order until we got the product back in stock. If a product was going to be out for a while, we would just edit the description to say that it’s out and will be back in soon. Simple enough. However, as we grew, we realized that system wouldn’t cut it. Aside from the sheer volume … Continue reading
Making Shipping Estimates a Little More Obvious
Back in September when we did our exhaustive shipping project on Detailed Image, one of the more interesting features was a system we developed to estimate the ship date and arrival date of the package based upon the delivery location, time of day (before or after our last shipment time), day of the week, upcoming holidays, and shipping service selected. It’s a pretty sweet system. In the comments, Oke suggested that we include the day of the week so that the customer doesn’t have to peek at a calendar to figure out when their package will arrive. I agreed and … Continue reading
Programming or Design – Which Comes First?
Over the past few years, Mike and I have come up with a pretty good design and development process. I think the new Detailed Image site is proof of that. I mean, we built a pretty awesome e-commerce platform from scratch in less than five months while still performing most of our day to day responsibilities. It always interests me to hear how other companies do things, especially because we’re starting to learn that we do things different than most. It’s not that our way is necessarily better or worse, but just that we solved the problem our way, which … Continue reading