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

tghw.com

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

#31

Post by vinceguidry »

tghw wrote: post #13
carsongross wrote: post #12

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

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.

Why'd you rely on a very beta web service being offered to the public for the very first time to do what you could have done in 2 minutes?

I didn't make an order, but I fail to see how you could have been surprised by this. They have no idea how much demand they were going to have at launch, and it's not a service that can scale easily.

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

#33

Post by esthlos »

tghw wrote: post #30
esthlos wrote: post #25

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

Griffin is a family name. I've looked into it and that particular representation of a griffin predates Reed's use of it.

Yeah, it seems that that graphic is distinct from the Reed seal. Best of luck then.

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

#34

Post by bri3d »

CPLX wrote: post #19

Indeed. If free-text SMS was an ideal way to interact with online delivery and concierge services you'd think someone would have done that already on an existing service. So then, why can't I just order from Seamless or Instacart via SMS? Oh right, because that experience sucks mightily. I have this lovely full color screen that can display menus, location and delivery times, let me search by cuisine, choose various…

Virtualized personal assistant services aren't really anything new. This one just had an interesting/novel/awesome (and probably unsustainable) approach to the onboarding, UX, and price model - instead of "hiring" a "virtual assistant" and doing a bunch of sign up forms and paperwork, you just punch an address and card and away you go.

As for why people want a personal assistant to shop for them when they could just use an app, think about it this way:

To get things (even online), I have to:

  * Decide what *specifically* I want (brand, item, size, etc.)
  * Decide where to get it from
  * Obtain their website or app
  * (often) Sign up for an account
  * Enter a bunch of information to order what I want
  * Follow up if it's late or wrong
With this service (or a hired personal assistant) I have to:

  * Decide what type of thing I want
  * Tell someone to make it happen
Also, I wouldn't call Instacart or Expedia's interface "perfected." Thanks to the way the industry works there's still not a single website where I can say "find me the cheapest flights from point A to point B in date range X" and have it actually do so. With Instacart, I can't just punch in a natural-language grocery list and say "get me decent quality options for each, but make the beef grass-fed please." I have to go through a huge array of brands and potential sources for each item and decide what to get.

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

#35

Post by tghw »

jacquesm wrote: post #20

I've launched something (once) that went from 0 to breaking in less than 10 hours. I aged at least a couple of years and it took weeks before we managed to get a grip on the situation. We were about as unprepared as could be. This is what all of you starter-uppers are dreaming of, but when the growth is higher than you can handle you're going to have to move really fast if you want to capture your potential. Unfortun…

Like I've said elsewhere, it's not the MVP-nature or the beta that's really the problem. It's that they want to start a service that charges 25% more in exchange for selecting which service to use, with a significantly worse user interface. It took me much longer to type in the order on my phone that it did to select the order from Postmates, the service they likely were using to actually do the delivery.

Even if everything had gone perfectly and I hadn't spent over an hour waiting for responses, I still wouldn't use this service. To pay more for a worse interface? No thanks.

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

#37

Post by jerf »

tghw wrote: post #13
carsongross wrote: post #12

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

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.

Your objection is probably more powerfully expressed as "waiting for a middleman to hire another middleman".

Of course, if you're intimately familiar with all the various services available to you in SF then this is not going to be a useful service. I mean that perfectly straight, not sarcastically; they basically tried to charge you $9 to "know Postmates existed". But there will be a lot of people who may still be willing to pay for not knowing all those various services. I'm personally skeptical but it's at least worth a try.

(I can't speak to the complexity of keeping track of the SF services, since I don't live there, but my impression is that it's challenging.)

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

#38

Post by jacquesm »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #27
jacquesm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 delive…

> I think that the 'magic' people were simply not prepared for a runaway success. But they were. Because they were using an invite-only signup to limit the amount of new users they can take in, they could make a reasonable assumption about how busy they could get at rush times. Besides, the people on the other side aren't robots - at the very least they could've apologised for the late replies and explained about how…

If it takes 30 seconds to route a request and you have 5 people stand by you can process 10 orders per minute before you get a backlog.

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

#39

Post by atmosx »

minimaxir wrote: post #3

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

> Note that the "Magic is a beta product released less than a week ago" excuse is irrelevant.

Maybe in disneyland, but that's mostly how things go down in the real world. It's a startup, first week, got hammerred by HN heavily, probably others, that's as much as they can handle. Things will go fine, they just need the time to adjust.

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

#40

Post by tghw »

vinceguidry wrote: post #31
tghw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why'd you rely on a very beta web service being offered to the public for the very first time to do what you could have done in 2 minutes? I didn't make an order, but I fail to see how you could have been surprised by this. They have no idea how much demand they were going to have at launch, and it's not a service that can scale easily.

I didn't rely on it. I tried it out to see how well it would work.

When I first signed up, they wait-listed me. Then, a few hours later they let me (and apparently everyone else) in. They didn't need to do that, but they did.

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