
Show HN: Add “Magic” to Your Business - MatthewB
http://blog.sendsonar.com/2015/02/23/add-magic-to-your-business/
======
primitivesuave
It's really frustrating to me when a Show HN gets thrashed this way. Every
developer puts love into what they build, and most of the people here are
developers that hopefully feel the same way. Imagine how terrible it must feel
to have your work responded to with such a harshly critical eye - what you're
doing is making the opinions of HN more generally negative and more easily
ignored, just as directors now ignore the overly critical tome of movie
critics.

This was a great demonstration of an interesting piece of technology, that has
been met with an overwhelmingly negative response. It's designed really well
and I can see it being especially useful for small businesses with a more
personal approach to client management.

~~~
larrys
"Imagine how terrible it must feel to have your work responded to with such a
harshly critical eye - what you're doing is making the opinions of HN more
generally negative and more easily ignored, just as directors now ignore the
overly critical tome of movie critics."

What does "feeling" have to do with it?

I can't agree with that. Criticism is valuable. You can't learn anything from
a pat on the back as you can from criticism. That's not saying that some of
the things aren't deserved.

As an example I always get frustrated when the manager/owner of a restaurant
walks around and says "is everything ok?" rather than "what can we do better
or what wasn't perfect?" (in other words invite comments that may be
negative).

Enough with the attaboys.

As far as HN what you typically can't learn from is downvotes without an
explanation of why a downvote was received.

~~~
primitivesuave
I agree that criticism is valuable, it's just that when I joined HN there used
to be incredibly useful feedback (designers would comment on design, UX people
would give detailed walkthroughs of where they ran into bugs). It seems that
since then, any Show HN that doesn't blow your mind to pieces goes straight to
the wolves.

It's like being that restaurant owner and having people take one bite of their
steak before complaining that it's not as good as the steak from the place
down the street.

------
nemo44x
I feel like as an art piece, "Magic" is sort of the distillation and
abstraction of everything that has happened with the Internet over the last 20
years - especially lately.

"Send a blackbox a message and you get something - on demand!"

That's art. Or it's an incredibly sad state of affairs with what qualifies as
"technology" and is a horrible commentary on modern societies values. Or a
reflection of it - imitating it I suppose.

"Magic" & "Yo" \- The future is bright.

~~~
maxerickson
What are we supposed to value?

~~~
nemo44x
I'm not sure. That's the job of art to reflect upon our culture to let people
judge for themselves.

I find it brilliant, disgusting, tempting and shocking all at once. I'm not
sure if it's a civilization in decline and on the eve of revolution or if it's
a beautiful thing.

You don't get an emotional response from just saying "Pizza" and a price comes
back and you reply with a "Yes/No" and then it arrives? Where is the service
that says "Pizza" and "Yes/No" for me? Clearly that's the only place the form
can go.

I guess it's the infantilization of society?

~~~
maxerickson
I tend not to order food, so the idea of making it easier didn't really
resonate with me. I also tend to be a cheapo, so the idea of spending $4 extra
also put me off. So my reaction to magic wasn't very strong.

I also don't really see the difference in values between buying flour and
making obtaining a pizza really easy. Why is buying flour okay, or dealing
with the details of ordering pizza yourself okay, but handing off the last
little bit of the pizza ordering is reflective of decay?

~~~
nemo44x
"Why is buying flour okay, or dealing with the details of ordering pizza
yourself okay, but handing off the last little bit of the pizza ordering is
reflective of decay?"

I think it has to do with the fact that you surrendered choice in where this
pizza comes from. You have no agency in the quality, labor conditions,
ingredients, etc of the pizza. You have reduced your "freedom OF choice" to
"freedom FROM choice".

Devo was right.

------
RaphiePS
I think this completely misses the point. The "magic" part of Magic isn't that
it's over text -- that's just an implementation detail. Rather, the value is
that it navigates all these services for you. You don't have to mess with
Instacart or Postmates or Doordash or any specific app. You don't have to
search or filter or download or re-enter your credit card a million times. It
just happens.

So, creating a single-business-specific Magic seems kinda useless.

~~~
Animats
Right. Ordering stuff over SMS isn't that great an idea. There's going to be a
lot of back and forth - what size do you want, is it OK if your flight has a
change of planes at DFW, do you want anchovies on the pizza? Sending an order
for a bag of groceries via SMS is going to take a lot of typing.

Processing the order is currently manual. You're back in the call center era.
For the back and forth, you'd probably be better off using voice. As in, the
customer _calls the service on the phone._

The big advantage of web ordering is that the user gets to browse the catalog
and select. They can find out if it's in stock before they order. The order
gets captured correctly and automatically. There's one central service for
buying, and it's called Amazon.com.

~~~
MatthewB
For more applications, a couple back and forths is all it will take. Then, you
can have your preferences saved for next time.

For me, I'd rather send a few text messages back and forth than sit
synchronously on a voice call for 15 minutes.

Companies are able to handle a much larger volume of text messages than they
could via voice (sync vs async).

At least for me, I send thousands of text messages per month but only do a few
voice calls.

------
dinisp
Can you give some insight in how a business would capture unique payment info
related to a phone # in Stripe? Is there a payment link sent to users?

~~~
MatthewB
I don't know how they're doing payments exactly but if I had to guess they are
recording a customer's credit card info to stripe and associate to a phone
number somewhere.

Since Magic says you need to send them your credit card and address info the
first time you use their service, my guess is that they would have to record
that info so next time you text message, they just look up your credit card by
your phone number (probably not in stripe, most likely in a separate database
they keep). They can associate your stripe customer id with your phone number
so they don't have to store raw credit card numbers (let stripe handle that!).

~~~
jusben1369
I would think existing businesses would already have a payment processing
relationship in place and so the challenge would be hooking it up to many of
those choices (if they didn't have one then Stripe is a good default) The
question is how is that card data getting from the text message into the
payment processor in a PCI compliant manner? Once they get it from their SMS
app into Stripe then Stripe will give them a token and they can map the token
and phone number for future charges. But I wonder how it gets there in the
first place. Again, due to PCI compliance, I expect the Magic guys are never
seeing the actual card numbers. So they must be paying for services on their
own cards and charging your card against their Stripe account. So there's some
double CC processing fees happening and chargeback exposure. I suspect though
the Magic guys just hacked this together (in a great way) and given the
interest I hope they can raise and solve for some of the unscalable parts like
this.

------
MatthewB
hey all - matt from Sonar here. happy to answer any questions. you can offer
Magic-like service to your customers within minutes with Sonar.

~~~
NiklasPersson
So why not use, like, "web messages"? I heard about this thing called HTTP,
seems pretty cool. Any opinions?

~~~
MatthewB
do you mean webchat? that's a good option as well but to build something as
simple and awesome as Magic, text messaging is the way to go

~~~
NiklasPersson
yeah no, I mean like literally let the user insert a message through a form,
like <input type="text">, that thing you know? And then you could, like, save
that. Just save that data. And read it. And respond. Something like that. THEY
ARE ON A BROWSER. Am I crazy here? Please, anyone? What year is this? Where am
I?

~~~
primitivesuave
Just so you (person who is new to HN) understands why your comment is
downvoted here - _HN is more of a community for providing constructive
feedback_. Read the other comments on this post to get practical examples.

If I posted something I had poured my heart and soul into for months/years and
had to deal with sarcastic vitriol from someone who completely misses the
point of what I'm trying to accomplish, I wouldn't feel comfortable posting my
work here. I'm personally very grateful there is a community like HN where
negativity and closed-mindedness is grayed out.

------
etrautmann
Minor edit:

s/Below is out you get started/Below is how you get started

~~~
MatthewB
thanks, updated.

------
benhov71
It's not about technology but about service.

------
comrade1
Is this using a long code or a short code? The examples seem to show a long
code, which is basically a phone number.

The FCC is in the process of cracking down on companies that use long codes
for marketing and interacting with customers. It's too amenable to fraud.

You should be using short codes which have strict requirements for opting in,
opting out, and restrictions on spam.

If this is using long codes you are setting yourself up for fines and legal
problems if you use this service.

~~~
300bps
Last I checked random short codes were $500 per month and vanity short codes
were $1,000 per month. In the past I did mobile banking projects for large
regional banks and of course a vanity short code is appropriate for that. For
small businesses though I don't see the monthly fee, let alone the stringent
approval requirements being feasible.

I've also done many text projects for small businesses using Twilio with long
codes. I sincerely hope the FCC would prioritize cracking down on scamming
robocallers (a major nuisance) before they crack down on small businesses
attempting legitimate communication with their customers.

~~~
MatthewB
Agreed about the FCC. For the $500/month short codes, were those unique or
shared? Shared short codes don't work with 2-way communication (when someone
replies, which business does it go to?).

~~~
comrade1
If the person is in more than one opt in keyword then it goes to either all
campaigns or it goes to the last communicated campaign.

Not ideal of course. Best to have geographically isolated short codes to
minimize this. But it's better to be FCC compliant.

------
curiously
does twilio offer this sort of service? I have a toll free number and would
like to offer text based replies.

~~~
vishaldpatel
Not out of the box, no. Sonar makes use of Twilio in the back-end to provide
all the front-end functionality that you see.

As for porting your phone number over... a quick search found this:
[https://www.twilio.com/help/faq/phone-numbers/i-already-
have...](https://www.twilio.com/help/faq/phone-numbers/i-already-have-a-phone-
number-i-love-can-i-port-it-to-twilio)

Feel free to send me an email: vishal@sendsonar.com.

------
curiously
looks like they have real operators 24/7.

how can you get those kind of operators, hopefully at low prices? odesk?

~~~
vishaldpatel
A company that wants to operate 24/7 would need to hire for the night-shift.
This would be based on demand, of course. Night-shift hours are probably lower
since most customers go to sleep at night.

I don't see why hiring evening and night staff would be that different apart
from training. It's probably a bit more difficult to find people that want to
work the night shift... some companies get around this by rotating staff
between the day and night shifts regularly to give everyone a chance to lead a
normal life.

------
nemo44x
I'm not sure that much thought has been put into this. Should probably work
out the CEO/CTO titles first, figure out where to get funding for this clearly
multi-billion dollar opportunity and begin to plan the exit immediately.

"Lady luck please let the dice stay hot..."

~~~
dang
This comment violates HN's rules about comments. Please read the guidelines
and try harder to follow them:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

------
folken
So someone was watching too much "Eden of the East",Noblesse oblige.

Explenation: In the animee there is a phone that can call a number which makes
anything happen or done. You have a billion credit. Too bad you die if you use
all the money.

------
pothibo
I really don't like this opportunistic BS. These guys yesterday struggled with
their launch and you took that opportunity to tell the world how to build a
better clone?

Cheap shot & I hope someone did the same when you guys launched and I hope it
made you struggle.

~~~
gk1
I think it's brilliant. The original discussion about Magic included comments
and questions about what's _powering_ it. For example, people wondered how the
texts got routed, whether it's automated or manual, how fulfillment is done,
etc. Clearly there was some curiosity about what powers these types of apps,
as further evidenced by this post's frontpage status.

~~~
pothibo
It's nothing like you describe. They go to great length to say how they love
Magic to turn around and tell the world how to do build a better clone.

Did they write about the routing? No. They advertised their product
piggybacking on a frontpage story.

Look, if the same thing would happen but Magic would be an established
company, I'd say it's brilliant, but it's not. And it matters.

~~~
stanmancan
How are they teaching someone to make a BETTER clone? All they're teaching is
how to communicate via text message through a web interface. The method of
communication isn't what makes Magic magic.

