
Magic: The Story of an Accidentally Founded, Wildly Viral Startup - Libertatea
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/magic-the-startup/
======
CPLX
> After I paid $50 to jump 178 spots in line, I got a VIP number and texted
> again. By now I was hungry, so I ordered a dozen chocolate chip cookies.
> Five minutes and $26 later, they were supposedly on their way—but they never
> arrived, and I never heard why. I never got my money back, either.

> I’ve never once actually gotten what I wanted from Magic.

So we should be celebrating a "company" that takes almost a hundred bucks from
this guy but doesn't deliver him anything at all. That's not a company or a
service it's a walking disaster.

The people that are having sour grapes (if they exist at all) presumably have
them because they work on startups that actually do things or solve problems
and have some small measure of success but don't get Wired articles because
they don't happen to be connected to YC dinners.

What about all the "ideas are worth nothing" dogma that permeates all of the
startup literature? What about it's the execution that matters? Doesn't
"product-market fit" require an actual product?

~~~
reasonish
It's all about who you know. That's all that matters in the startup world.

How is texting a pizza order to Magic, who then text it to a pizza company
(Introducing a middle man) making the world a better place?

It's so well suited to startup founders though - Hey I'm way too busy and
important to do menial things, I need a personal assistant on my phone that
can do things for me while I'm saving the world by making some crappy website,
which will never make any money, but will get bought for billions by some
bigger fool because we know people who know people.

Magic sounds like it's right out of "Silicon Valley" (The TV Show).

I'd be surprised if anyone remembers Magic in a years time. Either that or
it'll get bought by Amazon for $20bn. Or maybe both...

~~~
VikingCoder
If my wife, desperate to calm our crying daughter, texts Magic that she needs
Similac Advance, a gallon of purified water, and a CLEANED set of Tommee
Tippee bottles at 3 AM, and Magic is able to fulfill that need in short
order... that's a MASSIVE win for everyone.

Honestly, if you had to get those three things at 3 AM, how much time and
effort would it take you? Add a screaming child to the equation.

Anything that makes it easier for a consumer to get what they need, when they
need it, if they are willing to pay the price, makes the world a better place.
Especially if there's competition for that service.

~~~
legoisbest
You would seriously trust some random person to clean baby bottles for you?
Seriously? What the hell.

If I had to get those things at 3AM - I don't know where you live, but for me
(Out in the country), it's a 10 minute journey to a 24 hour supermarket, then
10 minutes back. The child would likely nap in the car.

~~~
VikingCoder
It's extremely hard to not be sarcastic when I respond to you, so I'm not
going to try:

You're right, all problems anyone ever has are solved by the Walmart 10
minutes away.

I retract my assertion that sometimes consumers are willing to spend money for
convenience.

------
frik
The idea is old, it's called an _concierge service_ :
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concierge](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concierge)

It is/was available in various countries in Europe from several companies
(call center companies, telekom companies, credit card companies). Several
"magic" like concierge services were already on HN, never heard about them
again. On Reddit it was mentioned a small startup company with seed money is
behind 'magic'.

The next step is a personal software agent, a vision that Bill Gates proposed
in his famous 1995 book "The Road Ahead". It's basically the next logical step
of Siri/Cortana/Watson.

~~~
flomo
Gates may have been referring to a greatly-hyped 1990s mobile startup called
(coincidentally?) General Magic, who promised software agents which could do
things like book flights.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic)

~~~
frik
Bill Gates's vision was about a "wallet PC", "information highway" and
software based "personal agents". You can think of smartphone with BitCoin
wallet, 3G web connection, Siri meets Watson.

He hoped Microsoft's "pen-based computing" (later Pocket-PC/WinCE) would get
traction. Microsoft Bob (from Gates wife) and Office agents
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant))
flopped. The Microsoft Network 1.0 (short MSN 1.0) integrated in Windows 95
(was a serious Web competitor based on Win32 controls and Explorer as browser
instead of HTML and Mosaic/Internet Explorer 1) flopped. The second edition of
the book features the Internet/web instead of "information highway".

Bill Gates vision can be seen in the Comdex 1995 video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XxeY-
OchwY&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XxeY-
OchwY&feature=youtu.be&t=1m59s) (shows the "wallet PC")

General Magic was definitely a competitor. AT&T was on the General Magic
bandwagon, see their TV ad:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZb0avfQme8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZb0avfQme8)
(triva: Jenna Elfman of Dharma & Greg in her first role in 0:48)

------
rubbingalcohol
I wonder if all the people who were bashing Magic the other day for having
scaling issues are getting Wired articles written about them. Or even
experiencing scaling issues. A startup that is absolutely swamped with demand
and unable to keep up is doing something right. But you wouldn't think it with
all the mean-spirited comments people were tossing around in the other thread.

This is the sort of thing HN should be celebrating as a community, not
deriding. Sour grapes, much?

~~~
wpietri
They are (possibly) doing something right, and they certainly have gotten
lucky, so yay for them. But this isn't 1994.

Launching a service now without thinking about scaling is an amateur move. It
is the kind of thing that can kill a company, or at least wound it severely.
At best, you are wasting a zillion first impressions in the hope that you will
do well enough that they'll eventually come back for a second chance. There
are plenty of well-tested approaches to prevent that from happening, and
they're not particularly hard to implement.

It seems pretty reasonable to me that people have put the time in to learn how
to do this right are critical when it is done wrong. It reminds me of the
tension between a person who has worked their ass off to get into a good
school and the one who got in because he won the ovarian lottery and his
family's name is on a building. Sure, we should be happy every time somebody
gets a good education, but I think it's asking a lot for skill never to resent
luck.

~~~
chm
> Launching a service now without thinking about scaling is an amateur move.

I don't think they were shooting for the stars with Magic. It seemed a hack
from day one. My impression is they didn't intend it to grow as it did.

~~~
wpietri
Sure, but so what? Not saying, "What will happen if this works?" is an amateur
move. In an industry where the whole goal is wild success, it's not a good
sign if you are totally unprepared for wild success.

But for the sake of argument let me grant that some people in YC somehow a)
thought something was so important as to take time away from their startup,
and b) never even considered that it might work. Once it started working,
there were a number of things they could do other than the "make a complete
hash of things" strategy that Wired's experience apparently suggests they are
pursuing now.

------
derefr
It's hard to make an analogy of what Magic is right now, other than to say
it's sort of like "Siri with humans." But at scale, I envision it would
basically be a _dynamically-allocated pool of secretaries_ , in the same way
that AWS is a dynamically-allocated pool of computer hardware.

And we already have "dynamically-allocated pools of secretaries!" Magic is
effectively a recreation of the concierge service attached to (some) credit
cards, which does exactly that.

This is not to poo-poo the business model—far from it, it's something people
want—but I'm guessing the true outcome of this battle will just be A. the
credit card companies opening up their concierge services to lower cardholder
levels; and B. AWS building a concierge-pool service to go along with (and
possibly run atop of) their Mechanical Turk labor-pool service.

~~~
VLM
Its an outsourced operations department. Like a NOC or dispatch organization.
The kind of place that needs some internal controls, policies, metrics,
standards, demarcation points, escalation contacts, something other than "do
your best". Observationally this seems to be an operations department without
all those features. Once they add those features, they'll either be wildly
successful, or no longer profitable, hard to say which.

If you've ever wondered what service would be like at a big company help desk
or call center without any rules, well, now you know. Some really good parts,
some really bad parts.

~~~
derefr
Right, the obvious comparison that everyone can understand is a call centre.
But, of course, call centre employees (ops employees in general) do the things
related to their line of business and which they're trained for.

This is slightly different, in that a concierge or administrative assistant
does a lot of things they're _not_ trained for, just because it's what the
boss/client asks for.

~~~
VLM
Your analysis is correct at the lower level functions but I was thinking
slightly higher level, you are correct there is no scripted procedure for
example, ordering a pizza and diet coke, but where is the procedure or policy
or anything, to handle "verification that something got delivered" "Follow up
with customer to verify he's happy with his delivery" "company wide standards
for tipping or including gratuity in the cost" "how to deal with a journalist
on the internet complaining" "Documentation and analysis of failures"

------
miket
I'm a big fan of the startup FancyHands -
[https://www.fancyhands.com/](https://www.fancyhands.com/). The value
proposition offered by the two services is similar: text a task, have an on-
demand assistant find a solution for you. I do wish sometimes FH would return
something faster: response for me range from 30m to a few hours. Though it
sound like the with the current scaling pains at Magic, they aren't fully
living up to their promised responsiveness, either.

UPDATED: Just saw that FH has released some real-time communication capability
with their assistants. Very cool:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fancyhands...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fancyhands.orri)

~~~
ilyaeck
Could you please detail your experience with FH: what you use it for and
whether your are satisfied (other than the latency issue)?

------
minimaxir
The unjustified fervor behind Magic reminds me of the Yo frenzy from last
year. "A stupidly simple startup went viral? That's an example of a good
startup!" Except that logic is circular; it's getting controversy because it's
getting controversy.

Yo led to an innovation collapse in Silicon Valley as many tried to do a "Yo
for X" without realizing that Yo became popular due to dumb luck. That time
could have been used to spend time on apps that have a legitimate purpose and
are not trying to chase stupid VC money.

At the least, Magic is not as easily cloneable. That just means the clones
will be _even worse._

~~~
bmelton
> At the least, Magic is not as easily cloneable. That just means the clones
> will be even worse.

Interesting you say that, as this article posted as a Show HN the other day
was derided as having exposed how easy it would be to clone Magic.

[http://blog.sendsonar.com/2015/02/23/add-magic-to-your-
busin...](http://blog.sendsonar.com/2015/02/23/add-magic-to-your-business/)

~~~
minimaxir
Processing and tying requests to a phone number isn't the scalability
bottleneck; that's easy to do.

The hard part and main scalability concern is coordinating user requests with
other third party services, and that can't be automated in any way. (For at
least the next few years, anyways). That's not something you could implement
and scale at a hackathon.

~~~
NeutronBoy
That's the key point.

What happens when my pizza isn't delivered? Normally I call the pizza shop.

What happens when my Magic pizza isn't delivered? I text Magic and say so. The
magician (may or may not be the same person dealing with my case the whole way
through) calls the pizza shop, get's an update. They text me 'Oh the shop said
they delivered it'. I text back, a different person gets on the phone to the
shop again, etc.

How is that manageable?

~~~
bmelton
Sticky message persistence is a pretty trivial problem to solve, FWIW. No idea
if Magic _has_ done so, because the magic is apparently operational opacity,
which is fine, but either way, the current agent should have ready access to
your conversation history.

------
gallerytungsten
Magic is really just a concierge service via text message. There's nothing
wrong with that, but it's not revolutionary.

To really make it work and to scale rapidly, they might think about a
franchise model, so that franchises can be started in numerous locations by
people who actually know the local area.

Magic could make plenty of money providing a reliable and customizable back-
end service for local operators.

------
ada1981
I rememebr hearing stories about how Zappos customer service would do things
like this... The conversation went like this.

"Zappos, how can we help you."

"I'd like a large pizza."

"Um, you relize we sell shoes. It's also 2 am."

"Yes."

"Ah, ok. Please hold."

"Ok sir, we've found these locations that are open and have the type of pizza
you'd like. Here are the numbers."

\--

Magic is cool. There are some big scaling problems. They will probably not
capture all the buzz the best they could.

Creating an on demand pool of virtual assistants + some machine learning to
optimize the solution paths those VA's take so as to provide suggested
solution routes for then to follow, ie for Pizza in SF at 2am, here are some
options..

At some point most tasks become routine.

And yes, there already exist lots of va companies. Magic isn't surprising if
you know about VAs, but many people apparnetly haven't read The 4 Hour Work
Week.

A Universal API for all resources, labor, goods and services seems like a damn
good product to build, perhaps magic can be that.

Otherwise, how can we begin to create a Universal Resource API?

~~~
wpietri
The Zappos story is actually from the founder, Tony Hsieh:
[http://about.zappos.com/press-center/media-
coverage/deliveri...](http://about.zappos.com/press-center/media-
coverage/delivering-happiness-zappos-way)

"Hsieh likes to end his presentation with what he calls his pizza story. One
night, he and some vendors returned to a hotel room late. Someone in the group
was craving pizza and was told room service had ended. As a joke, Hsieh
suggested calling Zappos. You can probably guess the end of the story—even
though Zappos doesn't sell pizza, the customer service rep found a list of
local pizza places that would deliver to the hotel. It's a fun story that
seriously reinforces Hsieh's theme of customer service."

------
albertwang
Question for those who've used Magic: how was your experience? What did you
buy, and under what circumstances? (ie, was the item cheap? hard to find? Did
you need it immediately?)

I've found that the tech behind this is actually quite scalable, thanks to
Twilio. As other commenters have pointed out though, Magic's concept has
already existed (free) for a long time, through concierge services like Visa
signature and Amex Platinum. What's different and innovative here are the sms-
interface and the hidden, Instacart-like surcharge.

~~~
MichaelGG
Innovative here are the promises to do anything, _just by texting_. Calling up
the Amex concierge service seemed like more of a big deal. And explaining to
them I'd like them to get food delivered to me... Dunno how'd that go. They
certainly don't market it for stuff like that.

------
woah
Scaling problems? That's what people have against these guys? This is the most
transparent sour grapes I have ever seen. Believe me, I'm insanely jealous of
them too. It's an amazingly simple idea that has exploded, and has potential
for great growth. This could be the Google of the Seamless, Postmates, etc
economy. All you guys can do is get pissed because they can't hire fast
enough?

~~~
minimaxir
Equating "publicity" with "success" is a dangerous game.

------
brador
I asked the founder about returns and how they'll handle customer support
issues in his reveal post a few days ago. No reply.

~~~
minimaxir
Magic appears to be using the tried-and-true method of Twitter support:
[http://twitter.com/tweetmagicnow](http://twitter.com/tweetmagicnow)

Which is funny because part of the value proposition of Magic is not trying
user interaction to an account.

------
Tarrosion
My Magic experience so far:

\- I asked "what kinds of things can you help me with?" and got a response
back: "We're magicians! We can do anything." But then when I actually asked
for some help, no reply.

\- The next day I asked if they could get me delivery from a local pizza place
which doesn't usually deliver to me. They say sure, great. After almost 4
hours of back-and-forth, we successfully communicate about what I'm hoping
for. Apparently the price had already been sent to me, but I never go that
message. And the price? $50 for a pizza that's $12 on the restaurant's menu.
Even generously figuring $10 delivery, $5 delivery tip, $5 Magic fee, I can't
explain how $50 is reasonable. Maybe some minimum delivery charge? Okay, so
tell me that.

Average response time is 20-30 minutes depending on how you count a message
they never responded to. I actually like this idea a lot, but I hope the
implementation improves.

------
qq66
This is a concierge service by text. It makes sense as an idea for two
reasons: first, most people don't know the variety of things that a concierge
(at a hotel, or credit card provider) can do; second, I've met many people
even of my age (31) who are pathologically incapable of making a phone call,
even to a pizza parlor.

------
chenglou
Magic reminds me of Path Talk
([https://path.com/talk](https://path.com/talk)), which is more focused on
places and probably has more room for automation & optimizations, e.g. if many
people ask for the price of a burger at place X, might as well display the
answer in the FAQ of the place on Path Talk. Otherwise a real person picks up
your question and texts you back in a while.

The app can also expand by striking some deals with smaller merchants to
handle the customer service part for them.

The benefit I see from this is that you asynchronously ask for an answer and
get texted back whenever, instead of waiting on the phone line.

------
itsbeendone
People have been making concierge companies for years. Here's one that was
around Brooklyn a while back:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/nyregion/thecity/21bode.ht...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/nyregion/thecity/21bode.html)

You can write good dispatching software, but at the end of the day your
scaling bottleneck is adding humans.

------
laurafurr_TP
Has anyone here used Magic? I am a reporter for a new startup Tech.pro and am
writing a story about Magic. I'm looking to interview users about their
experience for the piece. Please let me know. You can email me at
laf319@gmail.com, or reply to the post. Thanks!

------
grecy
I wonder if the "accidental launch" is going to hurt them. It seems like the
sheer volume of requests is resulting in long wait times and unsatisfied
customers - exactly the opposite of what they want to convey.

I hope they can overcome these teething hurdles and find a place.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
One way - stop growing virally (i.e. uncontrollably), raise your prices, and
create a process that works. Some metrics would help.

------
fabrice_d
So I guess their value will be all the real life data they are getting about
their users. Knowning what you like to eat, buy, where you're flying to, etc.

------
rhapsodic
This will fail.

------
paulhauggis
I think the first issue they will run into is scaling. A few people in a
startup won't be able to handle thousands of requests in an hour.

Personally, I don't have a use for this service. I have a smart phone that can
pretty easily search Google for anything that I would need.

~~~
mmastrac
This service is for people who are willing to trade more cash for less
cognitive load. In some ways, Uber was similar at the start -- rather than
having to figure out which cab company you want to call to have one sent over,
negotiate the phone trees, etc, you just fire up the app and ask for a car.

Concierge services are popular at the high-end and there's always been an
opportunity to bring these down to a different financial strata of users.

~~~
CPLX
> Uber was similar at the start... you just fire up the app and ask for a car.

That doesn't sound similar at all. The substantive difference is that when you
asked for a car, a car showed up. Unlike Magic, where you order things and pay
for them and nothing happens.

~~~
cherls
I'm sure if uber went unintentially viral the day it was launched it wouldn't
have been able to deliver either. They're similar in concept and uniquenes,
not how they were born. That's just a small bump in the road in the long run.

~~~
CPLX
Yes, if Uber had said they were ready to go in dozens of cities and took
people's orders for cars and charged their credit cards but the cars never
showed up and they had no manned number to call or email address to deal with
that problem and they hadn't coded an app that tracked cars and they had no
backend software to handle orders and registration they would have maybe had a
different business outcome.

