The Lost & Found Disruption: How Skyler Logsdon is Transforming an 8 Billion Person Problem with Boomerang | S2 Ep. 178

0:05Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Founder Story. Today, we have Skylar Logsden, who is the co-founder and CEO of Boomerang, when I first looked at your website, I was like, this is a massive problem that I've dealt with because your company is an AI-enabled company revolutionizing the lost and found across travel, sports, entertainment, and hospitality. And I can't tell you how many times that I've had to deal. Even recently, I was in Europe and I had lost and found, and it was the biggest hassle that I've ever experienced. How do you even come up with this idea? And then how did you come up with the solution to this problem?

0:45Yeah, Dan, I think you're not alone. I think it's really an 8 billion person problem. I've yet to find someone who I've told about Boomerang and they no one's said that, like, I've never lost something ever. Everyone has lost something and And it usually ends up in never recovering it, never finding it, usually just waste a lot of time trying to call businesses, email businesses, tweet at them, post on Facebook, Craigslist, Twitter, Reddit, Nextdoor, Ring, just casting wide. And it's just never effective. So to answer your question, where did the idea come from? One of my co-founders is a man named Philippe Engelbrecht.

1:26He's a Belgian man, and he is really talented with creating ideas, but I think even more talented at solving them really well. So Philippe was the founder of Shazam, the music recognition app that was acquired by Apple for 400 million. I think Shazam is just one of the most magical companies of my generation. I've had it on my phone for, gosh, 10 plus years and it's going nowhere. I will delete a lot of apps, but not that one. And so Philippe has mentored me since I was 19 years old. We built a company together most of my 20s. And it was actually at my 29th year old birthday in Cabo, Mexico, that Philippe shared this idea with me of creating the household name for Lost and Found.

2:10He's like, We should create like the Shazam of Lost and Found, a household name where if someone loses something, they know they got to go post it on Boomerang. If you find something, whether you're a business or an individual, you know you got to go post on Boomerang. And it can be a really magical solution. Just like Shazam, people think, wow, I didn't know the name of the song. Then it went like this. Seconds later, you told me it. It's so magical. And with the technology today, you can create something that is really smart, very fast, and that it just feels magical for everyone involved. And so that was the initial idea of Boomerang.

2:44And that's what we've been doing for just a little over three years now. I like how you said the Shazam of, but not that it's the exact same thing, but it's like the feeling that you get when you see the app or the household name status. I don't hear a lot of people using comparisons in business that way. It's not like the blank of blank, but it's a similar item. This is totally different. I think you attached your name to something that no one else is like, I want to be the household name of lost and found. And I think you found, what a niche, man. That's incredible. AI has been has been solving some amazing problems recently.

3:23So how did you know, OK, that we need to make this an AI enabled app, you know, three years ago when it wasn't as such a buzzword as it is now? Yeah, I think, you know, our whole background is building great tech. We hire really incredible engineers that are cutting edge, and they're always looking for great technology out there, crash coursing it, and then learning what can we build on? What can we build ourselves? So, you know, three years ago, AI wasn't, you know, as loud as it is now. And AI has made a lot of great advancements. And our engineers are always looking to see what out there could help improve the speed and the accuracy of a match.

4:05When someone comes to Boomerang, they tell us a lot of information. They say, I lost my Apple Watch. It has a cracked screen, has a yellow band. It has a passcode of 1234. I lost the MSG on Tuesday. Submit. We have a lot of information. They also upload photos included with their claim. So now we use image recognition and machine learning to scan for Apple Watch, cracked screen, yellow band, matching images at MSG on Tuesday. say, oh, bam, there it is. And then we show the item to the customer. Hey, Dan, is this your item? Yes, no. Yes. How would you like it back? Would you like it shipped or would you like to come pick it up?

4:44Most people don't want to take the morning off of work or the afternoon off of work to come to the city or to the suburbs, go to the airport, the hotel, to the stadium, to the theme park, whatever it is, and go find that item or go pick up the item. They'd rather have it shipped. so through boomerang you can pay for your own label we generate the shipping label give it to the business say hey hit print and it alerts the carrier to come pick it up and off it goes so i think the whole experience is what makes boomerang magical it's not just magical for the customer but then a headache for the person that found the item for the business or the individual that finds the item it's a pleasant experience all around and yes ai can kind of There's little pieces all around Boomerang that AI can make it better and it will continue to make it better.

5:33I think we're in early days of AI and we are always looking and finding ways to just what AI will improve the Boomerang experience, whether on the partner side or the loser side. Like many apps, you have the businesses, like you said, the business side, and then the person who lost its side. You have to convince both of them that this is a good idea or an application that they need. I can totally, as somebody who's lost items, easily understand that this is huge for me. How did you convince the businesses, though, that this was a good idea for them? As we know, not everyone is always quick to adapt new technologies or implement things into their business, depending on the size of the corporation.

6:18But how is that process? Yeah. So I think when you go meet a business, you can quickly tell whether they're the early adopters or they're going to be the followers. And I think when you first start your business, you get a lot of the early adopters, the ones that are always looking for cutting edge tech to automate workflow, to wow their customer. That's part of their brand is doing things first. And so I think we did a great job over the past two years of being live in the market. We rallied up those, I'd say, real category leaders, the MGMs, the New York, New Yorks, the casinos, the parks, entertainments, the airport to De Roma is like a just icon in travel.

7:00Uh, and so I think we did a great job at getting these types of businesses to come to Boomerang first, as well as like Universal Studios in, uh, Orlando and in, in Hollywood. They come first and you show the industry how it can be done. And for, for Universal or for any of these early adopters that joined Boomerang a couple of years ago, it's eliminate all the calls and emails for lost and found. You know, if you're a business that collects 500 items a month, a thousand items a month, we have companies that collect 16 ,000 items a month. Imagine without boomerang how many phone calls and emails you used to get.

7:39That's very expensive. If you're in an airport, that's taxpayers dollars going towards answering a phone saying, hi, what did you lose? A wallet? OK, let me go check the box. Three minutes later, I can't find it. Just call me again tomorrow. So for every item, if you don't have boomerang, that's going to yield you three to five phone calls per item. So if you collect 10 ,000 items a month, that's easily 40 ,000, 60 ,000 phone calls and emails a month for lost and found. It's a call center. So we partner with them. We say, hey, let's get rid of that phone number, that email. Just put a boomerang button on your website.

8:16We will get all the claims digitally. We're not answering phone calls or emails. We're getting the claim digitally from the customer. The modern day customer appreciates that. I don't want to sit on hold. I don't want to leave a voicemail. I don't want to keep calling you. I'd rather just digitally submit a claim via boomerang. All the time spent on item matching. Imagine you're holding on to 50 Ray-Ban sunglasses. You don't know which one was found on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, which one has a little scratch. You don't know which one was found in terminal two, terminal three, terminal four.

8:47So I'm giving you a little bit of a glimpse into where the workflow automation is. When you implement Boomerang, you usually see a 3x plus return rate booster. That means there's 3x more customers that get back your item. And I think the companies that join Boomerang are the ones that are looking for a way to wow their customers, to win over trust, to show our core values and integrity as a business. And all of that results in net promoter score booster. And it's really easy where like lost and found is a stigma of like, it never works. When you actually return someone back their wallet that has the 350 bucks in there that you left it with, they write incredible reviews for your business.

9:32MSG, I love you guys. My wallet has all my credit cards, all my IDs, all the cash. I love you guys. Thank you. Can't wait to come back to the garden sometime soon. Really, this is like reviews that we feed our customers every single day because customers are truly shocked that like good people out there really exist that didn't just take, you know, 20 for themselves. They just really want to wow the customer. I think everyone on Boomerang joins us because they want to do the right thing for their customers and get the customer to fall in love even further with them. Yeah, that's you never expect to get it back.

10:11It doesn't matter where you are. And congratulations on these major partnerships. You had mentioned the airports, Universal Studios. I think as somebody, as they're starting out to get these type of partnerships could be major for their organization, for their business. for their business. So if somebody is just starting out like you had done, what advice do you give in terms of being able to get these types of partnerships? Like, how do you get to the decision makers, for example? Is there a strategy or something that you've used that you feel works when you're looking to get into one of these big organizations?

10:49Yeah, it's a great question. You know, all I know is startups. I studied entrepreneurship in college. like it's not the easy path it's not straightforward uh i think you need to be willing to test your luck you need to be willing to like the answer is you need to figure it out like that's as much guidance as you sometimes have as an entrepreneur is like i don't know lost and found does not have a category leader that we can just copy whatever they did it's not like if we wanted to start a competitor of uber today like they gave you a playbook that you could follow if you wanted to you truly have to be comfortable pioneering the way.

11:29And, you know, lost and found sometimes rolls up to security. Sometimes it's customer experience. Sometimes it's chief operating officer. Sometimes we go right to the top to the CEO and they're like, this is cool. I want to know like I want to get back customers their items. For example, like a CEO of an airline may get a lot of complaints about lost and found his buddies, her buddies may actually write the CEO being like, hey, I lost my bag and it's been two weeks since I got this bag back. So it may actually go up to the CEO sometimes and we send a cold email to him or her and it lands because he or she's hearing a lot about it.

12:08So I guess the answer to your question is you got to figure it out depending on the business type, the business category. Maybe as high as the CEO could be customer experience manager. I like that. You got to make it happen. Yeah, that's right. You got to make it happen. You got to try. You got to do. You can't wait around. You got to go out there and try all the things you can to make it happen. We've heard this before with other amazing guests as well, that there wasn't a secret sauce. You just really have to go make it happen. So I'm curious on when you started to scale this, what were some things that you started to implement or maybe even something that you said, oh, wow, we didn't even realize this as we started to scale?

12:54I think, you know, you start to get emails from companies abroad that look at the U.S. is like, hey, you guys are the innovative country. You guys do a lot of great things first. And like, we want that. We want that in our country. Come expand here. And that's where you're like, wow, that's a really big business. They have a lot of items that they're finding. You know, lost and found isn't just a U.S. problem. It's clearly a global problem. And like every press article that comes out on us, it will cause inbounds to come from foreign countries or like we want that here. So I think that would be an example of like, yeah, do you want to go service that demand?

13:36Because the demand's there. It's, as I mentioned, it's not a US only problem. People lose things everywhere. And there's countries that are really trying to get us to come there, or we've already expanded their example. We expanded to Italy, and we expanded to the UK recently. How do you look at global expansion? We've had people talk about in previous interviews, some of them are all about it. Some of them were not so much because their business wasn't ready and it ended up hurting them. But how do you look at global expansion? I think, and the reason why this is important now, I mean, the world has never been such a big place and with the internet and AI and everything, it's like you can really go after many people, but we know it can be hard.

14:24It can put a lot of pressure on your company. It could be a detriment or it could be a savior. How do you look at global expansion? Yeah, so I think a lot about the business OpenTable. I think selling OpenTable 15 years ago to get a restaurant to stop answering the phone and then writing on their pen and paper saying table for two, John Smith, 730, and then answer the next phone. Oh, nope. Table for two, 730 is already taken up. I can sit you down in a week, though. How about at 430? Oh, you don't want 430? All right. Can't help you then. So I think it was really hard to sell OpenTable back then.

15:03But I think, you know, eventually once they got a big chain on or a marquee restaurant like a Nobu or something like this, then the rest eventually just followed. When you realize you need to hire, it's usually already too late. I've been there wasting weeks waiting for decent candidates. If I had used Indeed, I could have hired way faster. So when it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. stop struggling to get your job post seen on other job sites indeed sponsored jobs help you stand out and hire fast with sponsored jobs your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster and it makes a huge difference according to indeed data sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have 45 more applications than non-sponsored jobs one thing i love about indeed it makes hiring fast because it puts you right in front of the write people without wasting time.

15:53Plus, there are no monthly subscriptions, no long-term contracts. You only pay for results. And while I've been talking, 23 hires were made on Indeed worldwide. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. And listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com slash founders story. Just go to indeed.com slash founders story right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash founders story. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. I think now if you start a restaurant and you're not on open table, you look kind of silly.

16:38You look archaic. You look like a dinosaur. And I would get upset if my favorite restaurant that just opened up is not on open table. And so that's the ambition that I have for Boomerang. It's like our work is not done until every single business around the world that finds an item is uploading it to Boomerang. If there's one airport or airline in Ireland or the UK or Saudi Arabia that's not on Boomerang, my work's not done. Because what people deserve is one household name that has all of the lost items there. Just like Shazam, if you go like this and you're trying to match a song and it says song not found, they take that personal.

17:24They want to give you anytime you try to Shazam a song, Shazam wants to deliver that for you. I want to do the same thing for Boomerang. So to answer your question, I want every single found item to go up to Boomerang And I want every single lost item claim to come to Boomerang. And when that's done, my work is done. Sounds like the next billion dollar company. I can't wait for you to come back in a year, two, three, four years when you have every item in the world lost and found. And I'm going to say, you know what? I spoke to Skylar that day. That day I spoke to Skylar. He said every item lost and found will be on this platform.

18:03I've never heard of something, another company that does this. So you really are creating a category, huge, thank you for sharing everything today. If people wanna get in touch with you, maybe it's a company, they need your service or somebody who doesn't want to go through Lost and Found in the future without Boomerang, how can they do so? Send me an email, Skyler, S-K-Y-L-E-R at thanksboomerang.com. Skyler, this has been great. And thank you so much for joining us today on Founder's Story. Thank you for having me, Dan.