App helps track package deliveries via photos
Laura Borland and Sean Hale are obsessed with making sure your package gets to you in one piece.
It’s a big industry problem, Borland says, because 11% of e-commerce packages are lost, stolen, damaged or misdelivered. It amounts to a $31 billion headache for the industry annually, her research shows.
“We believe there is a gaping hole in the product life cycle. There is a unique opportunity for us to provide a photographic end-toend journey through the entire logistics process so we can identify gaps in quality but also reduce the amount of losses businesses incur due to damage claims,” said Borland, who earned her MBA from Florida International University
and also spent several years working for a logistics company as a quality engineer.
She and Hale, partners in the business and in life, created PodPic (podpic.net). It’s a subscriptionbased app solution that tracks a package delivery in photos every step of the way and is designed to protect e-commerce and logistics companies as well as last-mile delivery agents from being wrongfully charged for loss and damage claims. 2021 Miami Herald Pitch Competition judges chose PodPic as the second-place winner in the FIU Track.
The duo has done this before. In 2015, Borland and Hale created Vyllage, an app that connects homeowners with “Vyllagers” in their neighborhood who can receive packages for them and make money doing so. PodPic is an outgrowth of that service.
PodPic will be able to tell if the package was damaged from the truck to the warehouse, or when the warehouse is handing it off to a larger truck or an aircraft. What happens when it gets to the distribution depot — is it still intact? What about when it handed off to the customer? Has the tape changed? That could mean a theft has happened.
The app will provide insights for logistics companies to understand if they are using the best companies in the shipping process. Big data and AI will help them identify opportunities for improvement.
A side benefit of the app: “It also offers an awesome endorphin rush for the customer,” Borland said.
“[The competition] will provide you with a tracking number but it won’t make your toes tingle.”
Borland and Hale hope to finish the app this summer. “We know our lanes and our areas of expertise and we are grateful for that,” she said about working with Hale, who works in the telecom industry. “My strength is in app design and mapping out what a customer experience would look like. He thinks more along the lines of legal and accounting. We divide and conquer for sure.”
PodPic is planned as a subscription service with a tiered pricing system based on number of shipments. Customers could include the Amazons and Etsys of the world as well as delivery companies that thrive on the gig economy.
In the future, the team believes the PodPic app could help in many other use cases, such as photo documenting an installation all the way through. Photos could document every line item on a work order, for example.
Borland and Hale learned a lot creating Vyllage — which had to be rebuilt from scratch because developers they originally hired delivered a buggy product. This time, so far, the process has been much smoother, Borland said.
“We are hoping to get to about 100,000 users and that would be recurring income for us, and then we want to be prime for acquisition or partnership,” she said. But for now, they are focused on next steps.
“There’s nothing better than seeing the aesthetic of something you have envisioned for a while come to life. Seeing your app in the app store is pretty sexy too.”