Hacker News Reader

Comment by tghw | Hacker News Reader

I just signed up to see if they could renegotiate my Comcast price for me. It turns out you have to buy either 10 hours at $100/hour or 40 hours at $75/hour to get started. That's way too steep to try something out.

View on HN

It will probably take those 10 hours being on old for comcast to pickup. You think i'm joking.

But is it worth $1000?

Considering that many kinds of common requests would likely involve waiting on hold, I'd be surprised if they didn't contract out to some cheap automated service to handle "wait until this goes off hold and then connect me to them".

But that's not the actual problem. Let's say the hold time is a random 10 to 20 minutes. What's your personal assistant supposed to do in the meantime?

They can't reasonably do anything that requires making calls or other real-time interaction in case the first phone call is picked up.

Even if they could make them do some non-time-sensitive secondary task while they're on hold on some primary task they'd still suffer some time wasted due to overhead & distractions.

Why wouldn't Magic+ have a relationship with Comcast where they can bypass the queues? Seems like a natural relationship to have.

Then I, as someone who manages a remote development shop and pays Comcast in the several thousands a month for Internet access, would be pissed that -I- don't get such access.

Why on earth should Magic have a "preferred relationship" so they can make money letting their customers skip the line I'm waiting in?

They are a small startup. I think that credit cards personal assistants would have better contacts.

Lol. Great idea although it would likely take longer than that.

I would however pay for an outcome based solution to this as it's a pain to call Comcast every year. Renegotiate to $X for Y and I'll pay.

Have you seen https://www.billfixers.com/?

No. Checking it out. Have you used this before?

I feel like, if your income is such that you care about your Comcast bill, you are really not the target market for Magic+. This is aimed squarely at the Rolex-and-Lexus set.

An hour of my time is worth more than an hour of their time costs. And that's without counting the headache of doing it. Considering it would save me money for less than I would "spend" doing it myself, I don't see how it's not an application for most people.

If you're saying that you make >$100/hour, then you are a long, long way from "most people."

$100/hr is a salary of $208,000 which only about 5% [1] of household incomes exceed that. Certainly not "most people"

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/15/business/one-p...

Less taxes so more like $150/hr just to break even.

He's not going to hire Magic+ for 40 hours per week. Many services are $100/hr or more, they're just rarely billed out that way, because people have this reaction. If you have a moderate amount of disposable income, you can afford to have simple requests filled by Magic+ for $15-$30 (10-20 minutes of personal assistant time) several times a month.

The viability of the product for a solid middle class user really just depends on if Magic+ can fill the type of requests that you'd want to offload in a time-efficient manner or not. Some people in this thread say they're hyper-efficient and specially trained to do so, so it may be worth a try.

> If you have a moderate amount of disposable income, you can afford to have simple requests filled by Magic+ for $15-$30 (10-20 minutes of personal assistant time) several times a month.

Well, except that--as the grandparent post said--the minimum buy is $1000 for 10 hours. That puts it well outside "casual purchase, might come in handy" and into "must have a specific, long-term use in mind" for the typical middle-class income.

Yeah... I would be up for trying it (if they now or in the future allow European customers), and could imagine liking it enough to be willing to put in $1000 to last me a while, but not without trying it for a few $10s first.

Maybe they are choosing to price out those of us who would use occasionally but not often, or maybe it's an acceptable downside to benefits they get from having other people pay that lump up front. (For example, maybe they've found that in the first $200 of spending people aren't convinced, but if they're forced to spend another $800 then they start to appreciate the service more and are less likely to stop using it.)

You're right. I missed the comment about a minimum buy-in. That definitely puts it outside of the reach of someone who may find it useful for simple, occasional tasks. I guess they still want those people to use standard Magic.

I was just reading about a company started by 2 brothers that does exactly this. If I can remember the name, I'll post back. Maybe I saw it in Bloomberg? Anyone?

It might be BillFixers? (https://www.billfixers.com)

The Bloomberg article you may have read: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-10/billfixers...

If so, they charge 50% of the annual savings. That's steeper than a couple of hours of Magic+.

Not if you have to buy a minimum of 10 hours AND with BillFixers, you're getting a DEFINITE savings of 100% of whatever you paid them.

Yes, that's it. Thanks for finding it.

That's us! I don't want to do a sales pitch or any thing, but if I can answer any questions about the service (or Comcast or whoever), feel free to ask away!

(also our hosting isn't handling the traffic super well, so if you have any trouble visiting the site, but want to sign up or have questions, feel free to shoot me an email personally at ben@billfixers.com

have you considered a B2B offering? I'd love to have somebody do what you do but with the software / hardware vendors that I deal with at work.

We've been experimenting with it, and have worked with a few dozen businesses thus far (mostly in familiar territory like cable, phone, and cell, but also some SaaS expenses, shipping/parcel costs, etc.). Feel free to email me at ben@billfixers.com if you'd like us to look into your particular vendors!

Is it US only? I'm in the UK and I'm interested.

Maybe thinking of AirPaper? Not taking new customers at this time.

Some co-workers have raved about https://www.fancyhands.com/ for this kind of stuff, not sure if that's any different from Magic, though.

You can even send an API request ;-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com