About me
Hello there. I'm one of the co-founders of Pure Adapt, Inc, located in Albany, NY. Our primary business is Detailed Image, an online retailer of high quality car care supplies. We do almost everything in-house: design, programming, marketing, inventory management, warehouse operations, and more. Since our inception in 2006 we've bootstrapped all of our growth internally. No outside funding, just hard work and reinvesting profits.
I spend most of my days programming for Detailed Image and overseeing our web marketing initiatives, but like a lot of business owners I also spend quite a bit of time on HR, customer service, and anything else that's needed. I have two partners, Mike and Greg, who do a tremendous job managing the other aspects of the business.
We've operated from our warehouse in Guilderland Center, NY since 2008. It started out as a 5,200 sq-ft space, which we then expanded in 2016 and 2019 to accommodate our growth. We have an exceptional staff of full-time employees, part-time employees, and contractors that help make the magic happen. Every day we strive for fantastic customer service, a great website, efficient warehouse operations, a strong culture, and building a company for the long haul.
The Albany Business Review named us one of the Best Places to Work in the Capital Region. We were also named to their list of the Fastest-Growing Companies in the Albany area from 2016 to 2019. And for five straight years from 2015 to 2019 we were named to the Inc. 5000, a list of the fastest growing private companies in America.
We aim to be active in our community. For over 10 years we have offered college scholarships to students of Colonie Central High School through the South Colonie Dollars for Scholars program. I've guest lectured on entrepreneurship at several universities, including SUNY Albany and James Madison, where I co-taught a class called Web Venturing to seniors.
I'm originally from Albany. I attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (aka RPI) in Troy, NY and graduated in 2004 with a degree in Industrial & Management Engineering. After college I worked for the razor company Schick in Milford, CT as a quality control engineer in their R&D department for a year before leaving to pursue my own ventures. At the time I had a growing sports collectibles site SportsLizard.com. In early 2006 I left Connecticut and by the end of the year I had connected with my partners and Pure Adapt was founded.
Where is your blog?
I wrote over 1,000 blog posts on this domain between 2005 and 2021. If you took the time to read those posts, thank you!
In October of 2021 the WordPress installation was compromised. Rather than restore the site from a backup, I decided to take a step back and contemplate whether or not I really wanted to maintain a WordPress blog going forward.
I decided to replace the blog with this simple website. I built a very basic publishing platform that enables me to post short updates below and have them published to my RSS feed. Some updates will also post to my entrepreneurial timeline dating back to 2003, which I preserved from the old site.
I have all of the blog posts and may republish them in the future. If there's a particular post that you'd like a copy of, reach out to me via email and I can send it over as a PDF.
What I'm currently working on
We're in the process of improving a lot of the infrastructure on Detailed Image. We have legacy code and systems dating back to 2007. Now is the time to make improvements to ensure that we can have a modern, fast, and secure site for another 15 years.
We launched Notify My Team in early 2021, but didn't give it the marketing attention that we had planned. It works great for us internally and we have some really good paying customers. 2022 is the time to see if we can grow it into a business.
In 2019 I started working on an exciting software project. Then the pandemic derailed our plans. I'm hoping to get back on track and launch a demo in 2022.
Recent updates
- 10/2021 - One small-but-meaningful productivity improvement that I've made recently is to remove daily newsletters from my inbox. What I noticed happening was that I'd get distracted by a headline while sending a work email. Or feel the need to read the newsletter just to clear it from my inbox. These are by no means that urgent. My solution: I set up Gmail filters to archive and forward them to an Outlook account I set up specifically for newsletter reading on my phone when I have downtime.
- 10/2021 - How does my new site publishing system work? On my laptop I have a local server (WAMP). I created a single database table. When I want to post, I fill in a few fields, such as the content and where I want to post it - my home page under "Recent Updates", my Timeline, my RSS feed- and then I run a script that creates those three static files, which I then FTP up to the server. I can add links, images, and other basic formatting. Simple to use, ephemeral (posts on the homepage disappear once they're bumped off of the page), easy to backup, easy to migrate in the future. Exactly what I want in my personal site.
- 7/2021 - After Apple announced Mail privacy protection, we decided to remove open-tracking pixels from our newsletters. In 2012 when I built our internal newsletter system, we didn't even think twice about building in open tracking. It was a standard feature in all services out there. However, Apple's announcement, along with Hey.com's stance on the privacy implications, led to an internal discussion about the pros and cons of pixel tracking. Doing business in a manner that also respects privacy has become increasingly important to us, and we want to be on the right side of history when it comes to privacy
- 6/2021 - We upgraded to PayPal's Braintree for payments on Detailed Image. The new checkout experience offers many advantages to our customers, like added payment options (Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Pay), better vaulting (i.e. storage) options for faster payment on future purchases, faster refunds, better fraud tools, and more.
- 5/2021 - We bumped the starting pay for the pick & pack job in our warehouse from $14/hr to $15/hr (for reference, the New York State minimum wage was $12.50, and the Federal Minimum Wage was $7.25). It's a good starting point for a job like ours that's as entry level as it gets - no degree, certifications, special skills, or experience is required - but also has growth potential.
Contact me
You can get in touch on Twitter, LinkedIn, or by emailing adam at this domain.