Dream Car Garage: Founder, Designer & Sole Engineer
A production car-collection web app I conceived, designed, built, deployed, and now maintain entirely on my own. Car enthusiasts assemble their dream garage from 600+ vehicles, track how their collection evolves over time, compete on a global leaderboard, and explore a built-in automotive encyclopedia, across multiple languages and currencies. It's live, it's used by a real community, and I own every layer of it.
The Problem & The Vision
Car enthusiasts spend hours imagining the collection they'd own if money were no object, but that passion lives in scattered tabs, spreadsheets, and forum posts. There was no single, beautiful place to build, refine, and share a dream garage, and to feel it grow over time. Dream Car Garage exists to give the car community that home.
The product is built around a simple, addictive loop: browse a curated catalog of the world's most desirable cars, add them to a limited set of garage bays that force real trade-offs, then snapshot your collection as it evolves and measure it against everyone else. It's part fantasy tool, part social game, part reference library.
Where It Is Today: A Live, Maintained Product
Dream Car Garage is live at dreamcargarage.app as a fully functional product, not a prototype. The current release includes:
Garage builder. Users fill a limited set of bays from a catalog of 600+ vehicles across 11 categories (hypercars, supercars, GTs, hot hatches, SUVs, luxury and more), with adjustable garage size that creates real curation trade-offs.
Browse & discovery. A searchable, filterable, sortable collection with category tabs and brand filters spanning 70+ manufacturers, from Ferrari and Bugatti to Caterham and Gordon Murray.
Evolution. Collections are snapshotted into stages, so users can see how their taste and garage change over time and track swaps between snapshots.
Leaderboard & scoring. A "Share & Score" system and global leaderboard turn private collections into a social, competitive experience.
Carpedia & Brands. A built-in automotive reference for exploring cars and manufacturers in depth.
Accounts & saved garages. Users sign in to persist multiple named garages, duplicate them, and switch between profiles.
Internationalization. Full multi-language support (English and Spanish) and multi-currency pricing (GBP, EUR, USD).
Monetization. Sponsored placements integrated natively into the collection feed, plus an email subscription channel for retention.
Compliance. A complete legal layer I produced myself: legal notice, privacy policy, cookie policy with a consent manager, and terms of use, including explicit trademark attribution for every manufacturer.
What "Solo Founder" Actually Means Here
There is no team. Every role a startup normally distributes across people, I hold at once:
Product & design. Ideation, UX, visual design, and the entire interaction model are mine, with deliberate attention to detail at every step.
Full-stack engineering. The application is built on Next.js and React, with user authentication, persistent data, a 600+ vehicle catalog, search/filter/sort systems, the leaderboard and evolution mechanics, and an image pipeline for car assets.
Deployment & operations. I deploy, monitor, and keep the service online. The hard, unglamorous part of a startup isn't shipping the demo, it's maintaining a production system that a community relies on every day.
Troubleshooting & maintenance. When something breaks, there is no one else. Diagnosing issues in production, fixing them, and shipping the fix is entirely on me.
Growth, SEO & monetization. Discoverability, ad integration, and the retention loop are mine to design and tune.
Legal & governance. Privacy, cookies, terms, and trademark handling were all researched and implemented by me.
Carrying a community on your back means the standard isn't "it works on my machine." It's "it works for everyone, all the time." That responsibility shapes every decision.
Engineering Highlights
Data at scale. Modeling and maintaining 600+ vehicles across 11 categories and 70+ brands, each with specs, imagery, pricing, and classification, kept consistent and fast to query.
Performance. Server-rendered pages and an optimized image pipeline keep a media-heavy catalog responsive, loading a paginated subset of the full collection on demand.
Stateful, persistent UX. Saved garages, evolution snapshots, and per-profile state require careful client/server data modeling and authentication.
Internationalization done properly. Language and currency are first-class concerns across the entire UI, not an afterthought bolted on at the end.
Where It's Headed: The Roadmap
Today Dream Car Garage is a polished collection-building product. The ambition is larger: to become an operating system for the car community, the default home where enthusiasts build, share, discover, and connect around the cars they love.
Directions I'm building toward include deeper social and community features, a richer Carpedia, expanded brand and model coverage, and tighter feedback loops between collectors. The vision is a platform; the live product is the credible first step proving I can ship and run it.
Try It Live
Dream Car Garage is live and open to everyone. Build your own dream garage and see the product in action.