

Ask HN: Feedback on ToutPourMoniPad.com (ipad case finder for the french market) - thibaut_barrere
http://www.toutpourmonipad.com/

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thibaut_barrere
Feedback (even graphical - sorry it's in french) is most welcome!

<http://www.toutpourmonipad.com>

A couple of months ago I was looking for an iPad case. I found a lot of french
sites selling those, but not a single easily searchable place (eg: max budget,
material...).

I found (thanks to HN) <http://ipadcasefinder.com/>, but the shipping costs of
most sellers to France made the purchase not worth it.

So I decided to build something for the french market!

Technically, it's an ETL (extract/transform/load) back-end that stores in
MongoHQ, the front-end is based on Heroku, Sinatra, jQuery etc.

It's just a V1, a lot of changes are planned (search by "use case", for
instance).

~~~
lachyg
The site is very close to my site, I guess it's not too close though. Some
other guy copied the WHOLE site. I hope it works out for you. WordPress?
What's your sidebar plugin?

Good luck, it's a tough market.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
Thanks for the comment! Well I wouldn't have started it if the shipping costs
were low. There was an obvious gap here (picking partners that ship to
france), which I filled. I definitely agree the idea is useful and interesting
(given the feedback I got).

The site is making pocket money more or less (very far from your figures), and
the market is _very_ tough, filled by niche blogs here in France. It was very
interesting to make and I learnt a lot in the process, though!

It's not a WordPress - it's a custom application I developed wholly from
scratch myself using Sinatra, MongoDB, Ruby (the back-end, the views,
javascript/css etc), and which is heavily customizable (this is already the
fourth revision of the site).

This made the ability to filter by manually entered prices a lot easier to
implement, for instance.

I plan to do regular updates on this and let it grow slowly, see where it
goes.

------
jeb
What's with the iPad Case Finder startups? Is it some hot new market or what?

------
DotSauce
iPad is a trademarked term and you are running the risk of legal issues with
Apple. You may want to think of an alternative domain name.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
I hope that won't happen. I'll think about alternate domain names in case it
does. Thanks for the advice.

