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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: Work Ethic
Monday as a Measure
Steve over at Nerd Fitness wrote a great post last Monday entitled Always Dominate Monday: I challenge you today to start looking at Mondays differently. It’s not the start of a long week. It’s not the worst day of the week. Monday is the most important day of the week, so do it right: Plan out your meals for Monday on Sunday night. Where, when, and what will you eat? Can you prepare any of that the night before? Plan out your workouts for the week, and put them in your calendar. How many sets, reps, what time, and where. … Continue reading
Do More With Less
One thing I think we do really well is get more done with less. Less time. Less experience. Less money. Less room for error. What we have “less” of has changed over time. Sometimes it even changes from project to project. What hasn’t changed is our ability to consistently make the most of what we have. It’s one of the reasons that we have steadily grown as a company over 5+ years. It’s hard to know exactly why or how we’re able to do more with less. If I had to guess, the two most important factors would be our … Continue reading
X != Y
From the time we start learning we’re taught that if we put in X (time) that we’ll get Y (what we want). In school, if you study and do your homework, you’ll get good grades and be able to get in to a good college. At most jobs, if you work long and hard and are a team player, you’ll get raises and promotions (regardless of whether or not the work you did positively effects the bottom line). These statements are correct in most situations for most people. So when those same people read about a business that took 3 … Continue reading
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
How Our Team Pulled Together Quickly For Today’s Big Product Launch
At 6 PM EST tonight Detailed Image was among the first retailers to begin selling the new Meguiar’s DA Microfiber Correction System. Meguiar’s is arguably the most well-known detailing brand in the world, and this product line has been receiving tons of hype. The whole process has been fascinating to watch unfold. For the most part, everything has happened within the last week. Everyone has been working their ass off to ensure that at 6:01 PM tonight we had done everything we could to have an exhaustive online presence for these hot new products. My role in the whole thing … 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
Giving Credit Where Credit is Due
Yesterday I had to go to the DMV to renew my license. Not exactly my favorite thing to do. I purposefully drive a little further to a rural area as to avoid any of the downtown DMVs because those places are a mess. When I walked in around 10:30 AM, my best guess at when it would be empty, I was greeted by a nice long line anyway. While I was waiting though, I noticed that one of the ladies helping people was really good at her job. I mean really good. She worked about as fast as a human … Continue reading
The Idea Chart
About once every year I find myself re-reading Getting Real, the first book by 37Signals from 2006 about their software development process. There’s so much good stuff in there. I could probably do multiple posts on each chapter. Anyway, one thing that caught my eye when I was flipping through recently was this “idea chart” in Chapter 6 by Derek Sivers, one of the many “experts” they reference throughout the book: Be An Executioner It’s so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas. (People who want me to sign an nda to tell me the simplest idea.) … Continue reading
Lay Bricks
My good friend Adam Gilbert wrote recently on the My Body Tutor blog: When you give it your all every day, not only do you feel awesome for having done so, but you are making progress. And at the end of the day, I’ve never felt better from taking a day off of laying bricks than I have from a hard days work of laying them. Ever. One brick at a time. That’s so true. That article was in the context of dieting and exercising, but it just as easily applies to entrepreneurship. I enjoy taking time off. But I … Continue reading
What People Don’t Like to Hear
We often get asked about our e-commerce platform by other business owners. They like the functionality and want to know exactly what we’re using so that they can use it too. We reply with something to the extent of “our team built the platform in-house for solely our own use”. If I get the question, I also tend to then suggest Shopify and Magento as solutions that might work for them. I enjoy the question because it really validates the hard work that we all put into it. I often wonder how much more interested people would be if they … Continue reading