-
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.
-
If that sounds like something you're into, you can subscribe to blog updates via RSS or email, or follow me on Twitter. You can get in touch by leaving a comment or through email at
Category Archives: Sacrifice
Teamwork in Action
I’m writing this on Wednesday morning. Up to this point my work this week hasn’t really resembled what a “normal” workweek looks like for me. At all. I’ve spent the majority of my time in the warehouse helping the guys pack orders (we had a really successful early early holiday sale), answering customer service questions (which spike during big sales like this), and interacting with job candidates for our customer service position. Kind of a far cry from the usual web development and web marketing stuff. Why? Because while I was away Greg closed on a new house. Mike and … Continue reading
There’s Always a Trade-Off
In the most recent Inc. Magazine, Norm Brodsky used his Street Smarts column to answer a few reader questions. One in particular caught my interest: Dear Norm: I am 17 years old and recently sold a website for $100,000. It took me and my partners eight months to build, and we had to overcome many obstacles. And yet, when we finally sold it, I didn’t feel excited or elated. Rather, I’ve been really depressed. I went to a dance with a date last Friday and had a horrible time. It reminded me how out of touch I’ve been. As I … Continue reading
Trimming the Fat
Since we made the decision last week to launch our revamped Detailed Image by early April, I have been programming my brains out. I’ve probably worked more hours in the last two weeks than I have in any two week stretch since 2007. While there’s definitely some stress involved with that, there is also a really good by-product of doing it: being busy forces me to trim out all of the unimportant stuff that I spend my time on. I’ve cut the number of feeds in my feed reader in half, stopped playing video games or reading books, have been … Continue reading
There’s No Replacement for Hard Work
Mark Cuban is doing something awesome. He started The Mark Cuban Stimulus Plan – Open Source Funding, where he has decided to help stimulate the economy by investing in ideas and companies that he believes in. He’s still accepting requests via comments on that original post (almost 2k comments and counting!), but today he unveiled some of the first companies that are getting money from him. While I LOVE the idea and hope to someday be able to emulate it myself, I found the first part of his post today more interesting. He mentions that he’s learned 2 things by … Continue reading
A Wacky End to ’08
It was New Year’s Eve. Mike, George, and I would normally be out at a party, but because we were all sick and the weather sucked, we all were home resting. Around 8 PM I woke up from a nap and made my way over to my computer to read my feeds, when I noticed all of our sites were down. Not “down” per se, but all had a 500 Internal Server Error like the one below from the Pure Adapt site: Now, I’ve seen this plenty of times, but never on ALL the sites at once. Usually it’s while … Continue reading
Prioritizing Work – Part Deux
Oke from Life is What You Make of It (one of my favorite blog designs, by the way) left a really interesting comment on my last post about prioritizing work: I got a question for you. I am having a problem with this myself and do a shitty job on getting back on track. How do you prioritize your work/hobby/activities on the side when none of the tasks deal with making money? I’ve been thinking about that for a while, and decided it warranted it’s own post. In many cases, prioritizing the work isn’t the hardest part. It’s figuring out … Continue reading
What I Do on the Weekend
No question the most interesting statement from the interview I posted earlier today with Jun Loayza was when he said: “As a young entrepreneur, you will have NO work/life balance. I am very serious about this. If you want to succeed, you need to be working 24/7 every day of the week.” That’s why I wrote such a long response prior to asking my next question: “It’s easy to be happy for a year or two working all day, every day. In my opinion, it’s hard to be happy doing that for a lifetime – one day you’ll wake up … Continue reading
You Don’t Have to Worry About That!
Anyone who owns a business like ours has been there. You’ve just met a new group of people and they casually ask what you do for a living. You give one of a variety of answers, based upon how web-savvy the crowd is and how interested you are in talking about your business at the moment. They think what you do is really cool and they ask a bunch of nosey-but-well-intended questions. In a way, it gets a bit old. Of course, in another way it’s pretty freaking cool. Having someone genuinely interested in what you do is a pretty … Continue reading
Productive Output Update
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my productive output post where I declared that I would never work more than 35 hours in a week again (see Productive Output: What the 9-5 Misses and Why I’m Done with a 40 Hour Workweek). It was only two months ago, but a lot has changed since then. At the time I had just come off of 2+ years of pushing my entire life aside. In college I worked hard, but I played hard too. I might not have partied as much as some of my friends (some of which are still … Continue reading
Sex vs. Changing the World
One of my huge pet peeves is when someone is in a difficult situation and they whine and complain about it, but proceed to do nothing to change the situation. Usually this comes in two flavors - relationships and jobs – although it really can apply to anything. It drives me nuts. If you don’t like a situation in life get off your ass and do something about it. When it comes to starting your own business, everyone has a tendency to talk a big game. You might succeed, you might fail, but to me it’s unacceptable to talk about … Continue reading