11 ms·

Magic: The Story of an Accidentally Founded, Wildly Viral Startup

80 points by Libertatea 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
brador 12y ago
I asked the founder about returns and how they'll handle customer support issues in his reveal post a few days ago. No reply.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  Magic appears to be using the tried-and-true method of Twitter support: http://twitter.com/tweetmagicnow http://twitter.com/tweetmagicnow Which is funny because part of the value proposition of Magic is not trying user interaction to an account.
derefr 12y ago
It's hard to make an analogy of what Magic is right now, other than to say it's sort of like "Siri with humans." But at scale, I envision it would basically be a dynamically-allocated pool of secretaries, in the same way that AWS is a dynamically-allocated pool of computer hardware. And we already have "dynamically-allocated pools of secretaries!" Magic is effectively a recreation of the concierge service attached to (some) credit cards, which does exactly that. This is not to poo-poo the business model—far from it, it's something people want—but I'm guessing the true outcome of this battle will just be A. the credit card companies opening up their concierge services to lower cardholder levels; and B. AWS building a concierge-pool service to go along with (and possibly run atop of) their Mechanical Turk labor-pool service.
- CPLX 12y ago
  It's a virtual assistant service. There are lots of those. The business model of such a service is they sell the labor of someone who solves problems for you, and charge you slightly more than it costs them to compensate the labor. Or in the case of this specific virtual assistant service called Magic, they have people who don't in fact solve problems for you, and charge some unspecified opaque amount of money.
- VLM 12y ago
  Its an outsourced operations department. Like a NOC or dispatch organization. The kind of place that needs some internal controls, policies, metrics, standards, demarcation points, escalation contacts, something other than "do your best". Observationally this seems to be an operations department without all those features. Once they add those features, they'll either be wildly successful, or no longer profitable, hard to say which. If you've ever wondered what service would be like at a big company help desk or call center without any rules, well, now you know. Some really good parts, some really bad parts.
  - derefr 12y ago
    Right, the obvious comparison that everyone can understand is a call centre. But, of course, call centre employees (ops employees in general) do the things related to their line of business and which they're trained for. This is slightly different, in that a concierge or administrative assistant does a lot of things they're not trained for, just because it's what the boss/client asks for.
    - VLM 12y ago
      Your analysis is correct at the lower level functions but I was thinking slightly higher level, you are correct there is no scripted procedure for example, ordering a pizza and diet coke, but where is the procedure or policy or anything, to handle "verification that something got delivered" "Follow up with customer to verify he's happy with his delivery" "company wide standards for tipping or including gratuity in the cost" "how to deal with a journalist on the internet complaining" "Documentation and analysis of failures"
CPLX 12y ago
> After I paid $50 to jump 178 spots in line, I got a VIP number and texted again. By now I was hungry, so I ordered a dozen chocolate chip cookies. Five minutes and $26 later, they were supposedly on their way—but they never arrived, and I never heard why. I never got my money back, either. > I’ve never once actually gotten what I wanted from Magic. So we should be celebrating a "company" that takes almost a hundred bucks from this guy but doesn't deliver him anything at all. That's not a company or a service it's a walking disaster. The people that are having sour grapes (if they exist at all) presumably have them because they work on startups that actually do things or solve problems and have some small measure of success but don't get Wired articles because they don't happen to be connected to YC dinners. What about all the "ideas are worth nothing" dogma that permeates all of the startup literature? What about it's the execution that matters? Doesn't "product-market fit" require an actual product?
- reasonish 12y ago
  It's all about who you know. That's all that matters in the startup world. How is texting a pizza order to Magic, who then text it to a pizza company (Introducing a middle man) making the world a better place? It's so well suited to startup founders though - Hey I'm way too busy and important to do menial things, I need a personal assistant on my phone that can do things for me while I'm saving the world by making some crappy website, which will never make any money, but will get bought for billions by some bigger fool because we know people who know people. Magic sounds like it's right out of "Silicon Valley" (The TV Show). I'd be surprised if anyone remembers Magic in a years time. Either that or it'll get bought by Amazon for $20bn. Or maybe both...
  - CPLX 12y ago
    > It's all about who you know. That's all that matters in the startup world. Exactly. If they were't connected to YC or someone else that could grease the wheels they would have their merchant account and CC acceptance terminated in the first 72 hours for the obvious and flagrant violations outlined in the Wired article, and quietly fade into the ether.
  - aqme28 12y ago
rubbingalcohol 12y ago
I wonder if all the people who were bashing Magic the other day for having scaling issues are getting Wired articles written about them. Or even experiencing scaling issues. A startup that is absolutely swamped with demand and unable to keep up is doing something right. But you wouldn't think it with all the mean-spirited comments people were tossing around in the other thread. This is the sort of thing HN should be celebrating as a community, not deriding. Sour grapes, much?
- randallsquared 12y ago
  One could argue that this article was about those people, or at least about how right they were. :)
- minimaxir 12y ago
  Celebration can be just as unhelpful, if not even more (e.g. echo chamber effect of positive reinforcement). Ignoring legitimate faults in with a product/startup with a "they tried" excuse is the last thing a startup should do. The MVP culture for startups is not a one-size-fits-all idiom.
- pitt1980 12y ago
  questions about scaling seem entirely on topic and fair there is a middle ground between celebrating and deriding, which is where I think most people hope discussions of new startups wind up
- wpietri 12y ago
  They are (possibly) doing something right, and they certainly have gotten lucky, so yay for them. But this isn't 1994. Launching a service now without thinking about scaling is an amateur move. It is the kind of thing that can kill a company, or at least wound it severely. At best, you are wasting a zillion first impressions in the hope that you will do well enough that they'll eventually come back for a second chance. There are plenty of well-tested approaches to prevent that from happening, and they're not particularly hard to implement. It seems pretty reasonable to me that people have put the time in to learn how to do this right are critical when it is done wrong. It reminds me of the tension between a person who has worked their ass off to get into a good school and the one who got in because he won the ovarian lottery and his family's name is on a building. Sure, we should be happy every time somebody gets a good education, but I think it's asking a lot for skill never to resent luck.
paulhauggis 12y ago
I think the first issue they will run into is scaling. A few people in a startup won't be able to handle thousands of requests in an hour. Personally, I don't have a use for this service. I have a smart phone that can pretty easily search Google for anything that I would need.
- mmastrac 12y ago
  This service is for people who are willing to trade more cash for less cognitive load. In some ways, Uber was similar at the start -- rather than having to figure out which cab company you want to call to have one sent over, negotiate the phone trees, etc, you just fire up the app and ask for a car. Concierge services are popular at the high-end and there's always been an opportunity to bring these down to a different financial strata of users.
  - CPLX 12y ago
    > Uber was similar at the start... you just fire up the app and ask for a car. That doesn't sound similar at all. The substantive difference is that when you asked for a car, a car showed up. Unlike Magic, where you order things and pay for them and nothing happens.
    - cherls 12y ago
      I'm sure if uber went unintentially viral the day it was launched it wouldn't have been able to deliver either. They're similar in concept and uniquenes, not how they were born. That's just a small bump in the road in the long run.
      - CPLX 12y ago
        Yes, if Uber had said they were ready to go in dozens of cities and took people's orders for cars and charged their credit cards but the cars never showed up and they had no manned number to call or email address to deal with that problem and they hadn't coded an app that tracked cars and they had no backend software to handle orders and registration they would have maybe had a different business outcome.
minimaxir 12y ago
The unjustified fervor behind Magic reminds me of the Yo frenzy from last year. "A stupidly simple startup went viral? That's an example of a good startup!" Except that logic is circular; it's getting controversy because it's getting controversy. Yo led to an innovation collapse in Silicon Valley as many tried to do a "Yo for X" without realizing that Yo became popular due to dumb luck. That time could have been used to spend time on apps that have a legitimate purpose and are not trying to chase stupid VC money. At the least, Magic is not as easily cloneable. That just means the clones will be even worse.
- bmelton 12y ago
  > At the least, Magic is not as easily cloneable. That just means the clones will be even worse. Interesting you say that, as this article posted as a Show HN the other day was derided as having exposed how easy it would be to clone Magic. http://blog.sendsonar.com/2015/02/23/add-magic-to-your-business/ http://blog.sendsonar.com/2015/02/23/add-magic-to-your-busin...
  - minimaxir 12y ago
    Processing and tying requests to a phone number isn't the scalability bottleneck; that's easy to do. The hard part and main scalability concern is coordinating user requests with other third party services, and that can't be automated in any way. (For at least the next few years, anyways). That's not something you could implement and scale at a hackathon.
    - CPLX 12y ago
      One unstated question in all this discussion of Magic is how what they are doing relates to the terms of service for the third parties they are using to actually deliver. Couple that with the usual money laundering / fraud type problems you get with accepting credit cards and then placing an order with a third party service and you have a real life legitimate "hard problem" on your hands. How, exactly, do they plan to handle chargebacks and allegations of non-delivery from third party service providers that they don't have any apparent reseller agreement with?
miket 12y ago
I'm a big fan of the startup FancyHands - https://www.fancyhands.com/ https://www.fancyhands.com/. The value proposition offered by the two services is similar: text a task, have an on-demand assistant find a solution for you. I do wish sometimes FH would return something faster: response for me range from 30m to a few hours. Though it sound like the with the current scaling pains at Magic, they aren't fully living up to their promised responsiveness, either. UPDATED: Just saw that FH has released some real-time communication capability with their assistants. Very cool: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fancyhands.orri https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fancyhands...
- ilyaeck 12y ago
  Could you please detail your experience with FH: what you use it for and whether your are satisfied (other than the latency issue)?
woah 12y ago
Scaling problems? That's what people have against these guys? This is the most transparent sour grapes I have ever seen. Believe me, I'm insanely jealous of them too. It's an amazingly simple idea that has exploded, and has potential for great growth. This could be the Google of the Seamless, Postmates, etc economy. All you guys can do is get pissed because they can't hire fast enough?
- minimaxir 12y ago
  Equating "publicity" with "success" is a dangerous game.
frik 12y ago
The idea is old, it's called an concierge service: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concierge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concierge It is/was available in various countries in Europe from several companies (call center companies, telekom companies, credit card companies). Several "magic" like concierge services were already on HN, never heard about them again. On Reddit it was mentioned a small startup company with seed money is behind 'magic'. The next step is a personal software agent, a vision that Bill Gates proposed in his famous 1995 book "The Road Ahead". It's basically the next logical step of Siri/Cortana/Watson.
- drzaiusapelord 12y ago
  Except conceirge services are usually high-ticket items. So if I'm wealthy I know that there's a major incentive to be treated right and be given premium quality goods. Reputation in these services is everything. What the hell is magic going to sell me when I ask for roses from my wife? From the great florist down the block who wants $79 or from the chain florist that wants $49 and has 1 star ratings because he only delivers beat up looking flowers? When I dont like the goods, what happens then? I've already been charged. Who do I complain to? Magic directly? This florist? Even then, who cares? I imagine magic is busy making connections to the low price leaders to be their exclusive dealers. Now you don't have some tastemaker worried about offending you, you have put yourself in a captive market situation where one organization decides what vendor to use, and that vendor may or may not have your interests in mind. In fact, it would be stupid if they did. They are there to please magic, not you. Making you happy with over-priced cut-rate flowers is magic's job.
- flomo 12y ago
  Gates may have been referring to a greatly-hyped 1990s mobile startup called (coincidentally?) General Magic, who promised software agents which could do things like book flights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic
  - nostrademons 12y ago
    Ironically, a number of General Magic alumni have gone on to found companies that deliver on parts of the general promise, eg. Andy Rubin of Android ("talk to your phone and get any answers you want"), Tony Fadell of Nest ("tell your thermostat about the comfortable home you want"), and Pierre Omidyar of E-Bay ("tell the Internet what obscure item you want").
fabrice_d 12y ago
So I guess their value will be all the real life data they are getting about their users. Knowning what you like to eat, buy, where you're flying to, etc.
gallerytungsten 12y ago
Magic is really just a concierge service via text message. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not revolutionary. To really make it work and to scale rapidly, they might think about a franchise model, so that franchises can be started in numerous locations by people who actually know the local area. Magic could make plenty of money providing a reliable and customizable back-end service for local operators.
chenglou 12y ago
Magic reminds me of Path Talk (https://path.com/talk https://path.com/talk), which is more focused on places and probably has more room for automation & optimizations, e.g. if many people ask for the price of a burger at place X, might as well display the answer in the FAQ of the place on Path Talk. Otherwise a real person picks up your question and texts you back in a while. The app can also expand by striking some deals with smaller merchants to handle the customer service part for them. The benefit I see from this is that you asynchronously ask for an answer and get texted back whenever, instead of waiting on the phone line.
albertwang 12y ago
Question for those who've used Magic: how was your experience? What did you buy, and under what circumstances? (ie, was the item cheap? hard to find? Did you need it immediately?) I've found that the tech behind this is actually quite scalable, thanks to Twilio. As other commenters have pointed out though, Magic's concept has already existed (free) for a long time, through concierge services like Visa signature and Amex Platinum. What's different and innovative here are the sms-interface and the hidden, Instacart-like surcharge.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Innovative here are the promises to do anything, just by texting. Calling up the Amex concierge service seemed like more of a big deal. And explaining to them I'd like them to get food delivered to me... Dunno how'd that go. They certainly don't market it for stuff like that.
itsbeendone 12y ago
People have been making concierge companies for years. Here's one that was around Brooklyn a while back: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/nyregion/thecity/21bode.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/nyregion/thecity/21bode.ht... You can write good dispatching software, but at the end of the day your scaling bottleneck is adding humans.
qq66 12y ago
This is a concierge service by text. It makes sense as an idea for two reasons: first, most people don't know the variety of things that a concierge (at a hotel, or credit card provider) can do; second, I've met many people even of my age (31) who are pathologically incapable of making a phone call, even to a pizza parlor.
Tarrosion 12y ago
My Magic experience so far: - I asked "what kinds of things can you help me with?" and got a response back: "We're magicians! We can do anything." But then when I actually asked for some help, no reply. - The next day I asked if they could get me delivery from a local pizza place which doesn't usually deliver to me. They say sure, great. After almost 4 hours of back-and-forth, we successfully communicate about what I'm hoping for. Apparently the price had already been sent to me, but I never go that message. And the price? $50 for a pizza that's $12 on the restaurant's menu. Even generously figuring $10 delivery, $5 delivery tip, $5 Magic fee, I can't explain how $50 is reasonable. Maybe some minimum delivery charge? Okay, so tell me that. Average response time is 20-30 minutes depending on how you count a message they never responded to. I actually like this idea a lot, but I hope the implementation improves.
grecy 12y ago
I wonder if the "accidental launch" is going to hurt them. It seems like the sheer volume of requests is resulting in long wait times and unsatisfied customers - exactly the opposite of what they want to convey. I hope they can overcome these teething hurdles and find a place.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  One way - stop growing virally (i.e. uncontrollably), raise your prices, and create a process that works. Some metrics would help.
ada1981 12y ago
I rememebr hearing stories about how Zappos customer service would do things like this... The conversation went like this. "Zappos, how can we help you." "I'd like a large pizza." "Um, you relize we sell shoes. It's also 2 am." "Yes." "Ah, ok. Please hold." "Ok sir, we've found these locations that are open and have the type of pizza you'd like. Here are the numbers." -- Magic is cool. There are some big scaling problems. They will probably not capture all the buzz the best they could. Creating an on demand pool of virtual assistants + some machine learning to optimize the solution paths those VA's take so as to provide suggested solution routes for then to follow, ie for Pizza in SF at 2am, here are some options.. At some point most tasks become routine. And yes, there already exist lots of va companies. Magic isn't surprising if you know about VAs, but many people apparnetly haven't read The 4 Hour Work Week. A Universal API for all resources, labor, goods and services seems like a damn good product to build, perhaps magic can be that. Otherwise, how can we begin to create a Universal Resource API?
- wpietri 12y ago
  The Zappos story is actually from the founder, Tony Hsieh: http://about.zappos.com/press-center/media-coverage/delivering-happiness-zappos-way http://about.zappos.com/press-center/media-coverage/deliveri... "Hsieh likes to end his presentation with what he calls his pizza story. One night, he and some vendors returned to a hotel room late. Someone in the group was craving pizza and was told room service had ended. As a joke, Hsieh suggested calling Zappos. You can probably guess the end of the story—even though Zappos doesn't sell pizza, the customer service rep found a list of local pizza places that would deliver to the hotel. It's a fun story that seriously reinforces Hsieh's theme of customer service."
rhapsodic 12y ago
This will fail.
laurafurr_TP 12y ago
Has anyone here used Magic? I am a reporter for a new startup Tech.pro and am writing a story about Magic. I'm looking to interview users about their experience for the piece. Please let me know. You can email me at laf319@gmail.com, or reply to the post. Thanks!

80 points by Libertatea 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

I asked the founder about returns and how they'll handle customer support issues in his reveal post a few days ago. No reply.

minimaxir 12y ago
Magic appears to be using the tried-and-true method of Twitter support: http://twitter.com/tweetmagicnow http://twitter.com/tweetmagicnow Which is funny because part of the value proposition of Magic is not trying user interaction to an account.

derefr 12y ago

It's hard to make an analogy of what Magic is right now, other than to say it's sort of like "Siri with humans." But at scale, I envision it would basically be a dynamically-allocated pool of secretaries, in the same way that AWS is a dynamically-allocated pool of computer hardware. And we already have "dynamically-allocated pools of secretaries!" Magic is effectively a recreation of the concierge service attached to (some) credit cards, which does exactly that. This is not to poo-poo the business model—far from it, it's something people want—but I'm guessing the true outcome of this battle will just be A. the credit card companies opening up their concierge services to lower cardholder levels; and B. AWS building a concierge-pool service to go along with (and possibly run atop of) their Mechanical Turk labor-pool service.

CPLX 12y ago
It's a virtual assistant service. There are lots of those. The business model of such a service is they sell the labor of someone who solves problems for you, and charge you slightly more than it costs them to compensate the labor. Or in the case of this specific virtual assistant service called Magic, they have people who don't in fact solve problems for you, and charge some unspecified opaque amount of money.
VLM 12y ago
Its an outsourced operations department. Like a NOC or dispatch organization. The kind of place that needs some internal controls, policies, metrics, standards, demarcation points, escalation contacts, something other than "do your best". Observationally this seems to be an operations department without all those features. Once they add those features, they'll either be wildly successful, or no longer profitable, hard to say which. If you've ever wondered what service would be like at a big company help desk or call center without any rules, well, now you know. Some really good parts, some really bad parts.
- derefr 12y ago
  Right, the obvious comparison that everyone can understand is a call centre. But, of course, call centre employees (ops employees in general) do the things related to their line of business and which they're trained for. This is slightly different, in that a concierge or administrative assistant does a lot of things they're not trained for, just because it's what the boss/client asks for.
  - VLM 12y ago
    Your analysis is correct at the lower level functions but I was thinking slightly higher level, you are correct there is no scripted procedure for example, ordering a pizza and diet coke, but where is the procedure or policy or anything, to handle "verification that something got delivered" "Follow up with customer to verify he's happy with his delivery" "company wide standards for tipping or including gratuity in the cost" "how to deal with a journalist on the internet complaining" "Documentation and analysis of failures"

CPLX 12y ago

> After I paid $50 to jump 178 spots in line, I got a VIP number and texted again. By now I was hungry, so I ordered a dozen chocolate chip cookies. Five minutes and $26 later, they were supposedly on their way—but they never arrived, and I never heard why. I never got my money back, either. > I’ve never once actually gotten what I wanted from Magic. So we should be celebrating a "company" that takes almost a hundred bucks from this guy but doesn't deliver him anything at all. That's not a company or a service it's a walking disaster. The people that are having sour grapes (if they exist at all) presumably have them because they work on startups that actually do things or solve problems and have some small measure of success but don't get Wired articles because they don't happen to be connected to YC dinners. What about all the "ideas are worth nothing" dogma that permeates all of the startup literature? What about it's the execution that matters? Doesn't "product-market fit" require an actual product?

reasonish 12y ago
It's all about who you know. That's all that matters in the startup world. How is texting a pizza order to Magic, who then text it to a pizza company (Introducing a middle man) making the world a better place? It's so well suited to startup founders though - Hey I'm way too busy and important to do menial things, I need a personal assistant on my phone that can do things for me while I'm saving the world by making some crappy website, which will never make any money, but will get bought for billions by some bigger fool because we know people who know people. Magic sounds like it's right out of "Silicon Valley" (The TV Show). I'd be surprised if anyone remembers Magic in a years time. Either that or it'll get bought by Amazon for $20bn. Or maybe both...
- CPLX 12y ago
  > It's all about who you know. That's all that matters in the startup world. Exactly. If they were't connected to YC or someone else that could grease the wheels they would have their merchant account and CC acceptance terminated in the first 72 hours for the obvious and flagrant violations outlined in the Wired article, and quietly fade into the ether.
- aqme28 12y ago

rubbingalcohol 12y ago

I wonder if all the people who were bashing Magic the other day for having scaling issues are getting Wired articles written about them. Or even experiencing scaling issues. A startup that is absolutely swamped with demand and unable to keep up is doing something right. But you wouldn't think it with all the mean-spirited comments people were tossing around in the other thread. This is the sort of thing HN should be celebrating as a community, not deriding. Sour grapes, much?

randallsquared 12y ago
One could argue that this article was about those people, or at least about how right they were. :)
minimaxir 12y ago
Celebration can be just as unhelpful, if not even more (e.g. echo chamber effect of positive reinforcement). Ignoring legitimate faults in with a product/startup with a "they tried" excuse is the last thing a startup should do. The MVP culture for startups is not a one-size-fits-all idiom.
pitt1980 12y ago
questions about scaling seem entirely on topic and fair there is a middle ground between celebrating and deriding, which is where I think most people hope discussions of new startups wind up
wpietri 12y ago
They are (possibly) doing something right, and they certainly have gotten lucky, so yay for them. But this isn't 1994. Launching a service now without thinking about scaling is an amateur move. It is the kind of thing that can kill a company, or at least wound it severely. At best, you are wasting a zillion first impressions in the hope that you will do well enough that they'll eventually come back for a second chance. There are plenty of well-tested approaches to prevent that from happening, and they're not particularly hard to implement. It seems pretty reasonable to me that people have put the time in to learn how to do this right are critical when it is done wrong. It reminds me of the tension between a person who has worked their ass off to get into a good school and the one who got in because he won the ovarian lottery and his family's name is on a building. Sure, we should be happy every time somebody gets a good education, but I think it's asking a lot for skill never to resent luck.

paulhauggis 12y ago

I think the first issue they will run into is scaling. A few people in a startup won't be able to handle thousands of requests in an hour. Personally, I don't have a use for this service. I have a smart phone that can pretty easily search Google for anything that I would need.

mmastrac 12y ago
This service is for people who are willing to trade more cash for less cognitive load. In some ways, Uber was similar at the start -- rather than having to figure out which cab company you want to call to have one sent over, negotiate the phone trees, etc, you just fire up the app and ask for a car. Concierge services are popular at the high-end and there's always been an opportunity to bring these down to a different financial strata of users.
- CPLX 12y ago
  > Uber was similar at the start... you just fire up the app and ask for a car. That doesn't sound similar at all. The substantive difference is that when you asked for a car, a car showed up. Unlike Magic, where you order things and pay for them and nothing happens.
  - cherls 12y ago
    I'm sure if uber went unintentially viral the day it was launched it wouldn't have been able to deliver either. They're similar in concept and uniquenes, not how they were born. That's just a small bump in the road in the long run.
    - CPLX 12y ago
      Yes, if Uber had said they were ready to go in dozens of cities and took people's orders for cars and charged their credit cards but the cars never showed up and they had no manned number to call or email address to deal with that problem and they hadn't coded an app that tracked cars and they had no backend software to handle orders and registration they would have maybe had a different business outcome.

minimaxir 12y ago

The unjustified fervor behind Magic reminds me of the Yo frenzy from last year. "A stupidly simple startup went viral? That's an example of a good startup!" Except that logic is circular; it's getting controversy because it's getting controversy. Yo led to an innovation collapse in Silicon Valley as many tried to do a "Yo for X" without realizing that Yo became popular due to dumb luck. That time could have been used to spend time on apps that have a legitimate purpose and are not trying to chase stupid VC money. At the least, Magic is not as easily cloneable. That just means the clones will be even worse.

bmelton 12y ago
> At the least, Magic is not as easily cloneable. That just means the clones will be even worse. Interesting you say that, as this article posted as a Show HN the other day was derided as having exposed how easy it would be to clone Magic. http://blog.sendsonar.com/2015/02/23/add-magic-to-your-business/ http://blog.sendsonar.com/2015/02/23/add-magic-to-your-busin...
- minimaxir 12y ago
  Processing and tying requests to a phone number isn't the scalability bottleneck; that's easy to do. The hard part and main scalability concern is coordinating user requests with other third party services, and that can't be automated in any way. (For at least the next few years, anyways). That's not something you could implement and scale at a hackathon.
  - CPLX 12y ago
    One unstated question in all this discussion of Magic is how what they are doing relates to the terms of service for the third parties they are using to actually deliver. Couple that with the usual money laundering / fraud type problems you get with accepting credit cards and then placing an order with a third party service and you have a real life legitimate "hard problem" on your hands. How, exactly, do they plan to handle chargebacks and allegations of non-delivery from third party service providers that they don't have any apparent reseller agreement with?

miket 12y ago

I'm a big fan of the startup FancyHands - https://www.fancyhands.com/ https://www.fancyhands.com/. The value proposition offered by the two services is similar: text a task, have an on-demand assistant find a solution for you. I do wish sometimes FH would return something faster: response for me range from 30m to a few hours. Though it sound like the with the current scaling pains at Magic, they aren't fully living up to their promised responsiveness, either. UPDATED: Just saw that FH has released some real-time communication capability with their assistants. Very cool: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fancyhands.orri https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fancyhands...

ilyaeck 12y ago
Could you please detail your experience with FH: what you use it for and whether your are satisfied (other than the latency issue)?

woah 12y ago

Scaling problems? That's what people have against these guys? This is the most transparent sour grapes I have ever seen. Believe me, I'm insanely jealous of them too. It's an amazingly simple idea that has exploded, and has potential for great growth. This could be the Google of the Seamless, Postmates, etc economy. All you guys can do is get pissed because they can't hire fast enough?

minimaxir 12y ago
Equating "publicity" with "success" is a dangerous game.

frik 12y ago

The idea is old, it's called an concierge service: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concierge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concierge It is/was available in various countries in Europe from several companies (call center companies, telekom companies, credit card companies). Several "magic" like concierge services were already on HN, never heard about them again. On Reddit it was mentioned a small startup company with seed money is behind 'magic'. The next step is a personal software agent, a vision that Bill Gates proposed in his famous 1995 book "The Road Ahead". It's basically the next logical step of Siri/Cortana/Watson.

drzaiusapelord 12y ago
Except conceirge services are usually high-ticket items. So if I'm wealthy I know that there's a major incentive to be treated right and be given premium quality goods. Reputation in these services is everything. What the hell is magic going to sell me when I ask for roses from my wife? From the great florist down the block who wants $79 or from the chain florist that wants $49 and has 1 star ratings because he only delivers beat up looking flowers? When I dont like the goods, what happens then? I've already been charged. Who do I complain to? Magic directly? This florist? Even then, who cares? I imagine magic is busy making connections to the low price leaders to be their exclusive dealers. Now you don't have some tastemaker worried about offending you, you have put yourself in a captive market situation where one organization decides what vendor to use, and that vendor may or may not have your interests in mind. In fact, it would be stupid if they did. They are there to please magic, not you. Making you happy with over-priced cut-rate flowers is magic's job.
flomo 12y ago
Gates may have been referring to a greatly-hyped 1990s mobile startup called (coincidentally?) General Magic, who promised software agents which could do things like book flights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic
- nostrademons 12y ago
  Ironically, a number of General Magic alumni have gone on to found companies that deliver on parts of the general promise, eg. Andy Rubin of Android ("talk to your phone and get any answers you want"), Tony Fadell of Nest ("tell your thermostat about the comfortable home you want"), and Pierre Omidyar of E-Bay ("tell the Internet what obscure item you want").

fabrice_d 12y ago

So I guess their value will be all the real life data they are getting about their users. Knowning what you like to eat, buy, where you're flying to, etc.

gallerytungsten 12y ago

Magic is really just a concierge service via text message. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not revolutionary. To really make it work and to scale rapidly, they might think about a franchise model, so that franchises can be started in numerous locations by people who actually know the local area. Magic could make plenty of money providing a reliable and customizable back-end service for local operators.

chenglou 12y ago

Magic reminds me of Path Talk (https://path.com/talk https://path.com/talk), which is more focused on places and probably has more room for automation & optimizations, e.g. if many people ask for the price of a burger at place X, might as well display the answer in the FAQ of the place on Path Talk. Otherwise a real person picks up your question and texts you back in a while. The app can also expand by striking some deals with smaller merchants to handle the customer service part for them. The benefit I see from this is that you asynchronously ask for an answer and get texted back whenever, instead of waiting on the phone line.

albertwang 12y ago

Question for those who've used Magic: how was your experience? What did you buy, and under what circumstances? (ie, was the item cheap? hard to find? Did you need it immediately?) I've found that the tech behind this is actually quite scalable, thanks to Twilio. As other commenters have pointed out though, Magic's concept has already existed (free) for a long time, through concierge services like Visa signature and Amex Platinum. What's different and innovative here are the sms-interface and the hidden, Instacart-like surcharge.

MichaelGG 12y ago
Innovative here are the promises to do anything, just by texting. Calling up the Amex concierge service seemed like more of a big deal. And explaining to them I'd like them to get food delivered to me... Dunno how'd that go. They certainly don't market it for stuff like that.

itsbeendone 12y ago

People have been making concierge companies for years. Here's one that was around Brooklyn a while back: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/nyregion/thecity/21bode.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/nyregion/thecity/21bode.ht... You can write good dispatching software, but at the end of the day your scaling bottleneck is adding humans.

qq66 12y ago

This is a concierge service by text. It makes sense as an idea for two reasons: first, most people don't know the variety of things that a concierge (at a hotel, or credit card provider) can do; second, I've met many people even of my age (31) who are pathologically incapable of making a phone call, even to a pizza parlor.

Tarrosion 12y ago

My Magic experience so far: - I asked "what kinds of things can you help me with?" and got a response back: "We're magicians! We can do anything." But then when I actually asked for some help, no reply. - The next day I asked if they could get me delivery from a local pizza place which doesn't usually deliver to me. They say sure, great. After almost 4 hours of back-and-forth, we successfully communicate about what I'm hoping for. Apparently the price had already been sent to me, but I never go that message. And the price? $50 for a pizza that's $12 on the restaurant's menu. Even generously figuring $10 delivery, $5 delivery tip, $5 Magic fee, I can't explain how $50 is reasonable. Maybe some minimum delivery charge? Okay, so tell me that. Average response time is 20-30 minutes depending on how you count a message they never responded to. I actually like this idea a lot, but I hope the implementation improves.

grecy 12y ago

I wonder if the "accidental launch" is going to hurt them. It seems like the sheer volume of requests is resulting in long wait times and unsatisfied customers - exactly the opposite of what they want to convey. I hope they can overcome these teething hurdles and find a place.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
One way - stop growing virally (i.e. uncontrollably), raise your prices, and create a process that works. Some metrics would help.

ada1981 12y ago

I rememebr hearing stories about how Zappos customer service would do things like this... The conversation went like this. "Zappos, how can we help you." "I'd like a large pizza." "Um, you relize we sell shoes. It's also 2 am." "Yes." "Ah, ok. Please hold." "Ok sir, we've found these locations that are open and have the type of pizza you'd like. Here are the numbers." -- Magic is cool. There are some big scaling problems. They will probably not capture all the buzz the best they could. Creating an on demand pool of virtual assistants + some machine learning to optimize the solution paths those VA's take so as to provide suggested solution routes for then to follow, ie for Pizza in SF at 2am, here are some options.. At some point most tasks become routine. And yes, there already exist lots of va companies. Magic isn't surprising if you know about VAs, but many people apparnetly haven't read The 4 Hour Work Week. A Universal API for all resources, labor, goods and services seems like a damn good product to build, perhaps magic can be that. Otherwise, how can we begin to create a Universal Resource API?

wpietri 12y ago
The Zappos story is actually from the founder, Tony Hsieh: http://about.zappos.com/press-center/media-coverage/delivering-happiness-zappos-way http://about.zappos.com/press-center/media-coverage/deliveri... "Hsieh likes to end his presentation with what he calls his pizza story. One night, he and some vendors returned to a hotel room late. Someone in the group was craving pizza and was told room service had ended. As a joke, Hsieh suggested calling Zappos. You can probably guess the end of the story—even though Zappos doesn't sell pizza, the customer service rep found a list of local pizza places that would deliver to the hotel. It's a fun story that seriously reinforces Hsieh's theme of customer service."

rhapsodic 12y ago

This will fail.

laurafurr_TP 12y ago

Has anyone here used Magic? I am a reporter for a new startup Tech.pro and am writing a story about Magic. I'm looking to interview users about their experience for the piece. Please let me know. You can email me at laf319@gmail.com, or reply to the post. Thanks!