Boompa.com
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Boompa.com was 'your garage online' - a community-driven online vehicle encyclopedia and social network for car enthusiasts. Users showcased their vehicles in a personal 'garage', wrote guides on tweaking and maintenance, and voted on each other's rides in a hot-or-not/Digg-style format, with everything user-submitted. It was founded by Dave Snider and Ethan Lance, former CNET engineers who had launched TV.com and MP3.com; they built the site in a 10-week coding marathon in spring 2006 and launched it in March 2006 as the first site under their Enemy Kite banner. The name came from Lance's car-nut grandfather, to whom the site was dedicated. The plan was to be advertising-driven, with ad sales outsourced to Federated Media. The site later went dark and the domain now hosts unrelated content.
02 / Boompa.com FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
No detailed post-mortem was ever published. The only documented founder reflection is a brief entry in a startup-failure roundup advising entrepreneurs to first line up search, team, office and funding. Boompa was a two-founder bootstrapped project with no outside funding, launched into an already crowded field of car forums and vertical social networks; it never built a durable audience and quietly died, with no public shutdown announcement.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Built and launched
Dave Snider and Ethan Lance built Boompa.com in a 10-week coding marathon in spring 2006 and launched it in March 2006 as the first site under their Enemy Kite banner.
- Silicon Valley NewTech demo
Boompa presented at the Silicon Valley NewTech meetup in September 2006, pitching itself as a social network and wiki pulling together car communities under one roof.
- Press mention as niche community
The site was cited among emerging 'passion-centric' communities where car lovers could put their ride online; it never achieved lasting traction and later went dark.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Boompa.com launched in March 2006 after a 10-week build by two ex-CNET founders, with no outside funding disclosed.
- 02
The site was planned as advertising-driven, with ad sales outsourced to Federated Media.
- 03
The site eventually went dark; no shutdown date was ever publicly announced, and the boompa.com domain now hosts unrelated logistics content.
- 04
No reliable realized loss figure with clear subject, period and basis has been disclosed; the absence of outside funding means there is no documented investor loss.