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Magic

getmagicnow.com

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121–130 of 558 posts

Re: Magic

#121

Post by azakai »

cmikec wrote: post #58
weaksauce wrote: post #53

So I ordered a pizza last night(not through your service) and I had to call them after an hour because it didn't arrive and they misplaced the order. How would you handle such a situation?

We do exactly what you would do if you're being completely proactive...just behind the scenes so you don't have to worry about it. We call the pizza place, call the driver, deal with the annoyance. You just relax and wait for your pizza.

The customer knows if it arrived - do they need to notify you when it does? Or do all the services notify you? Otherwise, I don't see how you can tell if it's late and likely got misordered, and you need to contact the pizza place again.

Re: Magic

#122

Post by lotsofmangos »

joshmlewis wrote: post #51

I'm curious how they are scaling on the financials side. I'm assuming they are paying for the things ordered off of their personal CC's and with the sudden spike in requests and the long delay of getting money back into their account, I wonder how far they will go. A blog post after all of it cools down would be a fun read. :)

Any sane bank would be running them a fat line of credit right now.

Re: Magic

#123

Post by mst »

cmikec wrote: post #28
iamshariq wrote: post #4

Great service for a consumer. But as a business - how do you earn revenue?

This business started out of a need that I had. I've hired numerous assistants for myself in the past to handle these types of tasks for me. I've always been OK with paying a premium to have thing handled for me like magic. I've had my assistants do work for other people too to simplify their lives, and often times it was for things just like this. Here, we realized that instead of having to pay a salary, or even a m…

I love the idea. I currently pay minimum wage to a student friend of mine when they have time, but when they're busy paying the equivalent to a service would suit me fine.

I have no idea how viable this is, but if you could find an effective way to extend this to "we will deal with your suppliers who only work by phone, and charge you for the privilege of not having to make the stupid call yourself" I would be very interested ... but probably useless as a customer, since I'm in the UK. It's just I already pay for fulfillment work and wish I could easily pay for utility company wrangling, and if somebody can validate the model hopefully somebody will do it over here eventually :)

Re: Magic

#124

Post by colechristensen »

zaroth wrote: post #85

I love the idea, and the execution, but just one nit -- you say "no hidden fees", but I think bundling the fee into the total price is the definition of a hidden fee . If your examples itemized the fee it would be a different story. Other comments here express a similar anxiety, e.g. how much [extra] am I actually paying for this? Also, I know you're busy, but FYI CA state law requires you have a Privacy Policy. I wo…

I take "hidden fees" to mean asterisks. That is, offering something for $10 and adding 7% for tax, a $1 service charge, 10¢ convenience fee, 5¢ concierge vetting fee... you get the picture.

Re: Magic

#125

Post by nileshtrivedi »

Just want to point out that such a service wouldn't work in India. The Reserve Bank of India has stipulated that all "card-not-present" transactions (such as online purchases) require a secondary authentication (Verified by VISA password or a grid printed on the back of card). This improves the security but also pushes the liability to the consumer, given that he is not supposed to share this secondary password with anyone else.

Re: Magic

#127

Post by bsgreenb »

cmikec wrote: post #2

Hey everyone - this is insane. My friends and I created Magic a few days ago as a side project and it's completely blown up by accident since then. We're getting stormed with messages and orders. We thought we'd launch it ourselves later if it did well, and other people have been posting it on Product Hunt, Reddit, HN themselves... I'm here to answer any questions, although we've hardly slept!

Hey, just here to recommend that you use or otherwise build a CRM interface around the SMS conversations. This will allow you to scale the number of messages without being overwhelmed by operator costs.

Re: Magic

#128

Post by maxbrown »

willidiots wrote: post #78

This is crazy, I was just brainstorming about this last week. You're basically layering concierges on top of remote hands. Awesome! I'm curious to see what you'll do to handle exceptional cases. I live in the boonies and am asking for a philly cheesesteak right now.

1. Maybe it's just quoted at a ridiculous price

2. They may just be able to say it's not available and still maintain a positive experience for 99.9% of customers.

3. It doesn't seem like they're charging such a large fee that I expect them to do something crazy for me... I expect value in some proportion to my payment. Amex concierge might get the cheesesteak for a customer who spends 6-figures with them but not 4-figures, for example.

Re: Magic

#129

Post by Thiz »

hackaflocka wrote: post #6
cmikec wrote: post #2

Hey everyone - this is insane. My friends and I created Magic a few days ago as a side project and it's completely blown up by accident since then. We're getting stormed with messages and orders. We thought we'd launch it ourselves later if it did well, and other people have been posting it on Product Hunt, Reddit, HN themselves... I'm here to answer any questions, although we've hardly slept!

How are you scaling it up?

Uber-ize it.
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