The two guys behind the newly released car community site, Boompa, has a great post mortem detailing its story from conception to execution (via Kuro5hin). In it, the two developers (Dave Snider and Ethan Lance) reveal their archtypical story of two guys quitting their days jobs at CNET to pursue their own venture at Boompa.

It’s quite interesting to hear their take on developing a web app. They take a very utilitarian approach, which is quite evident by their disclaimer:

We are not businessmen by trade and we aren’t the kind of web geeks you’d probably hope us to be. Think of it this way, we don’t have a WordPress blog up telling you about the benefits of Ruby (yet). We used PHP because it’s what we knew and were comfortable with and we’d seen it scale to enterprise levels before. The advice in this guide then isn’t how to build the most pristine standards based site with 100% stability and geek factor (though we’ve got our fair share of chrome), it’s more about how to plan a build cheap, fast and scalable.

Basically, they targetted whichever market segment had the worst websites. Quite literally, they did this by perusing magazine racks by category and looking at associated websites. Seeing that car websites for enthusiasts simply sucked (and were still in high demand), they set their goal to fill the gap with an easy to use car community website.

A short two months later, they’ve got a full fledged website that allows car enthusiasts to show their ride, learn from others, and talk shop about cars. By the looks of it, their user base is starting to pick up. Boompa is a great example of a web application being built to target an audience that has long been neglected by community driven sites. And it also shows that you don’t need to have the latest whiz bang technology to satisfy user needs.

Now, if only they could work on fixing their site UI in Opera…

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