Lost & found doesn’t have to suck.
Posts tagged lostandfound
“Have an idea for a startup? Don’t launch a company, launch an experiment.” - @vacanti
Vin, from Yipit, wrote a great post suggesting entrepreneurs launch an experiment to prove their assumptions, before spending the cash and time building a product, a la the lean startup movement.
He had an idea, spent one day coding it (instead of six months), to realize consumers maybe weren’t so interested in that idea, so he could move on to the next. Eventually, his Yipit experiment tested well, and the rest is history.
At Phoundit, we have a similar mentality. It’s tricky to redesign lost & found.
Experiment - fail or validate - build. That’s the cycle. We’re always experimenting. Most importantly— we’re always moving. Because that’s the only way to solve big problems, after all.
So we were curious,
Are finders really keepers?
We dropped 100 stamped envelopes across New York City, with my name and address - at coffee shops, bars, street corners, all over the place! All a finder had to do was drop the found envelope in the closest mailbox. Nothing more, nothing less.
I was pleasantly surprised when 57 of them were returned to me. While this wasn’t the most scientific of experiments, I learned:
If made easy and actionable, quite a few people return what they find.
So that was an interesting insight. It was time run another social experiment. Like I said, we’re always experimenting - we’re just that curious.
Vin makes a great point - starting a company is scary. But when it’s an experiment, what do you have to lose?
*Thanks to my boy Alex Green for his help on this project
Source phoundit.com
Sometimes, you just have to pay attention.
Chris Dixon wrote an interesting blog post, regarding products build from improvised user behavior. We highly recommend you read it for yourself, but to summarize, some of today’s most popular technology startups were born from current behavior already present in niche culture. A good example mentioned by Chris:
“For a long time, there were niche communities of “lo-fi” camera enthusiasts: people who shared photos taken on old cameras that had interesting ways of filtering shots. The iPhone app Hipstamatic popularized lo-fi filters, selling over 1M copies. Because Hipstamatic lacked sharing features, many users took pictures with Hipstamatic and then shared them using other apps. Then came Instagram, which combined lo-fi filters and easy sharing. Instagram has been downloaded 15M times and has apparently crossed over to mainstream users.”
Other product ideas like Twitter and foursquare were also born from similar insights grounded in user behavior.
Phoundit fits this mold as well. People are human and lose things all the time. They post flyers on lamp posts. Post ads on Craigslist. And even a few post pictures of what they lose Twitter. Hmm, that’s interesting. So it got us thinking,
“What if we could centralize this behavior with actionable steps to mobilize the community to help us find what’s missing?”
A little food for thought as we enter the new year. We can’t wait to show what’s in store. Request an invite here. Stay tuned :).
Source phoundit
Back in March, I was fortunate to experience the epitome of human kindness. My journey began as I was heading to the bank to cash a check, where upon I panicked after realizing I’d lost it (womp womp). About a week later, I was blown away to find a check in my mailbox, returned by a good samaritan who found it along the way.
It moved me. Someone took time out of their day to do the right thing, with no expectation of a reward. It felt contagious. I wanted to do something nice for someone else. And I wondered, “What if we could enable more of this human kindness through technology?”
Later that day I came across Todd Bieber’s viral quest to return lost photos found in Prospect Park. For those of you who haven’t seen it, Todd found a canister of undeveloped film back in December while skiing in the park. He developed the photos, told a beautiful story over YouTube and asked the community to help him find the owners of the lost photos. More than 800 people offered their help to Todd!
And his story spread like wildfire. Over 1.7 million hits later, Todd and his girlfriend traveled to Paris to return the lost photos to a French women, who was studying in Brooklyn.
Wow. Blown away. What an amazing experience.
So it got me thinking - we’re human and we lose things all the time. But what are we supposed to do with what we find? What if we had a platform to mobilize our community to help us find what’s missing? “Lost flyers” are ideas that stand - how can we make ideas that spread?
So I’m very excited to introduce my latest project, Phoundit, lost & found redesigned for the networked city. Both an iPhone app and a website, we integrate social, mobile and location technology to cut out the middleman for a simple and meaningful shared experience. And we exist to make it easy for the community to act on their inherent goodwill and inspire others to do the same.
At its core, I really believe technology doesn’t change human behavior, it simply empowers an existing motivation.
More details to come, but sign up for invite if you’re so inclined. Our amazing team is building something pretty special.
Source phoundit.com
