Boompa car site

Wisdom from the entrepreneurs who built the online community car site boompa.com. I do not necessarily starting a business, but some of the advices are helpful for starting any technical projects.

Research

Everything starts with an Idea

Build a site that makes sense in the current market

The best way to find out if your site has revenue potential

Picking your Partners and Assigning Roles

Who's the better shot? Give them the gun.

Be Selective

Make sure any technology built is owned by the company, not the individuals

How to split up the company shares

The minimum skills you'll need to get the job done

1. Photoshop designer
2. CSS/SMARTY Developer
3. Data Entry / Database Populator Dude (scrapes are lame!)
4. PHP/JSP/Ruby Developer
5. JavaScript/AJAX developer
6. SysAdmin / DBA
7. QA/Product Management

There are also the following non-technical roles

1. Guy who talks on the phone
2. Guy who keeps the books and writes the checks
3. Guy who cleans the toilet

Office Space

You really do need office space

Back to College?

Things to watch for in your lease

Money

Find out how much you need first

Why we didn't try to find VC money

If it's that good of an idea, don't be afraid to put your own money on the table

How to set up your loans

What type of business entity to set up

Insurance

Preview of Part 2: Technology, Design, and our Build Schedule.

Tehnology Used

PHP 5: We used PHP as mentioned because we had used it before on other large sites and had seen it scale to hundreds of thousands of users. We also knew it really well.

SMARTY: SMARTY is a templating engine that you can use to seperate your frontend documents cleanly from your main PHP. For the most part we don't understand why it isn't more used and to us is a MUST HAVE on any web build.

MySQL 5: This was our first time using MySQL 5 and didn't have any real problems with it.

Fedora 4: We went with Fedora as our Linux build because it's free and it's very stable and supported.

CSS: Used to style our pages, I don't believe boompa.com has any tables outside of a couple we have to use with Dojo.

Dojo AJAX Toolkit: Pretty much our home run king. We would not have been able to work AJAX into the site without dojo. You see it everywhere from our fades on the front door, to our WYSIWYG editor in the boards.

Pear: We used a lot of pear scripts and functions for things like pagination and sorting.

Memcached: We use memcached to speed the site up and prevent hits to the database where we can. Along with SMARTY caching, it keeps the site running relatively speedy.