
Magic: How to launch a product so no one will ever use it again - tghw
http://tghw.com/blog/magic-how-to-launch-a-product-so-no-one-will-ever-use-it-again
======
CPLX
Indeed. If free-text SMS was an ideal way to interact with online delivery and
concierge services you'd think someone would have done that already on an
existing service. So then, why can't I just order from Seamless or Instacart
via SMS?

Oh right, because that experience sucks mightily. I have this lovely full
color screen that can display menus, location and delivery times, let me
search by cuisine, choose various customizations, etc etc. Then a "magic"
computer sends the orders to the restaurant via an already configured and
tested system so they are expecting an order and can fill it quickly and
efficiently.

Or alternatively, thanks to this innovative new startup, I can SMS to some
random number and say "I want food or something do you have any burritos" and
then have them text me back, etc, etc.

BUT WAIT says the new startup. IT'S NOT JUST BURRITOS, in fact it's not just
food. You could ask for a burrito today and a flight to Cancun tomorrow, and
you only have to put one phone number in your address book.

Aha, the real value proposition emerges. This startup uses their proprietary
technology to know that Seamless or Instacart or Expedia exist already, and
then they use it for me. Except it takes twice as long, without the UI/UX
those services have perfected, and costs 30-50% more money.

Step one: Landing page

Step two: Corner the market on taking SMS messages and using them to punch
orders into existing apps, using skilled college graduate US based labor.

Step three: VC/YC EXPLOSION

Step four: Profit

~~~
bri3d
Virtualized personal assistant services aren't really anything new. This one
just had an interesting/novel/awesome (and probably unsustainable) approach to
the onboarding, UX, and price model - instead of "hiring" a "virtual
assistant" and doing a bunch of sign up forms and paperwork, you just punch an
address and card and away you go.

As for why people want a personal assistant to shop for them when they could
just use an app, think about it this way:

To get things (even online), I have to:

    
    
      * Decide what *specifically* I want (brand, item, size, etc.)
      * Decide where to get it from
      * Obtain their website or app
      * (often) Sign up for an account
      * Enter a bunch of information to order what I want
      * Follow up if it's late or wrong
    

With this service (or a hired personal assistant) I have to:

    
    
      * Decide what type of thing I want
      * Tell someone to make it happen
    

Also, I wouldn't call Instacart or Expedia's interface "perfected." Thanks to
the way the industry works there's still not a single website where I can say
"find me the cheapest flights from point A to point B in date range X" and
have it _actually_ do so. With Instacart, I can't just punch in a natural-
language grocery list and say "get me decent quality options for each, but
make the beef grass-fed please." I have to go through a huge array of brands
and potential sources for each item and decide what to get.

------
jacquesm
I've launched something (once) that went from 0 to breaking in less than 10
hours. I aged at least a couple of years and it took weeks before we managed
to get a grip on the situation. We were about as unprepared as could be. This
is what all of you starter-uppers are dreaming of, but when the growth is
higher than you can handle you're going to have to move _really fast_ if you
want to capture your potential. Unfortunately we had no idea what we were
doing so I'm pretty sure those first weeks cost us dearly. Fortunately for the
magic people their scaling issues are something that can be overcome and I
really hope that they'll do well because of this.

Cut them some slack and think about how hard it would be to pull this off with
such rapid growth _without_ having any delays or issues during the first phase
of rapid growth. Dealing with high levels of traffic and orders is hard,
dealing with high levels of growth is a lot harder still.

Amazing they managed to ship the order at all.

~~~
Cthulhu_
At the very least they should've set up an auto-reply that explains they've
been flooded with unexpected high load, with an average reply duration of half
an hour or whatever it was at the time.

~~~
jacquesm
Would you suggest they do that during or after trying to deal with said
unexpected high load?

------
carsongross
I had to wait, in my apartment, for 40 MINUTES.

"Everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E)

~~~
tghw
I love that bit.

But in this case, waiting an hour and a half for a middle man to do what it
would have taken me 2 minutes to do wasn't worth the extra $9 they were asking
for.

~~~
vinceguidry
Why'd you rely on a very beta web service being offered to the public for _the
very first time_ to do what you could have done in 2 minutes?

I didn't make an order, but I fail to see how you could have been surprised by
this. They have no idea how much demand they were going to have at launch, and
it's not a service that can scale easily.

~~~
tghw
I didn't rely on it. I tried it out to see how well it would work.

When I first signed up, they wait-listed me. Then, a few hours later they let
me (and apparently everyone else) in. They didn't need to do that, but they
did.

------
minimaxir
Note that the "Magic is a beta product released less than a week ago" excuse
is irrelevant.

If Magic wants to be competitive, it needs to have services equal to or better
than existing options. (The Postmates comparison mentioned in the article is
valid). That's the way it is with all startups and "they're just figuring
themselves out" is not a sympathy granted by the marketplace.

~~~
ganeumann
I disagree. They launched a beta to see if anyone would use it. If no one used
it, then they could cut bait and move on.

But people did use it, enough that it caused them to be horrendously slow.
This means they should put more money into making it bigger. If there are a
few hundred "innovators" (in the Everett Rogers/Crossing the Chasm sense) who
were so alienated by bad service during the beta that they will never ever use
it again, even when it becomes a good service...well, that sucks but has no
bearing on the ultimate success or failure of the service.

If you're going to beta test something, you have to expect it to have a few
flaws. That's the point.

------
peteretep
You actually submitted a story to hackernews about trying to order a burrito
and it was $5 more expensive than you wanted it to be...?

~~~
tghw
The story is about a very disappointing first user experience and how it led
me to never want to use the service again. The burrito is just a side plot.

~~~
jacquesm
I think that the 'magic' people were simply not prepared for a runaway
success. Wait a while to give them a chance to get their act together and try
again.

First user experience during the hockey stick phase being 'poor' is to be
expected for anything with this degree of growth. Try scaling anything through
three orders of magnitude in 24 hours and you'll get why.

The amazing thing to me is that your order got delivered at all.

~~~
tghw
First, they had an invite wall when I signed up. I was ~4000th in line, but
they let me in anyway. This was their first mistake.

The bigger problem is that their service is just a simple middle man. They
don't provide delivery services, they just choose which service to use. For
the examples they gave (food delivery, grocery delivery, airline tickets),
it's never going to be worth it to me to have them charge me an extra 25% to
pick between the three services that will do that for me (Postmates,
Instacart/Postmates, Hipmunk). What's more, SMS makes it more difficult to
order. Postmates' interface is much better than trying to text an order in.

It's not that this is just an MVP. It's that this service really only takes
away the decision of which other middle man to choose, and there's just not
enough value there.

~~~
bluedino
Do they just keep your CC # on file?

~~~
calvin_c
They use Square, so you set up a payment method attached to your phone number,
and they use your phone number to check out.

------
jjling
Don't worry. It's just their "minimal viable product". <\-- Hate that, that
phrase has become an excuse to ship/launch crap.

~~~
PeterWhittaker
Hmm, not sure it's an MVP - it lacks V.

~~~
t_7u_ol8
If it creates buzz and makes money, it's viable. A few unsatisfied customers
should be irrelevant in the greater scheme.

~~~
PeterWhittaker
So are we suggesting that we know the missing step?

    
    
      1. Build something
      2. ???
      3. Profit!
    

We're suggesting that it's

    
    
      1. Build something
      2. Reduce convenience, increase price, piss people off, but get press
      3. Profit!
    

???

------
dirtyaura
No, this is exactly how early-stage startups often work. It's a great lesson
to anybody who hasn't experienced it. Planned launches rarely go as well as
planned, and big visibility happens when you are the least prepared. Been
there, experienced that.

According to the team, this was a side project, they had put a crappy landing
page out there (with Times Roman as a font and got some flak for that) and
somebody else submitted it to Product Hunt and it took off. They quickly
improved the landing page and started handling orders.

Now almost everybody reading HN knows them. They chose a brand name that is
easy to remember. If they get their shit together in 6 months and relaunch,
they will be totally fine. Most early stage startups can only dream of the
kind of visibility they got.

The bigger problem is that this kind of surprise success doesn't necessarily
validate the idea, but at least now they can see and start to measure
retention.

------
Vula_Design
Despite the humour and, on the surface, being a story about ordering a
burrito, I think this is actually a very useful 'what not to do' cautionary
tale for startups. They've clearly got a concept which, on paper, sounds like
a good idea. They've then rushed development and gone to market without
actually testing enough to know that they can deliver (literally) what the
customer wants. That kind of early0stages growing needs to hapen before the
company can gain a public reputation.

~~~
jacquesm
That's simply a function of growth. You can not prepare for runaway growth
like this, it's easier said than done and from the sidelines it looks like a
piece of cake.

At this level of growth _any_ action that you did not automate away will bite
you in a terrible way. And that's what all the handbooks say right: wait with
automation until you've found your product:market fit. But what if that
outruns you?

~~~
Vula_Design
I agree, but in this context I think that it's a valid criticism as their
business model is a sort of 'all things under one roof' delivery system that
should be prepared to offer a simple delivery like this one ate a competetive
price/timeframe. I'm definitely not saying that people starting a business,
particularly one in a service capacity, shouldn't expect to have to adapt with
growth. I suppose the main point I was making is that prior to launching you
should ensure that you are fulfilling your core functionality to at least a
market-comparable level.

------
Shivetya
I guess I am wondering how Magic is supposed to succeed. Most sites I need to
go to tend to have very custom means to make ordering efficient, in the few
cases where you might not know where to order something from a quick search is
all that takes?

Who is their target market? Let alone if I saw another service hitting up my
site like this I would likely try to find out why customer's weren't finding
it on their own or using it on their own, two things which would be at the top
of the list to improve all the time.

Perhaps to give people a separate billing point to reduce exposure of personal
information? Look I just paid thirty bucks for a pizza and Pizza Place will
never know it was really for me!!! Seriously the only convienence I can see if
reducing the number of entities with my CC info

------
mathgeek
The latency is certainly understandable for a product that just went live to
quite a bit of promotion... but considering that they included an invite
barrier to keep things from outpacing their infrastructure, there's obviously
a pretty severe point of failure here.

------
bluedino
For some contrast, a first-time user could fire up the Domino's app and have a
pizza delivered at the regular cost (+ tip and regular delivery charge) in 30
minutes.

------
notacoward
It's so hard to find good help these days.

(Or people on HN who understand irony, apparently.)

~~~
Dirlewanger
I honestly hope Magic amasses a lump sum from all the suckers and takes off.

------
dudus
Magic say they include the Tip.

~~~
vog
As far as I understood, the main issue was the astronomically huge latency,
not the price.

------
esthlos
Why are you using the Reed College logo on your website? Your resume doesn't
list any activity there. Watch out for legal issues.

~~~
tghw
Griffin is a family name. I've looked into it and that particular
representation of a griffin predates Reed's use of it.

~~~
esthlos
Yeah, it seems that that graphic is distinct from the Reed seal. Best of luck
then.

------
rubbingalcohol
ITT: mean-spirited people bash the hard work of others.

