7 ms·

Magic: How to launch a product so no one will ever use it again

43 points by tghw 12y ago

peteretep 12y ago
You actually submitted a story to hackernews about trying to order a burrito and it was $5 more expensive than you wanted it to be...?
- tghw 12y ago
  The story is about a very disappointing first user experience and how it led me to never want to use the service again. The burrito is just a side plot.
  - king_magic 12y ago
    On one hand, I get where you're coming from, but come on: "Wow, everyone! This is truly amazing. We released Magic under 48 hours ago as an experiment and a side project, and now the traffic and requests are streaming in faster than we can handle."
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    I think that the 'magic' people were simply not prepared for a runaway success. Wait a while to give them a chance to get their act together and try again. First user experience during the hockey stick phase being 'poor' is to be expected for anything with this degree of growth. Try scaling anything through three orders of magnitude in 24 hours and you'll get why. The amazing thing to me is that your order got delivered at all.
    - Cthulhu_ 12y ago
      > I think that the 'magic' people were simply not prepared for a runaway success. But they were. Because they were using an invite-only signup to limit the amount of new users they can take in, they could make a reasonable assumption about how busy they could get at rush times. Besides, the people on the other side aren't robots - at the very least they could've apologised for the late replies and explained about how busy they were. Because they're humans - or so the website claims - and that means they should show a bit of humanity and empathy and whatnot. TBF I don't really think they hire actual humans, that just doesn't scale. Especially if 90% of their users just want to order food - reasonably predictable input, that.
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        If it takes 30 seconds to route a request and you have 5 people stand by you can process 10 orders per minute before you get a backlog.
    - tghw 12y ago
      First, they had an invite wall when I signed up. I was ~4000th in line, but they let me in anyway. This was their first mistake. The bigger problem is that their service is just a simple middle man. They don't provide delivery services, they just choose which service to use. For the examples they gave (food delivery, grocery delivery, airline tickets), it's never going to be worth it to me to have them charge me an extra 25% to pick between the three services that will do that for me (Postmates, Instacart/Postmates, Hipmunk). What's more, SMS makes it more difficult to order. Postmates' interface is much better than trying to text an order in. It's not that this is just an MVP. It's that this service really only takes away the decision of which other middle man to choose, and there's just not enough value there.
      - bluedino 12y ago
        Do they just keep your CC # on file?
        calvin_c 12y ago
        They use Square, so you set up a payment method attached to your phone number, and they use your phone number to check out.
      - waterlesscloud 12y ago
        You're just not the target market. I'm not either, but despite that I can easily see that their target market does actually exist.
- vog 12y ago
  ... and having to wait almost 1.5 hours for it, most of the time wasted by waiting for the "Magic" reply. Seriously, who wants to chat with a service whose latency is about 19 to 31 minutes?
  - bluedino 12y ago
    Had he not attempted to sign up at the same time he was going to order the burrito it would have been much less time.
minimaxir 12y ago
Note that the "Magic is a beta product released less than a week ago" excuse is irrelevant. If Magic wants to be competitive, it needs to have services equal to or better than existing options. (The Postmates comparison mentioned in the article is valid). That's the way it is with all startups and "they're just figuring themselves out" is not a sympathy granted by the marketplace.
- ganeumann 12y ago
  I disagree. They launched a beta to see if anyone would use it. If no one used it, then they could cut bait and move on. But people did use it, enough that it caused them to be horrendously slow. This means they should put more money into making it bigger. If there are a few hundred "innovators" (in the Everett Rogers/Crossing the Chasm sense) who were so alienated by bad service during the beta that they will never ever use it again, even when it becomes a good service...well, that sucks but has no bearing on the ultimate success or failure of the service. If you're going to beta test something, you have to expect it to have a few flaws. That's the point.
- atmosx 12y ago
  > Note that the "Magic is a beta product released less than a week ago" excuse is irrelevant. Maybe in disneyland, but that's mostly how things go down in the real world. It's a startup, first week, got hammerred by HN heavily, probably others, that's as much as they can handle. Things will go fine, they just need the time to adjust.
dudus 12y ago
Magic say they include the Tip.
- vog 12y ago
  As far as I understood, the main issue was the astronomically huge latency, not the price.
dudus 12y ago
Magic say they include the Tip.
notacoward 12y ago
It's so hard to find good help these days. (Or people on HN who understand irony, apparently.)
- Dirlewanger 12y ago
  I honestly hope Magic amasses a lump sum from all the suckers and takes off.
jjling 12y ago
Don't worry. It's just their "minimal viable product". <-- Hate that, that phrase has become an excuse to ship/launch crap.
- king_magic 12y ago
  I'd rather see someone try to release something new and get a few things wrong than have no one try to release anything at all until it's perfect.
  - imh 12y ago
    It's not about waiting until it's perfect, it's about waiting a little bit longer and focusing a bit more on the "viable" part of MVP.
- EGreg 12y ago
  I think the MVP advice to startups is wrong. It is probably given by investors who would like to see many startups that fail fast and pick winners who survive the first round. It should be MVP + metrics + quiet A/B testing and iteration for months before launch.
- PeterWhittaker 12y ago
  Hmm, not sure it's an MVP - it lacks V.
  - t_7u_ol8 12y ago
    If it creates buzz and makes money, it's viable. A few unsatisfied customers should be irrelevant in the greater scheme.
    - PeterWhittaker 12y ago
      So are we suggesting that we know the missing step? 1. Build something 2. ??? 3. Profit! We're suggesting that it's 1. Build something 2. Reduce convenience, increase price, piss people off, but get press 3. Profit! ???
mathgeek 12y ago
The latency is certainly understandable for a product that just went live to quite a bit of promotion... but considering that they included an invite barrier to keep things from outpacing their infrastructure, there's obviously a pretty severe point of failure here.
carsongross 12y ago
I had to wait, in my apartment, for 40 MINUTES. "Everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E
- tghw 12y ago
  I love that bit. But in this case, waiting an hour and a half for a middle man to do what it would have taken me 2 minutes to do wasn't worth the extra $9 they were asking for.
  - vinceguidry 12y ago
    Why'd you rely on a very beta web service being offered to the public for the very first time to do what you could have done in 2 minutes? I didn't make an order, but I fail to see how you could have been surprised by this. They have no idea how much demand they were going to have at launch, and it's not a service that can scale easily.
    - tghw 12y ago
      I didn't rely on it. I tried it out to see how well it would work. When I first signed up, they wait-listed me. Then, a few hours later they let me (and apparently everyone else) in. They didn't need to do that, but they did.
  - jerf 12y ago
    Your objection is probably more powerfully expressed as "waiting for a middleman to hire another middleman". Of course, if you're intimately familiar with all the various services available to you in SF then this is not going to be a useful service. I mean that perfectly straight, not sarcastically; they basically tried to charge you $9 to "know Postmates existed". But there will be a lot of people who may still be willing to pay for not knowing all those various services. I'm personally skeptical but it's at least worth a try. (I can't speak to the complexity of keeping track of the SF services, since I don't live there, but my impression is that it's challenging.)
  - 12y ago
Vula_Design 12y ago
Despite the humour and, on the surface, being a story about ordering a burrito, I think this is actually a very useful 'what not to do' cautionary tale for startups. They've clearly got a concept which, on paper, sounds like a good idea. They've then rushed development and gone to market without actually testing enough to know that they can deliver (literally) what the customer wants. That kind of early0stages growing needs to hapen before the company can gain a public reputation.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  That's simply a function of growth. You can not prepare for runaway growth like this, it's easier said than done and from the sidelines it looks like a piece of cake. At this level of growth any action that you did not automate away will bite you in a terrible way. And that's what all the handbooks say right: wait with automation until you've found your product:market fit. But what if that outruns you?
  - Vula_Design 12y ago
    I agree, but in this context I think that it's a valid criticism as their business model is a sort of 'all things under one roof' delivery system that should be prepared to offer a simple delivery like this one ate a competetive price/timeframe. I'm definitely not saying that people starting a business, particularly one in a service capacity, shouldn't expect to have to adapt with growth. I suppose the main point I was making is that prior to launching you should ensure that you are fulfilling your core functionality to at least a market-comparable level.
CPLX 12y ago
Indeed. If free-text SMS was an ideal way to interact with online delivery and concierge services you'd think someone would have done that already on an existing service. So then, why can't I just order from Seamless or Instacart via SMS? Oh right, because that experience sucks mightily. I have this lovely full color screen that can display menus, location and delivery times, let me search by cuisine, choose various customizations, etc etc. Then a "magic" computer sends the orders to the restaurant via an already configured and tested system so they are expecting an order and can fill it quickly and efficiently. Or alternatively, thanks to this innovative new startup, I can SMS to some random number and say "I want food or something do you have any burritos" and then have them text me back, etc, etc. BUT WAIT says the new startup. IT'S NOT JUST BURRITOS, in fact it's not just food. You could ask for a burrito today and a flight to Cancun tomorrow, and you only have to put one phone number in your address book. Aha, the real value proposition emerges. This startup uses their proprietary technology to know that Seamless or Instacart or Expedia exist already, and then they use it for me. Except it takes twice as long, without the UI/UX those services have perfected, and costs 30-50% more money. Step one: Landing page Step two: Corner the market on taking SMS messages and using them to punch orders into existing apps, using skilled college graduate US based labor. Step three: VC/YC EXPLOSION Step four: Profit
- bri3d 12y ago
  Virtualized personal assistant services aren't really anything new. This one just had an interesting/novel/awesome (and probably unsustainable) approach to the onboarding, UX, and price model - instead of "hiring" a "virtual assistant" and doing a bunch of sign up forms and paperwork, you just punch an address and card and away you go. As for why people want a personal assistant to shop for them when they could just use an app, think about it this way: To get things (even online), I have to: * Decide what *specifically* I want (brand, item, size, etc.) * Decide where to get it from * Obtain their website or app * (often) Sign up for an account * Enter a bunch of information to order what I want * Follow up if it's late or wrong With this service (or a hired personal assistant) I have to: * Decide what type of thing I want * Tell someone to make it happen Also, I wouldn't call Instacart or Expedia's interface "perfected." Thanks to the way the industry works there's still not a single website where I can say "find me the cheapest flights from point A to point B in date range X" and have it actually do so. With Instacart, I can't just punch in a natural-language grocery list and say "get me decent quality options for each, but make the beef grass-fed please." I have to go through a huge array of brands and potential sources for each item and decide what to get.
jacquesm 12y ago
I've launched something (once) that went from 0 to breaking in less than 10 hours. I aged at least a couple of years and it took weeks before we managed to get a grip on the situation. We were about as unprepared as could be. This is what all of you starter-uppers are dreaming of, but when the growth is higher than you can handle you're going to have to move really fast if you want to capture your potential. Unfortunately we had no idea what we were doing so I'm pretty sure those first weeks cost us dearly. Fortunately for the magic people their scaling issues are something that can be overcome and I really hope that they'll do well because of this. Cut them some slack and think about how hard it would be to pull this off with such rapid growth without having any delays or issues during the first phase of rapid growth. Dealing with high levels of traffic and orders is hard, dealing with high levels of growth is a lot harder still. Amazing they managed to ship the order at all.
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  At the very least they should've set up an auto-reply that explains they've been flooded with unexpected high load, with an average reply duration of half an hour or whatever it was at the time.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    Would you suggest they do that during or after trying to deal with said unexpected high load?
- tghw 12y ago
  Like I've said elsewhere, it's not the MVP-nature or the beta that's really the problem. It's that they want to start a service that charges 25% more in exchange for selecting which service to use, with a significantly worse user interface. It took me much longer to type in the order on my phone that it did to select the order from Postmates, the service they likely were using to actually do the delivery. Even if everything had gone perfectly and I hadn't spent over an hour waiting for responses, I still wouldn't use this service. To pay more for a worse interface? No thanks.
esthlos 12y ago
Why are you using the Reed College logo on your website? Your resume doesn't list any activity there. Watch out for legal issues.
- tghw 12y ago
  Griffin is a family name. I've looked into it and that particular representation of a griffin predates Reed's use of it.
  - esthlos 12y ago
    Yeah, it seems that that graphic is distinct from the Reed seal. Best of luck then.
rubbingalcohol 12y ago
ITT: mean-spirited people bash the hard work of others.
bluedino 12y ago
For some contrast, a first-time user could fire up the Domino's app and have a pizza delivered at the regular cost (+ tip and regular delivery charge) in 30 minutes.
dirtyaura 12y ago
No, this is exactly how early-stage startups often work. It's a great lesson to anybody who hasn't experienced it. Planned launches rarely go as well as planned, and big visibility happens when you are the least prepared. Been there, experienced that. According to the team, this was a side project, they had put a crappy landing page out there (with Times Roman as a font and got some flak for that) and somebody else submitted it to Product Hunt and it took off. They quickly improved the landing page and started handling orders. Now almost everybody reading HN knows them. They chose a brand name that is easy to remember. If they get their shit together in 6 months and relaunch, they will be totally fine. Most early stage startups can only dream of the kind of visibility they got. The bigger problem is that this kind of surprise success doesn't necessarily validate the idea, but at least now they can see and start to measure retention.
Shivetya 12y ago
I guess I am wondering how Magic is supposed to succeed. Most sites I need to go to tend to have very custom means to make ordering efficient, in the few cases where you might not know where to order something from a quick search is all that takes? Who is their target market? Let alone if I saw another service hitting up my site like this I would likely try to find out why customer's weren't finding it on their own or using it on their own, two things which would be at the top of the list to improve all the time. Perhaps to give people a separate billing point to reduce exposure of personal information? Look I just paid thirty bucks for a pizza and Pizza Place will never know it was really for me!!! Seriously the only convienence I can see if reducing the number of entities with my CC info

43 points by tghw 12y ago

You actually submitted a story to hackernews about trying to order a burrito and it was $5 more expensive than you wanted it to be...?

tghw 12y ago
The story is about a very disappointing first user experience and how it led me to never want to use the service again. The burrito is just a side plot.
- king_magic 12y ago
  On one hand, I get where you're coming from, but come on: "Wow, everyone! This is truly amazing. We released Magic under 48 hours ago as an experiment and a side project, and now the traffic and requests are streaming in faster than we can handle."
- jacquesm 12y ago
  I think that the 'magic' people were simply not prepared for a runaway success. Wait a while to give them a chance to get their act together and try again. First user experience during the hockey stick phase being 'poor' is to be expected for anything with this degree of growth. Try scaling anything through three orders of magnitude in 24 hours and you'll get why. The amazing thing to me is that your order got delivered at all.
  - Cthulhu_ 12y ago
    > I think that the 'magic' people were simply not prepared for a runaway success. But they were. Because they were using an invite-only signup to limit the amount of new users they can take in, they could make a reasonable assumption about how busy they could get at rush times. Besides, the people on the other side aren't robots - at the very least they could've apologised for the late replies and explained about how busy they were. Because they're humans - or so the website claims - and that means they should show a bit of humanity and empathy and whatnot. TBF I don't really think they hire actual humans, that just doesn't scale. Especially if 90% of their users just want to order food - reasonably predictable input, that.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      If it takes 30 seconds to route a request and you have 5 people stand by you can process 10 orders per minute before you get a backlog.
  - tghw 12y ago
    First, they had an invite wall when I signed up. I was ~4000th in line, but they let me in anyway. This was their first mistake. The bigger problem is that their service is just a simple middle man. They don't provide delivery services, they just choose which service to use. For the examples they gave (food delivery, grocery delivery, airline tickets), it's never going to be worth it to me to have them charge me an extra 25% to pick between the three services that will do that for me (Postmates, Instacart/Postmates, Hipmunk). What's more, SMS makes it more difficult to order. Postmates' interface is much better than trying to text an order in. It's not that this is just an MVP. It's that this service really only takes away the decision of which other middle man to choose, and there's just not enough value there.
    - bluedino 12y ago
      Do they just keep your CC # on file?
      - calvin_c 12y ago
        They use Square, so you set up a payment method attached to your phone number, and they use your phone number to check out.
    - waterlesscloud 12y ago
      You're just not the target market. I'm not either, but despite that I can easily see that their target market does actually exist.
vog 12y ago
... and having to wait almost 1.5 hours for it, most of the time wasted by waiting for the "Magic" reply. Seriously, who wants to chat with a service whose latency is about 19 to 31 minutes?
- bluedino 12y ago
  Had he not attempted to sign up at the same time he was going to order the burrito it would have been much less time.

minimaxir 12y ago

Note that the "Magic is a beta product released less than a week ago" excuse is irrelevant. If Magic wants to be competitive, it needs to have services equal to or better than existing options. (The Postmates comparison mentioned in the article is valid). That's the way it is with all startups and "they're just figuring themselves out" is not a sympathy granted by the marketplace.

ganeumann 12y ago
I disagree. They launched a beta to see if anyone would use it. If no one used it, then they could cut bait and move on. But people did use it, enough that it caused them to be horrendously slow. This means they should put more money into making it bigger. If there are a few hundred "innovators" (in the Everett Rogers/Crossing the Chasm sense) who were so alienated by bad service during the beta that they will never ever use it again, even when it becomes a good service...well, that sucks but has no bearing on the ultimate success or failure of the service. If you're going to beta test something, you have to expect it to have a few flaws. That's the point.
atmosx 12y ago
> Note that the "Magic is a beta product released less than a week ago" excuse is irrelevant. Maybe in disneyland, but that's mostly how things go down in the real world. It's a startup, first week, got hammerred by HN heavily, probably others, that's as much as they can handle. Things will go fine, they just need the time to adjust.

dudus 12y ago

Magic say they include the Tip.

vog 12y ago
As far as I understood, the main issue was the astronomically huge latency, not the price.

dudus 12y ago

Magic say they include the Tip.

notacoward 12y ago

It's so hard to find good help these days. (Or people on HN who understand irony, apparently.)

Dirlewanger 12y ago
I honestly hope Magic amasses a lump sum from all the suckers and takes off.

jjling 12y ago

Don't worry. It's just their "minimal viable product". <-- Hate that, that phrase has become an excuse to ship/launch crap.

king_magic 12y ago
I'd rather see someone try to release something new and get a few things wrong than have no one try to release anything at all until it's perfect.
- imh 12y ago
  It's not about waiting until it's perfect, it's about waiting a little bit longer and focusing a bit more on the "viable" part of MVP.
EGreg 12y ago
I think the MVP advice to startups is wrong. It is probably given by investors who would like to see many startups that fail fast and pick winners who survive the first round. It should be MVP + metrics + quiet A/B testing and iteration for months before launch.
PeterWhittaker 12y ago
Hmm, not sure it's an MVP - it lacks V.
- t_7u_ol8 12y ago
  If it creates buzz and makes money, it's viable. A few unsatisfied customers should be irrelevant in the greater scheme.
  - PeterWhittaker 12y ago
    So are we suggesting that we know the missing step? 1. Build something 2. ??? 3. Profit! We're suggesting that it's 1. Build something 2. Reduce convenience, increase price, piss people off, but get press 3. Profit! ???

mathgeek 12y ago

The latency is certainly understandable for a product that just went live to quite a bit of promotion... but considering that they included an invite barrier to keep things from outpacing their infrastructure, there's obviously a pretty severe point of failure here.

carsongross 12y ago

I had to wait, in my apartment, for 40 MINUTES. "Everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E

tghw 12y ago
I love that bit. But in this case, waiting an hour and a half for a middle man to do what it would have taken me 2 minutes to do wasn't worth the extra $9 they were asking for.
- vinceguidry 12y ago
  Why'd you rely on a very beta web service being offered to the public for the very first time to do what you could have done in 2 minutes? I didn't make an order, but I fail to see how you could have been surprised by this. They have no idea how much demand they were going to have at launch, and it's not a service that can scale easily.
  - tghw 12y ago
    I didn't rely on it. I tried it out to see how well it would work. When I first signed up, they wait-listed me. Then, a few hours later they let me (and apparently everyone else) in. They didn't need to do that, but they did.
- jerf 12y ago
  Your objection is probably more powerfully expressed as "waiting for a middleman to hire another middleman". Of course, if you're intimately familiar with all the various services available to you in SF then this is not going to be a useful service. I mean that perfectly straight, not sarcastically; they basically tried to charge you $9 to "know Postmates existed". But there will be a lot of people who may still be willing to pay for not knowing all those various services. I'm personally skeptical but it's at least worth a try. (I can't speak to the complexity of keeping track of the SF services, since I don't live there, but my impression is that it's challenging.)
- 12y ago

Vula_Design 12y ago

Despite the humour and, on the surface, being a story about ordering a burrito, I think this is actually a very useful 'what not to do' cautionary tale for startups. They've clearly got a concept which, on paper, sounds like a good idea. They've then rushed development and gone to market without actually testing enough to know that they can deliver (literally) what the customer wants. That kind of early0stages growing needs to hapen before the company can gain a public reputation.

jacquesm 12y ago
That's simply a function of growth. You can not prepare for runaway growth like this, it's easier said than done and from the sidelines it looks like a piece of cake. At this level of growth any action that you did not automate away will bite you in a terrible way. And that's what all the handbooks say right: wait with automation until you've found your product:market fit. But what if that outruns you?
- Vula_Design 12y ago
  I agree, but in this context I think that it's a valid criticism as their business model is a sort of 'all things under one roof' delivery system that should be prepared to offer a simple delivery like this one ate a competetive price/timeframe. I'm definitely not saying that people starting a business, particularly one in a service capacity, shouldn't expect to have to adapt with growth. I suppose the main point I was making is that prior to launching you should ensure that you are fulfilling your core functionality to at least a market-comparable level.

CPLX 12y ago

Indeed. If free-text SMS was an ideal way to interact with online delivery and concierge services you'd think someone would have done that already on an existing service. So then, why can't I just order from Seamless or Instacart via SMS? Oh right, because that experience sucks mightily. I have this lovely full color screen that can display menus, location and delivery times, let me search by cuisine, choose various customizations, etc etc. Then a "magic" computer sends the orders to the restaurant via an already configured and tested system so they are expecting an order and can fill it quickly and efficiently. Or alternatively, thanks to this innovative new startup, I can SMS to some random number and say "I want food or something do you have any burritos" and then have them text me back, etc, etc. BUT WAIT says the new startup. IT'S NOT JUST BURRITOS, in fact it's not just food. You could ask for a burrito today and a flight to Cancun tomorrow, and you only have to put one phone number in your address book. Aha, the real value proposition emerges. This startup uses their proprietary technology to know that Seamless or Instacart or Expedia exist already, and then they use it for me. Except it takes twice as long, without the UI/UX those services have perfected, and costs 30-50% more money. Step one: Landing page Step two: Corner the market on taking SMS messages and using them to punch orders into existing apps, using skilled college graduate US based labor. Step three: VC/YC EXPLOSION Step four: Profit

bri3d 12y ago
Virtualized personal assistant services aren't really anything new. This one just had an interesting/novel/awesome (and probably unsustainable) approach to the onboarding, UX, and price model - instead of "hiring" a "virtual assistant" and doing a bunch of sign up forms and paperwork, you just punch an address and card and away you go. As for why people want a personal assistant to shop for them when they could just use an app, think about it this way: To get things (even online), I have to: * Decide what *specifically* I want (brand, item, size, etc.) * Decide where to get it from * Obtain their website or app * (often) Sign up for an account * Enter a bunch of information to order what I want * Follow up if it's late or wrong With this service (or a hired personal assistant) I have to: * Decide what type of thing I want * Tell someone to make it happen Also, I wouldn't call Instacart or Expedia's interface "perfected." Thanks to the way the industry works there's still not a single website where I can say "find me the cheapest flights from point A to point B in date range X" and have it actually do so. With Instacart, I can't just punch in a natural-language grocery list and say "get me decent quality options for each, but make the beef grass-fed please." I have to go through a huge array of brands and potential sources for each item and decide what to get.

jacquesm 12y ago

I've launched something (once) that went from 0 to breaking in less than 10 hours. I aged at least a couple of years and it took weeks before we managed to get a grip on the situation. We were about as unprepared as could be. This is what all of you starter-uppers are dreaming of, but when the growth is higher than you can handle you're going to have to move really fast if you want to capture your potential. Unfortunately we had no idea what we were doing so I'm pretty sure those first weeks cost us dearly. Fortunately for the magic people their scaling issues are something that can be overcome and I really hope that they'll do well because of this. Cut them some slack and think about how hard it would be to pull this off with such rapid growth without having any delays or issues during the first phase of rapid growth. Dealing with high levels of traffic and orders is hard, dealing with high levels of growth is a lot harder still. Amazing they managed to ship the order at all.

Cthulhu_ 12y ago
At the very least they should've set up an auto-reply that explains they've been flooded with unexpected high load, with an average reply duration of half an hour or whatever it was at the time.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Would you suggest they do that during or after trying to deal with said unexpected high load?
tghw 12y ago
Like I've said elsewhere, it's not the MVP-nature or the beta that's really the problem. It's that they want to start a service that charges 25% more in exchange for selecting which service to use, with a significantly worse user interface. It took me much longer to type in the order on my phone that it did to select the order from Postmates, the service they likely were using to actually do the delivery. Even if everything had gone perfectly and I hadn't spent over an hour waiting for responses, I still wouldn't use this service. To pay more for a worse interface? No thanks.

esthlos 12y ago

Why are you using the Reed College logo on your website? Your resume doesn't list any activity there. Watch out for legal issues.

tghw 12y ago
Griffin is a family name. I've looked into it and that particular representation of a griffin predates Reed's use of it.
- esthlos 12y ago
  Yeah, it seems that that graphic is distinct from the Reed seal. Best of luck then.

rubbingalcohol 12y ago

ITT: mean-spirited people bash the hard work of others.

bluedino 12y ago

For some contrast, a first-time user could fire up the Domino's app and have a pizza delivered at the regular cost (+ tip and regular delivery charge) in 30 minutes.

dirtyaura 12y ago

No, this is exactly how early-stage startups often work. It's a great lesson to anybody who hasn't experienced it. Planned launches rarely go as well as planned, and big visibility happens when you are the least prepared. Been there, experienced that. According to the team, this was a side project, they had put a crappy landing page out there (with Times Roman as a font and got some flak for that) and somebody else submitted it to Product Hunt and it took off. They quickly improved the landing page and started handling orders. Now almost everybody reading HN knows them. They chose a brand name that is easy to remember. If they get their shit together in 6 months and relaunch, they will be totally fine. Most early stage startups can only dream of the kind of visibility they got. The bigger problem is that this kind of surprise success doesn't necessarily validate the idea, but at least now they can see and start to measure retention.

Shivetya 12y ago

I guess I am wondering how Magic is supposed to succeed. Most sites I need to go to tend to have very custom means to make ordering efficient, in the few cases where you might not know where to order something from a quick search is all that takes? Who is their target market? Let alone if I saw another service hitting up my site like this I would likely try to find out why customer's weren't finding it on their own or using it on their own, two things which would be at the top of the list to improve all the time. Perhaps to give people a separate billing point to reduce exposure of personal information? Look I just paid thirty bucks for a pizza and Pizza Place will never know it was really for me!!! Seriously the only convienence I can see if reducing the number of entities with my CC info