One of the primary goals of this blog is to give people a peek into the life of someone who decided to work for themselves instead of pursuing a corporate career. Back in college I wish I knew that running my own business was a career option. And if I did know it was an option, I would have had a million questions for someone who was 25 and ran their own online business. For most people, their entire life is structured for them –… Continue reading
When people ask this question, I think they are really asking three questions: Can you be happy in a career in the corporate world? Yes. Can you innovate in a career in the corporate world? Yes. Can you be an entrepreneur if you’re working for someone else? No. I’ll explain my answers in a second. This question popped into my head while I was reading a post on Employee Evolution last night. If you don’t follow the blog, the founders (coincidentally both named Ryan) recently… Continue reading
I’ve decided to hold off on promoting Music Alerts for a while for a few reasons. Primarily because I’m in the middle of ramping back up our client services after the launch of DI and I’m swamped, but also because I wanted to give it some time to be tested in the field. There’s no way to predict when an album will be added to Amazon, so I just sat back and waited. Today I got my first real alert. It worked perfectly – Google… Continue reading
There’s no one out there that loves the recent advances on the web more than I do. From a user standpoint, “Web 2.0” is all about innovative technologies that push the boundaries of the web without costing a cent. From Flickr to MySpace/Facebook, Google Apps, and YouTube, one common denominator is that they are all free. And that’s awesome – if you are a user. But what about if you are a development company? Those rare successes have baited us into thinking that online advertising… Continue reading
I received a handful of great emails/comments about Music Alerts in the last 24 hours. I’ve also heard from a few hardcore fans who tried creating feeds of 200+ artists. I call them hardcore because mine consisted of about 25 :). As with any really raw program the faults were exposed for those large feeds so I spent a few hours today cleaning the programming up: Faster feed generation. Previously, I was generating the feeds on the fly every request…meaning each time you or your… Continue reading
Last Friday afternoon I realized that I almost missed the album release of one of my favorite bands. I just happened to visit their website out of boredom and notice they had already released a few singles and were about to release a new album. I don’t have my pulse in the music industry to the point where I know every release as soon as it announced, so I usually rely on checking bands websites. I wrote on a sticky note “find music alerts site”…. Continue reading
A few posts ago I mentioned our PDF invoice system for Detailed Image, one of the main benefits of which is that it brings us a step closer to being a paperless company. Every PDF I’ve opened since we began working on that has reminded me that I’m saving paper by reading it on my screen.This afternoon I had the same thought while “flipping” through a digital booklet that came with an album I recently purchased on iTunes. At first I thought “isn’t it nice… Continue reading
Preface: My mission with the blog is to try to get more young people to consider entrepreneurship as a career choice, because I know it is possible and my partners and I are living proof of it. I definitely definitely am not advocating that a sense of entitlement is a good thing for anyone of any age. From all of the nasty emails I’ve received related to this post I completely realize I did a horrible job of getting that point across. At the… Continue reading
Since we launched the new Detailed Image site last week we’ve had a lot of “the site looks cool” compliments. While we certainly appreciate the positive feedback, 99.99% of visitors will never ever recognize the changes we made to help improve Pure Adapt as a business. This post is dedicated to those features, why we put them in place, and the lessons learned in building a custom shopping cart from scratch. The goal was to have at least the functionality of the old cart for… Continue reading
Last night, after debugging from 9 AM to 9 PM we went to launch the new Detailed Image site, which has been a work in progress for all four of us the past 3 months or so. The first thing we did after uploading everything was test the redirects – which of course didn’t work. I’m no rookie when it comes to migrating sites and redirecting old pages to new ones – hell, I did it a week ago flawlessly with this blog! After exhausting… Continue reading