> 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?
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...
> 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.
It's the little things. It allows you to focus on whatever you think is more important, while someone specialized in the task can do it maybe more efficiently than you can.
It's the good ol' fashioned trade of money for time, and trading is what makes an economy work.
Call your pizza company and see how much effort it takes you to order a pizza to your house. They don't know your card number, your address, etc.
Compare with magic: "I want a large pepperoni pizza". Confirm the price, you're done. About 20 seconds of time involved.
Assuming your time is worth, I don't know, $20/hour or more, this seems to be worth the money directly--not even accounting for less cognitive load, loss of focus, daily happiness, whatever.
The pizza company sucks at taking your pizza order. Magic doesn't suck at it.
No, but I understand that there's plenty of people who do.
FWIW it's more like 5-10 minutes every time I've ever ordered pizza (admittedly not often, I'm sure my pizza skills could improve, if I worked on them. I don't want to.)
Magic doesn't magically know your address/payment, of course, but it remembers it in the future. For every service, including new ones. I'm sure you actually knew that already. Point is it's one-time, ever.
My Domino's Pizza online account remembers both my address and my last/favorite orders. (I could even let it remember my card number, but I don't.) Ordering pizza consists of visiting the website, selecting "Yep, that same thing again", and following through the order process.
Granted, Magic has that for all transactions, but pizza can already be pretty convenient.
I'm not wholeheartedly disagreeing, but there's so much more to consider:
1) You're not at home.
2) You don't always order Dominos.
3) You don't even know what's available for delivery (I'm in a less urban area than most--Pizza Hut just started delivering in the last 12 months, and doesn't deliver to the whole city)
Essentially, when things get complex, Magic's cognitive load hardly changes at all. If it's a matter of routine (same pizza, same company, same house), your way is probably worth saving the money they charge.
Anyway, my pizza place has none of that. Including "online account," my pizza guy would have a good laugh at that.
In my city, restaurants are typically very loud and staffed by someone who does not speak any of the languages that I do. There are ~ ten million people in my city with this problem, so Magic/Seamless/whatever is valuable because it prevents me from shouting, straining to hear, and repeating myself four times, only to find later that the order is wrong because I have no meaningful checksum to insure correctness.
I find it a little odd that the canonical use case for Magic in these examples seems to be ordering your favorite dish to your home. I would agree with you, the complexity/cognitive load of this is low and with e.g. Seamless you get more control over the order and timeframe for little to no extra overhead.
But I could see a huge value in having someone make these decisions for you when it's something that's far outside of your normal routine. The last time I went skiing for example, we landed in the small ski town at night and needed to get dinner, we ended up calling around to 4 different places and making a bunch of arbitrary decisions and still had no idea if the food would even be good. Someone else (or eventually software) could have done that just as effectively and it would have saved us a lot of stress, in that scenario it really would feel like magic.
>The pizza company sucks at taking your pizza order. Magic doesn't suck at it.
My regular pizza company is completely painless to order from, both on the phone or online. They know my address, don't need my credit card number because I pay via credit card at the door, and they even have my order history. This is 2015. Maybe you need a new pizza company?
FWIW my very favorite pizza company is a local place in my city that doesn't deliver. It probably goes without saying they also don't have a website, any way to store card data, etc. His register is a cashbox.
I have every expectation that Magic would handle that order for me, though. Probably slowly, if the article is any indication, but I'm assuming they'll get better.
I wasn't really talking about my local shop, though, so point taken. It'd be pretty enjoyable to get "hey mr. mod!" and I say "hey, give me what i got last time, please." and hang up.
I don't want to bother with paying at the door, but I'd tough it out, I guess.
I imagine I am not alone in wanting a pretty specific pizza order (the restaurant, the toppings, the crust, etc.), which greatly diminishes the value proposition of saving time.
"Okay, google. Send a text message to magic I'd like a hand-tossed pizza, supreme but without olives, with butter and marinara sauce on the side, and a 2 liter of coke."
I mean, you're going to have to tell someone the specifics of your order. It's all the rest of the details where you're saving time.
If the Pizza company is doing it right, they do have my address and payment info just from the number that pops up on callerID.
There is some pain points (god I hate myself right now) that magic could solve, but ordering food isn't one of them.
Grubhub or seamless is just easier. It takes longer to tell someone your order correctly that to just to it yourself.
I also do wonder if a pay per use secretary will actually work. My secretary knows me so she can better make choices. Someone with just a chat log has a harder go of it.
> 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?
In the old days we used to call this a personal assistant. Now an Uber for personal assistants is something that would be really useful because I sure as hell don't have the money or the need for a full time assistant.
Although I have considered hiring somebody on a retainer basis to just be available for a few hours of menial tasks a few times a week or month.
I spent the weekend with a bunch of venture partners at a firm's off site and Magic came up a few times in conversation: not ''is it a killer idea?'' (of course, if it works) but ''can it scale?''.
Some business models simply don't scale until some amorphous inflection point in tech/attitudes/etc hits, no matter how much we want them to.
There's a healthy argument to make for raising and burning a bunch of money to aggregate users together in anticipation of the market shortly hitting that scaling inflection point, but it's still a big gamble (albeit one I think Magic and a handful of competitors will all take).
And then ultimately if it can scale, I think Amex and Visa/MC buy up competitors and make it a loss leader/free service attached to their card services.
I predict a lot of new SMS services headed our way. e.g. If I'm EXP on American Airlines, why don't they have a concierge # for me to text with? Why doesn't Seamless have a # for food delivery? etc.
I don't think there will be "a lot of new SMS services headed our way." The real value to the user for Magic is that you can use it for everything. Pizza one day, flight reservations the next. You don't need to google multiple numbers for things.
And if there were multiple SMS services for pizza ordering or flight reservations or whatever, then Magic would just subcontract out to those smaller services, and people would still just use Magic.
Magic isn't going to exist in a year, so that's a non-premise.
They're going to drown and the temporary hype will go away (needed to support the volume, which will fall out from under their service just about the time they're trying to raise serious capital), long before they can scale up and deliver on the premise.
Someone else will make a lot of money off of a service like this, but it is not going to be Magic.
Keep in mind that sometimes the less you do, the better you do it. "Doing everything" sounds great but often just means the execution of various "things" suffers. Whereas Seamless for example just focuses on food and can no doubt provide better service there.
The term "SMS Services" reminds me of the archaic term "CD-ROM Industry", which was so popular before that "industry" was blindsided by the Internet. Fetishizing the medium itself, without taking a step back and asking "what's the actual product, and the best way to deliver it?" Why SMS and not Siri?
Is the cynicism truly necessary? I can practically taste the bile dripping off your comment.
Every minute that someone's spending on some random, menial task is a minute that someone isn't getting something else more productive done. Maybe the world isn't getting saved, but I find it hard to call a service that gives people more time in their day anything but "making the world a better place".
Yes, but with scale, they'll get better at it. They might even be able to automate large portions of it.
Also, it's a person spending their minutes on it, who might not have a better job available to them at the time.
Don't get mad because someone is willing to OFFER money for a service that YOU would find demeaning to provide. Just don't take that job. Problem solved. Sheesh.
Is you argument really that if there is something that "has been a thing for a LONG TIME" that it isn't problematic and that we shouldn't be concerned about avoiding it?
I'm seeking to improve the argument. Pretending that THIS is something new is a bad argument. If you want to assail the general category of what you consider to be demeaning jobs, then go for it.
No, you're doing far more than seeking to improve somebody else's argument. You're making your own argument, while pretending not to. This is clearly an argument: "Just don't take that job. Problem solved. Sheesh."
It's not even a very good argument, in that you're just demonstrating the willful ignorance the previous poster was pointing out.
Hilarious. I think it's good for an economy to offer jobs, even ones you find demeaning. People are free to not take those jobs. If enough people don't take that job, then they'll have to either offer more money for the job, or they'll have to find a new way to do the job. I believe in markets. I believe in minimum wages as well, but those are not mutually exclusive concepts.
You dismiss this entire line of reasoning as "willful ignorance," rather than ACTUALLY RESPONDING TO IT AND TELLING ME WHY YOU DISAGREE.
Sorry, but that's just arrogant and rude.
I had a completely different problem with kefka, which was that they said "Great idea." As though this concept of turkification were something new. It's not something new. Therefore, objecting to THIS idea on the basis of it "being a new idea" is a bad argument. If you want to reject the entire category of turk jobs, that's ANOTHER DISCUSSION.
It is not my job to solve your ignorance here, but suffice to say that I don't think the markets-solve-everything hypothesis stands up when you look at historical problems with labor issues over, say, the last century. Markets are fine tools when we set out to solve a particular problem, but they have been poor masters.
Markets (and capitalism) are great tools. They should not be seen as the end-all-be-all. Same with socialism, communism, as well as other socioeconomic -isms.
The failing of the markets is the lack of empathy for the fellow human. We know from the way the US looks how capitalism fails. Poor people are disempowered and marginalized from the system, because little money = little power over self. There is also a downward push to bring everyone into poverty.
The current gig economy and using mTurk are both ways to make previous corporate internalites to the public as externalities, whilst privatizing profit. Along with that, they also rely on having none of the protections of an employee, yet with all the requirements of one. It conveniently gets rid of the reforms we fought for in the '30s.
Are there solutions to the marginalization of the workforce, along with poverty working class? Yes.
1. Minimum income. Everybody gets it, regardless of a means test. This could be built up by the local level or state, where fees and fines and such could start the basis of a minimum income, even if it's $20/mo. Start small, look big.
2. Change laws to encourage worker cooperatives. Worker cooperatives, like Mondragon, have shown that they care for the fellow worker, because they all own the company as well as manage the company. It would also fit inside our current idea of ownership and contracts. The goal here is to enable political decisions to make company creation in this route easier. Thus the 3'rd...
3. Change unemployment law that allows you and 9 of your unemployed friends who want to start a cooperative to cash out of rest of unemployment to start a business: a worker cooperative. This has been a law in Italy since '85, and is greatly successful. And given how small businesses are celebrated, this should be a great law to pass regardless party.
I actually said explicitly that I believe in minimum wage. That already puts me well out of free-market fundamentalism.
If you've read some of my comments on HN, you'll see that I'm also in favor of regulation.
I happen to also believe that a Basic Living Standard is necessary.
I wish we had single-payer health care.
And I'm all for free, socialized education. (With BLS [stipend] on top of it.)
So, no, I'd say I fall WELL outside of the free-market fundamentalism you're referring to.
So, when you call me willfully ignorant, it's pretty damned offensive.
I happen to think data entry is demeaning. Some people enjoy it. I think busing tables is demeaning. Some people enjoy it. I have a friend who loves moving boxes in a factory, because he has free time to think about his poetry. I would never want to sell tooth paste to a super-market chain. Some people like to deal cards at casinos. Some like to sell pull-tabs. Some are waiters and airline stewards. Some people clean bedpans. Some clean houses after grisly murders.
Some people LOVE being a concierge. Well, this is a digital concierge service. And just because you and bendoernberg think it's menial and degrading, doesn't mean IT SHOULD BE ILLEGAL TO OFFER THAT JOB. Or, that we as a culture should be embarrassed that job exists.
If a person hates their job, I want to give them every chance to get out of that job. Every chance. But you're angry the job exists... regardless of whether someone WANTS to do it, for the pay they receive?
> we are not acting with sufficient empathy toward the people who are doing the work
I can't imagine why you think that of me. My grandpa worked four jobs at a time, sometime - because he grew up during the Great Depression, and if you can get work, you work. He set bowling pins. He delivered milk. He drove a school bus. He laid brick. All kinds of crap. Meanwhile, I TYPE in an air-conditioned building, and they pay me VASTLY more than he ever earned. It's ridiculous. And my peers are upset because the product owner violated the spirit of Agile when he made them change priorities mid-sprint (because we were shipping defective product). WHAT? GET OVER YOURSELF!
I want affordable housing. I want upward mobility. I want meritocracy and elbow grease. I want a safety net, and government-supplied-bootstraps. I want people to be able to declare bankruptcy, unlike today. I want an immigration system that's less like the mythical Labyrinth, and has empathy for immigrants.
So, are you really "solving my ignorance," or are you reading WAY TOO MUCH into one line of thought - and then running with it, half-cocked, and totally arrogant?
I'm not commenting on your entire history as person, let alone going back generations. My comments are about what you wrote here, in the things I responded to. You might be Mother Teresa, but "Just don't take that job. Problem solved," demonstrates willful ignorance. And then "Sheesh" implies people are stupid for even asking, encouraging willful ignorance generally. If that's in conflict with what you believe, well, maybe you should try writing something different next time.
Drama? You called me "willfully ignorant." That's an insult.
I'll note you haven't actually engaged me in conversation here, AT ALL.
All you've done is name-called, and then criticized me.
Can't you see how the combination of a secure net, PLUS a free market where you are free to not take a job, results in people having jobs that they want?
As in, "Problem solved."
The problem is not that there are jobs that you find degrading - the problem is there's no safety net, so people HAVE TO TAKE THOSE JOBS.
Or do you want ignore the actual topic, and just poke me with a stick, some more?
No, I said a comment was an example of the willful ignorance the previous poster was pointing out. You may or may not be personally ignorant; I couldn't know. But that comment ignored the actual reality. The reality here that people are not always free to not take jobs. It is something the HN glibertarian contingent continually ignores, which is precisely the point
bendoernberg when you jumped in. The problem is not solved until it is actually solved, not just because it might be solved in some imaginary world you are partial to.
Engagement in conversation is not something you are entitled to. It is earned. You seem to think you're entitled to make facile comments and then not have those comments challenged. And when they are, you turn it into personal drama apparently so that you don't have to face dealing with what you've actually said. I have no idea why you think that makes you an appealing person to have a conversation with.
> And when they are, you turn it into personal drama apparently so that you don't have to face dealing with what you've actually said.
That was me explaining the background behind my reasoning. Including personal anecdotes. Personal anecdotes are emotional, and you call it drama instead.
You still haven't engaged the topic, other than to say that my proposed solution is "some imaginary world."
Yes, PROPOSED solutions are "imaginary worlds" until you act on them. That's how that works.
I get that you didn't like my first comment, and I agree I didn't explain my entire world-view well in 140 characters.
When I tried to go deeper into my world-view, I was met with nothing but insults and meta-discussion. I'm not interested in either.
So how are you saving the world or does it bother you that other people are trying to make a difference? This tone towards startups and founders, I get it, but in the anonymous internet I have to wonder, who are these people and what are they doing that they think gives them a superior moral position. Or is it just that the other person has supposedly taken a superior moral position so you can argue however you want?
I'm not the one claiming to be saving the world. A lot of startups do seem to genuinely believe that what they are working on will save humanity (Or they'll sell the crappy website for billions and spend the money solving world hunger or something).
You should watch "Sillicon Valley" if you haven't already. I'm pretty sure they took a lot of it straight from YCombinator. And it's hilarious. "Magic" would fit right in on there, as it's comedy gold.
What it demonstrates to me is that online pizza ordering systems are too difficult to use. I know what I want and don't want to be asked a million questions or fill out endless forms. Magic might not be a good service, but lessons can be learned from it.
Hey lots of people use administrative assistants, for good reason. Days have 24 hours; somebody else to help you save minutes or hours has good marginal value. Doesn't matter what they're doing, just so you don't have to do it.
If my wife, desperate to calm our crying daughter, texts Magic that she needs Similac Advance, a gallon of purified water, and a CLEANED set of Tommee Tippee bottles at 3 AM, and Magic is able to fulfill that need in short order... that's a MASSIVE win for everyone.
Honestly, if you had to get those three things at 3 AM, how much time and effort would it take you? Add a screaming child to the equation.
Anything that makes it easier for a consumer to get what they need, when they need it, if they are willing to pay the price, makes the world a better place. Especially if there's competition for that service.
You would seriously trust some random person to clean baby bottles for you? Seriously? What the hell.
If I had to get those things at 3AM - I don't know where you live, but for me (Out in the country), it's a 10 minute journey to a 24 hour supermarket, then 10 minutes back. The child would likely nap in the car.
Have you actually used Magic? I'm a reporter for a new startup Tech.pro and am writing a story about Magic. Looking for users. Please let me know! Thanks!
Magic is chatroulette. A bizarre, temporary amusement. It acquires your curiosity, it gets media buzz because of the premise (which can't be delivered on), but the foundation under it and the 'company' behind it is sand.
To pull off Magic, realistically, will require extraordinary resources and execution. Magic will flame out long before they can manage to acquire such.
A company like Amazon however, might just attempt a variation of it. For Amazon it can be another AWS service: ordering things as a web service. Amazon sources contractor labor, said labor gets reviewed / rated. It's a form of mechanical turk.
All companies mess things up occasionally, especially if they're overloaded. Clearly other folk have got what they wanted which is why there is such a demand for their service.
p.s. Your website - www.complexventures.com - appears to be down, just in case you didn't know.
Nah, people with sour grapes are most likely are all arm chair wantrepreneurs. I doubt there are many people that are actually out there doing things that would be sour about this. People who think this went viral solely because of YC are likely too crippled by their cynicism to accomplish anything.
Isn't this a case of execution that matters? This could have been made into its own mobile app. It could have tried to create a "connection" service where they tried to put you in contact with the individual task runners. Instead it was created using text messages, significantly lowers the barrier of entry for the app and by simplifying to texts it makes it easier to use.
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.
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.
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.
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").
Bill Gates's vision was about a "wallet PC", "information highway" and software based "personal agents". You can think of smartphone with BitCoin wallet, 3G web connection, Siri meets Watson.
He hoped Microsoft's "pen-based computing" (later Pocket-PC/WinCE) would get traction. Microsoft Bob (from Gates wife) and Office agents (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant) flopped. The Microsoft Network 1.0 (short MSN 1.0) integrated in Windows 95 (was a serious Web competitor based on Win32 controls and Explorer as browser instead of HTML and Mosaic/Internet Explorer 1) flopped. The second edition of the book features the Internet/web instead of "information highway".
General Magic was definitely a competitor. AT&T was on the General Magic bandwagon, see their TV ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZb0avfQme8 (triva: Jenna Elfman of Dharma & Greg in her first role in 0:48)
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?
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.
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.
Sure, but so what? Not saying, "What will happen if this works?" is an amateur move. In an industry where the whole goal is wild success, it's not a good sign if you are totally unprepared for wild success.
But for the sake of argument let me grant that some people in YC somehow a) thought something was so important as to take time away from their startup, and b) never even considered that it might work. Once it started working, there were a number of things they could do other than the "make a complete hash of things" strategy that Wired's experience apparently suggests they are pursuing now.
What should we be celebrating? This is a joke of a company with ZERO barrier to entry. Throw up a Wordpress landing page with your phone number, and you have the exact same business in about 15 minutes.
A company that takes money and doesn't deliver the service should not have taken the money. Whatever they've done right, they also did something very basic WRONG.
A potential customer you had to turn away because you are to popular and you might contact again once you can safely deal with them is better than a customer you failed completely.
We can't very well ask them for a 0% failure rate, can we? Mistakes are going to happen, it's the nature of the world.
For example, humans try really hard to build "failure proof" nuclear reactors, and those still have problems. I claim that's evidence that 0% failure is just not a reasonable goal.
One of the mantras repeated most often around here is that when it comes to growth
Strategic Vision + Execution > Nice Idea + Connections
It's not surprising that a concept which, thus far, is demonstrating the exact opposite hasn't been universally welcomed.
I'm sure things will change if it ingenious logistics and commercial partnerships turn it into an Uber-esque juggernaut. At least there's a clear business model.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
I'm a big fan of the startup FancyHands - 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.
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.
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.
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?
The way to scale it would be to contract it back out to an existing personal concierge service, but then it might be obvious that Magic is new marketing for old services (with a little bit of an updated tech twist).
It might be valuable in that Magic might be accessing a market that basically didn't know such services existed. But I don't really see any fundamental process efficiency that Magic brings to the table for this market...
What happens when my pizza isn't delivered? Normally I call the pizza shop.
What happens when my Magic pizza isn't delivered? I text Magic and say so. The magician (may or may not be the same person dealing with my case the whole way through) calls the pizza shop, get's an update. They text me 'Oh the shop said they delivered it'. I text back, a different person gets on the phone to the shop again, etc.
Sticky message persistence is a pretty trivial problem to solve, FWIW. No idea if Magic has done so, because the magic is apparently operational opacity, which is fine, but either way, the current agent should have ready access to your conversation history.
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.
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?
"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."
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.
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.
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?
- 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.
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.
Magic reminds me of Path 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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...
> 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.
It's the little things. It allows you to focus on whatever you think is more important, while someone specialized in the task can do it maybe more efficiently than you can.
It's the good ol' fashioned trade of money for time, and trading is what makes an economy work.
You know who's specialised in taking pizza orders and delivering them? Pizza delivery companies!
Arguably not as optimized as Magic, strangely.
Call your pizza company and see how much effort it takes you to order a pizza to your house. They don't know your card number, your address, etc.
Compare with magic: "I want a large pepperoni pizza". Confirm the price, you're done. About 20 seconds of time involved.
Assuming your time is worth, I don't know, $20/hour or more, this seems to be worth the money directly--not even accounting for less cognitive load, loss of focus, daily happiness, whatever.
The pizza company sucks at taking your pizza order. Magic doesn't suck at it.
BS. How does Magic magically know my address or payment details?
In any event, I usually order pizza online, and it takes a couple of clicks. Even on the phone it's less than a minute.
Do you really consider your time so important that you refuse to even spend one minute on the phone talking to another human being to order a pizza?
No, but I understand that there's plenty of people who do.
FWIW it's more like 5-10 minutes every time I've ever ordered pizza (admittedly not often, I'm sure my pizza skills could improve, if I worked on them. I don't want to.)
Magic doesn't magically know your address/payment, of course, but it remembers it in the future. For every service, including new ones. I'm sure you actually knew that already. Point is it's one-time, ever.
My Domino's Pizza online account remembers both my address and my last/favorite orders. (I could even let it remember my card number, but I don't.) Ordering pizza consists of visiting the website, selecting "Yep, that same thing again", and following through the order process.
Granted, Magic has that for all transactions, but pizza can already be pretty convenient.
I'm not wholeheartedly disagreeing, but there's so much more to consider:
1) You're not at home. 2) You don't always order Dominos. 3) You don't even know what's available for delivery (I'm in a less urban area than most--Pizza Hut just started delivering in the last 12 months, and doesn't deliver to the whole city)
Essentially, when things get complex, Magic's cognitive load hardly changes at all. If it's a matter of routine (same pizza, same company, same house), your way is probably worth saving the money they charge.
Anyway, my pizza place has none of that. Including "online account," my pizza guy would have a good laugh at that.
In my city, restaurants are typically very loud and staffed by someone who does not speak any of the languages that I do. There are ~ ten million people in my city with this problem, so Magic/Seamless/whatever is valuable because it prevents me from shouting, straining to hear, and repeating myself four times, only to find later that the order is wrong because I have no meaningful checksum to insure correctness.
I find it a little odd that the canonical use case for Magic in these examples seems to be ordering your favorite dish to your home. I would agree with you, the complexity/cognitive load of this is low and with e.g. Seamless you get more control over the order and timeframe for little to no extra overhead.
But I could see a huge value in having someone make these decisions for you when it's something that's far outside of your normal routine. The last time I went skiing for example, we landed in the small ski town at night and needed to get dinner, we ended up calling around to 4 different places and making a bunch of arbitrary decisions and still had no idea if the food would even be good. Someone else (or eventually software) could have done that just as effectively and it would have saved us a lot of stress, in that scenario it really would feel like magic.
From your post: "The pizza company sucks at taking your pizza order. Magic doesn't suck at it."
From the article: "I’ve never once actually gotten what I wanted from Magic."
Sure, rephrase to;
"The pizza company's UI for ordering a pizza is far inferior to Magic's."
Whether they get the product delivered or not is most important, of course, but not really what I was talking about.
If they can scale, it won't be an issue, by definition.
That's highly debatable.
One of the UI's is a piece of software. The other is an English speaking human required to be quick and accurate.
Last I checked the slogan wasn't "manually entered orders done by on-demand employees are eating the world"
>The pizza company sucks at taking your pizza order. Magic doesn't suck at it.
My regular pizza company is completely painless to order from, both on the phone or online. They know my address, don't need my credit card number because I pay via credit card at the door, and they even have my order history. This is 2015. Maybe you need a new pizza company?
FWIW my very favorite pizza company is a local place in my city that doesn't deliver. It probably goes without saying they also don't have a website, any way to store card data, etc. His register is a cashbox.
I have every expectation that Magic would handle that order for me, though. Probably slowly, if the article is any indication, but I'm assuming they'll get better.
I wasn't really talking about my local shop, though, so point taken. It'd be pretty enjoyable to get "hey mr. mod!" and I say "hey, give me what i got last time, please." and hang up.
I don't want to bother with paying at the door, but I'd tough it out, I guess.
I imagine I am not alone in wanting a pretty specific pizza order (the restaurant, the toppings, the crust, etc.), which greatly diminishes the value proposition of saving time.
"Okay, google. Send a text message to magic I'd like a hand-tossed pizza, supreme but without olives, with butter and marinara sauce on the side, and a 2 liter of coke."
I mean, you're going to have to tell someone the specifics of your order. It's all the rest of the details where you're saving time.
The major companies (Papa John's, Dominos, Pizza Hut) are exceptional at it. I've used all of their websites in the past year and have no complaints.
Local pizza delivery companies vary more widely.
If the Pizza company is doing it right, they do have my address and payment info just from the number that pops up on callerID.
There is some pain points (god I hate myself right now) that magic could solve, but ordering food isn't one of them.
Grubhub or seamless is just easier. It takes longer to tell someone your order correctly that to just to it yourself.
I also do wonder if a pay per use secretary will actually work. My secretary knows me so she can better make choices. Someone with just a chat log has a harder go of it.
> 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?
In the old days we used to call this a personal assistant. Now an Uber for personal assistants is something that would be really useful because I sure as hell don't have the money or the need for a full time assistant.
Although I have considered hiring somebody on a retainer basis to just be available for a few hours of menial tasks a few times a week or month.
I spent the weekend with a bunch of venture partners at a firm's off site and Magic came up a few times in conversation: not ''is it a killer idea?'' (of course, if it works) but ''can it scale?''.
Some business models simply don't scale until some amorphous inflection point in tech/attitudes/etc hits, no matter how much we want them to.
There's a healthy argument to make for raising and burning a bunch of money to aggregate users together in anticipation of the market shortly hitting that scaling inflection point, but it's still a big gamble (albeit one I think Magic and a handful of competitors will all take).
And then ultimately if it can scale, I think Amex and Visa/MC buy up competitors and make it a loss leader/free service attached to their card services.
I predict a lot of new SMS services headed our way. e.g. If I'm EXP on American Airlines, why don't they have a concierge # for me to text with? Why doesn't Seamless have a # for food delivery? etc.
I don't think there will be "a lot of new SMS services headed our way." The real value to the user for Magic is that you can use it for everything. Pizza one day, flight reservations the next. You don't need to google multiple numbers for things.
And if there were multiple SMS services for pizza ordering or flight reservations or whatever, then Magic would just subcontract out to those smaller services, and people would still just use Magic.
Magic isn't going to exist in a year, so that's a non-premise.
They're going to drown and the temporary hype will go away (needed to support the volume, which will fall out from under their service just about the time they're trying to raise serious capital), long before they can scale up and deliver on the premise.
Someone else will make a lot of money off of a service like this, but it is not going to be Magic.
Why is this service not sustainable within a year? Seems like a totally valid business to me.
edit: Next year, one of us is going to be laughing.
Keep in mind that sometimes the less you do, the better you do it. "Doing everything" sounds great but often just means the execution of various "things" suffers. Whereas Seamless for example just focuses on food and can no doubt provide better service there.
The term "SMS Services" reminds me of the archaic term "CD-ROM Industry", which was so popular before that "industry" was blindsided by the Internet. Fetishizing the medium itself, without taking a step back and asking "what's the actual product, and the best way to deliver it?" Why SMS and not Siri?
"Users love CD-ROM - it is user friendly." -- http://forge.fh-potsdam.de/~IFLA/INSPEL/94-3laan.pdf
In retrospect, that line sounds like Lucille Ball describing Vitameatavegemin: "It's so tasty, too! Just like candy." -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmOLpeKwWGI
Is the cynicism truly necessary? I can practically taste the bile dripping off your comment.
Every minute that someone's spending on some random, menial task is a minute that someone isn't getting something else more productive done. Maybe the world isn't getting saved, but I find it hard to call a service that gives people more time in their day anything but "making the world a better place".
There's still a person spending their minutes on a random, menial task, it's just not someone with a Hacker News account anymore.
Yes, but with scale, they'll get better at it. They might even be able to automate large portions of it.
Also, it's a person spending their minutes on it, who might not have a better job available to them at the time.
Don't get mad because someone is willing to OFFER money for a service that YOU would find demeaning to provide. Just don't take that job. Problem solved. Sheesh.
Great idea. If you're not in the gig economy, you're a turk.
Just off the top of my head, World of Warcraft gold farmers. This has been a thing for a LONG TIME.
Is you argument really that if there is something that "has been a thing for a LONG TIME" that it isn't problematic and that we shouldn't be concerned about avoiding it?
I'm seeking to improve the argument. Pretending that THIS is something new is a bad argument. If you want to assail the general category of what you consider to be demeaning jobs, then go for it.
No, you're doing far more than seeking to improve somebody else's argument. You're making your own argument, while pretending not to. This is clearly an argument: "Just don't take that job. Problem solved. Sheesh."
It's not even a very good argument, in that you're just demonstrating the willful ignorance the previous poster was pointing out.
Hilarious. I think it's good for an economy to offer jobs, even ones you find demeaning. People are free to not take those jobs. If enough people don't take that job, then they'll have to either offer more money for the job, or they'll have to find a new way to do the job. I believe in markets. I believe in minimum wages as well, but those are not mutually exclusive concepts.
You dismiss this entire line of reasoning as "willful ignorance," rather than ACTUALLY RESPONDING TO IT AND TELLING ME WHY YOU DISAGREE.
Sorry, but that's just arrogant and rude.
I had a completely different problem with kefka, which was that they said "Great idea." As though this concept of turkification were something new. It's not something new. Therefore, objecting to THIS idea on the basis of it "being a new idea" is a bad argument. If you want to reject the entire category of turk jobs, that's ANOTHER DISCUSSION.
See? Two different arguments.
So don't conflate them, okay?
I understand that you have a faith in markets; free-market fundamentalism is depressingly common on HN.
This points out a problem, which is that we are not acting with sufficient empathy toward the people who are doing the work:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9108579
Here you shallowly dismiss that the problem is a problem at all:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9108684
That's the willful ignorance I'm talking about.
It is not my job to solve your ignorance here, but suffice to say that I don't think the markets-solve-everything hypothesis stands up when you look at historical problems with labor issues over, say, the last century. Markets are fine tools when we set out to solve a particular problem, but they have been poor masters.
Precisely.
Markets (and capitalism) are great tools. They should not be seen as the end-all-be-all. Same with socialism, communism, as well as other socioeconomic -isms.
The failing of the markets is the lack of empathy for the fellow human. We know from the way the US looks how capitalism fails. Poor people are disempowered and marginalized from the system, because little money = little power over self. There is also a downward push to bring everyone into poverty.
The current gig economy and using mTurk are both ways to make previous corporate internalites to the public as externalities, whilst privatizing profit. Along with that, they also rely on having none of the protections of an employee, yet with all the requirements of one. It conveniently gets rid of the reforms we fought for in the '30s.
Are there solutions to the marginalization of the workforce, along with poverty working class? Yes.
1. Minimum income. Everybody gets it, regardless of a means test. This could be built up by the local level or state, where fees and fines and such could start the basis of a minimum income, even if it's $20/mo. Start small, look big.
2. Change laws to encourage worker cooperatives. Worker cooperatives, like Mondragon, have shown that they care for the fellow worker, because they all own the company as well as manage the company. It would also fit inside our current idea of ownership and contracts. The goal here is to enable political decisions to make company creation in this route easier. Thus the 3'rd...
3. Change unemployment law that allows you and 9 of your unemployed friends who want to start a cooperative to cash out of rest of unemployment to start a business: a worker cooperative. This has been a law in Italy since '85, and is greatly successful. And given how small businesses are celebrated, this should be a great law to pass regardless party.
"markets-solve-everything"
When did I say that?
I actually said explicitly that I believe in minimum wage. That already puts me well out of free-market fundamentalism.
If you've read some of my comments on HN, you'll see that I'm also in favor of regulation.
I happen to also believe that a Basic Living Standard is necessary.
I wish we had single-payer health care.
And I'm all for free, socialized education. (With BLS [stipend] on top of it.)
So, no, I'd say I fall WELL outside of the free-market fundamentalism you're referring to.
So, when you call me willfully ignorant, it's pretty damned offensive.
I happen to think data entry is demeaning. Some people enjoy it. I think busing tables is demeaning. Some people enjoy it. I have a friend who loves moving boxes in a factory, because he has free time to think about his poetry. I would never want to sell tooth paste to a super-market chain. Some people like to deal cards at casinos. Some like to sell pull-tabs. Some are waiters and airline stewards. Some people clean bedpans. Some clean houses after grisly murders.
Some people LOVE being a concierge. Well, this is a digital concierge service. And just because you and bendoernberg think it's menial and degrading, doesn't mean IT SHOULD BE ILLEGAL TO OFFER THAT JOB. Or, that we as a culture should be embarrassed that job exists.
If a person hates their job, I want to give them every chance to get out of that job. Every chance. But you're angry the job exists... regardless of whether someone WANTS to do it, for the pay they receive?
> we are not acting with sufficient empathy toward the people who are doing the work
I can't imagine why you think that of me. My grandpa worked four jobs at a time, sometime - because he grew up during the Great Depression, and if you can get work, you work. He set bowling pins. He delivered milk. He drove a school bus. He laid brick. All kinds of crap. Meanwhile, I TYPE in an air-conditioned building, and they pay me VASTLY more than he ever earned. It's ridiculous. And my peers are upset because the product owner violated the spirit of Agile when he made them change priorities mid-sprint (because we were shipping defective product). WHAT? GET OVER YOURSELF!
I want affordable housing. I want upward mobility. I want meritocracy and elbow grease. I want a safety net, and government-supplied-bootstraps. I want people to be able to declare bankruptcy, unlike today. I want an immigration system that's less like the mythical Labyrinth, and has empathy for immigrants.
So, are you really "solving my ignorance," or are you reading WAY TOO MUCH into one line of thought - and then running with it, half-cocked, and totally arrogant?
Well hello, drama.
I'm not commenting on your entire history as person, let alone going back generations. My comments are about what you wrote here, in the things I responded to. You might be Mother Teresa, but "Just don't take that job. Problem solved," demonstrates willful ignorance. And then "Sheesh" implies people are stupid for even asking, encouraging willful ignorance generally. If that's in conflict with what you believe, well, maybe you should try writing something different next time.
Drama? You called me "willfully ignorant." That's an insult.
I'll note you haven't actually engaged me in conversation here, AT ALL.
All you've done is name-called, and then criticized me.
Can't you see how the combination of a secure net, PLUS a free market where you are free to not take a job, results in people having jobs that they want?
As in, "Problem solved."
The problem is not that there are jobs that you find degrading - the problem is there's no safety net, so people HAVE TO TAKE THOSE JOBS.
Or do you want ignore the actual topic, and just poke me with a stick, some more?
No, I said a comment was an example of the willful ignorance the previous poster was pointing out. You may or may not be personally ignorant; I couldn't know. But that comment ignored the actual reality. The reality here that people are not always free to not take jobs. It is something the HN glibertarian contingent continually ignores, which is precisely the point bendoernberg when you jumped in. The problem is not solved until it is actually solved, not just because it might be solved in some imaginary world you are partial to.
Engagement in conversation is not something you are entitled to. It is earned. You seem to think you're entitled to make facile comments and then not have those comments challenged. And when they are, you turn it into personal drama apparently so that you don't have to face dealing with what you've actually said. I have no idea why you think that makes you an appealing person to have a conversation with.
> And when they are, you turn it into personal drama apparently so that you don't have to face dealing with what you've actually said.
That was me explaining the background behind my reasoning. Including personal anecdotes. Personal anecdotes are emotional, and you call it drama instead.
You still haven't engaged the topic, other than to say that my proposed solution is "some imaginary world."
Yes, PROPOSED solutions are "imaginary worlds" until you act on them. That's how that works.
I get that you didn't like my first comment, and I agree I didn't explain my entire world-view well in 140 characters.
When I tried to go deeper into my world-view, I was met with nothing but insults and meta-discussion. I'm not interested in either.
Yes, informal 'working for gold' has happened in quite a few MMOs where the grind is required to play.
However, many MMOs (Eve excluded) usually ban or restrict selling gold for USD.
mTurk and the up coming gig economy are legal ways to extract money right now, as a IT1099
So how are you saving the world or does it bother you that other people are trying to make a difference? This tone towards startups and founders, I get it, but in the anonymous internet I have to wonder, who are these people and what are they doing that they think gives them a superior moral position. Or is it just that the other person has supposedly taken a superior moral position so you can argue however you want?
I'm not the one claiming to be saving the world. A lot of startups do seem to genuinely believe that what they are working on will save humanity (Or they'll sell the crappy website for billions and spend the money solving world hunger or something).
You should watch "Sillicon Valley" if you haven't already. I'm pretty sure they took a lot of it straight from YCombinator. And it's hilarious. "Magic" would fit right in on there, as it's comedy gold.
What it demonstrates to me is that online pizza ordering systems are too difficult to use. I know what I want and don't want to be asked a million questions or fill out endless forms. Magic might not be a good service, but lessons can be learned from it.
Hey lots of people use administrative assistants, for good reason. Days have 24 hours; somebody else to help you save minutes or hours has good marginal value. Doesn't matter what they're doing, just so you don't have to do it.
If my wife, desperate to calm our crying daughter, texts Magic that she needs Similac Advance, a gallon of purified water, and a CLEANED set of Tommee Tippee bottles at 3 AM, and Magic is able to fulfill that need in short order... that's a MASSIVE win for everyone.
Honestly, if you had to get those three things at 3 AM, how much time and effort would it take you? Add a screaming child to the equation.
Anything that makes it easier for a consumer to get what they need, when they need it, if they are willing to pay the price, makes the world a better place. Especially if there's competition for that service.
You would seriously trust some random person to clean baby bottles for you? Seriously? What the hell.
If I had to get those things at 3AM - I don't know where you live, but for me (Out in the country), it's a 10 minute journey to a 24 hour supermarket, then 10 minutes back. The child would likely nap in the car.
It's extremely hard to not be sarcastic when I respond to you, so I'm not going to try:
You're right, all problems anyone ever has are solved by the Walmart 10 minutes away.
I retract my assertion that sometimes consumers are willing to spend money for convenience.
VikingCoder,
Have you actually used Magic? I'm a reporter for a new startup Tech.pro and am writing a story about Magic. Looking for users. Please let me know! Thanks!
Magic is chatroulette. A bizarre, temporary amusement. It acquires your curiosity, it gets media buzz because of the premise (which can't be delivered on), but the foundation under it and the 'company' behind it is sand.
To pull off Magic, realistically, will require extraordinary resources and execution. Magic will flame out long before they can manage to acquire such.
A company like Amazon however, might just attempt a variation of it. For Amazon it can be another AWS service: ordering things as a web service. Amazon sources contractor labor, said labor gets reviewed / rated. It's a form of mechanical turk.
Bob Dylan song: "Nothing Was Delivered"
All companies mess things up occasionally, especially if they're overloaded. Clearly other folk have got what they wanted which is why there is such a demand for their service.
p.s. Your website - www.complexventures.com - appears to be down, just in case you didn't know.
Nah, people with sour grapes are most likely are all arm chair wantrepreneurs. I doubt there are many people that are actually out there doing things that would be sour about this. People who think this went viral solely because of YC are likely too crippled by their cynicism to accomplish anything.
Isn't this a case of execution that matters? This could have been made into its own mobile app. It could have tried to create a "connection" service where they tried to put you in contact with the individual task runners. Instead it was created using text messages, significantly lowers the barrier of entry for the app and by simplifying to texts it makes it easier to use.
The idea is old, it's called an concierge service: 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.
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.
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
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").
Bill Gates's vision was about a "wallet PC", "information highway" and software based "personal agents". You can think of smartphone with BitCoin wallet, 3G web connection, Siri meets Watson.
He hoped Microsoft's "pen-based computing" (later Pocket-PC/WinCE) would get traction. Microsoft Bob (from Gates wife) and Office agents (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant) flopped. The Microsoft Network 1.0 (short MSN 1.0) integrated in Windows 95 (was a serious Web competitor based on Win32 controls and Explorer as browser instead of HTML and Mosaic/Internet Explorer 1) flopped. The second edition of the book features the Internet/web instead of "information highway".
Bill Gates vision can be seen in the Comdex 1995 video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XxeY-OchwY&feature=youtu.be... (shows the "wallet PC")
General Magic was definitely a competitor. AT&T was on the General Magic bandwagon, see their TV ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZb0avfQme8 (triva: Jenna Elfman of Dharma & Greg in her first role in 0:48)
This was my first thought too. Aren't there other services / apps that do the personal concierge thing (can't think of any off the top of my head)?
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?
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
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.
One could argue that this article was about those people, or at least about how right they were. :)
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.
> Launching a service now without thinking about scaling is an amateur move.
I don't think they were shooting for the stars with Magic. It seemed a hack from day one. My impression is they didn't intend it to grow as it did.
Sure, but so what? Not saying, "What will happen if this works?" is an amateur move. In an industry where the whole goal is wild success, it's not a good sign if you are totally unprepared for wild success.
But for the sake of argument let me grant that some people in YC somehow a) thought something was so important as to take time away from their startup, and b) never even considered that it might work. Once it started working, there were a number of things they could do other than the "make a complete hash of things" strategy that Wired's experience apparently suggests they are pursuing now.
What should we be celebrating? This is a joke of a company with ZERO barrier to entry. Throw up a Wordpress landing page with your phone number, and you have the exact same business in about 15 minutes.
A company that takes money and doesn't deliver the service should not have taken the money. Whatever they've done right, they also did something very basic WRONG.
A potential customer you had to turn away because you are to popular and you might contact again once you can safely deal with them is better than a customer you failed completely.
We can't very well ask them for a 0% failure rate, can we? Mistakes are going to happen, it's the nature of the world.
For example, humans try really hard to build "failure proof" nuclear reactors, and those still have problems. I claim that's evidence that 0% failure is just not a reasonable goal.
One of the mantras repeated most often around here is that when it comes to growth
Strategic Vision + Execution > Nice Idea + Connections
It's not surprising that a concept which, thus far, is demonstrating the exact opposite hasn't been universally welcomed.
I'm sure things will change if it ingenious logistics and commercial partnerships turn it into an Uber-esque juggernaut. At least there's a clear business model.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
I'm a big fan of the startup FancyHands - 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...
Could you please detail your experience with FH: what you use it for and whether your are satisfied (other than the latency issue)?
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.
> 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-busin...
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.
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?
The way to scale it would be to contract it back out to an existing personal concierge service, but then it might be obvious that Magic is new marketing for old services (with a little bit of an updated tech twist).
It might be valuable in that Magic might be accessing a market that basically didn't know such services existed. But I don't really see any fundamental process efficiency that Magic brings to the table for this market...
That's the key point.
What happens when my pizza isn't delivered? Normally I call the pizza shop.
What happens when my Magic pizza isn't delivered? I text Magic and say so. The magician (may or may not be the same person dealing with my case the whole way through) calls the pizza shop, get's an update. They text me 'Oh the shop said they delivered it'. I text back, a different person gets on the phone to the shop again, etc.
How is that manageable?
Sticky message persistence is a pretty trivial problem to solve, FWIW. No idea if Magic has done so, because the magic is apparently operational opacity, which is fine, but either way, the current agent should have ready access to your conversation history.
Derided by morons, yeah.
It's clearly not easy to clone Magic. It's pretty easy to clone "software to SMS message with customers via a browser", though.
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.
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?
The Zappos story is actually from the founder, Tony Hsieh: 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."
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.
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.
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?
Equating "publicity" with "success" is a dangerous game.
I asked the founder about returns and how they'll handle customer support issues in his reveal post a few days ago. No reply.
Magic appears to be using the tried-and-true method of Twitter support: http://twitter.com/tweetmagicnow
Which is funny because part of the value proposition of Magic is not trying user interaction to an account.
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.
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.
Magic reminds me of Path 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.
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.ht...
You can write good dispatching software, but at the end of the day your scaling bottleneck is adding humans.
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!
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.
One way - stop growing virally (i.e. uncontrollably), raise your prices, and create a process that works. Some metrics would help.
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.
This will fail.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Now for a magic trick! I'm going to make this money... disappear!
Behold! It's gone!!