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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: Pure Adapt
Celebrating Our Success
In this day and age, where nothing is easy, we’ve accomplished a great deal as a business over the past few years. Last month we hit several milestones sooner than we had anticipated. One of the things I love about our company is that whenever we’re at a meeting and we’re discussing something big that we’ve done, there’s always talk of how and when we’re going to celebrate. Last night we went to dinner at a “trendy” wine bar in Albany. It was possibly the best meal I’ve ever had in my life. The whole thing took almost four hours. … Continue reading
Pure Adapt Featured on the AMEX Plum Site
About a year ago I wrote a post about how cool the American Express Plum Card is for small businesses. I also posted a picture of how the Pure Adapt card was shown among many others on their website at the time: After my subsequent post about how we saved $1k in FedEx charges with the Plum, AMEX contacted us and asked if they could feature the content of the post in their new online marketing campaign. We didn’t know exactly what to expect, but per Mike’s post earlier today it appears as if they used a quote from that … Continue reading
Getting close…
We turned a major corner this month. While I had my head in the sand focusing on wrapping up programming for our new cart, we had our largest revenue month…by a cool 33% more than our previous best! I didn’t even realize it until George read the revenue number out loud the other day and my jaw dropped. What’s encouraging about this is: We did it in a month that wasn’t during the holidays or the peak auto detailing season. We were able to keep up with inventory management and warehouse work, which bodes well for growth without the need … Continue reading
Teamwork
We have a pretty stressful few months ahead of us. It’s not the same type of stress we had last year when we feared that one wrong move would crush us and eventually decided to not pay ourselves for a few months, but nonetheless it’s still a little more stress than anyone would like. We’ve set up a culture of constant improvement, and because of that we expect a lot out of ourselves. Like any business owner, we see all sorts of opportunities that we’re leaving on the table because we haven’t had the time or money to get to … Continue reading
2008 Online Holiday Shopping Season in Review
This is a guest post by my business partner Mike. Each owner of Pure Adapt will be writing a post while I’m on vacation. A brief intro, my name is Michael Li and I’m a long time friend and current business partner with Adam at Pure Adapt, Inc. and I will be guest posting today. My post will be a review the 2008 online holiday shopping season. For us at Pure Adapt the 2008 holiday shopping season was a solid one and we finished the year strong despite the abysmal economy. We were prepared this year with a full fledged … Continue reading
8 Tips to Financial Stability for Small Businesses
This is a guest post by my business partner George. Each owner of Pure Adapt will be writing a post while I’m on vacation. Financing a small business can be very stressful when you are working with limited capital. Not having a solid cash flow can make or a break a company, so properly handling your finances is something no business owner should overlook. Below will outline some ways Pure Adapt has managed sustain positive cash flow and to continue self funding our growth without looking for outside investors. 1. Invest in QuickBooks or some other accounting software Keeping track … Continue reading
Vacation Time! Guess Who’s Filling In?
I’ve mentioned a few times that the last real vacation I took was a family trip to Florida back in January of 2005. A few months back we decided that since sales would likely be lowest in January (although we’re doing pretty good so far), we’d all take a vacation that month. Greg was away this past week. This coming week is my turn. I’m heading up to a Bed & Breakfast in northern Vermont with my girlfriend. Mostly I’m just looking forward to relaxing and not thinking about work as much as possible. Hopefully I’ll come back refreshed and … Continue reading
New Pure Adapt Inc Site (Finally)
I didn’t plan on posting again before Christmas, but I just finished and uploaded a new and improved Pure Adapt site so I figured it was worthy of something quick before I head off to dinner. The old one-page website needed some updating/expanding, so over the past few weeks I’ve been spending a few hours here and there developing the new site. Mike made the new logo and header, and I did the rest. Like everything else I develop, I tried to use this as a playground to learn a few new things. In particular, I practiced my AJAX skills … Continue reading
A Truly Amazing Experience
It’s hard to believe that we’ve only had Tastefully Driven since April. It feels like it’s been around forever. The first year has been a mixed bag, but overall we’ve learned a lot and created a solid stream of revenue so it’s hard to look at it as anything but a positive experience. My #1 favorite feature of the site is the Commerce with Conscience program where we donate 5% of our pre-tax profit to local charities in the Albany area. The idea being that we’re pulling in revenue from all over the world and pumping some of it … Continue reading
Micro Blog Security Fix
Ever since I wrote the post a few weeks back about our internal micro blogging system (see Using WordPress to Make a Secure Twitter for Business) I’ve been bothered by the fact that it isn’t really as secure as it should be. Following the steps I provided, there is still one unprotected RSS feed that – given the URL of your blog – almost anyone can find. My suggestion when I wrote that post was simply not to give away your URL since it’s an internal system. Obviously that’s not sufficient, and someone in the comments said as much. Every … Continue reading