How did you get office space at Moffett Federal Airfield?
There seem to be quite a few companies at Moffett Field. Maybe a sublease?
https://www.crunchbase.com/location/moffett-field/d32799a0b6...
Magic
411–420 of 558 posts
Re: Magic
#412Idea to scale: As a non-coder, I love reading the responses of programers here. "Automate this!" "There is no way to scale." "This needs AI." As an outsider looking in, my idea to scale is similar to Uber. Have workers that can sign on to work whenever they have the time. The workers handle the orders and receive a cut of the fee you charge. It would be great if you could have some kind of rating system where the con…
Re: Magic
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "There are no pizza places in this town". "...but there is one in the town 80 miles away, so your pizza will be $95". "Would you like to go ahead with that order?"
Meh, if you're going with that argument, then their service covers the globe. Not to mention that while the service might be Magic, pizza bags aren't, and a pizza that takes over an hour to get to you isn't going to be hot. I don't think "here's a ridiculously expensive, late, cold pizza" answers the spirit of "I'd like a pizza".
> I don't think "here's a ridiculously expensive, late, cold pizza" answers the spirit of "I'd like a pizza".
It does for someone in a town that doesn't have pizza.
Re: Magic
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you're using a concierge service is not the time to pinch pennies. Corollary: When you're pinching pennies is not the time to use a concierge service. The whole point of a concierge service, such as this, is to have someone on call to whom you may say "Here is my problem. Make it go away." Such services generally come at a much higher rate than Magic appear to be charging.
I think there's a fallacy here . . .
Is there, though?
Sure, it'd be preferable to have a full fee schedule available, for cases where it's needed. But, given that using a concierge service is perhaps the definitive case of spending money to conserve time; given also that this is a side project which has suddenly blown up in its creators' faces; and given finally that said creators appear to be working unbelievably hard to scale it up and out to meet the demand they've discovered -- given all that, I think it's pretty unreasonable to shit on the people who've made concierge service cheaper and more accessible than ever before because, in scrambling to meet unexpected demand, they have yet to get around to polish. Give them a month or two to get everything shaken out, and if they still haven't put up any fee information, then go after them. Until then, calm yourself; you are, after all, free not to use their service, if it fails to meet your requirements.
Re: Magic
#415I just decided to try this out in Seattle. Here's how it went! http://brianbeck.com/images/magic.png (the minimum was from the sushi place, not Magic)
And how was it? :) Not sure about surprise additions, but isn't it bit overpriced for one person quick lunch?
Well, the additions weren't really a surprise given I told them to just meet the delivery minimum for this particular sushi place ($25).
Re: Magic
#416From someone who's tried and failed: performing a large amount of high-quality labor for cheap is not a sustainable business model in the West, and riding hype can make you oblivious to that fact. That said, I do hope this team has some amazing trick under their sleeves that has eluded everyone else, because I do want this service to exist.
Agreed, this has obviously got some nice buzz, but never would I want to be the person having to run this business. Lots of manual work for little fees. They could hire/ outsource, but the quality will drop and prices will hike. They might be able to find a niche of people willing to pay a lot for simple things they could probably do easily themselves (like ordering food, or booking a flight), and use that extra mone…
I guess beause it's SMS they can you employ machine learning and simple classification, and internal tools to automate whatever is requested the most. Requests that require manual work will probably cost a little bit more.
They also seem to pass requests down to backend providers, which you can probably do very cheaply.
Re: Magic
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I used to use something like this with Amex's concierge service. Like getting a Wii on release day, or getting a gift somewhere. I stopped using them after this bad experience. I asked them to send about $100 of good chocolate as a gift, and they just sent a $10 bar, 10 times. Duh. Anyways, I felt a very good sensation looking over this. Probably because it's just such a PITA to do things like order pizza. Gotta t…
Whoa, I've never used my concierge benefit and didn't even think about it on hard to get items like console launches. How did that go? Do they just find you a scalper and you pay the overcharge, or do they find you one at retail price on launch day?
In general it was fairly reasonable. On the console, they managed to find a store not too far away that had stock and reserved it for me. No fee. Their travel agency also seemed pretty useful.
Best concierge thing was going to a packed restaurant, told it'd take a long time without reservations, making a call and turning around to "right this way". No fee from Amex. They really wanna sell the flattery/status idea to get you spending more and feeling the $450/$5000 annual fees are worth it.
Re: Magic
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're happy to call ATT on your behalf :) Try us out!
The last time I had a problem with ATT I had to make multiple calls and spent over an hour in total on hold. How would you charge for that? I'd have gladly paid for someone to take that pain away. There's probably a viable business model in there somewhere if someone can independently put a competent customer service layer in front of companies like ATT.
This would actually make a lot of sense if you could detect when a call came off hold. A small pool of operators could deal with calls as soon as the operator on the other end becomes available.
Re: Magic
#419I know it is too early to say, but if I had to guess what the next Google would look like, it would be this.
Re: Magic
#420I just decided to try this out in Seattle. Here's how it went! http://brianbeck.com/images/magic.png (the minimum was from the sushi place, not Magic)
How much did they surcharge?
I just put the same items into an order on eat24.com, which is how I'd normally do this. The order came to $30.38, which is exactly $2 less than what Magic quoted. That's before you have the opportunity to add a tip.
So either the Magic surcharge was $2 and they tipped $0, or they tipped $2 and were doing some free introductory thing. ($2 off coupons for eat24 are also plentiful, so I guess Magic could have also made $4.)