Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Magic+

getmagicnow.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 498 posts

Re: Magic+

#391

Post by arihant »

The $100/hr price point would make if and only if they are able to accomplish tasks that cannot be accomplished by a single hired assistant.

"Personally email all my 1,200 new customers today, get me feedback in 2 hours."

"Make sure this story hits top page on Reddit/HN."

These are probably weird examples. But the expectation here would be to get a superhuman, who does task a random human simply cannot do. Group work is what I expect I'm paying for. Otherwise, I can hire a freelancer online for $1000 a month.

Re: Magic+

#392

Post by puranjay »

BookmarkSaver wrote: post #382
puranjay wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just that, the guy wants to buy TWO! This is a purchase normal people would spend hours agonizing over. Should I get the 64GB model or the 128GB? Should I get the latest one, or one generation older? Should I get the slightly more expensive gray/white one, or stick with black? But that's okay. It's not meant for everyone, and that's perfectly fine with me

Ok, so why is this so unbelievably interesting to everyone here? I mean, seriously, its been ten hours and this thing is still at the top of the page, and that is very long time for a HN story. For something that doesn't seem particularly innovative nor useful for a typical person, it has a huge amount of support here. Which is especially confusing because this indicates that somehow there is a massive number of pric…

As another commenter pointed out, HN has a lot of young people making $150k+ and this is just a way for them to "optimize" their time and be more "productive".

In reality, this is just a way for them to pretend that they have the same luxuries as the actual rich who came from money.

Services like this will last only as long as the bubble in the valley.

Re: Magic+

#393

Post by interesting_att »

BookmarkSaver wrote: post #353

Ok. I must seriously be missing something here. I'm usually the last person to complain about shilling, because even on the very rare occasions that I am confident that some sort of "astroturf" operation is going on I usually find it to be a somewhat valid or at least entertaining form of promotion and don't care that it is clearly just advertising. But seriously, this thread is absurd. I truly do not understand how…

Welcome to Hacker News, where people's conflict of interests are not disclosed.

I agree with OP- this is an absurd tool. If you can pay $100/hr for an anonymous 'personal assistant' you can pay for a real personal assistant. This is another example where rich SV-elite are making out of touch predictions on the market.

Re: Magic+

#394

Post by DanBC »

BookmarkSaver wrote: post #383
rand1012 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of VCs read HackerNews...

Enough to dominate the top of the front page for 10 hours? And populate the comment section with numerous high ranked glowing/apologetic comments? This is the sort of activity that usually accompanies massive news that rallies wide community interest or support, not a niche service that only a handful of extremely rich people should seriously be interested in, even on a site like HN.

Did you flag the submission?

Re: Magic+

#395

Post by siculars »

jld89 wrote: post #376
nlh wrote: post #352

I'm trying to figure out why I (too) am having a strong negative reaction to this. Let me think out loud: I'm fortunate enough to have a real personal assistant. She's amazing, she knows me, she does fantastic work, and I pay her a fair and reasonable wage (including health care) that's far less than $100/hour. So let's put me in the category of "people who can afford a personal assistant" but not quite in the catego…

Just curious, but what is your line of work and that of your friends with assistants?

uh... read his bio?

Re: Magic+

#396

Post by fastball »

aestetix wrote: post #388

"Magic, here is a list of social security numbers for people I do not like. Can you share them with scam artists?" "Magic, can you get me HIV test results for my wife?" "Magic, what is my boss's salary?" Yeah, no issues coming up with this...

First one sounds vaguely illegal. Second one sounds illegal without wife's permission, otherwise I'm sure they would do it. Last one I'm sure someone could figure out.

Re: Magic+

#397

Post by Joe8Bit »

arihant wrote: post #391

The $100/hr price point would make if and only if they are able to accomplish tasks that cannot be accomplished by a single hired assistant. "Personally email all my 1,200 new customers today, get me feedback in 2 hours." "Make sure this story hits top page on Reddit/HN." These are probably weird examples. But the expectation here would be to get a superhuman, who does task a random human simply cannot do. Group work…

I somewhat agree. But more than that I don't this service is really comparable to a single dedicated EA. It feels more like TaskRabbit++.

The most valuable thing about having good EA is the relationship e.g. you often don't need to ask them to do things as they know you well enough to preempt the requests, they take initiative, which is always going to be lacking in a service like Magic+.

Re: Magic+

#399

Post by spyder »

cmikec wrote: post #249
cdata wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for bringing this up. I've addressed similar comments elsewhere in this thread so I'll try not to repeat myself much. - 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 bro…

This doesn't sound right: You are suggesting to use your more expensive service when even your basic service wasn't working well for him. Why aren't you saying him to try the basic Magic service again, is it because it's still not "fixed"?

Re: Magic+

#400

Post by pricechild »

Splines wrote: post #340
toddmorey wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a decent amount of innovation that can make the assistants more efficient, so you can improve profitability without driving down wages. But there's also something else: Since a high percentage of services will likely end in a transaction, there's a huge opportunity to become the Amazon-scale retailer of services. I find I don't even google products I want to buy anymore, I just immediately search Amazon. Amaz…

Personally, Amazon's UI has a long way to go and doesn't look like it's going to get better anytime soon. If you know what you're looking for, it's fine, but as soon as you try to comparison shop it falls apart fairly quickly. I've gotten into the habit of looking for experts on other sites that do hands-on comparisons for the thing I want to buy (some recent examples: rain jackets and fitness meters). Amazon is hone…

> Personally, Amazon's UI has a long way to go and doesn't look like it's going to get better anytime soon.

Haven't people been dismissing them over their UI since the beginning of time? And yet it works and is successful?

Post reply on HN