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Magic+

getmagicnow.com

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Re: Magic+

#451

Post by fluxquanta »

corin_ wrote: post #416
Terretta wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$100/hr is $200K/yr or $350K to get you $200K after taxes. Plus inefficiency or loss of fidelity to intent from the delegation, which adds a cost. I'd think $450K - $600K income before this makes sense. // Also note the contact and meeting management class of tasks require always on engagement. At that point, you're better off with your own company-supplied EA who is in the flow and can carry your personal prioritiza…

You don't have to use them all the time, though... there's plenty of things I couldn't afford to do all the time but sometimes it's worth paying extra for, a service like this could be one of them. If something urgent comes up that Magic+ could fix in 15minutes and that I don't have 15 minutes to use and it can't wait, a $25 fee could easily be justifiable, even if my salary was only $50k. The same way as most people…

But how do you know how long a request will take? Maybe I think a request will take 15 minutes, but in reality it takes 3 hours. I make less than $100k/year. There's a big difference to me between $25 and $300. What if I start the request, decide it's taking too long, and ask that it's cancelled? Can it even be cancelled? And then am I charged for the time used and get nothing in return?

To use your taxi analogy, I can get in a cab and ask "About how much will it be to get from A to B?" and probably get a good estimate (or not even have to ask with Uber and the like). Does that exist for this service? Maybe public transportation would be better for me depending on the answer.

It sounds to me like, at least from their perspective, they wouldn't want a poorer customer like me.

Re: Magic+

#452

Post by marknutter »

davecraige wrote: post #447
ksml wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the curious, looks like more info here: http://www.davecraige.com/magic/

Yes, thank you. That is the whole story. You can read it if you want. I spent over $3,250 traveling to Silicon Valley. I spent over 60 hours of intense work to do a project for free for them that they requested. I delivered them a beautifully custom 38 page research report that you can see here: http://f.cl.ly/items/3f3u1e14273P2v2a1Y2J/CAP1.pdf I was treated like a second class citizen and tossed to the side. My acc…

> I spent over 60 hours of intense work to do a project for free for them that they requested.

That might be where you went wrong.

Re: Magic+

#453

Post by davecraige »

cmikec wrote: post #30
xirdstl wrote: post #26

The examples are puzzling to me. Take this one: "I’m out of the office today. Check my email and let me know if there’s anything urgent." Are they proposing we should be ok with giving them our credentials?

Many of our users give us access to various aspects of their personal and work lives in order to gain the benefit of efficiency and saved time. We also set up users who don't want to share their primary email with email addresses at our domain.

Yea, I gave Magic access to setup recurring donations to two charities I support.

Unfortunately they closed my account and stopped the donations. They provided no information on when the last donations went out so I could resume them.

They went completely dark.

Re: Magic+

#454

Post by ph0rque »

pjc50 wrote: post #417
hackuser wrote: post #83

I would love to see more comments that provided value to other readers. There is so much expertise and intelligence in this forum, but so many discussions contain only what is easiest: obvious cyncism. It's kind of fun banter once in a while, but gets old and isn't worth spending the time reading.

This is Hacker News; it's a better, more informed, hand-crafted artisinal cynicism that we come here for.

Although, if you don't have time to be cynical, you can always use magic+ to obtain the ultimate super-human cynicism!

Re: Magic+

#455

Post by davecraige »

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…

This is exactly the same question I asked them yesterday: https://twitter.com/davecraige/status/684429034676092928

They haven't responded yet.

Re: Magic+

#456

Post by davecraige »

hackuser wrote: post #88

I'd love to know how they manage to scale such high quality service. They say they use "top-tier executive assistants and concierges", but it's hard to scale high-quality employees. How does it differ from other concierge services, such as the one connected to American Express cards? What have others typically done well and poorly, and how does Magic+ overcome the limitations?

I think that is misleading.

I believe the employees are only paid $15 an hour.

Re: Magic+

#458

Post by johnnymonster »

pjc50 wrote: post #401
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…

You can't scale a $100/hour service to the level of Amazon, there simply aren't that many people with that kind of money.

With that kind of attitude, you would obviously not be able to scale anything that would meet even the most minimal resistance.

Re: Magic+

#459

Post by [deleted] »

corin_ wrote: post #416
Terretta wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$100/hr is $200K/yr or $350K to get you $200K after taxes. Plus inefficiency or loss of fidelity to intent from the delegation, which adds a cost. I'd think $450K - $600K income before this makes sense. // Also note the contact and meeting management class of tasks require always on engagement. At that point, you're better off with your own company-supplied EA who is in the flow and can carry your personal prioritiza…

You don't have to use them all the time, though... there's plenty of things I couldn't afford to do all the time but sometimes it's worth paying extra for, a service like this could be one of them. If something urgent comes up that Magic+ could fix in 15minutes and that I don't have 15 minutes to use and it can't wait, a $25 fee could easily be justifiable, even if my salary was only $50k. The same way as most people…

[deleted]

Re: Magic+

#460

Post by wlesieutre »

IgorPartola wrote: post #450
TeMPOraL wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sad thing is - UIs generally don't matter if there's anything else making your product special. You can make your users as miserable as you want, and they will still use your service. Companies know it and prioritize effort accordingly.

Agreed. See Craigslist.

Craigslist's UI is great! High contrast text. All links are obvious (no iOS style "is that colored text or a button"). It loads quickly. I can find the information I need without hunting around a bunch of ads masquerading as useful content.

As an added bonus, I don't have to relearn how to use it every 6 months when the design team gets bored and decides to redo the whole thing for no good reason.

There are a few additions I'd like to see (PadMapper style apartment search being the big one), but all things considered I like Craigslist a lot more than most websites.

Compare it to Amazon where half of the items are miscategorized, sort by price doesn't actually sort by price, and sort by average customer rating is way too literal. In what world do I want to see something with a single 5 star review over the one with 191 reviews, 94% of which are 5 star, and another 4% are 4 star? But that's tucked away on page 7 of the results after all the items with nothing but a single good review. Amazon's got issues to work out.

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