321–330 of 498 posts
> As soon as possible.
So... it's not magic.
At their price point, it's only worth using the service if you have huge amounts of disposable income or your request is near impossible to fulfill on your own. It's basically a service that answers the question, "How much are you willing to spend to do X?" Where the amount is determined by them after the fact.
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the blue message bubble is iMessage specific.
It's evidently photoshopped, based on the message bubble padding. Definitely just an error.
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They don't chill the whole logistics chain, they just put the food in an insulated box with some dry ice and send it with the rest of the overnight packages.
Yep -- see http://orderboxesnow.com/ for FedEx's first-party options, which are the upper bound on expense (for the chilling, not the overnight delivery).
This is what I appreciate about Magic, by the way. I simply asked for food from the restaurant, specifying that leftovers were fine. Chilled overnight didn't even occur to me; I did not have any idea at the time how they might accomplish it, and I was prepared to be told it was impossible (or insanely expensive).
They figured out that chilled overnight delivery was possible, and got a local service to handle the logistics of picking it up from the restaurant, packing it into the box, and shipping it. It turned out rather nicely, and not nearly as expensive as I expected. It's not even really that much work and effort, when all is said and done.
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The metaphor is faulty. Uber hasn't brought down the cost of limousine service, and it didn't make cars cheaper or more efficient to create UberX -- it just tapped into a larger market of drivers who were willing to do commodity work for less money. You don't pay people $100 an hour for commodity work. Unless you're so rich that price doesn't matter, I guess.
Perhaps I should have extended it a bit more--as someone else commented, they will likely drive the price point down as the tech improves and they're able to do things algorithmically which will reduce overhead. The Tesla strategy is probably a better fit here than Uber, though.
Even Tesla isn't a good comparison. Tesla is making cars, the task that invented the assembly line. This more like applying "the Tesla strategy" to the job of a butler.
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Really - a $300 birthday gift to your friend? According to this website[1], the median American family has a combined income of 81k and spends about 1k of that on gifts. That's for the whole household, so more like $500/year for your friends. You're probably not going to blow half of that on one friend's birthday dinner. Of course there are plenty of people for who this is reasonable, but please don't be so ignorant…
>According to this website[1], the median American family has a combined income of 81k and spends about 1k of that on gifts And some people are a bit more generous than that. Or only have 1-2 friends that they go "all out" for. Small $20-40 gifts for a few friends/coworkers and 1-2 $200-300 gifts for the close friends lines up with your estimate just fine. Especially since they said could afford to and not will do so…
When I learned that the original business had been rebuilt and re-established, I thought I'd put together an extra special surprise for her birthday this year.
What was special about this birthday present was it seemed like an impossible feat, on first impression, and she had no idea how I did it. That's why what Magic did was so magical. Imagine having for your birthday dinner food from your favorite restaurant in the whole wide world, from a restaurant 2000 miles away, that you thought had burned down! Entirely unexpected and quite delicious!
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$100/hr is a salary of $208,000 which only about 5% [1] of household incomes exceed that. Certainly not "most people" [1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/15/business/one-p...
He's not going to hire Magic+ for 40 hours per week. Many services are $100/hr or more, they're just rarely billed out that way, because people have this reaction. If you have a moderate amount of disposable income, you can afford to have simple requests filled by Magic+ for $15-$30 (10-20 minutes of personal assistant time) several times a month. The viability of the product for a solid middle class user really just…
Well, except that--as the grandparent post said--the minimum buy is $1000 for 10 hours. That puts it well outside "casual purchase, might come in handy" and into "must have a specific, long-term use in mind" for the typical middle-class income.
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Really - a $300 birthday gift to your friend? According to this website[1], the median American family has a combined income of 81k and spends about 1k of that on gifts. That's for the whole household, so more like $500/year for your friends. You're probably not going to blow half of that on one friend's birthday dinner. Of course there are plenty of people for who this is reasonable, but please don't be so ignorant…
>According to this website[1], the median American family has a combined income of 81k and spends about 1k of that on gifts And some people are a bit more generous than that. Or only have 1-2 friends that they go "all out" for. Small $20-40 gifts for a few friends/coworkers and 1-2 $200-300 gifts for the close friends lines up with your estimate just fine. Especially since they said could afford to and not will do so…
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Hi, this is Mike, one of the founders of Magic. Really sorry to hear about your experience here. Did you get a refund? If not, please text in to 83489 and mention this post, and we'll be sure to get it to you. 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 vira…
Mike, As you know I had a very bad experience with Magic as well. I worked for you for free for a week and on boarded 63 new customers for you. You guys arbitrarily deleted my account, and abruptly shut off my autopay donations to numerous charities we had set up together. Then you went silent and wouldn't return any of the ten messages I sent to you asking for access to my personal records and information regarding…
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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.
Have you ever worked with a really great Grand Budapest Hotel style concierge? They really can do pretty interesting things, if you tip well and are willing to pay. But, you gotta go to that hotel and talk to that one guy. The software scales that person.
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"A few hundred at most"? What? UPS rate calculator for overnight cross country shipping of a 7lb package is $285, not "about $100". All this rounding down is the difference between "a few hundred" and likely "just shy of a thousand dollars". A few hundred in shipping, a couple of hundred for a meal that's not "cornershop Chinese", the time for the service. Etc.
> UPS rate calculator for overnight cross country shipping of a 7lb package is $285, not "about $100". I used FedEx overnight for a 5lb package, which came to less than $100. > a couple of hundred for a meal that's not "cornershop Chinese" I'd assumed a meal for 2-4 people at most, thus roughly $50-100. > the time for the service Given foreknowledge of the services needed to put together such a request, that should t…
Still, UPS at 5lb from NY to SF Next Day Air Early is still $150+.
If I'm overnighting a meal it's probably not going to be a $25/head dinner. I'll go out and enjoy that but it's not an 'across the country' experience. It's not even a steak from a non-steakhouse. Here, it's a chicken alfredo with no appetizer or sides.
2-4 people is going to be more than 5lb after you load up on dry ice.
Anyway - like you said, I'm also erring on the higher side of "what, to me, would make a meal worthwhile to ship like that". But hey, we had a civil discussion about it. Yay us.