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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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A Huge (& Highly Efficient) Cyber Monday!
That picture says it all. I couldn’t stand back far enough to get all of the boxes in the shot! I’m writing this at 4:45 PM on Monday, so I’m not sure whether or not today will break our record for sales in a day. I think it will based on our pace, but if it doesn’t, it will be close*. Regardless, we’ve already surpassed last November in sales, and the year as a whole surpassed 2010 a while back so in some ways it’s kind of insignificant. To me, the real significant thing about today was just how easy … 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
A Randomly Selected, Potentially Awesome Post From 7/15/2008
Does This Happen to Anyone Else?
This is driving me nuts. So I’m on browsing stories on Digg, which I am now officially obsessed with and fascinated by from a user perspective, a community perspective, and a business perspective. I click on a story in Firefox (3.0, but also happened previously in versions 2.xx) and about 1/10th of the time a page that should have a banner ad that looks like this: Has a banner ad that looks like this: With the javascript actually typed out: Am I the only one that this happens to? Wtf Digg. If this happens to anyone other than me, you’re … Continue reading
Embrace Those Constraints
Today I deployed a small feature on LockerPulse: keyboard shortcuts. This is one of those power user features that we’ve had a few customers contact us about. Most people won’t use it, but the people who are used to using keyboard shortcuts on Gmail and Google Reader will find it extremely valuable. I had a pocket of time before the chaos of the holiday shopping season ensues next week. Rather than digging in to a large project that I’d have to put on hold for a few weeks, I decided to make the most of my time and just release … Continue reading
Now With a “Real” Office
Back in ’09 I wrote The Bootstrapped Office. At that time we had the simplest, most basic work spaces at our warehouse and at home. As should be the case, there were a million things more important than the aesthetics of our office: Thing is, our customers will never see our work area. So when things go good for us we invest in better technology, employees, new product lines, new marketing initiatives, and a little bit in ourselves. Those things matter in our business. The aesthetics of a work area don’t. That was 100% true back then. The office was … Continue reading
Teaching Link Building
In the web venturing class that I’m co-teaching we recently covered SEO for their newly launched WordPress-driven websites. Like every topic in the class, we’re trying to cram ten classes worth of information in to one or two classes so that we can move on to the next topic and give them exposure to all aspects of web venturing throughout the class. Over the course of two periods we covered the basics of on-site SEO, the importance of incoming links, and how to utilize Google Webmaster Tools. We covered most of the important stuff from my SEO & Web Venturing … Continue reading
Holiday Shopping Season Starts Now!
You know what that means for us – a really really busy month. Like most retailers it seems like we keep starting our holiday sales earlier and earlier each year. My inbox this week was full of early Black Friday promotions. I guess technically our early early holiday sale in October was the beginning, but the real holiday craziness starts today with our always-interesting 25%/20%/15% off 3-day sale: The last time we ran this sale I was on vacation and the first day crashed the site. It was kind of a nightmare. That was in mid-2009 just after launching our … Continue reading
What About Competitors?
Whenever I give a talk to college students, I always get asked about our competitors. How do we follow what they do? How do we react to what they do? What do we do to protect ourselves from them? The answer is pretty simple: we don’t. I’m of the opinion that business do not fail because of anything that their competition does or doesn’t do. They fail because of what they do or don’t do. The second you start focusing on your competition is the second that you stop focusing on your customers. You also become a defensive company. You’re … Continue reading
How We Make Business Decisions – The CAG Model
I’ve noticed over the years that we’ve become very balanced in our decision making. I think that comes from having a very diverse set of partners. Almost every major decision involves a group discussion in which we discuss the pros and cons of the decision, as well as the priorities of making a decision (sometimes the best business decision is to just leave something alone). And, for the most part, we’ve been successful with this approach. Not like billion dollar successful, but continuous, steady, profitable growth in a down economy. I was thinking a lot about this the other day. … Continue reading
Warehouse Heating Problem Solved…3+ Years Later
When we first moved in to our warehouse back in February of 2008 we were less than thrilled with the heating situation. Don’t get me wrong – the place was the perfect size for the perfect price, and to be honest the low cost of operating it is probably one of our biggest assets…but the heating situation still sucked. There were two oil heating units, one for the office and one for the warehouse, both of which looked like they were no less than fifty years old. The place hadn’t had an occupant in over five years, so the oil … 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