Is this US only?
Yeah, the page says
"Q: Where is Magic available?
Anywhere in the US."
Magic
481–490 of 558 posts
Re: Magic
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you visit this link, you can pay them $5,000: http://getmagicnow.com/pay.php?p=500000 Payment pages should really be linked to an order ID of some sort, without which customers shouldn't be allowed to pay. Otherwise, lots of things can go wrong. Depending on how they have configured things on the server side, a customer could change the amount being paid and the system would consider the ticket paid, cheating them…
If you visit this link, they can pay you $5,000: https://magic.bettir.com/?p=-500000
Stripe doesn't let you send money to cards.
Re: Magic
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"Yay! Another useless service that creates more low wage service jobs that cater to the wealthy." ... What. This just doesn't compute. In what mindframe does this ever make sense as a complaint? If you're creating new jobs, even if they're low wage, you're just giving people more choice - they can now work at one more place than before, no one's forced into that, it literally can't do harm. And direct transfer of we…
I think that's a bit naive. In the micro, one new task economy startup might be a net gain, all other things being equal, but if it's part of a macro trend where skilled jobs are disappearing and being replaced with commodity task work, we might be sliding down a dangerous slope. Your final question sound kind of like the slightly more extreme argument that yacht factories enrich otherwise unemployed people. To me, t…
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Re: Magic
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't interesting because of pizzas. This is interesting because of the potential to centralize and offload all decisions of a certain type. It's like a pay-per-use secretary. What I do find.. "decadent"... is people like you, judging masses of other people on the basis of what they find interesting or useful. Especially when you can't see past the low hanging fruit and aren't able to grasp any potential a servi…
I don't think OP wasn't judging anyone, you took his comment a little too personally. The majority people on this site may find this service to be useful, but I gurantee, outside of the SV bubble, this service would get laughed at by the actual majority of Americans. The market here is exclusively the faux rich. If your time was actually this valueable you would have a real assistant. The service as useful as a upper…
I partially agree with the spirit of your comment, but I disagree that this doesn't solve real problems. If you think critically about all the little innovations out there that add convenience, it adds up to a lot more leisure time. I'm sure people thought car washes were decadent at one point.
For better or for worse, modern Western life is built on a thousand now-invisible time-saving innovations. I think we're at a transitional time in our culture. All this leisure time has historically mostly served to allow us to fill up our lives with increased complexity, but I think we've hit the point where that no longer scales, because it's simply too much to track. What Magic gets right, in my mind, is that it's part of a trend of abstracting away that new complexity. It gives you a single entry point through which to leverage a bunch of innovations that you don't even have to know about.
Where I think services like this can really win is if they can use economy of scale to improve upon the individual's own ability to optimize value for cost. This is possible, if say, they maintain a knowledge base of the best deals.
Re: Magic
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not? 80m users is probably in-line with what some of the larger banks and insurance companies deal with. They're big call centers, but we're not talking entire cities here.
A concierge service is a lot more intensive than responding to the clients of a bank. If Apple did this at their scale, they would probably end up very quickly having an (hopefully public) API for every business around, rather than having their agents call the same restaurant 10 times a day. That would really be a revolutionary way to consume.
Sort of like Just-Eat? http://www.just-eat.co.uk
Re: Magic
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>"Yay! Another useless service that creates more low wage service jobs that cater to the wealthy." That sort of comment annoys me actually. Is it not great that "wealthy" people pay for all of those service jobs? Out of all things, I literally can't see any problems with this. Unless the wages are below living wage of course,but it looks like the commenter has a problem with service jobs in general?
In Mountain View, California minimum wage is below a living wage. I understand the sentiment: The scarcest resource for me is my time. Money is how we let people decide who gets to tell whom what to do with their time. A system where 0.1% tell 99.9% how to spend their precious time alive is not morally just. (I'm not saying we're quite that bad as a society -- at least not yet.)
"A system where 0.1% tell 99.9% how to spend their precious time alive is not morally just"
Welcome to modern-day capitalism. This is exactly what it is, with or without Magic. Don't like it? Neither do I, but then we need a new socio-financial mechanism to redistribute wealth, which goes well beyond the scope of services like Magic.
Re: Magic
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hm, well here's a startling difference between the HN and Product Hunt community. The PH comments: This website looks extremely untrustworthy, purely from a design standpoint. I feel a lot of potential users would be put off by this! Interesting idea. Terrible site design. Unclear if they're charging for this added convenience. http://www.producthunt.com/posts/magic
This was pretty funny, actually. They saw the old version I mentioned above. I was surprised when someone posted it on there and I was actually glad that the reaction was lukewarm, because we didn't think we were ready to launch. And then...boom.
Time to trade up the chain?
Re: Magic
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
No clue why he's doing it the way he is, and I know nothing about how to buy a house, but it sure sounds like a pain.
His reason is almost certainly money. An agent's commission isn't insignificant. It's the opportunity cost of, well... what he's doing. If he's talking with contractors, he's probably also trying to figure out how to fix it up or modify it. I didn't need to talk with any contractors at all, so I don't know whether or not an agent would have helped.
When we bought our house, the seller paid for our agent as well as theirs.
Re: Magic
#489OK, I haven't read all the comments yet, and, sadly, when I texted the Magic number, I was wait listed, but I think this is a great idea and will definitely use it if prices are fair.
Re: Magic
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"Yay! Another useless service that creates more low wage service jobs that cater to the wealthy." ... What. This just doesn't compute. In what mindframe does this ever make sense as a complaint? If you're creating new jobs, even if they're low wage, you're just giving people more choice - they can now work at one more place than before, no one's forced into that, it literally can't do harm. And direct transfer of we…
I see both sides. Seems like there are way more low wage jobs out there though. Plenty to choose from.
Does it have to be low wage? What if people are paid a base wage but also got a percentage of the fee? Those that truly became experts at finding a service/product that matched the customer's request could become increasingly proficient.
As for the "low wage jobs" comments, I'd pick this over being an Amazon warehouse automaton!