41–50 of 53 posts
Don't worry. It's just their "minimal viable product". <-- Hate that, that phrase has become an excuse to ship/launch crap.
Hmm, not sure it's an MVP - it lacks V.
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…
I think what you, and the parent article, are responding to is that it's really hard to actually have an always on-call, fast-acting butler at your service.
You actually submitted a story to hackernews about trying to order a burrito and it was $5 more expensive than you wanted it to be...?
... and having to wait almost 1.5 hours for it, most of the time wasted by waiting for the "Magic" reply. Seriously, who wants to chat with a service whose latency is about 19 to 31 minutes?
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…
First, they had an invite wall when I signed up. I was ~4000th in line, but they let me in anyway. This was their first mistake. The bigger problem is that their service is just a simple middle man. They don't provide delivery services, they just choose which service to use. For the examples they gave (food delivery, grocery delivery, airline tickets), it's never going to be worth it to me to have them charge me an e…
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…
First, they had an invite wall when I signed up. I was ~4000th in line, but they let me in anyway. This was their first mistake. The bigger problem is that their service is just a simple middle man. They don't provide delivery services, they just choose which service to use. For the examples they gave (food delivery, grocery delivery, airline tickets), it's never going to be worth it to me to have them charge me an e…
According to the team, this was a side project, they had put a crappy landing page out there (with Times Roman as a font and got some flak for that) and somebody else submitted it to Product Hunt and it took off. They quickly improved the landing page and started handling orders.
Now almost everybody reading HN knows them. They chose a brand name that is easy to remember. If they get their shit together in 6 months and relaunch, they will be totally fine. Most early stage startups can only dream of the kind of visibility they got.
The bigger problem is that this kind of surprise success doesn't necessarily validate the idea, but at least now they can see and start to measure retention.
Who is their target market? Let alone if I saw another service hitting up my site like this I would likely try to find out why customer's weren't finding it on their own or using it on their own, two things which would be at the top of the list to improve all the time.
Perhaps to give people a separate billing point to reduce exposure of personal information? Look I just paid thirty bucks for a pizza and Pizza Place will never know it was really for me!!! Seriously the only convienence I can see if reducing the number of entities with my CC info
Earlier quoted context omitted.
First, they had an invite wall when I signed up. I was ~4000th in line, but they let me in anyway. This was their first mistake. The bigger problem is that their service is just a simple middle man. They don't provide delivery services, they just choose which service to use. For the examples they gave (food delivery, grocery delivery, airline tickets), it's never going to be worth it to me to have them charge me an e…
Do they just keep your CC # on file?
Despite the humour and, on the surface, being a story about ordering a burrito, I think this is actually a very useful 'what not to do' cautionary tale for startups. They've clearly got a concept which, on paper, sounds like a good idea. They've then rushed development and gone to market without actually testing enough to know that they can deliver (literally) what the customer wants. That kind of early0stages growin…
That's simply a function of growth. You can not prepare for runaway growth like this, it's easier said than done and from the sidelines it looks like a piece of cake. At this level of growth any action that you did not automate away will bite you in a terrible way. And that's what all the handbooks say right: wait with automation until you've found your product:market fit. But what if that outruns you?