Why Lost and Found?
Loss sucks. It's a bad afternoon for the person who lost their phone, and an even worse one for whoever's stuck fielding "have you seen a black iPhone, it has a cracked screen, it's REALLY important" forty times an hour. And it's not some niche problem — an estimated 70 million smartphones go missing every year. Ouch.
Meanwhile, the actual process of running a lost and found hasn't been touched since roughly the invention of the shoebox. So we're doing something about that.
Who are 'we'?
Two brothers with a genuinely unsettling amount of lost-and-found experience, a bit of technical know-how, and a mildly delusional goal of helping return the world's lost stuff — one wallet, phone, and inexplicably-abandoned single shoe at a time.
What is "Liff"?
As lifelong Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fans — and fully aware that nobody actually cares what we've named the company, they just want their stuff back — we borrowed a page from the absolutely froody Douglas Adams and his book, The Meaning of Liff:
Liff (n.) a common object or experience for which no word yet exists.
Seemed fitting for "the panic you feel realizing your phone isn't in your pocket." So, PS: don't panic. We've got you.
How are we doing it?
Festivals and events are basically black holes for personal belongings — hundreds of thousands of people, tens of thousands of pockets, and every single one of them eventually turns upside down. Fortunately, some of the biggest events on the planet were reckless enough to let us try something new.
We built the Liff App. Version one was, generously, a work in progress. But we kept at it, and it actually started working — which, in software, is not a guarantee.
In our first 18 months, we helped return more than
Four Million Dollars in stuff to their rightful owners.