In this episode of Freight Nation: A Trucking Podcast, host Brent Hutto is joined by Reed Loustalot, Co-Founder of LOSTFR8. 

Reed Loustalot is the “Chief Everything Officer” at LOSTFR8, a website that enables carriers of all sizes to market their services to their current and potential customers. Prior to this, Reed was a Broker at Armstrong Transport Group and a National Carrier Sales Representative at Echo Global Logistics.

[18:28] Reed has always been interested in technology and started teaching himself to code when he moved to Chicago in 2019. After learning several coding languages, he built his own website: reedislost.com. Around the time, he was laid off from his job, and an ex-colleague, Rob, offered him a sales role at Armstrong. With nothing else to do, Reed took it on until one day in June 2022; Rob mentioned that they needed a tool built and asked him if he could help out since he had coding knowledge. Although he wasn’t sure he’d be able to do it, Reed said yes and spent the next day trying desperately to figure it out. Over the next two months, he built it out and made it into a business, creating what is now known as LOSTFR8.

[27:45] To create LOSTFR8, Reed drew on his experience as a carrier rep. In his role, he spent most of his time calling carriers and asking them where their trucks were. There’s often very little information about carrier businesses available online, so it becomes hard to figure out what kind of equipment they have or find any information required to offer them relevant opportunities. Reed saw the opportunity to give them a way to answer these questions proactively so that opportunities can be made more readily available for them. The basic tool is a web page where they can input the lanes they run, where they have capacity, what equipment they have, and how to get in touch. Every carrier has its own profile that can be set to public or shared via links. This meant they could go to the web page instead of calling someone like Reed, but since they might forget about it, he built an email tool to send all this info out to their contact lists with no admin. It’s a marketing tool.

[38:09] When he first launched LOSTFR8, Reed didn’t have much money to market it. He was really into Twitter (as it was back then), so he started to post memes and build up a following to invite to a Discord chat he had with his co-founder. With this new audience, he created an AI excuse generator for truck drivers and put it live online, going semi-viral very quickly. Seeing this traction, he then put the LOSTFR8 brand on a hat and put it up to sell, and has gradually gained more and more sales and followers. Social media and communication have been crucial to building the LOSTFR8 brand.

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