241–250 of 498 posts
I use Magic and they provide incredible service. They've been able to accomplish pretty much everything I've asked, including some requests that I thought were borderline outlandish, such as having food from a restaurant across the country sent to me via chilled overnight air mail for a friend's birthday as a big flashy surprise (friend's favorite restaurant). If you value your time more than your money, then they're…
Thank you so much for your comments, feedback, and kind words!
I use Magic and they provide incredible service. They've been able to accomplish pretty much everything I've asked, including some requests that I thought were borderline outlandish, such as having food from a restaurant across the country sent to me via chilled overnight air mail for a friend's birthday as a big flashy surprise (friend's favorite restaurant). If you value your time more than your money, then they're…
Thank you so much for your comments, feedback, and kind words!
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People are fairly predictable. Presumably they'll build software to handle common requests quickly. Google pizza is a good example, but i doubt google will do pizza, dry cleaning, and travel booking all in one shot. (but they might). It seems like these folks can find a local vendor for service X, have a button on some internal software to send it out, then just leverage that for all customers in that city. presumabl…
> Presumably they'll build software to handle common requests quickly. I'm not the OP, but... I guess, but again, where's the software? You can entirely reasonably solve that problem with a well-indexed medium-sized binder and a Rolodex.
Note: I just drove from San Jose to Raleigh with two young kids, including a day from Salina, KS to St Louis. We found the most amazing place to stop, and I highly recommend it to anyone driving E-W or W-E on I70. The Moon Marble Company (https://www.moonmarble.com/) is not just a handmade marble shop. It has the best collection of retro toys I've seen anywhere in my life. We spent 3 hours browsing!
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I completely disagree. This service targets people who peg a higher value to their time than $100 / hour and/or are too busy to take on other tasks. This is valuable for anyone that runs their own business or who has an actual dollar amount pegged to their time (a large portion of HN readership), not just members of the 1%. E.g., cancelling a doctor's appointment takes 10 minutes. Even if you bill your time out at $5…
Someone who values their time at $100/hour, working 40 hours/week, is making over $200,000 a year. I'm not sure if that technically qualifies as the 1%, but I think it's close enough to the GP's point.
$100 * 26 * 40 ⇒ $104k ⇒ and then slice off the employer portion for FICA and SS and you're looking at a pretty modest figure.
A lot of skepticism here, which is understandable given the somewhat unbelievable scope of what they are promising. I'm a very active user of Magic+, so I'll give my perspective. (and of course I've been working with them from the beginning at YC, so you're also free to discard my opinion as biased) For me, Magic+ is basically the impossibly good personal assistant, kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man, or Emily in The De…
Hey Paul, this value proposition resonates with me (especially the comparison with lawyers and accountants) and I'm the target customer... But I enthusiastically tried Magic when they first launched and it was full of fail (big promise from Magic, no delivery on a keg of beer from the East Bay). I certainly would have paid a lot for it. Skeptical that it'd be any different this time around? [Edit: typo]
I can absolutely admit that when Magic first launched, we were over capacity and a certain percentage of orders went awry. I hate that this happened, but we really did not predict that the website would go viral so quickly. In fact, today, we still have such high demand for the service that there is a long waitlist for the regular service, and our $100/hr service is getting a lot of signups very quickly as well.
This is part of the reason that we created Magic+. We wanted to make sure that people who had a very high bar for service quality would be able to use the service right away and be guaranteed to have the absolute highest level of service, no matter what.
I completely understand that given your past experience with Magic, you might not want to try Magic+. However, I can confidently say that if you try it, you will find that it feels very different from the Magic that you tried. Your keg will be there.
their roll out of this pivot has been a disaster:
1) Last week the homepage was saying it was free: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6v7ctgeakcya1wi/1.png?dl=0 but when you signed up it asked you to pay $100/hr or $3000 a month
2) Then yesterday they updated the homepage to say it was a paid ONLY service: https://www.dropbox.com/s/t01zei3j9k6e99f/2.png?dl=0
3) Now today they've updated the homepage wording to say it's free OR paid: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5qlrt6vfzsigda0/3.png?dl=0
Venturebeat did a post on the pivot: http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/04/magic-to-start-charging-10...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People are fairly predictable. Presumably they'll build software to handle common requests quickly. Google pizza is a good example, but i doubt google will do pizza, dry cleaning, and travel booking all in one shot. (but they might). It seems like these folks can find a local vendor for service X, have a button on some internal software to send it out, then just leverage that for all customers in that city. presumabl…
> Presumably they'll build software to handle common requests quickly. I'm not the OP, but... I guess, but again, where's the software? You can entirely reasonably solve that problem with a well-indexed medium-sized binder and a Rolodex.
We may not yet have the technology to create a Jarvis, but we can make a person a lot more efficient at their job with some clever tools.
For example, in the website there's a request that mentions getting a private helicopter booked to LAX in 3 hours. A personal assistant would have to look up private aviation companies that fly out of a base nearby the GPS location of the user, guesstimate the closest one and most likely call to book as the online bookings might not be automatically processed and it's a short notice.
With today's technology, you can parse that request so that the software automatically picks up "Helicopter booking", from: GPS to: LAX. If it's right, the operator accepts it and it creates a checklist: 1) Call "Bob's helicopter co." 2) Enter exact time of booking: [ ] 3) Click to book car for booking_time - travel_time at [current_location|office|home] 4) send nice reply to customer.
Once you've done this a couple times, you write new software that automates the call step by filling in a form online, or sending an email to the receptionist, or both.
More importantly, since you log every action the operators take, you take decisions on what to automate based on data. Are our employees spending 24% of their time on google maps? let's add a database of businesses so they can simply choose from a list.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I completely disagree. This service targets people who peg a higher value to their time than $100 / hour and/or are too busy to take on other tasks. This is valuable for anyone that runs their own business or who has an actual dollar amount pegged to their time (a large portion of HN readership), not just members of the 1%. E.g., cancelling a doctor's appointment takes 10 minutes. Even if you bill your time out at $5…
Someone who values their time at $100/hour, working 40 hours/week, is making over $200,000 a year. I'm not sure if that technically qualifies as the 1%, but I think it's close enough to the GP's point.
Looks like the reception isn't doing too well. I remember when Magic launched here on HN and it BLEW up. I was one of the people who tried it out. I live in NYC and actually had a poor experience. The first two times, I said "hey I want a sandwich with [x]" and I got it but it took a lot longer than if I just clicked the necessary buttons on Seamless. Then I kept getting random calls from time to time from pizza deli…
I had a very similar outcome with Magic after trying really hard to rely on it. One of their suggested usages is to order flowers for someone, so I tried that on two different occasions. The first time around, I asked for flowers, and got a picture of some flowers that they could send to my recipient. I didn't like the flowers in the picture, and so they picked another set of flowers per some feedback from me. The fl…
- We really feel terrible that some early Magic users had a less-than-magical experience after our initial, spontaneous launch. I'm really sorry about that. I'm glad that you got your refund. If you're interested, reach out to us and we can probably track down exactly what happened and what broke down in the chain of operations.
- This is part of the reason that we created Magic+. We wanted to be able to hold a very high bar for top-tier service and guarantee that you would have it at all times, no matter what.
- We'd love for you to give Magic+ a try and compare it to your experiences with Magic. I'm highly confident that you will feel a major difference, however I understand if you don't feel inclined to do so after your past experience.
I tweeted about this last week and was surprised no one else noticed sooner: https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2F_... their roll out of this pivot has been a disaster: 1) Last week the homepage was saying it was free: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6v7ctgeakcya1wi/1.png?dl=0 but when you signed up it asked you to pay $100/hr or $3000 a month 2) Then yesterday they updated the homepage to say it was…
Also, pretty sure a service like this doesn't give a shit what the website says. If you are reading the website, it's either not for you or you have an interest in tech news and the exact pricing structure doesn't matter to you anyway.
Pretty sure this service doesn't need to advertise.
