21–30 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.
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.
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…
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…
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?
Don't worry. It's just their "minimal viable product". <-- Hate that, that phrase has become an excuse to ship/launch crap.
It should be MVP + metrics + quiet A/B testing and iteration for months before launch.
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…
At the very least they should've set up an auto-reply that explains they've been flooded with unexpected high load, with an average reply duration of half an hour or whatever it was at the time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 delive…
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 busy they were. Because they're humans - or so the website claims - and that means they should show a bit of humanity and empathy and whatnot.
TBF I don't really think they hire actual humans, that just doesn't scale. Especially if 90% of their users just want to order food - reasonably predictable input, that.
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.
But people did use it, enough that it caused them to be horrendously slow. This means they should put more money into making it bigger. If there are a few hundred "innovators" (in the Everett Rogers/Crossing the Chasm sense) who were so alienated by bad service during the beta that they will never ever use it again, even when it becomes a good service...well, that sucks but has no bearing on the ultimate success or failure of the service.
If you're going to beta test something, you have to expect it to have a few flaws. That's the point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 delive…
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 extra 25% to pick between the three services that will do that for me (Postmates, Instacart/Postmates, Hipmunk). What's more, SMS makes it more difficult to order. Postmates' interface is much better than trying to text an order in.
It's not that this is just an MVP. It's that this service really only takes away the decision of which other middle man to choose, and there's just not enough value there.
Why are you using the Reed College logo on your website? Your resume doesn't list any activity there. Watch out for legal issues.