The latency is certainly understandable for a product that just went live to quite a bit of promotion... but considering that they included an invite barrier to keep things from outpacing their infrastructure, there's obviously a pretty severe point of failure here.
Magic: How to launch a product so no one will ever use it again
11–20 of 53 posts
Re: Magic: How to launch a product so no one will ever use it again
#12I had to wait, in my apartment, for 40 MINUTES.
"Everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy."
Re: Magic: How to launch a product so no one will ever use it again
#13I had to wait, in my apartment, for 40 MINUTES. "Everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E
I love that bit.
But in this case, waiting an hour and a half for a middle man to do what it would have taken me 2 minutes to do wasn't worth the extra $9 they were asking for.
Re: Magic: How to launch a product so no one will ever use it again
#14You actually submitted a story to hackernews about trying to order a burrito and it was $5 more expensive than you wanted it to be...?
The story is about a very disappointing first user experience and how it led me to never want to use the service again. The burrito is just a side plot.
On one hand, I get where you're coming from, but come on:
"Wow, everyone! This is truly amazing. We released Magic under 48 hours ago as an experiment and a side project, and now the traffic and requests are streaming in faster than we can handle."
Re: Magic: How to launch a product so no one will ever use it again
#15You actually submitted a story to hackernews about trying to order a burrito and it was $5 more expensive than you wanted it to be...?
The story is about a very disappointing first user experience and how it led me to never want to use the service again. The burrito is just a side plot.
I think that the 'magic' people were simply not prepared for a runaway success. Wait a while to give them a chance to get their act together and try again.
First user experience during the hockey stick phase being 'poor' is to be expected for anything with this degree of growth. Try scaling anything through three orders of magnitude in 24 hours and you'll get why.
The amazing thing to me is that your order got delivered at all.
Re: Magic: How to launch a product so no one will ever use it again
#16Don't worry. It's just their "minimal viable product". <-- Hate that, that phrase has become an excuse to ship/launch crap.
I'd rather see someone try to release something new and get a few things wrong than have no one try to release anything at all until it's perfect.
Re: Magic: How to launch a product so no one will ever use it again
#17Despite the humour and, on the surface, being a story about ordering a burrito, I think this is actually a very useful 'what not to do' cautionary tale for startups. They've clearly got a concept which, on paper, sounds like a good idea. They've then rushed development and gone to market without actually testing enough to know that they can deliver (literally) what the customer wants. That kind of early0stages growing needs to hapen before the company can gain a public reputation.
Re: Magic: How to launch a product so no one will ever use it again
#18It's so hard to find good help these days. (Or people on HN who understand irony, apparently.)
I honestly hope Magic amasses a lump sum from all the suckers and takes off.
Re: Magic: How to launch a product so no one will ever use it again
#19Indeed. If free-text SMS was an ideal way to interact with online delivery and concierge services you'd think someone would have done that already on an existing service. So then, why can't I just order from Seamless or Instacart via SMS?
Oh right, because that experience sucks mightily. I have this lovely full color screen that can display menus, location and delivery times, let me search by cuisine, choose various customizations, etc etc. Then a "magic" computer sends the orders to the restaurant via an already configured and tested system so they are expecting an order and can fill it quickly and efficiently.
Or alternatively, thanks to this innovative new startup, I can SMS to some random number and say "I want food or something do you have any burritos" and then have them text me back, etc, etc.
BUT WAIT says the new startup. IT'S NOT JUST BURRITOS, in fact it's not just food. You could ask for a burrito today and a flight to Cancun tomorrow, and you only have to put one phone number in your address book.
Aha, the real value proposition emerges. This startup uses their proprietary technology to know that Seamless or Instacart or Expedia exist already, and then they use it for me. Except it takes twice as long, without the UI/UX those services have perfected, and costs 30-50% more money.
Step one: Landing page
Step two: Corner the market on taking SMS messages and using them to punch orders into existing apps, using skilled college graduate US based labor.
Step three: VC/YC EXPLOSION
Step four: Profit
Re: Magic: How to launch a product so no one will ever use it again
#20I've launched something (once) that went from 0 to breaking in less than 10 hours. I aged at least a couple of years and it took weeks before we managed to get a grip on the situation. We were about as unprepared as could be. This is what all of you starter-uppers are dreaming of, but when the growth is higher than you can handle you're going to have to move really fast if you want to capture your potential. Unfortunately we had no idea what we were doing so I'm pretty sure those first weeks cost us dearly. Fortunately for the magic people their scaling issues are something that can be overcome and I really hope that they'll do well because of this.
Cut them some slack and think about how hard it would be to pull this off with such rapid growth without having any delays or issues during the first phase of rapid growth. Dealing with high levels of traffic and orders is hard, dealing with high levels of growth is a lot harder still.
Amazing they managed to ship the order at all.