Ukrainian IT professional Serhiy Bezbabnykh developed the Lost and Found app, which aims to return lost items to their owners.
Ukrainian IT professional Serhiy Bezbabnykh developed the Lost and Found app, which aims to return lost items to their owners.
The application is already «flooded» on the AppStore and Google Play, and its author is thinking about a strategy for scaling the product.
«Lost your wallet, keys, phone or beloved dog? Found someone’s thing and want to return it? Create an ad in a few seconds — and it will become visible to people nearby,» the application description on the AppStore states .
The functionality of the «Lost and Found» application allows you to:
It’s quite obvious that the application is fundamentally tied to a map to see exactly where an item has disappeared or been found.
Registration is done by phone number.
In a comment to dev.ua, the author of the application, Serhiy Bezbabnykh, admitted that he spied the idea on Threads.
«Once, while scrolling through my feed, I saw a post from a girl, it seems, about an application for finding lost pets. But I immediately had a question: why only animals? Why not everything at once? And then I realized that, it seems, a similar service does not exist yet. And if it does exist, it has not achieved what I want to achieve — so that there is one and only place where people can look for their lost things and everyone knows exactly where to go in such situations,» Serhiy told about the motives for creating the application.
Now, according to him, in such cases, people turn wherever they can.
«If I lost something, where exactly should I look, where should I go? In the condominium association chat, in the local chat, in a Facebook group, in a car group? Why contact and monitor ten chats if there is one application?» asks the IT worker rhetorically.
The developer says that the creation of the application began as a pet project, but now he takes the project much more seriously and intends to scale it. «The intention is to develop it further, invest time, effort and resources and gradually bring it to wide use,» the IT expert assured.
As the author Serhiy Bezbabnykh says, he actively used AI tools in the process of creating the application.
«At first it was Codex with its models, but very quickly I decided to continue with Claude Code and its models. And even in that case, it’s hard to do it all by yourself, especially if you’re not a very creative person and are used to working under someone’s guidance,» the IT expert says.
However, he assured that all generated functionality was verified and tested. «Particular attention was paid to critical scenarios and security,» added Serhiy.
According to him, it took quite a bit of time from the idea to the first prototype, perhaps a few days. «For some reason, it was important for me to first see and „touch“ the skeleton, to understand how it would all look live on the phone, and then to fine-tune the functionality, design, and refine the ideas,» the specialist shared.
The IT guy spent a lot of time on mandatory testing of the app for Google Play. «It took two weeks, and then they probably spent about a week checking everything themselves. And the App Store also, it seems, allowed the app to be released on the site in about a week,» the IT guy says.
He says that a month and a half passed from the first commit to the moment when the application appeared on both pages. «I hope my employer will not see this text, but at the moment this project is a priority for me, and it is given much more attention and time than working projects. But there I also manage to do everything and do it qualitatively — just in case he does see it,» the developer humorously commented on his project.
According to the IT expert, the most difficult thing is not just to develop this product, but to «build» a significant audience for it, without which it will be dead.
«This is the most painful issue right now. I can’t even share it with my friends, I can’t ask them to install the application and use it, because right now it simply doesn’t make sense without a large number of users. Or to be more precise, probably without a large concentration of users in a particular city,» commented Serhiy Bezbabnykh.
One of the plans for promoting the application, he considers, is the possibility of choosing some agglomeration of medium-sized cities, located nearby and connected to each other, perhaps by enterprises, and trying to reach them through advertising so that the application works at least in a separate region. «Another plan is to immediately choose the main target Kyiv and hit it with advertising. And the third plan is to go on Threads and talk about your application in the hope that someone will see the benefits and potential in it and help tell a large audience about it. Moreover, the application is completely free,» the author joked.
Considering that the dev.ua journalist saw Serhiy’s post about his app in Threads, this part of the plan theoretically has the right to life, but it’s not certain :)
