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Magic

getmagicnow.com

131–140 of 558 posts

Re: Magic

#131
post #10
post #7

Great idea. Can we find out how much it costs, or do we just have to trust that the quoted price for the task isn't too much above actual cost? Or does it not have any service fees? The site is really vague about pricing.

This is a great question. We are still trying to figure this out right now. Our vision is to be a service that handles everything - and that means everything from ordering food, to ordering clothes, to booking a one week's vacation in St. Thomas. The fees obvioulsy vary. Any ideas you have about doing this in a more straightforward way would be welcome. For now what we are doing is thinking about what would be reason…

Why do the fees vary? Why couldn't you have flat min fee + % of total cost? Am I missing something? I feel like pricing transparency is key to scaling quickly here.

Re: Magic

#132
post #81

I can already order pizza and flowers and plane tickets myself. However, if you could handle requests like: Call Comcast for me and have them configure my Cisco DPC3939B for bridge mode Go stand in line at the post office and retrieve my package with tracking #xxxxxxxx My iPhone's screen is cracked. Take it to the mall and get somebody to fix or replace it, whichever's cheaper. Bring me some Mongolian BBQ with the fo…

Yeah, if you can wrap shleps like this in a painless interface, it would be incredible. I would pay _a lot of money_ for that. Especially for stuff like "Dispatch someone credible-sounding to stand in line and negotiate as my agent with large shitty ossified organization X," where X might be a post office, utility company, embassy, real estate, etc, where their user experience disrepects my time. The dev who sits nex…

So you're saying that your coworker needs a real estate agent.

Is there a reason, besides money, that he isn't using one? I say "besides money", because you said you would pay "a lot of money" for it, so you can clearly afford an agent.

Re: Magic

#133

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…

My impression is that they're buying stuff for you, then charging the user as a separate transaction that includes the original purchase price plus their fee.

Re: Magic

#134
What guarantee of customer satisfaction is offered? If your fees are "bundled" how do you intend to refund in the event of poor service by the final provider?

Re: Magic

#135
post #8

Besides questions about revenue and such, can I just say that I absolutely love the landing page. No gimmicks, no parallax, no videos, no fake testimonials, no hero images, no marquees. Just good copy. Not sure if this is because of how quickly this blew up, but well done.

Thanks! Yeah, honestly, after deciding to launch this we released a really minimal landing page which I saved here: http://getmagicnow.com/index-old.html - As you can see I made that in about 20 minutes, and was not expecting this. After someone posted it on Product Hunt I spent whatever time I could polishing it up. In general though, I agree, simple websites are much better. Thanks for the kind words.

Great MVP, great focus. Few thoughts -

Make sure top phone # is tappable on mobile browsers.

Examples that don't make me question your ability to deliver - airline example seems to be hiding complexity (I question it as I read it), others really good

Re: Magic

#136
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.

Don't worry - we have a plan to handle it. For now we are closing down free registrations so that we can focus on delivering the product to the awesome people who have signed up so far and who are using the service.

I've replaced the phone number on the page you see here with an email opt-in waiting list where you can sign up to be notified when Magic is available to you.

In the meantime, I have added a Stripe button for $20 after the email opt-in where you can gain access now if you want to get in right now.

Thanks everyone!

Re: Magic

#140

I can already order pizza and flowers and plane tickets myself. However, if you could handle requests like: Call Comcast for me and have them configure my Cisco DPC3939B for bridge mode Go stand in line at the post office and retrieve my package with tracking #xxxxxxxx My iPhone's screen is cracked. Take it to the mall and get somebody to fix or replace it, whichever's cheaper. Bring me some Mongolian BBQ with the fo…

Does it mean the singularity is happening when people consider googling to be too much work?
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