We have social networks for just about everything these days. If there’s one for dogs and cats, why not for cars?
Berkeley, California based Boompa is just that - a new web startup focused on car fanatics (and better yet, it isn’t ridiculous). The founders, Ethan Lance and Dave Snider, previously worked together at CNET before starting this company.
Users enter information on cars they own, or want to own. Other users can tag and comment the vehicle, and contact the owner and/or add him or her as a friend. The site is extremely well designed and uses Ajax effectively throughout. The fact that just the two founders built the site in a few months is impressive.
The founders have another, rather ambitious goal as well - to create the definitive database of car information on the web, called their Database Project:
The Boompa Database Project is an initiative started by the founders of this site in co-operation with the boompa community to build an enterprise level vehicle database that will be freely distributed back to the community through a developer API feed under a Creative Commons license. The current target for completion of the API is late Summer 2006.
They also took the time to document the process of starting the company and creating the product. Like Riya founder Munjal Shah’s posts on his experience with the Riya launch, this is a must read for every entrepreneur.
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Thanks for the kind words. I’m sure our server will blow up now and Ethan and I will have a busy sunday fixing caching issues, we really haven’t seen the servers tested. No complaints though of course. If anyone has any feature additions, questions or general flames, I’ll put the suit on.
Nice idea. If high school boys find it, this site is going to be the biggest thing evar. Really nice idea.
Not a car buff but this site even caught my fancy
AWESOME idea and very NICE site design.
just started reading the story of how the company started etc. always appreciate the hard work of start-ups!!!
nice idea, horrible name.
Poe - Why don’t you like the name?
Boompa is competing against thousands of generalist and niche oriented auto communities that already have established brands, huge user bases, and equal if not superior feature sets. Automotive enthusiasts choose communities about their specific vehicles - that is why communities like benzworld.org and m5board.com (which I frequent) are so much more popular than general communities like autoforums.com. If you are going to go after a larger landscape than just one manufacturer, than you should target a specific demographic and create a community around it like tunerfriends.com - boompa is just too generalist and too late to market.
I am a car fanatic and have a pretty good grasp on this market. An appealing UI alone is not sufficient in this highly competitive and fragmented market.
You gotta be kidding me…..
This concept is nothing new….rideroom.com, carspace.com, and a couple others have been around for awhile. However Boompa is probably has the best design, interface, and feature use.
@benjamin
You could be right, though traditionally umbrella sites do tend to handle more traffic then boards for no other reason then google (more content usually equates to more traffic). Cardomain, who I consider the site most similar to ours, is easily the largest non-classified car site on the net at present. Also, we are as far as I know the only car site that has a specific board per car model, so we do at least try to give people a narrow experience if they want it. Add that with a part specific database (who is using such and such part), user submitted guides (though we don’t have many at present) and there’s a potentially large amount of content to be built over time. Again… potentially, which isn’t saying much.
I believe you’re correct about relevance though. Are we going to be as relevant for VW fans as VWVortex? Definitely not. I think we’d be successful simply if people put their sigs linking to their car at boompa at those sites.
It’s funny, you never know how communities will end up. Sites I’ve built have gone well with board traffic (Guzzlefish and TV.com) and not so well (MP3.com). I did some different things with the actual board design this time around (mostly that there is heavy AJAX) and I’m hoping I didn’t try to get too tricky with them. AJAX seems to be a constant battle, you need to do about 2x the QA you had to do with a traditional site.
In any case, for me it was just fun building a large, everything but the kitchen sink site with a good friend over 2 months. I’m not terribly concerned about how it’ll end up (though I would like to pay back our modest loans), mostly I’m just glad I found someone willing to take a risk with me and build a big site in 2 months with only 2 dudes. It was a fun challenge and something I recommend to any engineer. Being able to look at something you poured your soul into over a short period of time without the normal resources of a large company (like we had at CNET) and seeing it for the most part well recieved gives you a great high.
dave,
when will “Part 2: Technology, Design, and our Build Schedule.” of Boompa post-mortem be ready?
looking forward to reading more
@nick
Heh, hopefully soon. We’re not sure how we wanna do it. We’d like it to be mostly tutorials about how we set up our servers to work quickly, how we used the Dojo Toolkit for our AJAX and general notes about our directory structure and organizational philosophies.
A quick intro is that our work setup was Ethan on his PC, me on my Mac and a local linux box as a staging server with CVS setup between the three. We worked on seperate sandboxes on the linux box then worked 6 day week, 12 hour days for about 9 weeks. We’ve since moved to normal working schedules and spend about half our time out of the office at local car events.
Our live setup has 4 servers, 1 db, 2 loadbalanced frontends and one specific image server. We used PHP 5, MySQL 5, SMARTY, Pear libraries and Dojo. The setup seems to be doing ok even though we have a limited amount of caching (mostly smarty) set up at present. We’ll move into more heavy memcaching as we grow and then scale hardware as needed. The big thing with image sites is we basically will need to continually scale our storage space, but that tends to be pretty cheap. We’re leasing all our hardware at pesent, just because hardware and DBA stuff is what we know least and wanted to the flexibility to change at a whim.
Our biggest problems are with AJAX and browser compatibility. Like right now we have a mem leak in Explorer that we just realized. I really dig what you can do with AJAX, but I’m curious to see if it will be widely adopted as people think just because its so sensitive.
great info dave!
i’m using XAJAX and no SMARTY for my current projects so i was curious to look into what you and Ethan have used
thanks for the tip on SMARTY, DOJO, and MEMCACHED - looking into them now!
“Boompa” - you have to visualize usage scenarios for that brand among your target demographics. Can you see a bunch of F&F-type kids using the name “Boompa?” Or, a bunch of grizzled musclecar types? Or a yuppie professional with a weekend Harley fetish? I’m not saying that any will or won’t - just try to visualize it happening and ask if it fits. Then again, I assume you have a brand strategy, research, and testing - so perhaps I’m just no longer cool enough to recognize a good brand.
As a former riceboy, then autocrosser, and now moved-on-from-the-scene, I am having trouble seeing it, however. IMHO, the name doesn’t lend itself to matters automotive - it sounds like something “cute” targeted at children.
One final thought - from a logo design standpoint, what does it mean that the “pa” is orange? Why use a courier looking font? Does your logo really appeal to your target audiences?
btw, I don’t mean to sound super-critical; these are just all things that I struggle with. I cringe when I think of the non-sensical goofy sounding names of my own sites. And my logos all suck fully. But - dayjob, family, etc comes first, so they continue to stink. So it goes!
All that being said, congrats on putting together a great site, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the ambitious database side of things turns out.
-rod.
I don’t understand how on one hand the company states their database is “freely distributed back to the community” while at the same time saying that it’s available only to “anyone who wishes to use it in a non-commercial way”. doesn’t sound that “free” to me.
The more I play with the site the more I like it. The design is very good and very original.
Not a original idea. See http://www.carspace.com
@ron
No worries, I agree with a lot of where you’re going. As far as the name we decided to use it for 2 things. 1. It was Ethan’s grandfather’s nickname, who the site was dedicated to. 2. It is 6 letters, easy to spell and easy to remember. Since number 1 isn’t going to matter to anyone, number 2 is our reason. Also remember that we’re not just a car site, but a site for planes, ATVs, bikes and whatever else people “ride”. Having a car specific name could have killed that premise. I’d say we’re about 50/50 on love of the name. You’d be amazed at the number of people who called their grandfather “boompa”.
As to brand testing I’ll admit you’ve given us too much credit. We’re just two dudes in a small office with a few thousand bucks. I was able to once build up an audience and sell a site ridiculously named “Guzzlefish.com” so in my mind domain names are secondary to featureset and ease of use. That said, I know it doesn’t exactly help our cause. The “pa” orange was mostly so that we accentuated the “boom” which we hoped people would find some logic to out of the “cutesy” name. As to the general design of the logo I’ll just claim to be a decent UI designer and a poor logo designer. Luckily the web is a dynamic place and we can change at a whim.
It is a very fine line though. You either make a clean UI that is easy to use and understand, or you make a heavy, hip one that is targeted to a specific style. Generally I think people are going with clean these days, I’m not saying it’s going to prove to be a smart choice, but I did voluntarily make that choice knowing full well we might be in trouble for it. My logic is that the cars are going to be styled enough, you don’t need heavy design to compete with them (see http://custom.autos.yahoo.com for an antithesis).
In any case, thanks for the observations.
Interesting idea, but I have to agree most real enthusiasts will stick to their niche communities. You guys will probably get decent traffic, but I do not foresee the database from actually becoming a comprehensive source of information. Most message board users do not want to spend time sharing their knowledge outside the message board.
Thats pretty cool. Dunno if a the US’s population of cookie-cutter stock vanilla cars will make it a financial success… but I am anxiously awaiting a site for robots! I’m eager to show off my Roomba
Next time you create a logo, you should probably try to not copy Lotus.
@William
“Next time you create a logo, you should probably try to not copy Lotus.”
Your refering to the default icon users have if they dont create their own…. dont be silly we didnt ‘try’ to copy lotus on that, we ‘did’ copy lotus. The site is dedicated to my grandfather a huuuuge lotus fan. The icon is an obvious homage to lotus and my grandad. We may change the icon now and again for to pay tribute to other great cars.
Lotus cars are generally good, but what is also good is originality.
Anyhow, like so many people said - there are a lot of sites out exactly like this.
TunerSpot.com
CarSpace.com
MyOnlineGarage.com
Your site lacks:
- a weblog (because people do like to track the progress of their car, or share their experiences street racing against the local honda crew or dodging the local street racing task force)
- picture organizing (how can I post pics of my last track day?! Oh yes - send your users to Photobucket or Flickr and lose the impressions at the same time)
- a cool name for the site
- the ability to create groups (people want to create their groups and they should not have to go to onlineshowoff.com to do so)
- community appeal (who exactly is this site supposed to be appeal to? Have you checked your SEMA numbers and seen that SUVs are by far the most modified vehicles with their fugly 24″ spinnerz?)
- ability to customize a user page. Even Catarina Fake agrees - people want to customize their little corner on the world wide interweb. Don’t pull a friendster and get screwed because you didn’t understand what users want (yes a decent user experience and the ability to customize!)
@William G.
Cool thanks for your comments. We’ll be rolling out more features throughout the summer. We’ve only been up for about a month. Your right about the track day photos and groups… all coming.
The weblog is already in there on each user page. We’ll think more about some of your other suggestions. Thanks for visiting boompa.com
You’re welcome and best of luck fighting against the very entrenched car forums. In the end, that will be your biggest fight - not the other CarSpaces of the world.
@ William G
hehe, thanks man. I’d just be happy supporting those car forums as an extra service to them… and building my car site for love of cars.
We’ll see how it goes!
Every niche social networking site wants to be the next Flickr. This is the first site I’ve seen which I really think could be the next Flickr. Here’s my reasoning: Flickr has proven that people are passionate about their photograhs and that you can build a community around photography. Well, we all know how passionate people are about their cars, so it’s a no brainer that you can apply the same concept to building a community around car enthusiasts.
Me, I’m a VW buff, and was a major poster on VWVortex for a while, but the forum community (read: every other car community) isn’t as connected as Flickr, and I’ve since devoted less and less time to VWVortex and more time to Flickr. In a sense, it’s more satisfying. I’m definitely going to sign up at Boompa and try it out, especially since I already found two of my Volkswagen buddies (who are also friends on Flickr) have already signed up!
Suggestion: Use a similar tagging system as Flickr. For example, if I want to look at VWs, I can go to boompa.com/vehicles/vw/ to find all VWs and if I want to look at a Toyota Corolla, I can go to boompa.com/vehicles/toyota/corolla to find all Corollas, and if I want to find all 1969 Camaros, I can go to boompa.com/vehicles/chevrolet/camaro/1969 to find them. You get the idea; it’s a simple, obvious heirarchy which works like a charm on Flickr.
To all the haters saying it’s already been done. Google when it came out had a lot less features than its competitors and it still won. What people don’t understand in the economy is that there is no such thing as first mover advantage.
It’s funny that my site does the same thing, yet no techcrunch feature. Michael, when we relaunch within a months time, you’ll be hearing from me.
BTW, if it helps the status any, I’m a current Disney Internet Group employee.
Oh Sam, you conviently forget in your defense of Boompa that Google had more relevant search results versus their competitors, for example.
What is inherently better about Boompa versus CarSpace.com? Ajax that makes Arrington tingle? Woo. It has less features and less people using it. To date, Boompa has a blog that someone spent entirely too much time writing when they could have been spending more time researching the market they were entering and figuring out a way to take out the car enthusiast major players.
The site useability is excellent. As a car buff myself, I like the idea. There are tons of auto sites, but if it takes too long to figure out the ops the visitor is long gone. If you ever need anything Mercedes related, drop me a note - I’m on the club’s national board.
This idea doesn’t need to be original to hit. Haven’t we learned that over and over in this space?
Dave Snider - man - you are awewsome.
I just sent your report http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/5/18/16204/1055
to all my partners.
I am 21 year old kid with 3 direct mail
millionaires who are trying to launch a
few social network sites.
I would love to talk to you and could also
mail out to our large databases of 200K
subscribers if you’d want to engage in a
conversation.
My SKYPE ID = jasonjcox and my email
is jjcoxjjcox@gmail.com
I LOVED this quote
“We of course had tons of ideas, just like I imagine you do. The funny thing is, a car site wasn’t even on the radar when we started, but in the end, it was the one that made the most sense. The trick to picking the best one of your ideas is basically to do a large amount of research on the competitive market. My favorite method is to walk into your local bookstore, check the magazine rack, and take a tally of the number of magazines dedicated to certain genres. Then take those numbers and compare them to the number of decent websites doing the same. The site you should be building is the one with the largest magazine coverage to sucky website ratio. Why? Quite simply that the number of magazines for the most part represents the current interest (and number of advertisers) in a specific industry. Now this doesn’t work for everything, obviously some hobbies are likely to cater to people who don’t use computers, but to be honest, that day is slowly coming to pass.”
Damn that makes coming up with a good
idea for a social network site WAY easier.
My first site I’ve launched is
http://www.marketersource.com and it sucks right
now to be honest - had high traffic ranks - but
all the wrong people. (10,000 alexa rank for
a bit!)
Now that I’ve partnered with huge mailing
list owners and some real $$$ to get the
programming done to make it way coolor -
I hope to knock this site out of the ball park
in 1 month when we re-launch it and add
some features.
Also, I was wondering what other “How To’s”
you’d seen on “How to launch a social network”
site i’m trying to dig up as many as possible.
I’m moving to CALI soon with my little “pausi”
i have a 4 person staff and have been making
money online working for myself sense 18 years
old!
Great Site - Great Documentation on how you
launched it - and thank you Michael for pointing
this guy out to us.
AWESOME STUFF GUYS!
im thinking a social network site for GOLFERS could have huge potential
@Jason on the golf site
Actually that’s a pretty good idea. I wouldn’t necessarily make it a social networking site as the genre tends to skew very young. However, I could see an AJAX based mapping/database service of every golf course / hole in america being pretty big. Especially if you threw overlaid notes on it. How many times have you met someone going to play a round of golf at a course they’ve never played and know very little about?
yea my partners do alot of infomercials to build our mailing lists
- could get big fast
showing ad’s during all them PGA tours ect magazines galore
ect
cool well i really hope you’ll shoot me an email
so I can get to know you better!
JJ
Nice site and nice user experience.
I hope to do the same in the future.
I’m slowly but surely working on something similar at: http://www.myride.com
You built mp3.com and tv.com all by yourself? Impressive.
I built TV.com by my self. This is ridiculous! I should get the credit.
hey! I was the one who built TV.com by myself!
UrbanDictionary.com definition for boompa:
Boompa: A slang term for butt, acceptable to say for all ages
http://www.websearchinfo.com/cars
Mirrored over here, I couldn’t access it then.
Johnnie, your link is down:
Try this: http://top-search–results.com/cars
So, is this “boompa” site going to just up and disappear all of the sudden, leaving tons of confused and upset users the way that guzzlefish did?
Ok, guys, good luck everybody!
looking for information and found it at this great site.
I love this website! It really makes me Happy!
WOW! %-) very interesting! I did know about this …
cool news! i have too webssite but not so cool
i have a good audio sistems on my site
http://car-audio.org.md
I have a website where consumers can post pictures of their car for free.
http://www.sellmyauto4free.com... Someday soon I hope to add this video feature i think it’s the future.