-
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: Tastefully Driven
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
Tastefully Driven was an April Fools Joke
Nah, just kidding. We’re live. Check it out on TastefullyDriven.com. If you signed up for the pre-launch email list, we’ll be sending you a coupon code by the end of the week. We’re just waiting for a few final products to trickle in and are holding off on our big marketing efforts until everything is in and photoed. We launched with five “stores” and approximately 200 products (store #6 didn’t make the final cut and will be postponed for a few months, which is why the home page is imbalanced) . I’ll talk more about what did and didn’t make … Continue reading
Less Than 2 Weeks Until TD Launch
I’m starting to realize that this 4/1/2008 launch date for Tastefully Driven was a bit aggressive. We didn’t realize how much time would be wrapped up in settling into the warehouse. Nor did we consider how much extra work we’d need to put in as Detailed Image was expanding and reaching record levels in sales. After all, there’s just four of us. If I had it to do all over again, I would have pushed for 5/1. That’s what makes it all the more amazing when I can honestly say that I’m 99% sure we’ll make our targeted launch date. … 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
Starting on Tastefully Driven Pre-Marketing
OK, so it’s happening about 2 weeks later than I had hoped, but I’m finally at the point where I can spend an hour or two a day on some pre-launch hype for Tastefully Driven – the goal obviously being to collect as many email addresses as possible on our splash page. I don’t have a set goal (yet), but having a list of 10,000 to start with can jumpstart a site a lot quicker than a list of 100 so it behooves us to get as many as we freaking can. Today we did two things to get us … Continue reading
Cutting it Close – Time to Step Up
I bet you think I just haven’t been posting much this week because we’ve been busy getting acclimated to the warehouse. Right? Right? Nope – I caught a wicked cold and have spent most of the week home sick getting very little accomplished. This was supposed to be the week where I started my ‘new’ routine, but that’ll have to wait until next week. Speaking of next week, we could end up spending the majority of the week working with the oil company trying to figure out why our heater mysteriously stopped working today. That should be fun. With the … Continue reading
Officially Announcing Tastefully Driven
Now that I’ve got all of the client stuff out of my system, I want to “officially” announce our upcoming site Tastefully Driven. Here’s how it came about: Towards the end of 2007 we realized that our Detailed Image shopping cart was outperforming our expectations and started brainstorming other types of sites where we could ‘copy’ the cart and get similar results, the most obvious being a re-branding of many of the cleaning supplies on DI as home electronics care products. Then we had a handful of other site ideas before that one ‘ah ha’ moment: all of our ideas … Continue reading