I can absolutely admit that when Magic first launched, we were over capacity and a certain percentage of orders went awry. I hate that this happened, but we really did not predict that the website would go viral so quickly. In fact, today, we still have such high demand for the service that there is a long waitlist for the regular service, and our $100/hr service is getting a lot of signups very quickly as well.
This is part of the reason that we created Magic+. We wanted to make sure that people who had a very high bar for service quality would be able to use the service right away and be guaranteed to have the absolute highest level of service, no matter what.
I completely understand that given your past experience with Magic, you might not want to try Magic+. However, I can confidently say that if you try it, you will find that it feels very different from the Magic that you tried. Your keg will be there.
As you know I had a very bad experience with Magic as well.
I worked for you for free for a week and on boarded 63 new customers for you. You guys arbitrarily deleted my account, and abruptly shut off my autopay donations to numerous charities we had set up together.
Then you went silent and wouldn't return any of the ten messages I sent to you asking for access to my personal records and information regarding my numerous charity donations.
How can I encourage others to use your service if I was shown such an unprofessional and disrespectful experience?
I spent over $3,250 traveling to Silicon Valley. I spent over 60 hours of intense work to do a project for free for them that they requested.
I delivered them a beautifully custom 38 page research report that you can see here: http://f.cl.ly/items/3f3u1e14273P2v2a1Y2J/CAP1.pdf
I was treated like a second class citizen and tossed to the side. My account was deleted. I contacted all 4 of the founders. Not one would respond. They went dark.
I would hope that no one else gets treated as poorly as I was and experience this type of disrespect.
That might be where you went wrong.
But I agree with you, I need to be more judicial with my time in the future.
One of my main frustrations though was that this was a very highly regarded YC company. Should consumers expect this disrespectful behavior to be accepted from other YC companies as well?
Should YC founders be expected to be able to simply pick and choose which customers they want to arbitrarily delete?
I can completely understand if this was a fly by night operation. But YC is basically the Harvard of startups and this was completely out of left field for me.
We have stories like this every now and then with various companies, and here's something that makes me wonder: assuming that both parties are neither evil nor stupid (which I think is fair assumption in most cases), how exactly such situations happen? There's a lesson for every founder and manager hiding here.
So how does a situation like that happen? You justify it to yourself to cut corners in order to succeed, and because you're a job creator in America, you're entitled to respect in the end.
I received no response yet, but my twitter account was promptly blocked by David. http://f.cl.ly/items/1x3Y1h2n0i1Q1F3e1H1f/Screen%20Shot%2020...
I will be reaching back out to Mike in a week and will update you guys. Thx.