- Surprisingly, Americans spend $5 billion annually on buying new items to replace lost ones 😉 But this means that the lost and found market in the USA alone is worth billions of dollars!
- Moreover, this market is relatively easy to tap into. You just need to go out and start wooing public places where items are commonly lost — offering them to join your lost and found platform.
- And the most interesting part is that the “automate trivial stuff” principle works here, which can be successfully applied in other areas as well. So, it’s worth taking a closer look at both the principle itself and examples of its application:
The project essence
Boomerang is a service for finding lost items in public places.
Its principle of operation is very simple:
You enter a description of the lost item into the service and attach its photo if you have one. The search engine begins regularly searching the database of items found in public places. Once suitable matches are found, you receive a notification, and you check if the item has been found. If it is, you contact the administration of the public place where the item was found through the application and arrange how to retrieve or receive it.
The problem is that the photos and descriptions of the sought item and what is found may not match significantly because different people describe items differently, and they also photograph them differently.
Therefore, special AI technologies are used in the search to intelligently match arbitrary descriptions and photos of the sought item with those items that have been photographed and described as found.
The service is distributed through partners—through the administrations of those very public places where people often lose things.
Why should public places implement such a service? Because it allows them to spend less time of their employees on dealing with people who have lost their items.
The administration of one such place claims that with the help of the service, they managed to reduce the time spent by their employees on communication with people who lost items by 50%, while increasing the number of returned items by 20%.
Thus, public places start saving their employees’ time while simultaneously improving their image in the eyes of their visitors.
Administrations don’t even need to install any special software. They just need to connect their public place to the Boomerang cloud service, where employees will upload photos and descriptions of found items, and then add a link to the lost and found service to their website or application.
The startup earns money by subscribing public places to use the platform; the service is free for people looking for their items in it.
One of the startup founders was a co-founder of the sold Apple startup Shazam and president of the startup True Car that went public; the other two founders also have quite extensive entrepreneurial experience.
This helped them raise the first $2.8 million for creating Boomerang in November 2021, which opened in May 2022. Currently, the startup has raised an additional $4.9 million in investments.
What’s interesting
Boomerang decided to expand systematically, gradually moving from one category of its potential clients to another.
Immediately after its launch, the startup began to connect stadiums. Typically, games take place at stadiums once a week or once every two weeks, after which the stadium receives around 100 requests for lost items. At this volume, the startup continued to train the search AI engine of the platform in real-world usage.
Having achieved satisfactory results with the AI engine’s performance towards the end of 2022, the startup started connecting universities and colleges.
During the exploration of the topic, they discovered an amusing statistic—in British universities, students annually lose only charging devices and cables worth £1 million.
British parents spend £42–65 million annually on replacing school uniform items lost by their children.
By early 2023, the startup was able to target larger public places with more lost items—airports. By the summer of 2023, they had two American airports as their clients.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reports that around 100,000 items are forgotten by passengers annually in American airports. This prompted me to look into how many things Americans lose in general.
It turns out that Americans spend approximately $5 billion annually to buy new items to replace the ones they left in airports, stadiums, concert halls, amusement parks, hotels, and fitness clubs.
In other words, joking aside, the potential market for lost items is worth $5 billion in just one country. Moreover, to cover this market, all that is needed is to systematically connect public places where people most often lose their belongings to the service.
By the way, it was unexpectedly discovered that there are already at least several dozen platforms designed for finding lost items that also operate by connecting public places to their services.
This once again confirms that there are no unique ideas. No matter what we might come up with unexpectedly, someone else has probably already thought of it. Therefore, it is never worth starting something from scratch or assuming that your main competitive advantage is being the first and only one in your field. 😉
Where to Run
Startup that created a project management platform for creative individuals, for whom managing their projects is a burden rather than a creative process. Since then, that startup pivoted into a platform for storing and managing creative materials (photos, drawings, videos) — but the main conclusion of the review at that time, in my opinion, has not lost its relevance.
And the conclusion was: “Anything trivial is a good theme” 😉
The point is that most startups strive to create platforms to optimize the core activities of their target audiences — resulting in stiff competition in each such field.
However, noticeable amounts of time and effort are consumed by everyone in non-core activities, which they are forced to engage in. But for some reason, not many startups want to simplify, cheapen, and automate such auxiliary activities. Although the target audience considers the time and effort spent on such “side tasks” unnecessary and unpleasant — and would gladly pay money to save time on these “side tasks.”
Dealing with lost items is an example of such auxiliary activity for the administration of public places. They have to spend their employees’ time on this — but they are unlikely to be willing to purposefully invest resources to improve this side process, as it clearly is not their priority.
However, if someone comes to them with a ready-made solution that helps reduce the time and effort spent on such auxiliary activity, and they don’t have to do anything extra for it, just pay a little — why wouldn’t they agree to that? 😉
Accordingly, the general direction of possible movement is the creation of platforms to reduce the time and effort spent on auxiliary activities that representatives of the chosen target audience are forced to engage in.
You probably understand some target audiences because you have been or are part of them, or you have studied them as part of analyzing ideas for your startups. However, before, you mainly focused on their main tasks.
But now, try to look at their situation from another angle. What auxiliary activities are representatives of this target audience forced to engage in? What do they reluctantly spend time and energy on because it takes away time and energy from their main work? With the help of which platform can this time and energy be saved, while increasing the quality of the results obtained?
That’s exactly what you can focus on optimizing 😉
About the Company
Boomerang
Website: thanksboomerang.com
Latest funding round: $4.9M, 25.01.2024
Total investments: $7.7M, rounds: 2